On the death of a protestor / The time I almost felt sorry for a (minor) capitalist / Ho hum

On the death of a protestor.

Late at night, A few hours after the first report of the death of a (then unnamed) protestors at the G20 demonstrations, I posted this at Lenin s Tomb -

... My condolences to his family and friends...Scanty reports are suggesting he was caught up by the cops. Others 'natural causes' which could be a host of things. e.g. what may have caused e.g. a heart attack. I’m not going to point a finger yet.

But IF the cops are involved or indeed if they don’t yet know whether they are involved this is what has already happened.

At an emergency meeting at Scotland Yard, their people PR will have already had it made clear to them that they need to leak whatever they have on the dead protestor to the media ASAP - he went there for a trouble, maybe a youth caution for shoplifting, that sort of thing. Spurious accusations - e.g. ‘was he my rapist?’ (as happened to Jean Charles de Menezes) will occur later.

Elsewhere a cop detail will have destroyed all forensic evidence relating to the death, already met to collaborate on how they write it up and will have managed to ‘lose’ other bits of evidence.

Somewhere else cops will desperately be trying to see from their intelligence video etc, which protestors or journalists may have captured events around the death as photos or video.

As soon as they identify them, they will seek straightaway to seize this and there is a possibility that this will later be destroyed, in an ‘accidental fire’ or similar. About as accidental as Steve Biko ‘falling out’ of police station window, that is.

I really, really advise anyone who may have such evidence to immediately post it online and anonymously e.g. at Flickr, YourTube, indymedia etc so that we at least have a copy when the cops seize the originals. Post links to it in many Left and anarchist sites. Such photographers should do so from a web café and may also want to stay elsewhere for a few days.

If, and I stress if, the cops have killed, it will be the first time they have done this to a demonstrator in Britain (save NI) since they murdered Blair Peach in 1979 and Kevin Gatley in 1974. The time previous to that was in the 30s.

It will be a whole new ball game. It will be a declaration of war by the pigs.

Let us not be found wanting.

We should view any 'official version' with a healthy dose of scepticism, before making up our minds independently.

And then, in the early hours, I wrote

News Front Pages, 0400 - Lead story headline:

Man collapsed and died in G20 summit protest - Telegraph

Man dies during G20 demonstrations in London - Guardian

G20 leaders get down to business – BBC (Britain’s most popular news website) No mention of the death, at all, on front page.

Nice one, Beeb. Are such actions what it takes to keep your government charter?

-

The police pump a never-ending succession of arrests of young men with Pakistani origins, in which these heroes foil ever more elaborate master plots to slaughter us all in our beds.

The press fawn and regurgitate whatever the pig press officer has just vomited all over them. Meanwhile these ‘Al Qaeda desperados’ are all released without charge, nor a column inch, a few days later.

It’s good we are using technology against the cops - cameras, video. Who ever would have heard of Ian Tomlinson if we didn’t?

But just don’t let them play the usual ‘it was just a bad apple’ card, if anyone, in blue is ever done for the violence the state inflicted on the G20 protestors.

They’re all guilty and the mainstream media (a front page story on the BBC News website as I write – ‘Barack Obama unveils the First Puppy’) are their accomplices.

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The time I almost felt sorry for a (minor) capitalist.

Maybe as an excuse for activity, or, as I like to think, in addition to it, I make full use of whatever regulatory apparatus there is.

(Do you remember all that ‘light touch’ regulatory regime in Britain - the one that was keeping us nimble in contrast to our ‘overregulated’ European competitors with their inflexible workforce and their banks tied up with red tape? I wonder if that worked out well - with the Pound sinking against the Euro, and unemployment rising a lot faster here).

I’m pleased that my reporting to the local authority has seen Tesco prosecuted at least twice for overcharging and selling unsafe goods. I’m pleased that action has also been taken against at least one dubious college (they are always called the Oxford or Cambridge College of Canning Town, or similar) that I reported for falsely claiming affiliation with prestigious universities, so as to attract and then fleece foreign students.

I should do more. Still at least a recent spam email to me started matters moving.

-

Feb 17, 2009 at 4:29 PM

Dear Southpaw,

I am writing to you about …

Then followed a long email that, in short, was trying to get me to pay for something that it is illegal to charge for – the standard services of an employment agency..

Best regards,

Alan Ashley, Executive


Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 6:05 PM

Dear Mr Ashley,

Thank-you for your brochure about your services. I may be interested in taking the matter further but I notice the document doesn't appear to give a contact address for your company.

I'd be grateful if you could supply same so that I may further consider the matter.

Kind regards,

Southpawpunch


Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:32 AM

Hi Southpaw

Thanks for your reply.

The contact detail of our companies MD is given at the end of the broucher. i suggest that you should read the broucher for the payment system and let me about you decision to utilize our service asap so that i can forward your details to my manager who will contact you further process.

Looking forward to hear from you

Regards
Alan Ashley



Wed, Feb Mar 18, 2009 at 2:55 PM

Dear spammer,

Thanks for confirming the details.

I will be passing them all to the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate and will be telling them that I suspect you are breaking the law by attempting to illegally charge job seekers.

Now just fuck off.


Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 4:48 PM

Dear Southpaw, I just wanted to mail to say that how we work is entirely legal. We charge executives for various xxx services. There are many comapnies that provide such services in the UK. - would be happy to discuss should you wish, We do the same thing as such firms as X. I am sorry that you have been upset by Alan’s approach, and if there is any way that I can compensate you for your time, I of course will. My personal mobile is X. Best regards, Bill, Managing Director.


Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 5:31 PM

Couple of examples.

Hi Southpaw, just thought I'd send you a couple of examples of similar firms. (4 x websites) Many of these companies have been working for years. Even so I would like to send you a bottle of wine for your trouble. Best regards, Bill


Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 6:19 PM

Another one – (another website). I'll leave it at that. All the best Southpaw. Another alternative would be to offer you inclusion in our services for gratis and you can see what we can deliver. Best regards,


Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 7:16 PM


You were right...
Southpawpunch, my huge apologies. You were right. I have contacted BERR and reread the employment regs, and although reg does mention X is ok, it is grey to say the least. We will now look at totally changing the way we work. I just assumed that as all these other companies were doing similar things, that it was ok. Please don't contact anyone - I would be grateful. We will change the way we work asap. Thank you for alerting me to this. Best regards, Bill. p.s. We are not scammers!



I didn't reply. But sure enough, they completely changed what they were doing.

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Ho-hum

I find it quite strange that Labour are so amateurish to allow liabilities like Derek Draper to play a role. But that is the party that is sleepwalking towards electoral defeat, in part, because they can not see what a liability Brown is for them now and don’t even have the self-preservation instincts of the average sloth to jettison what damages them.

You’d have thought the thought of losing all their second home mortgages, spouse’s salary and access to god knows what personal indignities they will expect their young interns to provide for them, would concentrate their mind a bit more but, as I’ve said, I think parties lose power, not gain it, and Labour were just lucky, and soon, so will be the Tories.

I also don’t think we can leave Draper without mentioning, as others have, how non-news was the revelation that one political party was planning to tell lies about members of the other one. I think it is all these BBC political journalists, Tory bloggers, policy wonks and the like think that the whole country is interested when some in their charmed circle of a few hundred fall out with each other. We’re not.

Such near non-news wouldn’t be so readily inflicted on us if these people didn’t have power. The whole of the Easter weekend news agenda was taken up with their tittle-tattle where stuff like the killing of Ian Tomlinson and whatever is happening in Sri Lanka (How many civilians are trapped there in the Tiger area?) didn’t get a look in, particularly on our loyal state broadcaster - the BBC.

I still think Draper could make the cabinet though, although I personally look forward to seeing him in a six-foot long wooden box instead.

An unrecognised hero / Library snooping / Mission Statement muses

An unrecognised hero

What should be the attitude of Lefts to 'heros'? I think the word should have a restricted currency; to me it’s usually someone who risks their life to undertake a worthy task.

Like that ten year old girl who, long ago, ran back to try and get her sister out of that burning flat on a estate near me. She died with her younger sibling, arm in arm.

And whilst singers, writers and the like have their place, it’s only their end product that I may admire. I have never seen them as 'heros'. And why even bother reading an article about, say, a musician when you could listen to their music instead?

I find artists and the like generally often have no more than maybe four songs, three books or two films in them anyway. Dying in their 20s is the most sensible career option for many.

Those people that I do have the most time for are political activists - communists, of course. Many of those that I would list as people to be admired (although rarely as 'heroes') would be very familiar names, although many have never been known other than to their closet comrades - such as those who died defending the Bavarian communist revolution or strikers shot down by the Pinkertons in 20th century USA - and many others.

I’m also wary about making lists of people that I like, or even heroes. Things change over time. And I also think that sometimes we may invent, or project things, onto such people to fill our own gaps.

More heros?

I’ve always had time for Victor Serge. I’ve bought and read many of his books and I have even thought, on two separate occasions, after reading his 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary' that it was the most interesting book that I had ever read.

But that was a long time ago. Does he deserve a place in the socialist Pantheon or is it that his reputation meets a particular need?

Serge was originally an anarchist. I have always had more time for some class struggle anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists than for many Trots. (Like those Trots from the Committee for a Marxist International whose Greek section has been fulminating about the 'hooligan' and 'anarchist' elements leading the current disturbances there - who the hell do they think started things going? It is also obvious to the best anarchists, without being patronisingly lectured by the CMI et al, that this movement will fail without the wider involvement of workers.)

Serge was an internationalist with a trans-national life. He stood firm against Stalinism and paid the price but he also made some apt criticisms of Trotsky. So he can be the perfect instrument on which to place our reservations about Lenin and Trotsky (such as Kronstadt), as well as our condemnation of Stalin, but whilst still remaining rock hard defenders of the revolution, advocates of communism and scourges of backsliders. I fear this may now be the purpose of Serge and there are others who fill similar gaps.

But what was Serge the man like? Would we have agreed with him on other things? Would he have made an interesting companion and a solid comrade? In the absence of evidence otherwise, I would presume that he would but it is wrong to think you could ever know just how he was. Was he a hero?

Unrecognised hero

Serge will make many a list of Left 'heroes' but there’s one figure that never gets a mention in any Left list of notables. In fact I don’t recall him ever seeing him being written about in a Left context, or as a Left. But he undoubtedly was a communist and he also meets my definition of a ‘hero’ as well. That missing name is Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald wrote to the Socialist Party of America, aged 15, as a "Marxist" asking for info. The photograph above, from March 1963, shows him holding copies of the publications, 'Militant' (US SWP) and 'The Worker' (CPUSA). He read Marx when young and joined the Young People's Socialist League. He later told a friend that his involvement in politics dated back to reading a pamphlet about the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In summer 1963, Oswald distributed leaflets for the (US SWP) sponsored, pro-revolution, 'Fair Play for Cuba Committee'.

The Warren Commission (which investigated JFK’s assassination in 1964) said Oswald attempted, in April 1963, to kill retired Major General Edwin Anderson Walker. The general was an extreme right-winger, a member of the John Birch society and an anti-communist. He was relieved of his command for distributing right-wing literature to his troops.

Oswald's wife is reported to have said to him about that incident, 'I mean how dare you to go and claim somebody's life, and he said "Well, what would you say if somebody got rid of Hitler at the right time? So if you don't know about General Walker, how can you speak up on his behalf?." Because he told me... he was something equal to what he called him a fascist."

Oswald was though also a Marine from age 17 until his defection to the USSR aged 19. He stayed there for four years.

In Minsk, Belaraus he is said to have written the following in his diary; it vaguely reads to me like the thoughts of communist disillusioned with Stalinism. -

"The Communist Party of the United States has betrayed itself! It has turned itself into the tradional lever of a foreign power to overthrow the government of the United States; not in the name of freedom or high ideals, but in servile conformity to the wishes of the Soviet Union and in anticipation of Soviet Russia's complete domination of the American continent."

"There can be no sympathy for those who have turned the idea of communism into a vile curse to western man. The Soviets have committed crimes unsurpassed even by their early day capitalist counterparts, the imprisonment of their own peoples, with the mass extermination so typical of Stalin, and the individual surpresstion and regimentation under Krushehev. The deportations, the purposeful curtailment of diet in the consumer slighted population of Russia, the murder of history, the prositution of art and culture."


Life - simpler than some think

Now of course some will say that Oswald wasn’t what he seemed, or even that he didn’t kill Kennedy. Just about all the facts that I have written about him here are disputed by someone, including the photo above that some say was faked. (All the information I write here is derived from www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk and www.wikipedia.org, with checks made elsewhere to ensure that these facts are generally agreed.)

Such inaccuracies in the record would, of course, be likely to change my view of him - especially if he was an agent of reactionaries, or if his Left record is a state smear, but I always think life is more straightforward than people think.

I remember once watching a 'serious' TV documentary - so serious that it convinced a couple of gullible 'Trots' that I was sat with watching it - that 'proved' that Kennedy was killed by the Corsican mafia.

You can just imagine the agenda of their planning meeting in Ajaccio -

- Item 16: Liaison with farmers about olive oil adulteration.
- Item 17: Whip round for village square Xmas trees.
- Item 18: Assassination of US president.

A review in the latest Lobster magazine of a new book ("It’s one of the most important books on the subject in the last decade") - 'JFK and the Unspeakable' by James W Douglass - claims that there was a Oswald double in the cinema where he was arrested and that this person was later seen in a car with switched plates that belonged to a friend of J. D. Tippit (the cop Oswald killed shortly after JFK and for whose murder he was arrested in the cinema). This friend was also a contractor for CIA boats smuggling guns into Cuba!

Maybe the 70s 'French Connection' was the result of said boatman later fleeing the Corsican mafia to Marseilles and there setting up heroin importing with the CIA, the New York mob and the Illuminati?

In fact I wonder whether I have spotted a book opening. I mean there have been thousands (or is it tens of thousands?)of books about the JFK assassination, like the thoughts of someone who was married to the barber who cut Oswald’s hair when he was a kid or analyses of bus tickets that Oswald may have used in the weeks leading up to the assassination. I am confident I pass that bar.

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee is reported as being set up by the US SWP; an ostensibly Trotskyist organisation (although other reports say it was set up, as a trap, by the FBI or the CIA). Oswald unilaterally set up a branch of it in New Orleans and then sent guest membership cards to Gus Hall and Ben Davis, two leading figures in the CPUSA.

To expect these two figures, in the 'official' (or 'Stalinist') Left, to join a Trot lead organisation would only be contemplated by a political naïf and Oswald, with his long experience with the Left, would not have been that.

I don’t know what the meaning of this apparent contradiction is but I feel quite sure that I could pad it all out to a book, maybe by tying it in with all sorts of stuff about the early 60s US far Left which could be written up to have some sort of faint relevance. Book publishers (or film producers), with a fat advance only, are invited to contact me.

The synopsis I once read about another volume on the JFK killing, called 'Case Closed', sums up my view. ('Case Closed' - All the theories are just guff to sell books and I prove why. Oswald shot JFK and that’s it.)

JFK, the liberal?

Of course liberals mourn Kennedy but then liberals can be very stupid.

Memo: Obama to liberals (and even a few 'Trots') - Did you see how right wing my cabinet is? You cried at my victory; are you sobbing now, for real, you saps?

JFK threatened nuclear war, supported an invasion of Cuba, supported the Ba’athist revolution in Iraq (where the new regime used a CIA supplied list to massacre Lefts) and, most murderously of all, sent 16,000 military 'advisors' and Special Forces into Vietnam and also agreed to the use there of free-fire zones, napalm, defoliants and jets.

Like the (true) Vietnamese heroes in the resistance, just maybe Kennedy got to learn, if only momentarily as his brain exited towards Jackie’s coat, about the awesome power of US weaponry and military force.

The communist

The Lobster book review makes a pertinent point, "In discussing the assassination, the most striking feature of those who propagate the official 'lone, crazed, assassin' line is the omission of the crucial, wider issue of motive?"

I think that’s right. But I think the motive is very likely to be very straightforward. Oswald killed JFK because the president was a murderous scumbag and Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist hero.

Or as the Warren Commission stated, "his commitment to Marxism and communism appears to have been another important factor in his motivation (for killing Kennedy)."

It could be argued that Oswald should have realised that there are 'no short cuts to revolution' or reds should concentrate on being active in their trade union or that 'patient socialist propaganda work is the way forward'. In fact, I’m sure every identikit Trot would argue this. But then 'Oswald as a Left' has never occurred to any of them before.

Maybe Oswald just thought - 'Fuck this, I can see 50 years hence and nothing’s fundamentally changed. Let’s just take out one of the bastards.'

And don’t you wish that Iraqi had something other than shoes to throw, whilst exclaiming 'This is a farewell from the Iraqi people, you dog!' at war criminal Bush in Baghdad today?

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Library snooping

Thinking about reserving a book about Islamism in your local library? Using the Internet there to research a student project about hardcore Greens? Maybe you should think again.

The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals has surveyed some of its members in the light of them having "received a number of reports concerning increased police or other security agency activity with regard to libraries and their users."

They go on to say "The results of the questionnaire have revealed that libraries are experiencing legitimate police and security agency activity."

"One library was asked to supply details of what Muslim patrons were reading. Another turned down a request for websites visited by library member as it was perceived to be a 'fishing expedition'."

"Earlier in the year we had reports of Special Branch officers visiting our individual libraries to introduce themselves and to encourage staff to report any suspicious behaviour on the part of customers directly to them, particularly if it involved terrorism, political extremism and animal rights."

"Only recent involvement with the police has been an enquiry from them about our policies and guidelines for internet use. The officer enquiring spoke to one of my colleagues and said his particular interest was extremist religious sites. He asked that we contacted him direct with any incidences of this nature, should we ever get any."

It would appear clear, from the above responses, that libraries are keeping records of the websites visited by each user.

I have commentated before that when web access was first introduced in libraries, the system was that you would just put down any name on a list to book a time to access the Internet but this has changed so that now you need to be registered and use your library card to get on the web in a library.

I speculated that the introduction of this new system was to be enable records to be kept of the sites you visit - the new system doesn’t give advantages over the previous one for the library or for its users, in fact it’s more hassle for all. This speculation would appear ("turned down a request for websites visited") to be confirmed.

Indeed libraries seem quite happy with these arrangements - "We have found the police to be entirely considerate and helpful on each occasion and have had no cause to question the procedures they have followed." Yes, officer; no, officer; three bags full, officer. Can I tell you who has being taking out the 'Communist Manifesto' and 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover' as well, please, officer?

These procedures will be called something like 'local service providers in a joined up, multi-agency approach to community safety' or other such spiel. Communists call it police snooping, added and abetted by the council.

Did it ever occur to the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals body to ask why they are doing this, and should they be doing this, instead of just pondering how frequently the cops do tap them for info?

(Prompted by a reference to the report in 'Lobster' 56, Winter 2008/2009.)

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Mission Statement muses

I have had to spend too long going through 'mission statements' and other corporate twaddle. I have even, for my sins, written some. Whilst ploughing through this treacle, I have thought many things and have started having visions such has been my utter boredom - but I have never seen the beauty that lies therein.

But Nick Astbury, has managed this and gone beyond that which is immediately apparent. He has seen the poetry in the proprietary prose and has produced some verse from the texts.

I like his reworking of corporate statements from Lastminute -

You’ve got that dreamy look on your face.
You want to career down a mountainside
in a perspex ball: shake up the days,
dazzle the world with your escapades.
You wake up here, in a shabby career,
in a perspex ball, not travelling at all.

And from KPMG -

I am strong.
I am vibrant.
I am committed to a vision.
I am tremendous.
I am quality.
I will lead people to excellence.
I am delighted.
I am respected.
I am very greatly valued.
What am I?
I am the best.

Let the banks go bust / The honest copper

Let the banks go bust

There's little that demonstrates better a communist critique of capitalism than the current banking crisis.

Events are clearly showing how business sucks the lifeblood from people through their surplus labour, but then also purloins public money as well.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, as first reported by the BBC’s crime correspondent, is planning a daring daylight robbery on the Treasury tomorrow. The planned proceeds of this heist - £50bn - will then be ‘invested’ in Britain’s banks.

I’d imagine they’ll make him Chair for Life of RBS, etc., when he retires from politics; maybe they will even rename a shopping centre, or town that they own, after him.

Did anyone notice the banks gifting billions to the public purse when they were flush with cash?

I have no doubt that the banks' PR machines are working overtime to get across their message - For the good of Britain, pay us the fucking money - although maybe they're working on saying that with a bit more subtlety.

£50bn is getting on for a grand from everyone in Britain. Can I put in a request to Alistair Darling for £1000 for the Southpawpunch website - or just for my holidays?

This £50bn is also proportionally very similar to the £400bn ($700bn) giveaway, sorry ‘investment’, that the US government has just bunged the US banks (the American economy is 7x bigger than Britain’s).

Of course billions have been given away there, here and everywhere else already. And will doubtless be so again in future. Once a burglar has worked out you don’t lock your back door; he’ll keep on returning.

In Brown’s banana Britain there’s not even a parliamentary debate about the £50bn ‘investment’ before it's gifted - as happened in the US Congress about the $700bn, and where legislators even dared to reject the bail-out, for a few days - although I’d imagine they’ll chew over the deal in the UK - after it has been done, of course. I can imagine already the pained look of angst on the face of Diane Abbott Portillo or John McDoughnut in the parliamentary committee.

It's ludicrous to see this gifting megabucks to businesses as 'socialism', as some American rightwingers have claimed, but nonetheless I was kind of hoping that these 'pure' free market advocates, who are using such a term, would have put up more of a fight for their politics. If you're going to argue for capitalism, it's only reasonable you accept its flip side as well.

Jump!

I’m so far a bit disappointed that no bank directors has yet made use of that readily available commodity in Canary Wharf - height - to toss themselves, 1929 style, from the top of one of the buildings.

It may well be the sealed windows in the skyscrapers there that defeat them (is that the real reason why they don’t open?) as these types are often a bit thick (as I know from school). So can I suggest that they could chuck a chair through first; and then quickly follow?

I'm enjoying the meltdown spectacle but I also think it's instructive about the often random nature of capitalism. That system’s defenders will pretend it to be the most rational system but it’s all clearly just wild and unpredictable. It’s ludicrous that an company can, just like that, become worth half or what it was worth the day before - it’s not as though half its buildings have burnt down overnight.

British Banking Corporation

The British state broadcaster, the BBC, is super loyal to the British ruling class at the best of times. But it turns to bootlicking at times of ‘crisis’.

Today we had - the City, that “symbol of this buccaneering island spirit” from Nick Robinson, Political Editor and a summit today between the banks and government to agree the £50bn deal was described by Robert Peston, Business Editor as “the meeting to rescue our banking system, and the British economy”. And of course the money being injected into the banks is being “invested”. Lickspittle, lapdog journalism.

Will the banking system 'collapse'?

You pay a mortgage (or payments on a business loan, or other) to RBS and they go bust; you then find yourself paying the same to the China Overseas Bank after they buy your bank for £4.30.

You have savings of £3000 with RBS and you get a compensation cheque from the government when they go bust. You then move this to a new Mittal Bank.

The Channel Tunnel went bust (or nearly did). It didn’t mean it stopped working, or evaporated, but it did mean that whoever took it over acquired an asset without the debts incurred in building that link. They maybe got a bargain in the process. Imagine how well set a bank could be getting lots of paying mortgage holders (with the defaults taken care of elsewhere) at a knock-down price.

Britain used to have a car industry and a coal industry. It has been cleansed of both as these industries collapsed - but people still drive cars in Britain and some of its power stations burn coal.

There have been bank collapses since the first moneyman put his money out to ‘work’. Scores of these companies have collapsed before. But it's ludicrous to think the banking system, as a whole, will collapse. There’s nowhere on the planet that is cleansed of banks, nor will there be under present arrangements - if capitalists have spare cash, they will always will seek to get the biggest return, be it via a bank based in a grand looking building lending to the government or bank of gangsters' monies collecting their vig.

Sure, there'd be some dislocation if the current banks were just left to burn. Maybe rates would increase for a while and funds dry up, in part - but market pressures will come to bear, the funds will return if the return on investment is enough. The losers would be financial services workers and those who have a lot of money in troubled banks (which I presume they are now withdrawing).

The alternative to letting the banks burn and that is currently being undertaken by their agents in government is giving £Xbn (X being a very large number) to their banks. This makes a lot of bank shareholders happy (and a lot of very big shareholders, very happy indeed). The knock-on effect of this will, however, be minus £Xbn in state funds - so less hospitals, roads, fat rail companies, soldiers etc.

I can't really see one course being worse than the other in terms of the number of jobs lost; the former may even mean limited numbers lost as replacement banks pick up staff (but doubtless more 'efficiently' - e.g. not picking up bank employees at the top of their grade).

A variation on this strategy seems to be governments taking a stake in banks, that stake often just being the losses, but not always. So a forced nationalisation of a company - a bank - that will be obliged to act like a bank when the market returns? Very socialist.

Other variations on this appear to be such as has happened with banks like Fortis (whose arrogance was personally very apparent to me, not long ago, during a job interview. I don’t suppose there’s much point me putting in a belated travel expenses claim now.) They were bought up, in large part, by governments who then appear to have sold this Benelux bank to one of its rivals. Lucky BNP Paribas.

Lucky other banks as well. Lloyds TSB have taken over HBOS. This would have been rejected as ‘anti-competitive’ in ‘normal’ times but when this deal was recently announced it was also stated that they had been in talks for sometime before (for how long? even before the crisis, when such a deal would not have been sanctioned?). How very convenient for Lloyds TSB; I read that they will now have 30% of the British mortgage market.

Slumpism

There’s a cod form of communism that indulges in 'primitive slumpism’. Its proponents think ‘the worse it is, the better’ (just ask your local anarchist - oh dear, there’s none left). I’m opposed to such thinking because, for example, more unemployment will make strikes harder (a greater reserve pool of labour) - but then it was hardly sparking during the boom time either.

So, thinking the playing of a joker or two, even if just to break up the monotony, may lead to unexpected opportunities. I’m just wondering whether we should welcome the appearance of, say, modern soup kitchens (Pot Noodle kitchens sponsored by Golden Wonder, maybe?) and the like, as a harbinger of depression and more - which may yet lead us to be able to inherit the ruins, like the 30s repeated but with a different epilogue?

So to that end, can I start a web rumour right here (supposedly a lot of this starts from such baseless rumours). Goldman Sachs is in secret talks to be taken over by a Wrexham based chain of pound stores and Merrill Lynch’s board will, next week, reveal themselves to be really be the Twelve Apostles of the Age of Aquarius.

Sell, sell, sell!

So what we should do?

Now could be a great time for communists to organise against the ravages - current and soon forthcoming - the capitalists will be sure to try and force us to pay for their crisis.

We should go on the offensive and argue for -

Expropriate (i.e. seize, don't buy) the banks - pay compensation only in the case of proven need.

Not a penny to businesses, no bank bailout - let them go to the wall.

The state to provide banking services (mortgages, etc.) to those requiring such.

A workers government to execute all present and former directors of FTSE100 companies, and all individual shareholders holding 5% of more of these companies, as well as those having assets currently valued at £10M plus.

Demo

Some public minded citizens are getting together a posse to try and run the Bank Bros gang out of town before they do over the main safe. If I have time, I will be there with a placard saying ‘Jump’.

March on the City
We won’t bail out the bankers
Friday 10 October 4-6pm
Assemble at the Bank of England, Threadneedle St, London EC2R

(demo details from Socialist Worker - I don’t know who is organising the protest.)

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The honest copper

“I don’t think anything went wrong”. - Response at the inquest when Jon Boucher, who had been Anti-Terrorist squad officer in the control room at Scotland Yard, advising Cressida Dick, was asked about the events including the holding down and killing of Jean Charles de Menezes on a tube train by a police execution squad.

"And equally, I pray it doesn't happen, but it is possible that an innocent member of the public might die in circumstances like this" - Cressida Dick, ‘designated senior officer’ in charge of the operation.

Investigate! / Thatcher - the Tory cut / Good Morning for Vietnam? / Strike Three / All points right

Investigate!

I’ve written extensively before about how the Left could use the net to do a lot more than it does now. We could organise, report and agitate - and not just pontificate.

But why is no-one Left using the web to do that other necessary task - to investigate? Why can’t Left bloggers not just say who and what it is that they dislike, but also provide some facts - and dig up some background - to expose their prey as well?

Many a current print title started life as a muck-raking, small budget newspaper. Many more never made it. I remember, in my youth, visiting 'Grassroots' bookshop in Manchester where I used to pick up a badly printed, but well written investigative small newspaper whose name I can’t now remember.

I do remember that it (most unusually) managed to attract some mainstream advertising. So there would be incongruous display ads - for BabyBio - next to muck raking articles about the Manchester elites - such as James Anderton, God’s copper. The paper doesn't exist anymore.

Neither does one that was based a few miles further down the road - the 'Rochdale Alternative Press'. RAP got some good scoops. For example, it alleged in 1979 that “during the 1960s, Cyril Smith (then Liberal MP for the town - Southpawpunch) was using his position to get lads (in childrens’ homes - Southpawpunch) aged 15 – 18 to undress in front of him in order that he could get them to bend over his knee while he spanked their bare bottoms or let him hold their testicles in a bizarre ‘medical inspection’. Smith never sued RAP - or was prosecuted.

Swansea council's corrupt Labour administration was done over by another crusading and investigative paper, 'Rebecca', in the late 70s.

There were other similar papers elsewhere.

Where are their modern day equivalents? Draconian libel laws remain in place but print bills and distribution hassles don't exist for online journals. Useful legislation to help such journalism, like the Freedom of Information Act, is also now with us.

Amongst the big boys there’s a paucity of investigative journalism. The 'Guardian' will sometimes put resources into an in-depth investigation into, say, supermarket practices. The 'Evening Standard' did some good investigations into that 'Left' fraud Livingstone during the recent London mayoral election (but something tells me we’ll be waiting a long time for them to do the same to their boy Boris.)

The 'Daily Mirror' may occasionally put the boat out and reel in a few small businessmen running web scams and the like. The 'Sun' had a good story yesterday on its front page about one of the last wanted war-time Nazis being espied at a football match.

Some Sunday tabloids also do welcome investigations into pimps and politicians or executives and excesses but they’re far more likely to waste ink on coked up celebrities or sybarite sportsmen.

Channel 4’s 'Despatches' can be watchable but the BBC’s 'Panorama' doesn’t usually deliver. Local papers and radio mainly report what the PR release tells them to but local TV news can sometimes make an effort to meet the terms of their licence.

'Private Eye's news pages can be a real draw although they do have a skewed interest in the unimportant - such as hacks - and some stories only contain spurious stuff about who’s shagging who. (I also wonder why that magazine bothers with the humour pages; they’re somewhat worse than the Victorian era 'Punch' witticisms that they used to mock.)

But most media - including the above, most of the time - don’t dig like they did or could.

I recently read a former editor, Peter Wilby, of the 'New Statesman' implying that a good outcome of a Tory General Election victory could be a revival of his former magazine.

The 'New Statesman' is now full of dull policy prose from one of the identikit think thanks. It all comes wrapped around an insert called something like 'Community Policing (published in association with Taser)’ with a forward by the Home Secretary. The magazine lives off the advertising of multinationals that pay them in the hope of influencing the government connected readership.

But I remember enjoying reading a very different NS in my school library. I fondly recall the exploits of the investigative journalist, Duncan Campbell (who was harassed by the state for his journalism in the ABC Trial). Campbell would often burrow away under Whitehall - quite literally - exploring the capital’s secret spy tunnels. (Where has he been these last twenty years - bricked in round a bend under Belgravia?)

I’ve also seen some good exposes in 'Socialist Worker'. I think usually a member of theirs has got hold of something that they’d rather see published in their own paper than in the mainstream media.

This week’s 'Weekly Worker' also has an interesting investigative article about Tower Hamlet council’s manipulation of opinion polling to support their privatisation schemes. I emailed the author and urged he try and get a wider audience for his research. He replied that he had tried the mainstream and trade press, but that they generally weren’t interested.

But I have seen one blog that does do investigative journalism and does it well - ‘Postman Patel’. That link takes you to an interesting recent article from that blog about Britain’s latest Military satellite - delivered under PFI, naturally.

The author of that blog, 'Postman Patel' told me that he publishes a thousand words a day. I think most of them are interesting. It was no surprise to me to find that, as I understand it, he was connected with the 'Rochdale Alternative Press'.

So why can’t Left bloggers investigate? Make a name for yourself - get on the net, in the council minutes, in the planning approvals - and start digging.

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Thatcher - the Tory cut

Have you seen the latest recut of the Story of Margaret Thatcher (on now, all channels) - the ex PM as an early feminist and a principled fighter; an admirable figure and smasher of glass ceilings but whom previous TV directors have misunderstood?

Maybe this trend is the media catching on that the Tories are on the rise, and that their latest draft of history needs to be rewritten once more.

But Southpawpunch hasn’t forgotten the bastard offspring of Attila the Hun and Elizabeth Báthory. In fact that bottle of Cava has been hanging around near my fridge for a while now. Could it be that these belated tributes to Thatcher instead mean that they know what we don’t yet - but that we earnestly hope and pray for - that she’ll not be with us anymore, sometime soon?

I look forward to a celebratory drink when that happens - and a lot more.

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Good morning for Vietnam?

As an orthodox Trot (how can there be any type?) I considered Vietnam, and other places, to be a degenerated workers state.

I am near enough sure that it, like all the rest (except Cuba?), have reverted back to capitalism but my lack of time to sit in the British Library and, of course, my lack of economic knowledge, precludes me from saying when this took place.

One of the reasons for being sure of this change is a report about that country that I read in my 'Wall Street Journal' this week - “new labour laws …make workers liable to compensate the employers if they walk off the job illegally.”

You would expect that move may have led to a cooling down in the number of strikes in Vietnam, not least because many of them are illegal. Certainly such rules in Britain led to a downward pressure on strikes - no end of trade union professionals are all too pleased to have to kowtow to this employer’s law.

If Vietnam is no longer a workers state I don’t rule out the possibility that it can be so again - and a healthy one, this time.

The Vietnamese showed how you can defeat the strongest imperialist force on the planet, just a generation ago. And their response to this latest offensive against them? The number of strikes there after this legislation was introduced increased by almost 300%.

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Strike Three

'Kapoom' or similar noise doubtless echoed along the mountains as an attack from the USAF hit home last week in the latest country to suffer their advances. Has that foresight from the Left (and many others), organising in defence of the next likely target, Iran, been shown to be on the ball?

No, it was 11 Pakistani soldiers who were obliterated last week when the United States destroyed one of that country's border posts on their frontier with Afghanistan.

The Pakistani government has gone very quiet since its election a few months ago. Doubtless it’s been spending most of its efforts deciding exactly who will be receiving which kickback in the ruling coalition.

But it’d better hurry up with governing - because far from being able to get rid of their hangman in waiting (the former dictator Musharraf) as they’ve intended, they may yet be answering to him again. Last month the US said that “(Bush) looks forward to President Musharraf’s continuing role in further strengthening US - Pakistani relations.”

Since the birth of that state, its armed forces have engorged themselves on the product of Pakistanis. The army is perhaps that country’s biggest business. But that body has the characteristics of a military midget if it can’t stop its troops being killed in cross border attacks. And now the Afghani president (and American puppet) Karzai is threatening more of the same.

I wonder what the response of the Chinese (who also share a border with Afghanistan) would be if the US blew up one of their border posts?

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All points right

I suppose if you’re a swimmer trapped underwater, your desperate thinking may make you imagine every movement around you in the inkyness to be someone coming to your rescue. Anyone Left has to have had that feeling, from time to time, of solitary abandonment and of running out of oxygen but still with hope alive. That's why you may not appreciate that the motion near you may be something dangerous coming towards you instead.

And the sea in which all the Left swims is certainly hard to fathom. But still why, in the full glare of daylight, is the Labour ex Left knowingly diving into a tub full of sharks?

It’s just plain sad to see Labour ex Lefts - such as 'Labour Briefing' - pandering to the sharp suited careerists in Compass and jumping into their tub. Why do these Labour ex Lefts let themselves be pulled ever rightwards like a rudderless tugboat? Why are they so incapable of dragging Compass in their direction?

I think it’s because, without Compass, these Labour losers would drift even further - right out to sea, they've no anchor left at all. They’ll do anything to break from the monotony of having wave after wave crash down onto them.

The Labour ex Lefts remind me of all those ‘in the know’ who just 'knew' that Brown was going to be noticeably different from Blair. Well, I suppose they were right - Brown is sending more troops to occupy Afghanistan than his predecessor.

And like those idiots without insight - the acolytes who saw in Brown what plainly wasn’t there - so if it wasn’t for Compass, these Labour ex Lefts would instead now be watching out for any slight Left trick of the light emanating from the Cabinet, not unlike a collection of Cold War Kremlinologists overinterpreting the angle at which every member of the Politburo was wearing their fur hat.

I could imagine what the witterings of the Labour ex Lefts would be - 'Was Harman pulling a face at that fringe meeting, and so should we be supporting her to run for Leader?' - 'Was Blears actually answering the question (and for the very first time!) about mistakes on Question Time indicative that she may be worth supporting as someone who may develop new policies?'

But the Labour ex Lefts think they don’t have to go quite that low now - they are doing ok, they have Compass. But why do they think that the wannabe Labour ministers in that outfit offer anything better than how things are now?

Do they really think a ‘kinder’ capitalism is on offer from their betters in the Compass leadership? What might their programme be - maybe no prescription charges (as Labour did in 1945-50 government) but with Travelodge hospitals and Virgin GPs running alongside.

Is this all the one time Trots, amongst the Labour ex Lefts, will settle for? Have they no principles? Have they no politics? Or do they just want to become a Commander of the British Empire, like former ostensible Trotskyist - and now member of the Compass coterie - Ruth Lister?

The Cruddases and co. of this world are just positioning themselves ‘Leftish’ for a fight for their party after Labour’s defeat. These putative ministers want to replace the old guard - just like the ‘Lefts’ Harman, Blunkett, Hodge etc did in the 80s - and Wilson, Attlee and more did before them.

So Compass won’t just drag the Labour ex Lefts north, south, east and west, as well as backwards through a hedge, it won’t even notice them clinging on to its shoelaces as it walks onwards - but never leftwards - towards whatever prize will sate the personal gluttony of the wannabe members.

Cop it! / Southpawpunch is

Cop it!

A security guard, probably on minimum wage (or thereabouts), threatens to kill you.

How do you react to him? The best response is to point out that your argument isn’t with him, personally. You might also stand your ground and ignore him; decide to beat a tactical retreat or go on the offensive and threaten something back. It all depends on the circumstances.

What you don’t do is go to the cops to try and get the guy prosecuted for what he has allegedly done.

But that’s just what Andy Newman, proprietor of the Socialist Unity blog, is doing. Indeed he’s also trying to get the support of his MP, the Leader of the Council and others to help out with this dirty work.

He alleges that a security guard made a threat to kill him - a serious criminal offence - when he was recently handing out political leaflets in Swindon, and that this guy did this in front of witnesses. Such an incident would be pretty unpleasant although it also hardly sounds like a credible threat.

I can understand, to a degree, how someone may think all sorts, with the adrenalin rushing, in the immediate aftermath of such a moment. I can also appreciate how someone may act initially in an unthinking manner, in an aggrieved response to a nasty incident.

But writing coldly later about such an occurrence; and reporting how you are taking the issue up with the state - including with the cops - suggests at least a serious misfiring in any socialist DNA sequence.

Cops - no and yes

There can be reasons why you do need to report incidents to the cops - such as if your ex-partner makes a credible (or possible) violent threat towards you.

A few times I’ve had to call the cops myself, such as when yet another violent affray broke out in the nether world that's the heaving mass of bodies in the bend of an overfilled bendy nightbus.

For want of a telephone number for a 'Workers Militia - Psychiatric Wing', I also dialled 999 not so long ago when I spotted a bloke sat on the very top of a sloping roof - and who was babbling away incoherently.

In general though, you don’t go to the cops to put other workers in the soup.

You don’t shop workers to managers either. The enemy is the bosses - those who give the orders. It’s tragic that Jobcentre workers, council staff, ticket inspectors, debt collectors and many more workers are obliged to work against the masses to protect the millions of their masters but workers such people remain - and deserving of our basic solidarity.

I remember once being astonished, in a supermarket with whom I thought was a rather hardcore red, when she took umbrage with an error made by the person working on the checkout. She then insisted on making a formal complaint about him to management, despite my strongly expressed disdain for what she was doing.

Andy Newman

I’ve disagreed with Newman before, but in his defence, he’s no Left hobbyist (those many bloggers who think that tap tap tapping away their bon mots gives them a pass on having to do any trade union, single issue campaigning - or other left activity that involves doing more than just arguing the toss with like thinkers).

He does stuff. A leaflet distributed (and organised?) by him as part of the Swindon Stop The War Group and that is aimed at convincing young people not sign up for the armed forces is a great initiative.

I’m not sure whether such a record makes his error worse or better.

Left malaise

But it’s not him that’s the issue; it’s the basic lack of awareness by British Lefts of a class approach towards the state, its representative and those obliged to work for same.

What’s more alarming is that no reader of his article about the Swindon incident, on what is reputed to be the most widely read Left blog in Britain (claimed near 200,000 unique visits last month) has pointed out what's wrong with Newman’s actions.

The comments left even include advice on what law he can use against the hapless security guard! Is it the herd mentality of many witless blog reader and writers; the lack of capacity for independent thought amongst the Left or just sheer rightward thinking that provokes such dross - or a combination of all of these?

One commentator even wonders whether the security guard is ex-forces, as though that makes his conduct more explainable and with the implication of ‘what can you expect from such?’

It’s a socialist viewpoint to consider volunteer soldiers (and pigs) to be the inveterate enemy. But when they (or cops) ditch that uniform, they (nearly always) rejoin the ranks of workers. It’s certainly true, that brutalised and indoctrinated as they will be, they'll often maintain reactionary views - but then so do millions of others.

In uniform

I’ve been thinking about the position of some others working for the cops, such as Police Community Support Officers or civilian police photographers, in the class lines. My view is that if, at least, they wear the uniform, they are fair game. More fool them for signing up for the brickbats without getting the pay and benefits of the standard cop.

But security guards are fellow workers (in a uniform). Maybe Newman can do a victory post if he gets the security guard sacked or convicted.

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"Southpawpunch is"

I often list comments made about this website - good and bad - on the right, under "Southpawpunch is".

My favourite comment has to be one I found recently appended to a block of text that had been copied from one of my articles here by Call me Jim

“WHEN I TRY TO READ ABOUT FORIEGHN POLITICS IT MAKES ME FEEL STUPID. but i do it anyways becals it make me feel smart to know i tryed. :)”a nd that is a sumery of my entire life. god bless my brain, it'll need it by the time i'm done with it.“

Return / Overheard in a library

Return

I won’t be posting weekly (as before) and in fact there may be very lengthy periods between publication. I also can’t see myself knocking out the lengthy posts as I did once but I am returning to this website. (But then if things did pick up, and this website could relate to that; matters could change.)

I do think that whilst it’s good to analyse, argue, debate and record; the point isn’t to interpret, it’s to force change. I suspect in such circumstances the efforts of all Lefts would be best expended on bigger fish elsewhere rather than writing websites such as this which gets more hits now, with people looking at one particular photo, than it has ever done from those who wanted to read something I wrote.

I’ve also just punted a guest article at Dave’s Part on my recent experience, and my continuing views, about the Left List.

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Overheard in a library

“And the Queen has two birthdays. Who has been doing their homework and can tell me when they are?” I’d wandered again into some training session in the library - they had put the screens up but that didn't stop the teacher’s forceful monotone banging on my brain as I tried get to grips with one of the magazines on the tables.

I suppose I don’t mind the new uses for libraries; web access, for example, certainly gets the punters in although it’s noticeable that you now need to have a web card to go online in every library (which presumably could record all the sites you look at) whereas just a few years ago you just put down any old name on a list to use the internet facilities there. (But then it used to be claimed that the details of anyone who borrowed the 'Anarchist Cookbook', or similar, from a library were forwarded to Special Branch).

Yes, it’s good to see all these new and non-traditional uses of libraries (although not so for stations - a few less non-traditional shopping arcades and a few more traditional seats would be nice. Reading station is now a shopping centre with a few attached platforms).

So I decided it was the content of the lesson that was grating, not the noise. Those assembled were going through a course that is designed to meet the new requirements imposed upon those seeking British citizenship. I’d already become ill disposed to this citizenship test and ceremony initiative when I saw a photo and report about it in a council magazine on a previous visit to the library.

The photo in that magazine featured the Mayor centre stage. He was stood there with as much dignity as could muster - a dubious small businessman, with legendary sharp elbows, and always with eye open for an opportunity to switch and pocket his valuable civic chain.

He stood portentously in front of the largest Union Flag I have ever seen with a portrait of Elizabeth Windsor placed over the middle of the Butcher’s Apron. The photo gave the impression of being a still from a film set in a South American police station using that stereotypical large image of El Presidente that is to be found on the wall of every public building in a dictatorship.

And under the Mayor in that photo were gathered a carefully colour co-ordinated coterie of supplicants, obliged to display themselves such to receive their passports.

Back in the library the teacher was going on. He was now talking about the central role of the Queen and the oath of loyalty that all potential British citizens have to take. Likewise back in that article, I remember various migrants waxed effusively about their gratitude to Britain, and their acceptance of ‘our’ vales (that'd be an interesting list).

This is all a big sham. The smiling faces from every continent that were being patronised by the civic leader did so because they had no choice to receive a British passport and an end to the hassles that living as a non EU citizen in Britain entails. A day trip to Calais with an Third world passport? Sure, with a week long visa process thrown in as well.

In the photo they were taking the oath to Her Majesty after being obliged to listen to chapter and verse on their responsibilities as new Brits. I understand that you can’t just send off for a passport in the post after proving your knowledge and loyalty - you also have to go through this charade as well.

But the most insidious side of it all was the lies that were being told to our new or potential compatriots - such as the necessity of being loyal to the Queen. I’ve never taken an oath to Elizabeth Windsor - this Brit says fuck Her Maj.

I also don’t have to accept a list of responsibilities as though I rest here by the grace and leave of some authority. I and everyone else, from wherever they may originate, have as much right to walk these streets as anyone else.

There’s an attempt to force a revived patriotism on us all. Maybe they will start playing the National Anthem again in cinemas. But first they target the vulnerable; forcing those seeking a surer status to act in their little performances, recite their little lines and learn superbly useless stuff like when are the birthdays of the Queen. Stuff the citizenship tests, oath, ceremonies and all.

And don’t they know anything? Everyone already knows when Elizabeth Windsor’s birthdays fall. Every day is her birthday; she has a party, with presents from us and a day off from work, 365 days a year.

Respect cracks / No Football, No Free Speech - By Order / Battle of IDs

Respect cracks

It’s a picture of a crack in the ground, right?

No it isn’t. Why do I have such philistines as readers?

It’s in the Tate Modern, so it’s Art.

But in fact it’s a lot more than just art. According to the leaflet issued to those who view the (sculpture?) -

“First, and most obviously, the contemplative nature of such a venue allows the gesture to resonate in its widest sense. Walking down (the artist, Salcedo) incised line, particularly if you know about her previous work, might well prompt a broader consideration of power’s divisive operations as encoded in the brutal narratives of colonialism, their unhappy aftermaths in postcolonial nations, and in the stand off between rich and poor, northern and southern hemispheres…For Salcedo, the crack reveals a ‘colonial and imperial history [that] has been disregarded, marginalised or simply obliterated… the history of racism, running parallel to the history of modernity and… its untold dark side.’"

But it’s also clearly a lot more than that description. It’s not just a leftist commentary on “colonial and imperial history” for this piece of art is called no less than Shibboleth.

Yes, that’s right, the very term, one of a million words used by Respect members, that is the touchstone of how that party’s rightist critics express their disdain about the organisation - Lindsey German reportedly said that gay rights are not a shibboleth. Lindsey German, long-time socialist feminist, turns homophobe? - only in the ravings of the Labour liquidationists.

With four SWP or SWP sympathetic councillors splitting from the Respect group on Tower Hamlets council, there’s an almighty crack in Respect as well as in the Tate Modern. I think it’s only a matter of time before the two wings of that party permanently split asunder. Coincidence that Salcedo called her work, denoting a small fissure that turns into a gaping division, Shibboleth? I think not.

But the artist does seems a bit coy in commentating further on what she clearly devised her work to describe. I haven't yet read her views about John Rees, George Galloway and the other major (no, that’s not the right word) players in Respect, so let me add my view instead.

A measure of contempt should be ladled on both sides in this looming divorce.

The disdain with which the SWP treated its leftist critics, when the latter remarked upon the often reactionary nature of some of Respect’s members (such as was well reported in devastating interview after devastating interview with Respect candidates in the Weekly Worker) makes the SWP’s late discovery of the true nature of their allies beyond pitiful.

The SWP is accused of bureaucratic manoeuvrings against its foes in Respect (and to be fair, accuses them back). This charge against the Socialist Workers Party is more than credible to anyone with experience of how they work.

I thought it noteworthy that the SWP criticised the raising of a petition, amongst its members, that complains about the recent expulsion of three of their comrades for siding with the anti-SWPers, in Respect, and against their own party.

Those members (wrongly) concerned about this decision were criticised by their leaders for acting not in the culture of the party, by raising such a national petition, rather than arguing the issue at their branch meetings.

It says a lot, about the reported culture in the SWP, that aggrieved members don’t feel confident enough to follow this formally correct advice from their Central Committee. All I’ve ever heard from ex members of the SWP is that if you did do as the CC advised, you’d pretty soon find yourself consigned to outer darkness, if not beyond membership.

But worse than the SWPers are the rightward movers, including the supposed Trots (in fact, in the ‘Fourth International’ [sic] itself) who have found themselves on the side of the small businessmen and Galloway against the ostensible Marxists of the SWP. Huh?

Glyn Robbins chair of Tower Hamlets Respect writes well about a common Leftist mindset. “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the SWP. The very fact that I feel the need to make this statement and in those words should alarm anyone who is serious about left wing politics. For as long as I’ve been involved in the labour movement (over 25 years) there has been a neurosis about the SWP that, at its most extreme, almost requires medical treatment. I am sorry to say that there are some people within our movement who are far more interested in fighting the SWP than our enemies”

A prime example of this is the recent reporting on a Left blog that the East London Advertiser has reported that the 6 Respect-SWP councillors on Tower Hamlets council are in discussion about joining in an alliance with the Liberal Democrats. It is beyond the realms of possibility that SWP members, in this or any other parallel universe, would undertake such a move.

It is completely scurrilous for any Left to repeat such garbage. When the SWP leadership tell their membership, falsely, that all other far Lefts out there are sectarian losers out to destroy their party, they sadly have now been given another piece of ammunition supporting their tainted worldview.

You can read chapter and verse, if you so desire, about the slow-burning implosion of Respect on websites like Dave’s Part (from Dave Osler). From there, you can go to lesser sites where there are hundreds of comments about the minutiae of this particular small candyfloss stall in the long running carnival fairground that is British Leftism.

There’s a strong culture of Leftist trainspotting in Britain. So on Osler’s site, there are more than three times as many comments on the SWP expelling three members than on another article about the Left and Saudi Arabia. It’s hard not to feel scorn for the over excited Lefts dedicating endless bytes to the politicking of other Left parties.

I think that, on the whole, these developments in Respect are positive. It was never going to last unless the SWP (and Socialist Outlook, etc) really did break completely with their history.

The SWP will walk away (or be pushed out) with six (?) councillors and the experience of having Lindsey German come fifth (and beating the BNP and the Greens) in the last London Mayoral election. (No I don’t think electoral strength is the be all and end all - but neither do I treat it with disdain. It’s good, not bad).

Similar in support, at least in terms electoral terms, is the Socialist Party with, I think, also about six councillors.

How about a lash up between both of them, the CPB (with the Morning Star - and the SLP), the small Trot groups (which I would loosely define as Workers Power, Permanent Revolution, AWL, etc) and any remaining ex (and it must be ‘ex’) Labour Lefts? Add in a few hundred (possibly four figures?) unaligneds (like me) who are in this general political area and we may have a goer.

Fantasy politics? Doubtless. But why should it be?

The Netherlands has the Dutch Socialist Party (which started life as a Maoist organisation), the Scots had the SSP (born from various Trot groups), the Germans have the Linkspartei (coming from ‘official’ communism and social democracy) and the Italians have the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (starting life in ‘official’ communism) (or maybe had, in terms of Leftism able to be supported). There are other such formulations in Scandinavia, eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Are we so incompetent, in Britain, that we can’t at least have the same? It’s hardly as though the Labour Party is attracting the support of Lefts that it did, in say, the 80s.

Sure, such a group wouldn’t be a perfect party. Those looking for an excuse not to join could always find one. I’d have a fair few differences with any of the above European parties myself - but I’d also join them if I lived there and argue my politics inside.

Let’s have a British (or if we must and English and Welsh) Socialist Alliance / Party / Organisation - whatever.

Or, like the Whigs, Gnostic Christianity and the Temperance movement; be prepared to fall permanently down a crack, just like in Salcedo’s work.

Update - I see that a "Solomon ("Simon") Punt" described as a "Respect supporter, Hoyland Nether (West Riding)" has signed the SWP's "An Appeal to Respect Members". This isn't me. I do wonder whether there is such a person - do people still say they live in 'West Riding'? - maybe. I live in London and I'm not called "Solomon Punt" - that's just a nom-de-plume to keep my Facebook account - or even Southpawpunch, in real life.

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No Football, No Free Speech - By Order

This week I read an article in a London council publication that was bemoaning the way that kids nowadays play football.

The writer correctly reported that it’s very rare indeed that you’ll see an informal and spontaneous game of football, as I took part in as a kid in my local park or even across my street. Just about all young players now have to take part in organised (and paid for) games - arranged and timetabled for them by businesses.

An obvious consequence of this degradation in the quality of the lives of these children is that, as reported by the article, fewer kids now play soccer outside school.

It was a good point that the council was making. They were wondering what they could do about it.

In the same publication I also read that the same council would be stepping up its activities against those engaging in unauthorised leafleting in its streets. This initiative follows on from its activities in breaking up (and having arrested) those setting up leaflet stalls (primarily Islamists) in some of its shopping areas.

Then add into this mix it’s scathing reply to me, ridiculing my concerns that I expressed in a letter to them, when its staff refused me access to leaflet one of its old people homes during an election - Any legitimate political party will issue photo ID to its members, without this and a prior appointment and approval, you will not be given access to any of these premises in line with our duty to protect those in our care.

Further infuse the council’s stated determination to stop ‘doorstep calling’ in its borough and the result is pretty much that anyone with a view to express better hope that what they want to say is in line with the view of the editor of the local rag.

That is, if they hold any hope of being able to locally disseminate their message. It’s that culture of control, compliance (and censorship) that also contributes to keeping kids indoors.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Battle of IDs

It’s interesting when you recognise a few names, from long ago, on Facebook and note how many of them have either reinvented themselves or at least obliterated their Left past.

I’ve seen not a few former members of Militant who are now firmly ensconced as ‘petit bourgeois’ small (and even big) business types. And so are now guilty of that ‘crime’ of which they often accused me - being a ‘PB’ - and levelled at me when I was in fact an unemployed squatter.

I haven’t yet managed to find the guy in Militant to whom I, in a sarcastic manner (but that was completely beyond him), offered a (completely fictitious) job to as my dad’s chauffeur - and the tale of which mutated to me supposedly sacking his dad as my family’s (completely fictitious) butler - by the time I went along to a threatening reception at the next Greater Manchester meeting of the Labour Party Young Socialists. I hear that he’s nowadays joined the Satanists; he’s a Director of Human Resources.

There’s a few former SWPers on Facebook, who, from reading their profiles, not only no longer have a political thought in their head but little else in way of thoughts about anything else.

But it’s the alumni of the Revolutionary Communist Party that brought the most wry smile to my lips. (You remember them, the ‘Party of the Future’ as they described themselves in the 80s - including on a near inaccessible bit of flyposting that blighted for years one of the few bits of pleasant decoration, amongst the general dinghiness, of the communal areas in my council tower block).

If you look up former RCPers on Facebook, they’ll often make mention of how they met some of their Facebook Friends (and former RCP comrades). ‘We took part in this great project to reshape the world’. ‘We met whilst thinking big big thoughts’ ‘We went on a journey together.’ No one on the Left could patronise like they could.

Some of what I read in their modern incarnation as Spiked Online can give pause for thought, especially when they comment upon the ridiculousness of some aspects of modern life. They’re big on criticising risk adverse cultures and the mealy mouthed pandering to the censorship of the elites or the 'easily offended'. They can sometimes be correct.

I thought of them when I recently lost or had stolen (I’m not sure which) a wallet. I reported this at the local cop shop (God knows why). I was surprised not to receive a letter noting the ‘crime’ that I had reported but also to get lengthy advice about how I could make use of Victim Support services and counselling to contemplate the misfortune that had befallen me.

(It was a deep relationship, counsellor. I first saw her on a market stall in Hoxton. I overlooked her minor faults, such as her loose clasp, and I grew used to her leathery skin. I was devastated when she left, I haven’t yet found a worthy replacement and, in dark moments, sometimes think about her now - inside the trousers of some other bloke).

The offer to me of counselling also reminded me of one of the most cringeworthy exchanges (there were a few) that I had to witness when working in the NHS.

Mental Health Patient’s sister - She was never right after she lost Terry in the Bethnal Green tube disaster. I was with her.

Patient Care Coordination Liaison Officer (or similar Mickey Mouse title) - What was that? Terry got lost on the tube?

Patient’s sister - A lot of people died, it was in the War, dear. It was her son, he was crushed.

(On March 3 1943 at Bethnal Green Tube station, a nearby anti-aircraft battery opened up with a deafening roar. Some people, heading down to shelter from a bombing raid, slipped on the stairwell and 173 people - including 62 children - suffocated or were crushed to death in the ensuing panic.

Think of how you’re walking through where all their bodies lay, if the lift is ever out and you need to take the stairs).

PCCL (to patient) - Oh dear. That must have been a bad time for you. Did you access proper counselling? It helps to talk about these things.

Patient - The council never did nothing. They didn’t even get us a prefab after the war. I couldn’t talk to him, he was dead.

The ex RCPers don’t like ludicrous self-indulgence masquerading as social concern but then neither do I. But I don’t go from laughing at the muddy thinking (or cynical manipulations) of the caring and controlling professions to writing right-wing political manifestos for their business sponsors that favour decimating regulations and laws so as to promote their joint vision of a laissez-faire economy.

Southpawpunch goes corporate

This website has an account at Facebook but I’ve had to change my account name there from “Southpaw Punch” to Solomon Punt (Solomon seemed to scan [?] better than Simon).

Both account names bear the same relation to my real name - very little - but I’ve already been befriended on Facebook by another Punt who wants me to sign up to some Punt family network.

This reminded me of other occasions when someone has got me confused with a 'namesake'. I don’t have that common a name but there are a few of us

I received an interesting email last year, addressed to ‘me’, and that was sent to one of my accounts (my name at gmail.com).

Let me call myself ‘Solomon Punt’ in my report below of what happened.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Solomon Punt - Financial Controller - Europe
From: Big Boss Andrew (Blackberry)
Date: April 9
To: Big Big Boss Alan and 19 others Bosses at BadBank
Cc: Solomon Punt
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Colleagues,

This is to let you all know that Rajesh left the company yesterday and Solomon Punt has joined BadBank with effect, and with full operational responsibility, from today as Financial Controller - Europe.

Solomon will be responsible for all Financial and corporate (non Legal) matters for all the European Markets and will be based in the London Office.

I hope that you all join me in welcoming Solomon onboard the group.

An email account and mobile phone number is being setup for Solomon and will be active on Monday.

Welcome onboard the group Solomon...

Thanks & Kind Regards

Big Boss Andrew

- Sent from my Blackberry -

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


So I looked up BadBank, I was interested to find out more about where I was going to be working.

The company is the UK subsidiary of a US ‘financial services company’. It specialises in providing sub prime mortgages (at crippling interest rates) as well as credit cards to the ‘financially vulnerable’.

That’s not credit cards that maybe give you a 1% cashback to help you a little bit with your financial plight.

That’s credit cards where you pay a fee for the credit card, are not given any credit (you have to top them up before you use them) and where you also pay a fee every time you use your card.

But it’s ok - your card looks flash and has a fancy name - ‘Portfolio’ or ‘Prestige’ or similar.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Solomon Punt - Financial Controller - Europe
From: Solomon Punt
Date: April 9
To: Big Big Boss Alan, Big Boss Andrew and 19 others Bosses at BadBank
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello everybody,

I'm really pleased to hear about my new job. There I was thinking I was a PR consultant on London but now I'm appointed financial controller for some financial services company even though I failed my Maths A Level and didn't apply for the job.

Please remind how much I am getting and make sure my salary is in the bank at the end of the month - I can send the details.

As the new Financial Controller - Europe of BadBank, one of my first decisions is for some radical financial restructuring.

I note that we claimed, in our recent response to our trade body’s request for information for their submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee investigating our sort of company, that BadBank “at all times operates with the highest ethical considerations. We are proud to provide financial services to those who may be otherwise disadvantaged and we are also proud of our entrepreneurial ability to grow our company whilst dealing with clients who may be high credit risks…we are leaders in treating our staff well, we beat the rest in our industry.”

I’m making these changes to bring us fully in line with this declared ethical policy.

I am awarding all our mortgage holders a six-month holiday from their payments.

All directors will no longer be paid. The next quarter of staff paid immediately between the level of the directors will be subject to a 90% pay cut. All the lowest 60 percent of staff (by pay) will have their pay increased by 400% with immediate effect and their holiday entitlement will likewise be increased to 100 days.

I can see no mention of trade unions in any of the corporate information that we put online, so I’ve taken the initiative. I’ll be involved in a quick discussion with the TUC to ask them to get the appropriate trade union to set up a branch in our company - we will then recognise this body.

Alternatively you may wish to change your contact details so you have the correct email address for the real (or is it the fake?) Solomon Punt and so you don't send me any more emails - although if you do send me more, such as your secret plans, maybe I can sell them to your rivals?

Another thing. It’s all a bit sudden isn’t it, making the announcement the same day as Rajesh has been unpersoned? What have you done with him? Was it a case of ‘It's not personal, Rajesh. It's strictly business.’ Has his wife been told where to find his body?

Best Rgds,

- Not sent from a Blackberry -

Solomon Punt


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Solomon Punt - Financial Controller - Europe
From: Big Big Boss Alan (Blackberry)
Date: April 9
To: Big Boss Andrew and 19 others Bosses at BadBank, Solomon Punt
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Andrew

I think yu sent to wrong address!

Check with Solomon...

Rgds

Alan

- Sent from my Blackberry -


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Solomon Punt - Financial Controller - Europe
From: Boss Dave
Date: April 9
To: Big Big Boss Alan, Big Boss Andrew, 19 other Bosses at BadBank
Cc: Solomon Punt
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sure Alan, to what extent I remember Solomon was never so funny!!!...


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Solomon Punt - Financial Controller - Europe
From: Big Big Alan
Date: April 9
To: Big Boss Andrew, 19 other Bosses at BadBank, Solomon Punt
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

All,

I’m concerned that confidential information like this is so easily getting sent beyond the company...

I have found there can be a particular probelm that once an email address is uesd it can be hard to weed it out. Make sure you do that now. I’ve copied Solomon Punt in (the real one, not the joker!!) and weeded our ‘friend’ out on this to explain what happened.

More attention all...

Rgds

Alan

- Sent from my Blackberry -


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Solomon Punt - Financial Controller - Europe
From: Boss Dave
Date: April 9
To: Big Big Boss Alan, Big Boss Andrew, 19 other Bosses at BadBank
Cc: Solomon Punt

URGENT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alan, I’m sorry to tell you that you are still copying in the ‘joker’ in on your emails. I’ll get Skip from IS to sort for you...

- Sent from my Blackberry -


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Solomon Punt - Financial Controller - Europe
From: Solomon Punt - Financial Controller - Europe
Date: April 9
To: Big Big Boss Alan, Big Boss Andrew, 19 other Bosses at BadBank
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi all again,

Hey, I’m pleased that I am getting all my emails and you’re clearly taking measures to eliminate the other ‘joker’ who is pretending to be me.

Anyway - a few more initial financial decisions:

1. Donation of 100% of last year’s net profits to the International Red Cross

2. I’ve arranged an early meeting with HM Revenue and Customs to put our arrangements with them on an ethical basis (as per our stated policy). I am going to insist we pay at least 70% of our gross profit as tax but I would also like a full declaration from all of you of all the ‘scams’ regarding tax - legal and illegal - that we pull so I can inform them. We appear, from perusing our Annual Report online to have paid an astonishingly low level of tax last year - 2%? - some error, surely?

Look forward to seeing you all in the office, tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll have a warm reception.

PS. Why do us corporate types end every email message with ...?

Solomon Punt

- Sent from a dubious Internet café in Portsmouth (with no food) but who’s complaining at 50p per hour? -


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Solomon Punt - Financial Controller - Europe
From: Boss Mary
Date: April 10
To: Solomon Punt
Cc: Big Big Boss Alan, Big Boss Andrew, 18 other Bosses at BadBank
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Solomon Punt -

Who the hell are you to give us the benefit of your ‘wisdom’?

You are a sad joker. Doubtless your only other activity is to wander down to the dole office every two weeks to collect the payment that I and the rest of our staff here (on whatever wages) are paying towards.

How dare you consider emailing the top executives of this company with your asinine ‘witty’ commentary? Grow up.

Boss Mary


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Emails
From: Legal, BadBank
Date: April 11
To: Solomon Punt
Cc: Big Big Boss Alan, Big Boss Andrew, 19 other Bosses at BadBank
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Mr Punt,

It would appear that employees of BadBank might have sent you emails in error.

As the legal representative of BadBank, I would like to inform you that BadBank has not, and does not, intend to offer any form of contract of employment or any other undertaking to yourself.

With Regards,

Legal, BadBank


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Payment in lieu of notice
From: Solomon Punt
Date: April 12
To: Legal, BadBank
Cc: Big Big Boss Alan, Big Boss Andrew
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Legal, BadBank,

Damn, That must be my shortest job ever. Just over three days between the notice of my appointment and my sacking by you. Oh well.

Anyway, can you advise me on how much you will be paying me in lieu of notice and when can I expect payment?

Regards,

Solomon Punch

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- SILENCE -

Then, four months later I started being copied in again on a series of emails concerning mundane financial and corporate matters of BadBank. Sadly nothing was particularly confidential (that I could sell) and it was all rather tiresome reading.

So, getting bored... (Damn, I’m doing it now...)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


--------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: BadBank, financial status
From: Solomon Punt
Date: September 10
To: Big Big Boss Alan, Big Boss Andrew and 19 others Bosses at BadBank
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear colleagues,

Well I’ve been ploughing through all the financial strategy stuff that you’ve kindly been sending to me recently. It’s the most turgid task I’ve ever done. When they said it’s the dullest witted automatons with a paperweight for a heart that become accountants, they weren’t wrong.

But even just flicking through this stuff I see that my impostor ‘Solomon’ (no relation) predicted a 1.6% increase in C3 outturn over the last quarter but, in fact, there’s been a 0.2% decrease. Likewise, the predicted uplift rate expected for non-complaint conversions was 300% out - it’s 16%, not the 4% Solomon predicted.

Really, you’ve got the wrong Solomon. Surely you can see that now? Give me my job back and all will be forgotten.

Solomon Punt

- Not sent from a Blackberry -


-------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: unsolicited emails
From: Legal
Date: September 13
To: Solomon Punt
Cc: Big Boss Andrew
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Mr. Punt,

Without prejudice.

I am writing to you to insist that you do not further contact anyone working for BadBank by email, or by other means.

I would also draw your attention to the legal provisions under which you may have accidentally received copies of emails originating from BadBank.

This email and its attachments could be confidential If you are not the intended recipient of this communication and its attachments, you must take no action based upon them, nor must you copy or disclose them to anyone. Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of BadBank. Please contact the sender if you believe you have received this email wrongly.

I must ask for an undertaking from you that you will forward copies of all emails from BadBank employees and/or relating to the business of BadBank and that are in your possession or control to us without delay.

I must also insist upon written acknowledgement by you that you have destroyed all copies of these emails and which may have been stored by electronic, paper or other means.

We reserve our rights in connection with the above matter.

Judith Name, Legal Counsel, BadBank


-----------------------Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: unsolicited emails
From: Solomon Punt
Date: September 15
To: Judith Name, Legal Counsel
Cc: Big Boss Andrew, BadBank
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hiya Jude, How are you doing?

I’d also like to draw your attention to the legal text that has accompanied my emails to you and the rest of you working for BadBank.

This email and its attachments could be confidential. Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. It is for the purposes of satire and can be copied freely. Does anyone ever read this stuff? Any views expressed here are those of revolutionary socialism and represent the views of Karl Marx. If you are the intended recipient of this communication and its attachments, you must send a PayPal payment of £1000 to the sender (the details of which will be given on request), you must also copy them to all the staff that report to you and post them on the public area of your company’s website.

I’d always considered the spiel written at the bottom of corporate emails - threatening all sorts of dire consequences - to be just ‘legal’ hot air that types like you use to try and scare the gullible.

But clearly you believe that the act of simply receiving an email actually imposes a legal contract on the recipient. Well who I am to argue with you, I mean you’re the lawyer?

So I must insist that you fulfil your obligations arising from receiving emails from me - I reckon BadBank owe me about £84,000. If you could pay up quick - I’ve got a bookie breathing down my neck and nine kids with 4 different women to support - I’ll be sure to send you back your emails pronto.

Warm Rgds,

Solomon Punt

Socialism and Stalinism / Competition - book

Socialism and Stalinism

Che Guevara’s been dead forty years. He was maybe the most radical; the most to be admired in what some still call ‘Stalinism’.

But how much did the Left lose when he was executed, what losses were endured when no end of ‘Stalinist’ liberation movements & parties slowly strangled themselves and what damage was done when various ‘socialist’ states - generally ruled by homburg wearing geriatrics - expired during the night from their own decrepitude?

Stalinism

First - on terms. It’s traditional amongst Trots to describe all those in membership (or close to) the ‘official’ communist parties - those that were in fraternal relations with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as led by Stalin - and those latter descendents or splits by parties from this tendency (and which still kept much of the politics, even if only to bury them deep) - as ‘Stalinists’.

So today this terminology may be still be used about those expressing widely differing politics - from the Parti Communiste Français to the rulers of China to Naxalite guerrillas in India.

Even just in Britain, the term Stalinist was and still could be used about some collaborationist, drippy, reformist feminist separatist from the ‘Eurocommunist’ end of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) right through to a member of the ‘Tankie’ faction of that organisation - the sort of person who didn’t think Beria went far enough in the 30s purges of oppositionists (including Trotskyists) in the USSR.

It may still be appropriate to use the word ‘Stalinist’ about some historical figures or in referring to the very few who really do argue for the politics of Uncle Joe today.

Stalinism is also, perhaps with a small ‘s’, used to describe undemocratic manoeuvres of Left parties. Be it meeting packing, political slurring or the spreading of disinformation, the Stalinist left in Britain once certainly excelled at this practice e.g. Trotskyists = fascist collaborators. But I’ve no doubt, that given a bigger stage, some of today’s Trots would also excel in ensuring compliance with their line in ways which would get more and more degenerate as their influence grew.

So I much now prefer the term ‘official communist’ to ‘Stalinist’. With their Left influence near dead in the UK, these ‘official communists’, such as those in the Communist Party of Britain are now no more than just Left reformists anyway - no worse and sometimes even better than not dissimilar thinkers to them in the Labour and nearby Left.

Cuba

I’ve yet to see a good Marxist analysis of present day Cuba. Everything I’ve ever read, including from Trots, bases its view on present day Cuba on the events of 50 years ago e.g. because it was a peasant supported guerrilla army that seized power, with relatively little involvement from workers, it could never have developed into socialist regime.

Whilst all that may be true, I’d be interested to know a lot more about, for example, what would happen to you if you tried to organise a political party there now that was in favour of communism - in defence of the Revolution but in opposition to the current regime. I suspect you’d end up in a prison cell.

But that’s not to say that Cuba’s all bad. I’d defend the revolution against its overturn but I suspect the most progressive elements of it died long before its true hero did.

When Che Guevara was captured In Bolivia and was awaiting execution, he was asked by one of his tormentors whether he was Argentinean or Cuban? The way I remember his answer (or possibly a myth that was later created?) is that he replied along the lines of 'I’m Argentinean, Algerian, American, Australian etc etc, you understand?'

Would that I’d have the wit to think of such a correct reply at such a time. I’d rather spend an hour reading about the ‘Stalinist’ Che than spend a few minutes in the company of some ‘Trotskyists’ of my acquaintance. He was someone to be admired.

Trotskyism

Trotskyists supported the ‘defence of the deformed workers state’ i.e. the Soviet Union. The USSR was a healthy workers state at the start but became deformed at some time in the 20s. We’d also support the defence of ‘degenerated workers states’ - that is those countries that became ‘workers states’, but in a stillborn manner, in the period after World War II and which included all of the Eastern bloc, China, Indochina, Cuba and, according to some, a few other places such as Syria (and Burma?). But in all these countries we thought a revolution was needed - a political revolution to otherthrow the rulers - who were a caste, not a class (they couldn’t pass on inheritances, etc) - rather than a social revolution.

There was a fault line between those of the ‘The USSR etc. is state capitalist’ view - and whose best known proponent in Britain was the SWP with their slogan 'Neither Washington or Moscow’ - and other Trots. It’s also why that tendency wrongly didn’t support North Korea (and its official communist allies) in the Korean War, although it doesn’t explain why they then (correctly) later supported North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. This division is sometimes defined as that between ‘Orthodox Trotskyism’ and ‘State Capitalist Trotskyism’. There are also a few ostensible Trots who subscribe to different formulations.

(Orthodox) Trotskyists would defend all workers states to the hilt against attempts to restore capitalism and so would support them, unconditionally, in any wars against capitalist countries, regardless of cause, or even would support them in dealing with internal elements that supported the return of capitalism (even if the demands of such oppositionists - such as for national self determination - were formally justified).

I do still hold to those views - I was convinced at the time, and remain convinced by the arguments made by those such as Trotsky in his ‘In Defence of Marxism’ (even though that text was written before World War II). But this argument is now just academic, save for a couple of places. And despite being reflected and distorted through no end of crazy mirrors, I think today’s Cuba and probably North Korea (despite being a monarchy!) still meet the criteria - as would anywhere else where capitalism hasn’t been restored (although I think there probably aren’t any other such states).

I remember the way that we’d look with contempt at the politically naïf amongst us - or close to us - who’d sometimes politely query the uncompromising line of ‘Defend the Soviet Union’ that was one of the main points in the programme of ‘Classfighter’ - the youth movement of Socialist Organiser and Workers Power in the 80s. Thinking of it now, I’m reminded of the not too dissimilar way that immature school student members of the NF would flick Nazi salutes at all and sundry, just to give the appearance of being uncompromisingly hardcore. I’m sure you’d have been considered suspect by them even for suggesting you’d be interested in an explanation for their conduct and is was the same for us about that particular slogan.

Events intervene

But events can stretch or even break what looks good on paper. The above was the policy - but could it always be held to? In the eyes of the Spartacists, who are correctly accused of Stalinophilia by most other ostensible Trotskyists, I was on the “side of the CIA and the Madonna” in supporting Solidarity in Poland in its actions against that country’s regime. Likewise I would’ve supported the uprisings against the Stalinist regimes that occurred in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. These movements were originally workers movements, despite the misreporting of, for example, the Hungarian events as being purely nationalistic. It wasn’t written in stone that Solidarity would help restore capitalism to Poland and that its leaders, like Wałęsa would play the reactionary role that they later did. It was right - and consistent with Trotskyism - to support them.

When the Stalinist Left mattered

Some of my convincing, about these arguments about the nature of the workers states, was supplied by the empirical evidence before my eyes. Whole swathes of the planet were liberated by these regimes - Cuba, in particular, committed large resources to fight the troops of the apartheid regime in southern Africa. No end of national liberation movements, and ruling classes in developing countries whose policies put them in the crosshairs of the major capitalist countries, benefited from the largess of the Soviet Union and its allies.

Nonetheless I have always concluded that the prime motivations - the reasons why the Eastern bloc correctly supported Nasser during the Suez War or various Palestinian guerrillas in their actions against Israel - were near always because of the geopolitical advantages in doing so for Moscow and the rest - and rarely because of the progressive nature of that which they supported. There is some grit in the smoothness of this argument - what could the Cubans have gained in Africa? - but I think it’s generally true.

Guerrillaism

I wouldn’t be as hard on guerrillaism as many other Trotskyists. Without the guerrillaism of the IRA and the INLA, Catholics in Northern Ireland may still just be organising petitions and peace marches protesting against their latest clubbing by the RUC. Ian Smith could still be lording it over Rhodesia. Indeed sometimes not more that guerrilla formations bore major fruit - such as in the despatch of the British colonial rulers from Aden. But like all cross class liberation movements, these forces are bound to unravel once the immediate objective is realised - the removal of the Brits, French etc and those who have taken power then need to decide how Algeria or Angola or wherever is to be run.

Life under ‘socialism’

It was always wrong that somebody couldn’t have easily just got up and relocated from Karl Marx Stadt in the German Democratic Republic to Köln in the Federal Republic. The building of the Wall through the middle of Berlin was a demonstration both of the weakness of the GDR and also its anti-democratic tendencies.

But ‘socialist’ countries were also never fairly judged by the standards applying elsewhere. I don’t know if you’d have been shot at if you’d been seen by border guards attempting to skip over the border, say between Austria and Italy, before Schengen, but I’m pretty sure that if you’d been, say a British or American nuclear scientist, with access to military secrets, and you’d announced your intention to give it all up and go and live in a Russian Orthodox monastery in Crimea during the period of the Cold War - you’d instead have ended up being framed for something, or been killed - you'd have never got to leave the West.

There’s no denying that near all in the workers states voted to move westwards - politically and sometimes literally - once they had the chance, such as from East to West Germany. If we’re socialists, we pride ourselves on being the best democrats and supporting the rights of workers to change their society. It’s when they clearly also want to overthrow ‘socialism’ as they will have seen it, or reintroduce capitalism, as it actually was - such as in the dying days of the Soviet Union - that holes in orthodox Trotskyism theory start opening. I don’t have any Polyfilla to fill in that particular question.

Gravediggers

Neither as the makers of shoddy consumer goods nor as places that promoted free expression did the Stalinist regimes excel. But it was as the gravediggers of revolutions that they did beat all comers.

These actions included telling the Greek communists (at the end of World War II) to submit instead of going for it; the collaborationist policies of the postwar French and Italian official communists and the inability to either move beyond supporting guerrillaism (amongst what were usually splits from official communism) or, conversely, the inability to support the same guerrillaism (as one of a few tactics) by the official communists in the same country.

Maybe above all it was simply the murderous turning on revolutionaries, even on their own side - such as during the Spanish Civil War - that shows how distant from Marxism were the policies of that branch of ‘communism’.

Official communism in Britain - from rabid reformists to poodle pups

I saw the tail end of the above tendency. CPGB members at union meetings and elsewhere would happily combine, even with the Right, in order to defeat the ‘ultraleft’ Trots and all in a futile hope of building broad ‘across class’ coalitions. Their former magazine, ‘Marxism Today’, was the epitome of the defeat of Leftism. In its pages they’d scrabble around in a vain attempt to try and stitch up some sort of popular front with which to move Britain even just slightly towards the Left - this got no traction except with a few media types. It was no great step for Sue Slipman OBE, a former president of the National Union of Students to move quickly from being a member of the Executive Committee of the CPGB to joining the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s.

Two-way traffic

Whilst some official communists were recruited to the ranks of Trotskyism, after the hard face of their master was occasionally exposed - such as in the brutal crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 - the traffic was more in the other direction. This pressure to drop revolution, and move instead to the militant sounding Left reformism of the ‘official communists’, has always caused damage amongst Trots. It’s always an easier option to capitulate. Pablo and more wrongly bought the idea that tension with the ruling castes of what was the Soviet Bloc meant that some of these official communist parties could move in the direction of socialism. What was probably once the largest Trotskyist party in the West, the SWP (US), passed over into official communism and that explains their current day praisesinging for ‘socialism’ in Cuba.

This pole of attraction is now all but gone but that still doesn’t stop the weaker Trots moving toward the hole in the ground that it left behind. So Alan Woods, leader of Socialist Appeal / International Marxist Tendency, and a former leader of Militant writes this week that, “We have no doubt that had (Che Guevara) lived he would have moved towards Trotskyism and in fact he was already doing so before his life was cut short.”

In fact these words (which remind me very much of how the SWP US claim that Malcolm X was moving towards them before his assassination) demonstrate instead the continuing uncomfortable position of Trotskyists. We’re hanging on by our fingertips to the undercarriage of the Left whilst being severely battered by every bump in the road. This leads to the flakier end of the movement rashly letting go, whence they’re crushed by the following truck - the one driven by Chávez, in the case of Woods.

A gamble untaken

I’d be interested to know how Stalin personally set on the course that he did. His early Bolshevik career included some work that is still well regarded by Marxists, such as on nationalism, and his early activities including time spent expropriating banks for the party. But individuals don’t make history. It’s events that made Stalin, not vice versa. The Soviet Union was, early on, faced with a harsh choice - it could go all out to spread revolution throughout the world or it could play it safe. If it went for broke it’d either be successful - and its communism would remain healthy - or the capitalist world would combine and commit everything and manage to destroy this mortal threat to them. Stalin and co. decided not to gamble. They raised the drawbridge and engaged in a futile attempt to build socialism in one country. Whilst the former course could have led to the early extinguishing of socialism, the latter just delayed the inevitable demise of their regime for 70 years.

But the making of that decision probably wasn’t the most significant moment in helping capitalism survive. Capitalism had been overthrown in Russia - the imperative was to spread it quickly, particularly to another major country. I know such a view could be criticised as being terribly determinist but if ever I was asked the question ‘Communism, where (and why) did it all go wrong? I’d answer like this. I’d reply on the ‘why’ - There is a necessity of ideological purity. The correct line is important above all else - small differences in actions now can have fundamental impacts in the long term, as the slow death of Stalinism demonstrated (the fact that it is near impossible to sometimes work out the correct line is perhaps our most fundamental problem). But on the ‘where’ - I’d say this would’ve been in a room in Berlin. It would’ve been where some Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (or predecessor party) faction was meeting on some date in the period after the end of World War I.

And in that room they made whatever wrong decisions that meant there was to be no German socialist revolution. When I work out the address, I'll erect a plaque. Amongst the sauerkraut, a few squabbling comrades determined the course of the rest of the 20th century. If only Che Guevara or, a lot better, some Trots had been at that meeting - then maybe the Daily Worker would be selling a lot more than the Daily Mail.

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Competition - book

The first Southpawpunch book will be published in a few weeks - in good time for Christmas. The book will contain both some of the highlights from what I've written in these columns, a few of my comments from elsewhere and some exclusive content that’ll only be available in this publication.

The name I am running with at the moment for this book is ‘Uppercuts’ but I’d also be grateful for your suggestions for what it should be called. If you do put forward an idea that I use (or a variation of it), then I’ll send you a copy of the book. Please either add your suggestion in the comments box below or, if you prefer, email it to me via the link given on the profile page.

And talking of competitions, the Prize Draw and Survey about this site will draw to its scheduled close at the end of this year. Thank-you to the many of you who have completed this survey about the Southpawpunch site. I’ve already made quite a few changes here to reflect the views and ideas expressed by readers but I’d be grateful if some more of you could spare some time - less than five minutes - to complete the Survey. I designed and run the Survey and Prize Draw myself. Your responses are completely confidential and, if you reply, you can also enter a competition with a chance of winning an Amazon £20 (or local currency equivalent) voucher. Thanks. Just click here.