Jim Denham has an interesting piece over on Shiraz Socialist about the TGWU Region 1 Committee (trade union bureaucracy; dontcha wish it was more complex and mysifying, huh?) increasing it’s stake in the People’s Press Publishing Society to a £20,000 stake; thus giving it a seat on the board. The PPPS is the organisation which publishes the Morning Star, pictured right, which, ironically, is where the paper lies in the socialist spectrum.
Of course, bureaucrats will always seek to help other bureaucrats and there is a long history of trade union bureaucrats and unreconstituted Stalinists holding hands and being very lovey-dovey indeed. The criminal (in terms of the socialist movement anyway) sell-out of the French Communist Party in May 1968, abusing it’s position at the head of the workers’ movement to force revolutionary workers to abandon the barracades and go back to work, leaving the students to be defeated at the hands of the Gaullist government.
However, I don’t think I’m against trade unions giving money to left papers in principle. Say, for example, I manage to get my trade union branch to give £100 to support Solidarity, the AWL’s newspaper, then I doubt Solidarity’s editor would mind. The SWP have their Socialist Worker Appeal and I know from my time in the SWP that they do solicit donations from union branches. This I have no problem with, if, of course, it is done democratically.
Such donations encourage union branches and regions to get politically active and to support alternatives to Blairism. We seek to affiliate union branches to the Labour Represenation Committee, and I don’t think donating to the left press is anything different.
Naturally, the money donated to the PPPS could be better spent, and the point that since General Secretary Halpin’s windfall the PPPS really doesn’t need the cash earned by the sweat and tears of grafting workers, is also a fair one.
However, I think we have to be careful and make sure that not every political donation by a trade union - even if some of their donations, in this instance, are quite odious to genuine communists - is a case of corruption.
Anita Halpin’s personal fortune is neither here nor there…
Surely the democratically accountable committees of the relevant trade unions are free to support whatever causes they see fit to- As we can see your attitude is different if the same committees had vote to support “Workers Liberty” or Solidarity by a one off donation to its support/fighting fund? Aside from the fact that WL/Solidarity is a turgid and tedious read in my opinion which is read by far fewer readers than the Star, the decision is the prerogative of the democratic structures of the union, and I would respect that . Surely Trade Unions democratic structures are there to carry out such decisions?-what alternative decision making process do you envisage. If you object so vehemently to this support to a newspaper which has been a consistent ally of the trade union and labour movement since 1930.So your distaste of it is irrelevant -if that distaste is NOT shared by the democratically elected trade union committee doing the donating-the same olf chestnut is used by right wingers in the Trade Union movement to attempt to block LP affiliation-and is in fact a Trot version of the same argument- It is dangerous since it legitimises attempts to de-politicise trade unions- which we all know is not desirable or possible. Does anyone object so vehemently to donations by companies to the Tories-often unknown to shareholders. The source of this objection by Jim and his pals is good old fashioned left sectarianism-a luxury we can hardly really afford these days- we should be pleased that there is STILL a left wing daily paper….It may not be exactly what you want - but you can change that too- by submitting articles and letters- Jim Denham often does because he knows it is read by many active and politically switched on trade unionists.
I suspect what REALLY irks Jim and your good self and other right ward drifting Trotskyites is the fact that the Morning Star has continued to be published every day since the collapse of the USSR and has even notched up a growth in readership in the past three years, despite the confident predictions of most doctrinaire trots that the “stalinists” paper would fold without Soviet sales. Of course the reality is that the Morning Star has commanded a mixture of, (admittedly often wry)affection and respect in the UK labour movement for so long now that its support base obviously stretches far beyong the very limited resources of the CP membership. Whether you like it or not it is a Labour Movement asset, and the dislike Jim shows for it is simply based on sectarianism. If Jim dislikes the paper that much, then he and his friends can always get elected to the various trade union committees and campaign against such donations. There is also an element of humbug in this matter also….As I said earlier Jim is a regular letter writer to the Morning Star, which suggests that he either buys it himself, or perhaps he hypocritically reads the “free” copies paid for by his unions donations…
First off: one sixteenth of an inch.
That’s the distance you have to move your pinky in order to make your post look presentable. Right now it looks like a random stream of conciousness and at 11pm at night, when I’m just about to go to bed because I’ve got to be up at 5am tomorrow morning for my morning commute into work, I’m not that inclined to read it.
New paragraphs are done by hitting the return key twice. So now you know.
Now, onto the politics:
Imagine a man, or a woman - you can choose - running down the road. In the distance, there is a bus. That bus (let’s pretend it’s a Routemaster) is slowly pulling away from the stop. The person is running faster and faster, but the bus is still a good distance away. No matter how faster the person runs, the bus is just off in the distance.
Now, the person is you, and the bus is “The Point”.
As I said quite clearly, I am not against unions giving money to lefty papers, so long as it’s done democratically. Since I’m not a member of the TGWU, I don’t want to comment on their internal democratic proceedure. As I pointed out, I’m not against the TGWU giving money to either the Morning Star, Solidarity or Socialist Worker in principle. So, I agree with you there.
The point is that I think that money could be better spent. I think that the Morning Star, and the politics it represents, are in diametric opposition to independent working class socialist politics, but that’s another argument, I suppose. You might not remember Solidarnosc, but I do, and I was more preoccupied with crapping my nappy at around the time it happened. The CPB’s Stalinism, it’s popular frontism, and it’s god-awful politics are why I’m opposed to unions funding the MS.
I’d disagree with my union giving money to fund Gordon Brown’s election campaign to Labour Leader (being a McDonnell supporter myself). That doesn’t mean I hold the union’s democratic proceedures in contempt or anything like that, I just think they’ve made the wrong decision. If I was at that meeting which decided to increase the PPPS stake, I’d have argued against it, but I wasn’t there, and I’m not even a member of the TGWU. So I have my blog instead. Unusual, I know, but bear with me here.
Quickly on Halpin; even that degenerate Tommy Sheridan still adheres to the principle of the workers’ representative on a workers’ wage. No-one who is involved in what tries to pass itself off as the ‘communist movement’ (though I doubt the CPB could ever be considered ‘communist’ but again, that’s another discussion). If a workers’ wage was good enough for Phil Piratin, then isn’t it good enough for Halpin?
No: levitas. The point is that socialist trade unionists should be against giving big donations to *any* cause whatsoever, without consulting the membership. This was without consulting the membership; therefore it would be (if it goes through) a corrupt misuse of the members’ dues. I should be opposed. And I’d sasy the same if it was a donation to the AWL. It’s a corrupt disgrace.