Courts, nihilism and abour movement

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I WROTE, and Kevin Riley quotes parts of it: the courts in a long-stable bourgeois democracy such as Britain normally dispense a high level of justice and fair and impartial dealing - within the existing laws"

This was to concede the main pillar of Militant's case for using the courts, while arguing that it was irrelevant to the issue of making the bourgeois courts the arbiter of the affairs of the labour movement. The same paragraph goes on to discuss the increasing use of the courts to interfere in the affairs of the unions under the new Tory legislation. The reference to 'the existing laws' was emphasised in the original.

Why then does Kevin Riley think me likely to disagree with him that those existing ". ... bourgeois laws are for the defence of property... (and) are racist, sexist and anti-youth"? Yes, of course they are! What reason does Kevin Riley have for thinking that I don't know that? These are after all pretty much ABC questions.

Does he think that I don't read the regular exposés in SO? That I am innocent of such typical experiences of a socialist militant in Britain as, being lied about in court or beaten up in a police station?

Whatever the reason, that would seem to be his picture of me. But that still doesn't explain why he thinks it needs to be spelled out in such details for socialists prepared to plough through a long 'heavy' article about whether it is in line with socialist and Marxist principles for Militant to go to Perhaps Kevin Riley thinks that the readers of SO also don't bother to read the exposés of racism, sexism, police violence, court bias, etc? I think comrade Riley has just missed the point.

Perhaps 1 should have spelled it out - not for the typical SO reader but to forestall trigger-happy comrades so eager to attack that they haven't got time to read what they are attacking, or to think about it.

Sometimes articles are over-compressed and distorted for lack of space. That was perhaps why the editors cut an important paragraph from my reply to Bob Fine (last week).

Why we should help the black youth in Brixton and others to avoid a sweeping nihilism - unjustified and false to reality - towards every aspect of the existing system, is that the widespread political attitudes that result from such nihilism - ultra-leftism, eclectic populism, 'Brixton (etc) is part of the Third World' - are also directed against the existing British labour movement and thus ultimately against the interests of the oppressed groups, too, by needlessly isolating them from that movement.

The labour movement's racism, sexism, backwardness, subordinate enmeshment in the existing system, etc., are seen as irreversible and unchangeable. Forces (blacks, youth, women, gays, etc.) that could help transform that movement, by helping to fight its backwardness and by strengthening it in other ways, remain separate and isolated from it. Their rebelliousness is thereby isolated, ghettoised, and politically neutered All this helps only the ruling class and its agents in the labour movement. The job of Marxists is to fight for a different outcome, to help integrate the Brixton youth and others into the la bour movement, to give them a perspective of fighting to change it -so as to be able, as part of a labour - movement - based socialist offensive, to transform existing society, and not merely impotently to 'reject' it in words and sometimes in desperate but mainly fruitless deeds.

Despite appearances and intentions, there is really little that is revolutionary, and (despite eclectic phrases) nothing Marxist, in the negative and nihilistic 'polities' to which some of the most oppressed are driven by the indifference and hostility of the broad labour movement.

If you doubt it, look at the antics of the mindless sect that calls itself the Revolutionary Communist Party, which systematises this approach.

JOHN O'MAHONY, London. On council budgets, 1