Write on: letters to the editor

Boycott Shell I was livid at the recent murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and others in Nigeria. "Saro-Wiwa has led the battle against the oil multinational Shell's environmental vandalism of the Niger Delta region in southern Nigeria — home to 500,000 Ogoni people". (Norm Dixon, GLW #210) Ken-Saro Wiwa was a non-violent, human rights activist. Please help me knock the HELL out of SHELL over this murder. Please help me give the multinationals the message that they cannot continue to put Profit before People. Let us show them that the killing of one will bring legions to the standard. To achieve this, I propose a complete ban on all Shell products at the retail, wholesale, fuelling, transportation and terminal levels until they withdraw completely from the Niger Delta and compensate the Ogoni people for the damage they have already caused. I would like this boycott to be on a local, national and international level. I must confess that I haven't got a clue how to go about achieving this aim as I am a 63-year-old grandfather who suffers from a central nervous disorder which makes it difficult to write. If, therefore, you could help in any way, e.g. high school student, organiser, committee formation, computer user, letter writer, typist, union member, translator, envelope addressor, stamp sticker or just by putting a stamp in an envelope, I would be much obliged were you to contact me on 065-540761 or PO Box 33 Pacific Palms, 2428 NSW.
Seán D'Arcy
Pacific Palms NSW Boxing dollars The Australian's article (20/11) on American "extreme fighting" shows up a great irony. As they lost ground in world and Olympic amateur boxing to the Cubans, coached by Alvarez, the Yanks led the movement to ban amateur boxing in the Olympics. They said in media campaigns that amateur boxing was too violent, too dangerous and too harmful. Their campaign grew as the Cubans won more world and Olympic titles. Now it's clear that, when a dollar can be made, the Yanks don't care how violent boxing is. In fact, they promote "extreme boxing" which is two men beating each other to death, and near death, without sporting rules or regulations.
Denis Kevans
Wentworth Falls NSW Marginal seats I am afraid of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society's and the Tasmanian Greens' political thoughts on the coming Federal election in February. On the 20th anniversary of Whitlam's dismissal and predicting a massive swing to the Liberals, they are prepared to oppose Labor in marginal seats and support the election of a Dry Liberal government in Canberra. It's inevitable the Liberals will be returned sooner or later they say, and Labor's done nought for the forests. Megalomaniacal laughter comes down the phone. What forgetfulness is this? Wind the political clock back twenty years; even block supply? No sense of history here. Of Liberal history with green and black (and red). Go 20 years back, down that corridor of time called history, to the mansion of the judge of Ned Kelly (the other man of the people hung on the 11th of the 11th) where the Australian Conservation Foundation's council, responding to the Dismissal, sacked Kerr as their Patron. My entry into environmental politics. "Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone", we sang when Viner refused to see the Aboriginal Elders from Aurukun and Mornington Island as Bjelke Petersen, and his political friends, forced grog onto the community and took the land. Take us back to the days when the orders came out of Fraser's Canberra to chase us up Oombulgurrie River in North Western Australia with a police helicopter. In the days when mining was king we were branded criminals for giving support and information about CRA and De Beers South Africa to the Kimberley and Northern Territory Land Councils. Black Brown Green. Are we being rafted down the river without a paddle?
Lyn McLeavy
Hobart Tas
[Edited for length.] East Timor This is simply to say that Wall of Testimony by the East Timor Theatre Group, is brilliant. I was expecting something "worthy" but not that good. It was terrific. See it!
Stephen Langford
Secretary, Australia-East Timor Association NSW Leninism today Phil Shannon's reply [GLW #210] to Doug Lorimer is spot on. But perhaps he skips over an important lesson in (unconsciously?) linking together the mistaken ban on party factions and the closing down of the political space for working people represented by the policy of incorporating the labour unions more closely into the state. Leninist organisations are voluntary organisations — you're free to join so long as you will work as a committed, conscious activist respecting the organisation's democracy. A revolutionary state is not a voluntary organisation. While the members of a party can agree to put discussion off to one side for a short while to concentrate on a particular campaign, they accept the chance that the party may go off course a bit while the discussion is suspended. The members of a trade union, or the entire working class of the revolutionary Soviet Union, could not and would not ever make such a choice — discussion can't be suspended in any way within the masses, only repressed. The same is true of a mass political party. In a mass party, the discussions can only be on the burning questions of the day. Rather than attempt to forestall discussion, the Bolshevik's tenth congress should have developed, and politically intervened into, the party's debate. Marxist must accept the inevitability of organised currents of opinions: but attempt to focus the discussion on the immediate and long-term tasks facing working people and their allies. In that way, discussion can only strengthen the revolutionary movement of the oppressed and exploited.
Duncan Chapple
Assistant editor of Socialist Outlook
London Permanent revolution Quit a bit of fuss has raged in the GLW letters page over Phil Shannon's claim in a review (GLW #208) that Lenin was won over to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky's theory grew out of the experience of workers and peasants in the Russian revolution of 1905. After the defeat of 1905 Trotsky theorised that the working class leading the peasantry in their common struggle against the Tsarist autocracy would have to fight the cowardly and ever compromising Russian bourgeoisie turning the "bourgeois-democratic" revolution permanently or uninterruptedly into the socialist revolution. Trotsky argued they would overcome the economic backwardness of Russia by spreading the revolution and gaining assistance from a victorious revolution in Europe. This then became known as the "theory of permanent revolution". The dynamic of the February and October revolutions in 1917 proved Trotsky right. From April of that year Lenin made "All power to the soviets (councils)" his central slogan, arguing against the "Old Bolshevik" attitude that the continuing revolutionary process was primarily "bourgeois-democratic" in its nature. The day after the October revolution Lenin addressed the All-Russian Congress of Soviets simply: "We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order". It is not which "phase" or "stage" of a revolution that you brand socialist that gives it socialist character (or for that matter whether or not Lenin made a point of confessing his "conversion" to Trotsky's theory), it is whether or not the working class are the leaders of the revolutionary process. In 1917, Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks won over a majority of workers organised in their soviets to the ideas and very real fight for revolutionary socialism. Chris Slee asserts that revolutions since 1917 have proven this theory as "too schematic". Surely the experience of revolutions in Yugoslavia, China, Cuba and Vietnam and Nicaragua prove one thing: that as long as the working class are not the leaders and motive force of the revolutionary project, then these revolutions are socialist in name only.
Anthony Hayes
O'Connor ACT
[Edited for length.] Liberalism Kath Gelber's column on How not to fight Sexism (LW November 15) raises difficult questions. Men should be wary of criticising feminist strategies for change, but socialists should always criticise liberalism — the ideology of capitalism. And it is liberal ideas of free speech which I see Gelber propagating when she opposes other feminists' attempts to "censor" pornography. In capitalist society, freedom of expression gives those with power and resources the freedom to dominate our media and culture. Similarly in a sexist society, freedom from regulation gives more power to those who already have it — and they ain't women. Kath Gelber is right that the struggle to combat sexism must take place on many fronts, but where would we be if we adopted her opposition to legal intervention/regulation in other struggles. We'd have the New Right's industrial relations and Paul Keating's deregulated economy! State regulation is no substitute for feminist struggle any more than it is a substitute for class struggle, but it has its place in those struggles. Socialists and feminists need to develop a consistent critique of that role — free from shallowness of liberalism.
Greg Stare
Hackett ACT