Workers' Liberty

The Oxford Union is not a union at all, but a posh Oxford University debating society you have to pay almost £200 to join. It does, however, occasionally have some interesting debates, including one this Thursday, 26 April - "This House regrets the founding of the United States of America".

Who is speaking on the proposing side? One Robert Griffiths, general secretary of Communist Party of Britain, along with speakers from the UK Islamic Party and Hizb ut-Tahrir. (Those speaking in opposition look like bog-standard right-wingers.)

The founding of the United States did indeed mean exploitation, repression and even death for enormous numbers of people - not least the millions of native Americans exterminated in the colonisation of the West, or the millions of black people who worked the southern plantations as slaves until the 1860s. And of course the US has always been a capitalist state dedicated to the control and exploitation of the American working class. That is even more true today than it was in 1787.

No doubt the Islamist bigots of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the UK Islamic Party, when they draw breath from calling for a theocratic world empire or advocating the death penalty for having gay sex, will hypocritically make some of these points, using other people's repression to justify the worse repression they themselves would like to carry out. But why would a communist line up with such people in his or her criticism of the United States?

The answer, of course, is that Griffiths is not a communist but a Stalinist, a nostalgic for the Russian Stalinist empire and a fervent advocate of Russia's attempts, even under capitalism, to return to great power status. Like his Islamist allies, he may make use of some socialistic criticisms in his attack on US society, but the real motivation of his critique is a million miles from socialist democracy and internationalism. His is a reactionary anti-capitalism.

Workers of the UK, US and the mainly-Muslim countries - workers of the world - unite!