Militant's ethics

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to defend jobs and services.

ployed. *Freeze rent and rates.

workers' defence squads. olerate cotine, ban cannabis?

SOCIALIST ORGANISER Embass Joylan WHAT do modern socialist youth think of cannabis and its legalisation? Listen to last week's Militant.

«With the massive growth in cannabis taking, there have been calls from some quarters - mainly 'liberal' politicians and even sections of the Young Conservatives - for the drug to be legalised. What then should be the attitude of Marxists to this question?

"It cannot be looked at in an abstract way. It is not simply a question of personal liberty and freedom. We must look at it from a class point of view: would it advance the struggle of the working class or detract from it?"

The writer is Matthew Reed of the Labour Party Young Socialists National Committee.

Reed argues that cannabis is bad for your health - as bad as tobacco and alcohol. But they are legal? Yes, and socialists are opposed to their 'widespread' use.

"But at this stage it would be unrealistic to campaign for their abolition - such a blunt demand would not be understood by whole layers of workers"

Cannabis is not widely accepted the way tobacco and alcohol are, so its legalisation can be safely opposed.

But, he says, health is not the main reason to fight legalisation. Legalisation "would mean giving big business the opportunity to another social sedative with e ich In and Mass oroduce to dampen the anger of our generation...

"The sudden mass influx of cannabis would be used as a deliberate ploy by the ruling class as a way of stopping youth from struggling against the social nightmare they face.

"Unlike nicotine, cannabis induces an unnatural euphoric state of mind. [But doesn't alcohol?]. There is nothing the British ruling class would relish more than to see the present generation become passive and docile onlookers, incapable of fighting back"

If the ruling class "get their hands on the mass production of cannabis" , then they will be able to throw up yet another obstacle in the way of the labour movement".

Powerful stuff, this cannabis! So how come the ruling class and the Tories have not legalised it long ago?

In fact all the evidence is that cannabis is a great deal less harmful than alcohol. Logically Militant should campaign for prohibition of alcohol, which also produces a false euphoria.

But "the workers would not understand such a blunt demand" and some would think that they were in the presence of puritans if not cranks.

A problem for the YS is that Militant's 'blunt demand' • on cannabis brands them with the same mark in the eyes of most radical youth.

For many years Militant speakers have regaled YS conferFriday April 6: The Limits of Local Council Socialism. Speakers Robin Murray, Chief economic advisor to Ken Livingstone and Scott Meikle, author of Essentialism in the Thought of Marx. All meetings at 7.30pm, University of London Union, Malet Street, London WC1. THE THORN in the Rose -the Polities of Clause Four, A Revolutionary Marxist Critique. By Brian McKenna. Produced by Socialist Student (Glasgow). 30p.

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PRESS

ences with passionate denunciations of legalised cannabis as a plot to 'create yet one more capitalist monopoly' ', much in the same vein as the YS disgraced the labour movement for many years by its backward hostility to gay and lesbian rights.

Now of course we should tell young people that they are being stupid if they get stoned out of their heads with any form of booze. Health, energy and time are revolutionary capital which we should not squander.

But Militant does something different.

The article appears under the name of a youth. In fact the attitudes and prejudices, the uptight and irrational puritanism, all reflect the state of mind of one or two venerable old fogies and their precociously old clones - a state of mind buttressed and made doubly self-righteous by the central drive to accommodate to the least enlightened sections of the working class and the labour movement.

In fact, while platonically endorsing prohibition of alcohol, in practice what Militant does is to accommodate to the mass working-class choice of one booze (alcohol) as against another (cannabis), which is probably less harmful.

It is one reason why the YS continues to be so small and limited, and so unlike a real youth movement.

LABOUR Briefing conference on 'Labour and NATO'.

Saturday March 24, from 10.30am at County Hall, London SE1.

'IRELAND - the issue facing Labour'. Southampton Labour Committee on Ireland meeting, Thursday March 22, 7.30 at the Labour Club, Queensway.

Speaker: Don Flynn.

ACTION Group on Immigration and Nationality conference. Saturday March 24, 10 am to 4.30 pm, at AUEW House, 43 The Crescent, Salford.

NEXT Socialist Organiser delegate meeting. April 14, in Nottingham.

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