Letters

Delusions

In your article ‘Defending sect cohesion’ you note that the new group formed by former members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is the “grandly” named International Communist Group (October 9). This is indeed true, but how many more delusions are then in a tiny group of a couple of dozen that describes itself as the Communist Party of Great Britain?

Importantly your article relies on second-hand reports of the meeting that it purports to describe. None of your supporters saw fit to describe the meeting in question. Perhaps the subject of the meeting, class struggle in the 1970s, was one on which you felt you had nothing to contribute?

One also wonders why your report discusses the “culture” of the AWL but does not make more than the most cursory attempt to discuss the questions of principle in dispute between those who have left the AWL. Perhaps it is because on the disputed questions your own organisation holds positions rather close to those of the AWL?

Delusions
Delusions

Beyond the pale

I was very surprised to read the letter from Paul Flewers (September 25). I have read Paul before and he had struck me as a clever, insightful and thoughtful writer. He comes from an opposed political tradition to me, but I respected his quality as a politician and historian. However, his critique of my September 18 letter was completely extraordinary and a spectacular example of shooting oneself in the foot.

Paul stated that Mike Macnair’s article in the same issue (‘Stalinist illusions exposed’, September 18) answered the first part of my letter, where I argued that Soviet society and economy in the 1930s onwards was essentially, despite some authoritarian tendencies, run for, by and in the fundamental interests of the working class and the working people - the vast majority of the population. That the Soviet peoples had stood up and were actively, creatively and enthusiastically creating and developing a new society, a new civilisation. Did Mike or Paul counter any of that? No, they did not. So my original arguments stand unrefuted. Good!

Why did Paul instantly choose to contrast and compare Soviet society with the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s, as opposed to, say, Russia pre-1917 or the depression-racked capitalist ‘democracies’? Why did he soft-soap the murderous policies of the Nazi regime and imply that their genocidal, ethnic-cleansing and population-purifying policies were so marginal as to be insignificant, in order to strongly imply that, in terms of people killed, the Nazi regime was preferable to the Soviet government?

Is this not an exact parallel line with the practice of the defeated opposition rights and ‘lefts’ in the Soviet Union, to ally themselves with the fascist regimes of Germany and Japan, and the very points I made in my letter, and proved in the so-called ‘show trials’ in the 1930s, the bitterness and hatred of the defeated stopping and stooping at nothing to undermine and overthrow Soviet power? Maybe it is true that Trotskyism represents a straight line from anti-communism to pro-Nazism.

In his extraordinary apologia for the Nazi regime, Paul completely omits the deaths associated with the extermination camps, limiting himself to those who ‘happened’ to die in the concentration camps, “not as a result of deliberate state policy”. Why ignore the ‘final solution’, a deliberate policy to eliminate perceived population and political enemies of the Nazi state and to relieve what was effectively becoming a prison population burden on the war-stretched economy? Why does Paul exonerate the Nazis of these crimes? Is he that keen to paint the Nazi regime in such a favourable light?

If Paul is implicitly arguing, through omission, that the Zionist claim that six million Jews died in the gas chambers is arithmetically incoherent and demonstrably false, then I would tend to agree with that. But it is undeniable that ethnic minority peoples and political opponents were murdered on an industrial scale, as part of the regime’s survival strategy and as a deliberate outcome of state policy from the middle of the war, and it is shocking Paul should exclude this fundamental feature of Nazi policy, in order to falsify his attack on Soviet society.

In quoting figures of 1.5 million arrests and 700,000 executed during the Yezhovschina from the Soviet archives, I do not automatically accept, agree or justify these. I simply quoted these to contrast with Paul Smith (and other Trotskyists and anti-communists) who, just like the party magician, invents figures out of thin air, doubles or multiplies them for good effect, then lies in print. Smith alleged that 20s of millions of people died in the Soviet Union. Why not say 50 or 100 million for even better effect?

As the nearest to concrete evidence, I merely pointed out that the very detailed figures and lists compiled from the archives, and very likely to approximate to the truth, are a mere miniscule fraction of those magicked and magnified over the years for anti-communist effect. Yes, Paul, statistically, less than 0.5% is “a minuscule proportion”, by any measure.

Beyond the pale
Beyond the pale

Spot on

Robbie Folkard’s article on non-gendered toilets and trans rights was spot on (‘Defend trans people’).

It’s about time more of the left cast aside notions of ‘gays and lesbians’ and focused on the oppression of LGBT people as a whole, who comprise one of the most stigmatised groups in society. I hope CPGB members will consider this when they redraft their programme.

Spot on
Spot on

Free speech

You are absolutely right to criticise the Socialist Workers Party for its support of state repression against racists and fascists. Leon Trotsky made the point: “Theory, as well as historic experience, testify that any restriction to democracy in bourgeois society is eventually directed against the proletariat, just as taxes eventually fall on the shoulders of the proletariat. Bourgeois democracy is usable by the proletariat only insofar as it opens the way for the development of the class struggle. Consequently, any workers’ ‘leader’ who arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion in general, and the press in particular, is a traitor” (‘Freedom of the press and the working class’, August 1938).

So far, so good. But the subtitle of your article is terrible: “Jim Moody advocates free speech - even for the extreme right” (‘Thought police pursue Nazi apologist’, October 9). I am sure I’m not the only one to understand that the CPGB is not merely protesting against state censorship, but actually calling for ‘free speech for Nazis’, similar to the American Civil Liberties Union. Your past arguments for opposing ‘no platform for fascists’ and supporting debates between the left and the British National Party makes me think this isn’t just a case of a bad headline editor!

A communist position is not the same as a particularly militant formulation of the liberal position. A communist position needs to be based on the goal of working class power, which can only be achieved by defeating both the fascists and the state. We would never support state bans of fascist organisations, but it would be even more absurd to fight for their right to free speech. ‘Free speech’ isn’t some abstract value which exists now and will be perfected under socialism - it is an instrument made available by bourgeois democracy which we must use as long as we can.

To take a concrete example, look at the position of the independent youth organisation, Revolution, in Germany towards the ‘No NPD’ campaign. This was a campaign initiated by the German Communist Party, a toothless, post-Stalinist formation, which called for a state ban of the Nazi party, the NPD. We explained that bans of political parties are used primarily against the left: in the 1950s, the German state banned the SRP, a small fascist party, only to ban the large Stalinist party, the KPD, shortly afterwards. In the 1990s, the ban of the Nazi FAP was irrelevant compared to the simultaneous ban of the Kurdish leftwing party, the PKK.

We opposed ‘No NPD’ with the slogan: “Banning the NPD is our job!” More concretely: we, and not the state, will rob the fascists of their ‘right to free speech’.

Free speech
Free speech

Football sermon

I thought Peter Tatchell was supposed to support free speech, but calling for Spurs fans’ homophobic chanting to be regulated betrays this (Letters, October 9).

It is true that some of the chants were offensive - such as “Sol, Sol, wherever you may be, you’re on the verge of lunacy”, and “We don’t give a fuck if you’re hanging from a tree, you’re a Judas cunt with HIV” - but to snuff out the last bits of free expression in order to save our feelings would be worse.

Football is the last playing field where the authorities struggle to control speech. Don’t let them turn it into yet another church sermon.

Football sermon
Football sermon

New AWL low

Billed as a debate between Sean Matgamna and Moshé Machover on Iran, last Sunday’s event marked a new low for a group that still describes itself as Trotskyist and Marxist.

The debate itself barely touched on the issue of Iran, since Matgamna was patently unable to defend the ludicrous, pro-imperialist position the AWL has got into on any potential Israeli attack. Apparently the AWL are “against” such an attack but will not oppose it, still less condemn it! And whilst the CIA and western intelligence agencies don’t believe Iran is developing a nuclear bomb, the AWL and Matgamna have no doubts on the matter.

Matgamna decided instead to defend his organisation’s support for Zionism and Israel. What was the reason for supporting the existence of the Israeli state as a Jewish state and all the racist baggage that goes along with that? If Israel had existed in the 1930s, then fewer Jews would have died in the holocaust. As Ilana Machover put it, even though all her family died at the hands of the Nazis, she was opposed to the suggestion that the murder of European Jews was somehow a reason for the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians. In fact, using the same ‘logic’, Matgamna should be campaigning to re-establish the Stalinist states, because between 750,000 and 1.5 million Jews survived the war by fleeing into Russia.

Machover, one of the founders of the Israeli anti-Zionist group Matzpen, made Matgamna look even more absurd than normal, stating that he had a sense of déjà vu. Listening to Matgamna made him think of the worst of Israeli embassy propagandists except they were somewhat more sophisticated!

In fact one of the truly awful things about the AWL position is how they make a virtue of ignorance. Whereas the New Israeli historians (people like the late Mapamnik Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim) have demolished the old myths of Zionism - for example, that the Palestinian refugees ran away rather than being expelled - as mere post-hoc inventions and shown that the stories of Arab armies invading to destroy the nascent Israeli state were again untrue, since they ‘invaded’ the areas allocated to an Arab state, Matgamna and his cohorts repeated the most outrageous examples of Israeli hasbara. It would seem that none of the post-Zionist debates in Israel, none of the recent scholarship has ever entered the collective head of the AWL. Israel is the victim, the Muslim Arabs are the aggressors.

In reality the AWL, with its talk of a Muslim bomb (but not a Jewish bomb!) display both anti-Muslim racism and naked support for imperialism. They should be treated like any other pro-capitalist and imperialist current in the labour movement.

It is one of the ironies that the AWL complain people won’t debate with them, but when they get the chance, their members resort to shouting down their opponents, as they did on Sunday, because that is their only response. As my comrade, Roland Rance, put it to me afterwards, virtually all the Jewish people at the meeting opposed Zionism and it was the non-Jews of the AWL who accused us of anti-semitism!

Matgamna demonstrated his utter confusion by continually conflating the “Jewish nation”, “Israeli nation” and “Israeli Jews”. When he spoke of the Zionist “national movement”, I asked him which nation they represented. His response demonstrated the clarity of AWL’s subtle analysis: “Fuck off”.

I would, however, urge the CPGB to ignore the AWL from now on. They are a tiny cult on the fringes of the labour movement who are utterly politically discredited. Instead it would be better for the CPGB to rethink their own, frankly incoherent, policy of support for two secular states in Palestine/Israel. Let the AWL support partition. It is not the job of communists and socialists to advocate the division of the working class of the Middle East.

New AWL low
New AWL low

Opportunism

Like Chris Knight, I am a member of the Radical Anthropology Group. Yet I was bemused by his October theses (Letters, October 9). I know Chris regards himself as a revolutionary and a communist. How could the author of the most compelling account of how a communist revolution made our species human over 100,000 years ago be otherwise?

However, these theses, rather than pointing to the essential tasks facing the working class and communists, foster illusions in exactly the kind of reformist, legalistic, state-loyalist political practice from which the working class has to break if it is to emancipate itself.

The early paragraphs are predicated on the assumption that the Labour Party pre-Blair and Brown was in some sense a genuine party of the working class. I and the CPGB believe in engaging with the Labour Party, but we recognise the accuracy of Lenin’s characterisation of it in the early 1920s as a bourgeois workers’ party. Ultimately, it has always served the interests of capitalism.

In many ways this remains the case; it is simply that the centre of gravity in bourgeois society in recent decades has swung to the right and the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy has swung with the times.

Contrary to Chris’s assertion, the New Labour leadership in the 1990s signalled quite clearly the path on which they embarked. It is to the shame of the labour movement that they were not held to account, but it was ever so with Labour governments. Talk of electoral fraud fails to draw the correct conclusion that what the working class needs is a Communist Party - a party committed unambiguously to the interests of the working class.

Chris goes on to talk about “treason” and the sanctity of “international law”. Plenty of imperialist adventures - including the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan - have been conducted within the parameters of “international law”. Communists should oppose them regardless. If the US and British governments had persuaded the UN security council to back their invasion of Iraq, we should still have opposed it. By what right does the self-selected security council determine the legality or otherwise of state actions for the rest of the world? In fact, no existing international institutions incorporate even the semblance of democracy or accountability.

Chris does not mention the Iraq war directly. The focus of his theses is the Afghan war. He seems to believe that al Qa’eda and the Taliban actually are one of the major threats facing humanity, requiring a “coordinated people’s war”. I presume he intends to organise international brigades to sally forth to the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan?

Chris deems it appropriate to accuse brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith of treason for suggesting that Britain should be prepared to sue for peace. Well, the CPGB calls for the immediate and unconditional British and US withdrawal from both Afghanistan and Iraq. We are for the defeat of our own side in an imperialist war. That makes us very much open to the charge of treason that Chris is so happy to bandy around. But then Chris, in these theses, lurches towards social-imperialism.

Finally, Chris calls on the monarch to sack the government. But the appeal of communists to the working class is based not on bourgeois legality, or fealty to the monarch, or concepts of loyalty and treason, but to democracy and social justice. Our task is to expose the fear of democracy that lies at the heart of our state structures - most strikingly around the institution of the monarchy - not to pander to it. We are republicans.

How is it that Chris has produced such a confusing mix of downright reactionary sentiments? I think the answer is found in his penultimate paragraph, where he announces the death of global capitalism, and his last paragraph, where he invites us not to miss the revolution on October 31. Chris genuinely sees an opportunity to make a revolution right now and these theses are an attempt to appeal to the working class as they are right now, with all the reactionary and conservative ideas that capitalism inculcates.

My response is unambiguous. First, capitalism has not collapsed. We are witnessing a spectacular financial failure - for most of us, the most dramatic economic events of our lifetimes. But capitalism will not collapse of its own volition. If the working class does not take political power, capitalism as a social system will find a way to continue.

Second, a working class revolution is impossible without the working class consciously organising in democratic organisations to make it happen. In Europe that means that the vast majority of people have to be either active members of a Communist Party or have been won over to its ideas. Without this, even the collapse of the capitalist state cannot lead to anything positive - the military or the mafia wait in the wings. And were a minority imbued with revolutionary idealism to seize power, their venture would be crushed by counterrevolution of one form or another - bourgeois or Stalinist.

A crisis of capitalism, however severe, does not alter this essential principle. Over the last 30 years the capitalist strategy of neoliberalism has served its function in delivering a series of crushing defeats to the organisations of the working class around the world. What is more, the left has emerged scarred from almost a century in which the ideas of Stalinism and social democracy dominated the working class - and influenced the development even of anti-Stalinist trends such as Trotskyism.

That is why the focus of the CPGB is on the left itself. Unless self-proclaimed revolutionaries can get their act together and build a united, pluralistic, democratic party that is serious about revolution - ie, a Communist Party - then we can make no progress. Currently, we are not even at first base in terms of creating the kind of organisation that the working class (and, by extension, humanity) needs. Just look at the sorry, undemocratic sects that dominate the British left, which are currently wasting their efforts trying to build competing Labour Parties marks two to 10.

Years (and possibly decades) of patient, principled work rebuilding the labour movement and building a Communist Party (virtually from scratch in both cases) lie ahead of us. And we have to organise on a continental and global scale. There are no short cuts.

That said, the present crisis does present opportunities for communists and the working class. The hypocrisy at the heart of neoliberalism has been exposed. Twenty five years ago the British state engineered the closure of the bulk of the mining industry in order to destroy the militant section of the British working class.

In the current year, government employees must accept below-inflation pay rises to meet Gordon Brown’s inflation and debt targets. This week, the British government is pouring tens of billions (and ultimately hundreds of billions) into nationalising the banking industry in order to save finance capitalism. Other European governments and the US government are engaged in the same exercise at a cost that runs into a trillion dollars and more.

We can take steps to rebuild the confidence of the working class and set it on a trajectory that will change the balance of social forces. It is the question of working class organisation that is crucial. But in this endeavour communists should at all times be entirely honest and straightforward. To engage in any other kind of politics - to play the games of the bourgeoisie - is to patronise the working class and collapse into rank opportunism.

Opportunism
Opportunism

Act now

Mike Macnair’s article does not seem to grasp the root of the crisis as one endemic in capital itself (‘From boom to bust?’, October 2).

Mike is right to criticise Permanent Revolution’s optimism for the future of capital. He is also right to state that the only way to escape from the tendency to crisis (what he describes as “the boom-bust cycle”) is for the working class to overthrow the existing system. This means both smashing the capitalist state and the rule of capital. However, the tendency to crisis is not just “boom-bust”, but towards a worsening of humanity’s conditions and a threat to the survival of civilisation - indeed “socialism or barbarism”.

Macnair writes of societies as “collectives” - with the qualification, “even if they are divided into classes”. While capital must ensure the reproduction of living labour-power to survive, this does not mean it is capable of a rational savings scheme analogous to the provision individuals make for themselves. Capitalism has been unable and unwilling to prevent mass famines in many parts of the world, particularly where there has been no readily exploitable labour force.

Macnair writes of inflation as something that inevitably arises from money savings. This separates the financial crisis from its capitalist roots. Macnair then states that capitalist booms must be inflationary because “Credit money increases with economic activity, increasing the total money supply”. However, he locates this in “the classic capitalist ‘virtuous circle’ of recovery and boom periods”.

Prices actually fell several times in Britain during the 19th century. This was despite recurrent booms, followed by crises brought about by the contradictions of capital, in particular the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. An examination of today’s crisis needs to show what changes there have been in the forms capitalism has taken since then.

The tendency for the rate of profit to fall is discussed by Marx in chapter 13 of Capital Vol 3. It comes about, as Macnair mentions briefly, through the increased investment in machinery relative to living labour-power. This increases labour productivity and therefore surplus value and the rate of exploitation. However, as only living labour-power can produce surplus value, the return as a proportion of total investment, and hence the ‘rate of profit’ falls.

As Macnair indicates, for the individual capitalist, investment in machinery means initially reduced costs through increasing productivity and hence higher profits. However, increased productivity means a fall in the value of the commodities produced, and thus: “A capitalist working with improved but not as yet generally adopted methods of production sells below the market price, but above his individual price of production; his rate of profit rises until competition levels it out.”

The phrase “price of production” (rather than ‘value’) is significant because there is a process of equalisation of the rate of the profit that entails the transformation of values into prices of production, which may be higher or lower than the values of the commodities (although total price in capitalist society can only express total value) (Capital Vol 3, chapters 9 and 10).

The equalisation of general rates of profit and transformation of the values of commodities into prices of production occurs through all spheres of production. Macnair’s statement that, “as the new technology is generated across the industry, it leads to falling profits in the industry as a whole” misses Marx’s point. The mass of profits will still rise. As Marx summarises: “The fall in commodity prices and the rise in the mass of profit … is in fact but another expression for the law of the falling rate of profit attended by a simultaneously increasing mass of profit” (Capital Vol 3, chapter 13).

Since 1948 there has been a huge expansion in credit, both among capitalists and for consumers. This has allowed capitalists to maintain profit rates through raising prices, but only in the short term, as those prices do not represent actual values produced. Money has thus been introduced into the economy without it representing values produced.

We thus cannot simply state that increased money causes inflation. Rather, increases in prices to maintain profit rates have meant that a larger quantity of money is required. The ‘credit crunch’ is rooted in the nature of capital itself.

The inflationary nature of this trend in western countries was reduced by the low cost of imports from countries with low-wage economies such as China and India. This can only be maintained by continued superexploitation of the workers in these countries.

Marxists who ignore the cyclical nature of the crises of capital risk resembling stopped clocks who tell the right time twice a day. However, it is important to show that, despite temporary booms, the trend is for crises to become deeper and longer-lasting, and that more barbaric means may be used to resolve them.

It is not sufficient for Macnair to talk of the crisis as “part of the gradual return to capitalist normality”, even “within the framework of declining capitalism”. Capital resolves crises through wiping out capital that cannot yield a profit, mass unemployment and oppression of the working class. As the ratio between investment in machinery (constant capital) and living labour-power continues to increase, the trend must be for longer and deeper crises.

Two world wars, fascism and the mass unemployment of the 1930s were the precursors of the prolonged boom, which almost everyone (except perhaps Permanent Revolution) now accepts has ended. Macnair states that “the crisis itself does not pose the question of power”. The crisis certainly shows the necessity for communists to struggle within the working class to enable it to develop a Communist Party and the mass organisations that can, with the leadership of that party, overthrow the capitalist states and lay the basis of the new, communist society.

Macnair seems pessimistic about the timescale for this. With the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, environmental destruction and return to mass unemployment, communists should act now. Developments in the working class that can bring about such a revolutionary situation can take place very fast, as they did in 1917.

Act now
Act now