Letters
Labour again
Comrade Chris Strafford’s latest missive on the question of the Labour Party, alas, still persists in the major misunderstandings of the CPGB’s position common to all his interventions on the subject (Letters, September 22).
He seeks once again to prove that the hypothesis of a leftwing shift in the Labour Party is bunk by reference more or less exclusively to Ed Miliband and his parliamentary cronies. Sure enough, the good brother Miliband stands revealed as a vacillating pseudo-Blairite and our analysis proved decisively wrong.
The problem is that this was never the point. Indeed, in my reply to his last polemic on the subject, I responded to almost exactly the same line of argument: “If we had confidently predicted that Ed Miliband would come out in favour of waves of militant strike action, then Chris would be quite right to argue that our position has been shown to be a nonsense. Yet we did not say any such thing” (‘Repackaging of a tenuous argument’, August 11).
We have still not said any such thing - yet the indefatigable comrade Strafford insists on attributing this thesis to us. A year ago, myself and comrade Strafford opposed the CPGB’s critical support for leadership hopeful Diane Abbott - but to read his material now, one would have thought that the CPGB had rather called for a vote to Ed Miliband.
To make things as clear as possible - a shift to the left in the Labour Party is not to be measured by whether or not Miliband takes a principled line on this or that (this week’s left litmus test: the Dale Farm evictions). Political shifts in Labour make their mark rather in the relative discomfort of leaders as they inevitably take up their sell-out lines - that is how we discern the pressures, from both the objective processes of the British political cycle and the internal struggles of the party, incumbent upon the leaders.
Most significantly, the largest Labour-affiliated unions are balloting for united strike action on November 30. There is talk of civil disobedience and, more guardedly, of defying anti-union laws. Much of this will be hot air - what more would we expect from the labour bureaucracy? Relative to the abject quiescence of the Blair years, however, this is big news, and very definitely a shift to the left.
At the recent TUC congress which gave us these declarations and initiatives, Miliband - having made a bit of a tit out of himself over the June 30 strikes - had to submit himself to rather humiliating questioning on that matter. Now, at Labour conference, he carefully hedges himself against condemning the November 30 action, and produces a speech guaranteed to reanimate all the old ‘red Ed’ business in the rightwing press.
The idea of Tony Blair in that position is self-evidently absurd; not, I repeat, because Ed Miliband is more pro-working class as an individual, but because there are severe, historically variable, objective constraints for an organisation like Labour, open to pressure both from the bourgeoisie and the working class.
So on to the fundamental question, for the umpteenth time: the bourgeoisie has availed itself of no end of means to make the Labour Party a tame instrument of capitalist rule. Labour has played this role more or less uninterruptedly since its inception. But it is still vulnerable to pressure from the organised working class, and thus to serious strategic intervention by the far left.
In the end, one does not have to make a detailed analysis of the ‘bourgeois workers party’ concept to make the fundamental political point. Unite, Unison and so on keep the Labour Party solvent and afloat - especially at times, like now, when big-money capitalist donors are less prevalent than they were. They should get some political bang for their buck.
Rank-and-file militants in those unions, moreover, should no longer be content with stitch-ups between Barber, Prentis, McCluskey on one side and Miliband (or whoever) on the other, but should take control of their unions to force pro-working class policies on Labour. This, of course, amounts to the overthrow the labour bureaucracy. Success will not materialise overnight - but it is, after all, one of the key conditions for revolution anyway.
What is Chris’s alternative? “The place of communists is to join working class resistance wherever it emerges and fight for a programme that can transform the disparate movements into a real force for change.” All very agreeable - but our job is not simply to react to struggle in an ad hoc way, but act according to a strategy, which aims to destroy the objective supports for bourgeois rule.
We have a strategy to neutralise one such support - the Labour Party. Like any hypothesis, there is no guarantee it will be proven correct - but Chris can only ‘disprove’ it at this point by falsifying our arguments. He certainly has not provided any serious alternative.
Labour again
Labour again
Fighting party
Dave Douglass rightly considers that “the whole strategy of the CPGB towards the Labour Party to have been ill-conceived then [in the 1930s] and even more so now” (Letters, September 22). Of course, the British road to socialism aimed at building a Marxist party of Great Britain hand in glove with a reformed or left Labour Party. This dates from the 1950s, but has its roots in the popular front period in the 1930s.
The British road is a two-party strategy combining an ‘orange’ with a ‘lemon’. The ‘Little and Large’ of working class politics would form an alliance for power. This would be a popular front in which workers are subordinated to the interests of the bourgeoisie. Dave expressed hostility to this in his critical comment about “the 59th variety of ‘Vote Labour without illusions’”.
Chris Strafford takes up cudgels against the consequences of the CPGB majority’s British road strategy (Letters, September 22). It is a courageous stand, but it reveals the weaknesses in his position. First he plants his flag of rebellion on the shifting sands of the Labour Party. He shows that Labour has not shifted to the left, as the majority predicted.
The Labour Party always shifts to the left and right and then back again. It is part of Labour’s DNA. How else can Labour hope to fool and mislead the working class? If working class resistance grows, no doubt Miliband and co will adapt to that. The fact it hasn’t done so yet will not dent the CPGB majority, who have a longer-term strategic view. If or when Labour does move left, will Chris admit he was in error and join the Labour Party?
The second weakness in his position is his alternative of ‘fighting back’ and ‘revolutionary unity’. Chris predicts the workers will fight back. We will all join in that, including some in the Labour Party. But we need to learn from the Tories. They understand the necessity for a party to enable a class to be fully armed. The party is the heavy guns, fighter-attack aircraft and helicopter gunships of the class struggle. The workers have no fighting party and are left with rusty rifles and a few old machine guns.
The strength of the CPGB majority position is that it recognises the central importance of party. Chris sounds more like an anarchist ducking the party question and substituting the vain hope of revolutionary unity. He will never storm the CPGB majority redoubt with anarchist or syndicalist ideas of non-party self-activity.
The militant section of the working class needs its own ‘independent militant party’. This party must be independent of the bourgeoisie and hence independent of the Labour Party. It is the party of militant class fighters who want to get politically organised. The word ‘militant’ and not ‘revolutionary’ is used deliberately. We could borrow a phrase from the CPGB theses on Labour: “a united front for all pro-working class partisans” (ie, militants). It is the party of those who want to fight back, regardless of whether they are or pretend to be ‘revolutionary’ or not, communist or not.
Fighting party
Fighting party
Straight talking
Comrade Eddie Ford (Letters, September 15) raised a number of issues relating to my letter in the previous edition of the Weekly Worker (September 8). He says he is not “sure the comrade [me] is following his own advice” to be “honest about ideas and the ideas of others”.
Eddie bases this, as he did in his original article, not on what is written, but on his understanding of what the writer really meant. I can only consider the actual written words. If I have doubts about an author’s views, I ask them for clarity - honest debate does not allow me to invent. So I may be naive when I quote others, but I do so in trust.
Comrade Ford tries to demonstrate how the writer of the original Socialist Party article on the riots is being less than honest. He implies that I conspire with the SP’s dishonesty, but does not explain if this is a result of a deliberate act of deception on my part or through my aforementioned naivety. Am I bothered? No, I know I am attempting to be honest and, hopefully, achieving it.
The SP is accused of journalistic tricks in using others to express the SP’s own reformist positions. But there is little proof of this, only assertions based on poor evidence. The Socialist Workers Party does it (again an assertion), so the SP must be at it too. Eddie’s evidence is that the SP article quoted local residents, in the way that the SWP supposedly uses friendly workers, who complained about the police, as a way of promoting the SP’s own views on the police. How does comrade Ford know this?
Even more damning, in comrade Ford’s eyes, is that the SP journalist quoted a certain Paul Deller of the Metropolitan Police Federation, who commented on the level of police morale. Are the views of local working class people of no interest? Is the state of police morale of no interest to revolutionaries? I would have thought it would be.
Eddie continues his polemic when he asserts: “Quite obviously, the article was written this way so as to give the effect that ordinary local people, the MPF and SPEW all agree that police cuts are a regrettable thing.” The article certainly quotes local people and the MPF, but where, other than in comrade Ford’s assertion, does it state that the SP holds these positions on police cuts?
I never set out to defend, support or even to give a rounded explanation of the Socialist Party’s position on the riots or the police. I am not in a position to undertake such a task - I am not a member, supporter or regular reader of their paper. But, in the cause of honesty, I need to state that I am an ex-member of Militant and still hold to some of their ideas and methods. Equally, I have also developed new ones and rejected some of the ideas and methods accrued in my Militant days.
Comrade Ford accepted my implied challenge to find the actual, as opposed to assumed, SP position on the riots and police cuts. After consulting the demands raised in the article, he formed the opinion that my arguments were flatly contradicted by the very first programmatic demand - “An independent, trade union-led inquiry into the death of Mark Duggan. Scrap the IPCC. We need police accountability through democratic control by local people.” Here, comrade Ford asserts, is the proof of the SP’s illusions in the police.
But is it? In my view, it is quite the opposite. There is no call for a police or government inquiry; the call is for one that is “independent” and “trade-union led”. If the SP’s trust in the police is so obvious, why call for an independent and trade union-led enquiry and for scrapping the Independent Police Complaints Commission?
But, of course, the most damning of the SP demands is the call for “police accountability through democratic control by local people”. Is this showing illusions in the police or a rejection of the present policing system? What’s the alternative - a workers’ militia? If so, where was the militia when working class areas were, in the CPGB’s own description, being looted?
To ask this question does not imply that I have illusions in the police. As it happens, in the course of the riots, the police met almost all of my expectations. No real support for working class areas, property or communities. There were the usual repressive actions against the youth in particular and plenty of claims for overtime. It was reminiscent of the miners’ strike. Given the resources - mainly a mass party with a suitable leadership - I would support a defence force, probably based on the trade unions, within working class communities.
Comrade Ford’s final attempt to demonstrate that the SP support for illusions in the police is centred on his continuing assertion that the SP was calling for an end to the cuts in police spending. To prove this, he butchers the SP programme by supposedly quoting the SP’s final demand of “No to all cuts in jobs and public services”, making the following observation: “And in this context, the demand in the final bullet point ... can only be read to include the police.”
Comrade Ford misplaces the demand and then gives it a very specific context relating to the police failure to defend working class communities. I question if it is given an accurate contextual setting. Reading comrade Ford’s original article and his letter, the impression is created that the SP article in question centres on the role of the police. But it does not. The SP article consists of description and analysis of the riots, with the role of police occupying a small part. The demand is actually second to last within a longer list, the vast majority of which are unrelated to the role of the police.
I am still at loss as to how the demand, in his words, “can only be read to include the police”. The clever SP journalist has hidden the inclusion of anti-police cuts I think most comrades would not have noticed. When I was in Militant I was often charged by the right wing of trying to hide extremist ideas, never of hiding reformist demands. Is the problem caused by the word ‘all’? If this is the case, I thought I would examine the CPGB reportage of an event.
In his report on the Labour Representation Committee’s AGM, Stan Keable reported: “‘No cuts at all, no privatisations at all’ - that is how John McDonnell MP set the militant mood of the Labour Representation Committee’s annual conference.” The report continues: “FBU general secretary Matt Wrack described the ‘horrifying’ cuts as ‘a general attack on our class … This is not a war on the poor - it is a war on the majority’ ... The FBU ‘rejects the cuts agenda completely’ ... The ‘no cuts, no privatisations’ policy was endorsed in resolution 9.” And comrade Ted Knight is reported as demanding that Labour councillors “should refuse to implement cuts budgets and refuse to vote for a single cut” (‘Cuts and rebuilding’, January 20).
The CPGB does not distance itself from these quotes or others of a similar nature. What we have is simple reportage. If I adopt comrade Ford’s methods, I would claim they are a clear statement of the policies and programme of the CPGB. Further, as they call for opposition to all cuts, they must include the police. I could go further by saying that, as they oppose all cuts, they would include MPs’ wages and expenses. But I know this would not only be dishonest; it would be ludicrous.
Finally, I turn to this little gem from comrade Ford: “Presumably, to put forward a principled Marxist position on the riots would be a manifestation of unBritish ‘ultra-leftism’.” I will not give chapter and verse from the SP’s 2,000-plus word article: suffice to say for me it manifestly did contain numerous items of Marxist analysis and positions. I will just note the following passage that is but one of many similar: “… contrary to reports from some politicians and media, the rioting and looting that took place was not just the result of ‘outsiders’ or ‘hooligans’, but was a spontaneous outpouring of the anger of sections of the local population, particularly young people.”
Straight talking
Straight talking
Blood feud
I was obviously not clear in my previous letter about Chris Knight’s book, Blood relations (Letters, September 8). I do not believe that human behaviour is the natural or inevitable result of human biology. I wanted to indicate that, even if we do support an idea - such as that the whole process starts from the alpha male monopolising sexual access to all the females and those females resist this by synchronising menstruation - we must have some evidence that this would be possible.
Since Chris (Letters, September 15) bases his argument around the significance of menstruation, I tried to show that, even if we do want to pursue this line of argument (which I don’t), we must answer the suggestion that menstruation is a response to having multiple male partners. If that is true, the alpha male could not dominate menstruating females because menstruation and alpha male domination would be mutually exclusive. It is fundamental to Chris’s theory that menstruation can be synchronised. There are several studies which do not support that possibility. I only introduced these examples in response to the original argument. I don’t believe that reproductive biology is a useful area to examine for the origin of women’s oppression in any case. In fact, quite the opposite.
Chris points out that, before human culture, there was only the natural world. It has been quite successfully argued, from Engels onward, that the manipulation of natural resources led to the development of class society and gender inequality. This is quite different from basing an argument about the social organisation of human reproduction solely on the biological characteristics of human reproduction. That is the kind of idea I described as ‘sociobiology’, which Chris says is an incorrect use of the word and he may well be right. I had never been challenged on my use of the word before.
My main objection to the ‘sex strike’ theory is its reliance on reactionary ideas of sexually predatory men being economically manipulated by women whose sexuality is purely instrumental, used by women for material benefit. Adoption of this view will inevitably lead to the justification of similar behaviour in the present day as innate, natural and inevitable. That can never be progressive.
Blood feud
Blood feud
Politics of coal
In reply to Arthur Bough (Letters, September 15) let’s restate some facts on the political nature of the closure of the British coal industry.
The National Union of Mineworkers did not fight the closures on whether the pits were profitable or not; we fought the closures on the grounds that they could not be closed on such spurious and temporary conditions as the market selling price of coal at any particular moment in time. We could have got an agreement back in April 1984, when disagreement hung on one word ‘beneficial’. Having taken out all references to ‘economic’ and ‘profitable’, the board said they would agree to work coal where it could be ‘beneficially developed’. Arthur Scargill considered this to be a fudge and refused to accept any leeway on closing pits on economic grounds. My assertion was that, incidentally, British coal was the cheapest deep-mined coal in the world. So comrade Bough is wrong to say that coal is produced and brought here because it can be more cheaply mined abroad. Whether cheap labour, non-union or high-tech, it can’t and it isn’t.
The miners were engaged in a battle against a government whose central social policy was smashing the NUM, as a by-product wiping out the most ‘marginal’ of unit costs, in order to sell off a super-profitable, non-unionised coal industry, whose socially challenging teeth had been drawn. But the coal industry overall produced coal cheaper and more efficiently and safely than any other country in the world. Fact.
Obviously some pits were more profitable than others, but in mining this changes from one mine to another over a period of time, back and forth. Selby was only just starting production, so didn’t in any case come into the equation in 1984, but there was nothing wrong with lower-cost Selby coal bringing down the overall cost to consumers - this was a single enterprise.
So the struggle never was about ‘unprofitable pits’ or us defending some archaic industry. We were fighting to keep our class position, as well as our social and economic position as workers. We all knew the longer-term solution was the overthrow of capitalism, but we were not engaged in an all-out struggle for class power at that stage. We would have needed a higher level of political consciousness among other industries’ workers for that. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t fight for demands short of the abolition of capitalism - and this is what this argument was all about in relation to Bombardier and jobs on this island. Defence of our jobs or their jobs isn’t a “nationalistic solution” - it’s a class defence, it’s a defence of our incomes, our organisation, our rights to intervene and challenge society. If people who claim to be socialists can’t see that I really despair.
Thatcher didn’t succeed in the central task of de-unionising the coal industry and, after beating us in 1985, was left with a still highly combative NUM despite the loss of 100,000 jobs and 100 mines. Union struggles raged across the country post-1985. The vast majority of power generation in this country was still in the hands of a highly politicised, class-conscious union. The ‘final solution’ to the problem of the miners was to close the industry. It was at this stage that the questions of ‘overproduction’ and there being ‘too much coal’ came in. That was only the case because coal’s market was confiscated in the wasteful and anti-social ‘dash for gas’. Coal power generation and capacity was closed down and switched to new gas-powered stations.
At this time the world benchmark for profitable coal production was £1.75 per gigajoule. Only a handful of British pits were temporarily producing coal above this price. The bulk were operating at £1.30, and pits like Bentley in Doncaster were closed despite producing coal for less than 90p. The British Steel market remained a main consumer but was itself losing massive amounts of capacity in the same de-industrialisation process which was hitting the miners.
Truth was, no matter how efficient or super-profitable the pits now were, they would still close because that was the politically decided policy. Post-Major, the handful of pits that remained were super-profitable, with secured local markets or specialist coal, but none of them had secure futures, despite endless supplies of coal, because UK Coal, which owns three of the last five big mines (plus one they have in ‘mothballs’), want out of coal mining. Their land portfolios offer them bigger profits than mining coal underneath the land it sits on. It requires capital investment and long periods until this pays off, and they don’t want to wait. As they told Ian Lavery, the last NUM president, “This is a business, not an industry”.
Supplies of gas lying off British coasts, which would have provided hundreds of years of domestic consumption, were burned off in power generators in a very few cases - and then only for a very brief period, while it was flowing slightly cheaper than coal power. Of course, it couldn’t last, and after native supplies were exhausted, and demand across the world rose, so the spiralling costs of gas have driven millions to fuel poverty. The fact is, 70 million tonnes of coal are now imported into Britain to burn in coal power stations, at prices far higher than that which was available here. But on top of that all coal power generation faces massive added tax burdens, both as a punishment to consumers for using coal power and as supplement to offset the costs of so-called ‘green’ energy - which, if it was left to find its own ‘market’ level, nobody would buy because it’s so inefficient. Not that it can be left to its own devices, as green power, for all its cost, cannot meet base load requirements of power generation.
Arthur misunderstands my references to workers’ control and miners’ freedoms. These were not ‘introduced’ in some plastic workers’ participation scheme or anything to do with Fordism. I’m talking about ancient job controls and inroads of dual power into the mining process, which kept control of team composition, manning, overtime, deployment and the way in which work is done in the hands of the miners and their union. This wasn’t introduced with nationalisation, but was a feature fought for under the private coal owners since lang syne - and continued despite nationalisation agreements which stated they should end. But there is really no argument as to whether terms and conditions within the NCB were better than under the old coal owners: it’s just too well documented.
This is not the place to argue about workers’ cooperatives in coal mines - Tower worked, but others have ended in physical and financial disaster. Cooperatives, except in very particular circumstances, couldn’t have worked because the economies of scale are too great and the market was already rigged against them.
Coming to David Walters (Letters, September 22) and his concern for the poor coal miners and support for nuclear power, this is the tune Harold Wilson sang in his ‘White-hot heat of modern technology’ speech in the 1960s, before he closed more coal mines than Maggie Thatcher. They seem to think nuclear power grows on trees, but let me assure you that the death, injury and working conditions endured by our comrades in uranium mines are far worse than anything we experience as coal miners in Britain. Uranium is also a fossil fuel and, believe it or not, it is limited. It is also a fact that (outwith the one tragedy of Aberfan), when the mines have a disaster, it is confined to miners and under the ground. When the nuclear industry has a disaster, it cripples the whole surrounding community and leaves a fatal legacy for a lifetime and beyond.
Coal kills on such a scale because it is essentially mined in places where union strength and social gains by the labour movement are weak or non-existent. This isn’t the case in Australia, Canada or, by and large, Britain or New Zealand. It’s not that the coal is any different; it’s the strength of the workers’ movement which is crucial here. Despite the recent disaster in Wales, only seven miners have been killed in Britain in the last six years. Too many - but still the safest coal mining in the world. As a matter of fact, mining comes way down the list of fatal occupations in Britain, behind deep-sea fishing, seafaring, diving, oil rigs, construction, docks and agriculture. Does comrade Walters aim to phase out such occupations? Of course not - what needs stopping are the accidents, not the tasks and skills.
Coal production has doubled in the last 20 years across the world. It is set despite the recession to double again in something like 10 years. New coal mines are being won across the globe. Coal is going to be mined - another fact of life. Instead of standing like Canute, we must ensure we assist in making sure this takes place in union mines with the highest attainable levels of safety and job control, and burned in clean-coal power stations with all the back-up of energy-saving and insulation we can combine in the process.
Dave should not think that renationalisation of the energy industry means automatically a public acceptance of nuclear power and a rejection of coal. Put to the test, most people will back clean coal and a regeneration of the coal industry rather than an expansion of nuclear power - or the never-ending encroachment of wind turbines and pylons for that matter. But, come that glorious day when workers are actually asked for their opinion, I can assure him that the mining communities will be demanding coal is a central feature of energy policy.
Politics of coal
Politics of coal