Letters

Ahistorical

Ben Lewis states that “Carl Simmonds doggedly insists on asserting that Karl Kautsky, VI Lenin, Lars Lih and I hold the working class, ‘in disdain’ …” (Letters, March 20). I’ll plead guilty to doggedness, but not the rest. It should be apparent to anyone reading my letter in the previous week’s paper (March 13) that Lewis is distorting my argument.

I did accuse those who repeat today the mantra that the working class is only capable of trade union rather than socialist consciousness of viewing the working class with disdain. If you doubt there are people who believe this to be a fundamental article of faith of Marxism-Leninism, well, just head over to RevLeft and do a search. Incidentally, this is not a view held by Lars T Lih - see his article online: ‘How a founding document was found, or 100 years of Lenin’s What is to be done?’ The only person on Lewis’s list whom I might conceivably be accusing of holding this view is himself. I say ‘might’ because his butt appears to be so firmly impaled on the metaphorical fence that, despite his two letters, it is still difficult to see what his own position on the contemporary relevance of Lenin’s 1902 formulation is. We may be fundamentally in agreement, but then again we may not be.

Lewis accuses me of not understanding the difference between a “clumsy or unsuccessful formulation” of a valid point and an invalid point. I must admit that, while I am perfectly capable of conceiving the distinction in the abstract, I can’t see its relevance to our present discussion. In plain English, making a bad argument in support of a good idea, which your opponents subsequently exploit, is a mistake. We should not repeat that mistake. When people attempt to elevate that mistake to the status of an article of faith of Leninism, then they need to be told that Lenin made a mistake and subsequently abandoned the formulation. As Lenin himself put it, “Obviously, an episode in the struggle against economism has here been confused with a principled presentation of a major theoretical question: namely, the formation of an ideology.” This should be clear enough for anybody.

His formulations in WITBD should not be taken as the Marxist position on the relationship between class and ideology. Lih himself has shown that “By 1906 WITBD was already being treated (even by its author) as a document from a superseded episode in party history.” I’ll state again so as not to be misinterpreted that I do not accept the rightwing narrative that WITBD indicates Lenin’s ‘dictatorial tendencies’ or ‘disdain for the working class’ with which Lih is primarily taking issue. However, like any Marxist, Lenin was capable of making mistakes and this formulation was one of them.

Lewis repeats his claim that Lih has shown Trotsky’s 1939 account of the issue to be inconsistent with contemporaneous accounts. Lih certainly disagrees with Trotsky’s account, but he has hardly shown it to be unsupportable. What are Lih’s actual arguments? His strongest is Lenin’s short October 1905 article praising Stalin’s repetition of his formulations. This is mentioned by Lewis. However, it is not like this article was any kind of surprise to Trotsky. He deals with it and dismisses its significance in subsequent paragraphs.

Other than the 1905 article, Lih’s main argument appears to be the lack of contemporary criticism of Lenin’s formulations by other Iskra supporters. However, the weakness of this argument is that a lack of public criticism, and a basic agreement with Lenin with respect to the ‘economists’ does not necessary signify agreement with him on particular contentious points, such as section 2 of WITBD. I would urge the “lazy readers” of the Weekly Worker, whose laziness I am supposedly encouraging, to read the online transcript of sections 8 and 9 from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 1903 congress and judge for themselves. It seems to me that the supporters of Rabochee Delo, Martynov and Akimov are attempting to use the issue to drive a wedge between Lenin and other supporters of Iskra, in particular Plekhanov.

As far as academic historians go, I don’t think Lih does a bad job. Many of his points are interesting and his position is preferable to openly anti-communist historians like Service and Conquest. My beef is rather with those who attempt to elevate Lih’s views to a new orthodoxy, and use them to attack Trotskyism and promote some kind of neo-Kautskyite revival, as if the world hasn’t moved on and Marxism developed since the Erfurt programme. The CPGB’s attempt to portray groups on the Trotskyist left as latter-day ‘economists’ is in my view ahistorical tripe.

In regard to Lewis’ final points about discussion of internal party differences in public, I’m not in principle opposed to public discussion. However, there is nothing in Lenin that suggests a party doesn’t have the right to set the bounds of such a discussion in accordance with its party statutes. As to whether the Socialist Party has used this right wisely, I think Ben Lewis should probably address that question to someone who is both a member of the Socialist Party and familiar with the points at issue.

Carl Simmonds
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Dirty hands

Regarding the conception that socialist ideas come from outside the working class, where did Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky get their ideas then? From the working class! Socialist ideas don’t just pop into the heads of brilliant thinkers. The founders of Marxism read books about the working class and its history. They listened to workers and lived with them.

To create separate compartments for trade union consciousness and socialist consciousness is undialectical. There is a combined interaction between the two: militant trade union consciousness confronts the police, the courts and fights scabs, which can lead to a process of socialist consciousness. Naturally, there are contradictions between the two. Trade unionism works within the boundaries of capitalism, while pushing against those boundaries. Lenin emphasised the contradiction. I think we need to emphasise the unity of these opposites.

Most of the daily class struggle is not about taking power: it is the practice ground and school for the working class. We can easily isolate ourselves, like Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party, who in the United States denounced trade unionism as reformist. The fight for socialism means dirtying our hands in the small battles in the unions and communities where we work and live.

Earl Gilman
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PA openness

I was pleased to read Peter Manson’s report of the People’s Assembly recall conference (‘Keep it broad, keep it safe’, March 20). I hope that people reading it won’t be too put off by the undoubtedly problematic arrangement of the conference.

The Weekly Worker has devoted a lot of detailed coverage to the formation of Left Unity - understandable, given the CPGB has decided to participate in the new party. So I welcome the attention on what may be, in the short run, a much more significant entity in terms of its geographic spread and influence within the working class movement.

In the North East, for example, there are more active People’s Assembly groups than branches of LU. I’m not suggesting that the two organisations are comparable in terms of their function, but that LU will struggle to incorporate comrades from existing electoral parties. The breadth of the PA is both its strength and its potential weakness, which is why I hope the CPGB will be fully engaged in the debate on the PA’s structure and strategy.

The Teesside PA was launched due to the initiative of one comrade, who called for a meeting of activists from the area straight after the North East People’s Assembly in Newcastle last year. My view of the PA is that it was badly needed years ago, but organisations like the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party, which have influence within the major unions, were unwilling or unable to establish a united anti-austerity organisation. So, although the PA is late, it is still needed - and I hope that the SP and SWP will remain involved.

Certainly, at a local level, activists from all the different socialist/communist organisations participate in the PA, and this can and does overlap with membership of different trades unions supportive of the PA at a national level. It’s a shame that the motion we sent to conference on the subject of economic democracy, cited in Peter’s article, was not discussed or voted on directly - I wrote the first draft and it was greatly improved by clarifying amendments from two comrades. In addition to the debate at the PA meeting, I led off a discussion on economic democracy at a ‘general assembly’ of the Teesside Solidarity Movement, an activist network which is mostly sceptical of the People’s Assembly’s potential.

Certainly, in Teesside PA we haven’t shied away from controversy and have had comradely debates on the strategy for defeating austerity, what Grangemouth means for our movement and our clearly differing views on whom to back in elections. This openness has not prevented effective solidarity action: it has allowed it to take place.

James Doran
Darlington

Sensitive

Jack Conrad writes that “it is clear” that I, like the CPGB, oppose age-of-consent laws, and goes on to reformulate my proposal as a system of positive proof of consent when the partners in a relationship straddle the age of 16 (Letters, March 20).

This is really a matter of how to formulate the idea I am advocating. Jack’s idea seems thoroughly compatible with mine in reality, but obviously both my position and his formulation of it as ‘positive proof’ depends on some sort of age threshold to hang it around; otherwise the idea does not work.

Whether this should be called an ‘age of consent’, or some other term that sounds less forbidding (but sufficiently so not to be ignored), is a question that requires some consideration.

But Jack is right about the principle that people who are close in age but on either side of the ‘line’ (whatever you call it) should not face prosecution for obviously consensual sex, and even in cases with a greater age difference, provided consent can be proven, there should be no crime involved.

We are agreed on the principle, I think - precise formulation of it needs care, as this is a sensitive subject.

Ian Donovan
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Fear not

Having spent many years thinking and occasionally writing about gender and sexuality from a Marxist standpoint, I’m gratified that the CPGB takes this aspect of capitalist society seriously and, particularly at this time, the important questions lurking under the label, ‘age of consent’.

I must take issue with Vernon Jacks, however, when he says that it is impossible to debate this publicly because of state repression (Letters, March 20). The same reasons could be cited for not discussing proletarian revolution.

However, a development of our theory is needed if we are to escape a purely liberal problematic. As a pointer in this direction, why has the notion of ‘paedophilia’ become so overwhelming in recent years, displacing ‘homosexuality’ as the dominant policing concept of sexuality? The answer must lie in the changing form of family: perhaps ‘homosexuality’ corresponded to the hegemony of the nuclear family (having itself displaced earlier notions such as ‘fornication’ and ‘sodomy’), while ‘paedophilia’ fits the needs of a society in which marriage has significantly eroded, so that responsibility for children falls more firmly back on the mother in a context of commercialised sexuality.

The recent Daily Mail campaign against Harriet Harman and others has highlighted the utopianism of attempting a rational reform of sexuality while capitalism rules supreme. But let us not be afraid of developing our critique of the current repressive order and our ideas on the general direction in which sexual relations might develop in a communist society.

David Fernbach
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Sex crime

Ian Donovan (Letters, March 6) is surprised at my “focusing on one narrow aspect” of the debate on ages of consent. But I wasn’t writing a major article on the issue; I was simply submitting a letter, where it is normal to confine oneself to one or two subjects (February 27).

Turning to the actual subject, I am not convinced, as Jack Conrad is, that Ian is arguing for abolition of the age of consent. Clearly (to me anyway), not only is he arguing for an age of consent, but in favour of the age of consent, as understood by the British state. Why, for example, should a person of 17 having sex with a willing and consensual partner of 15 be subject to proof of consent if nobody in the relationship has any complaint or accusation that consent wasn’t given? Why should a fellow 15-year-old not require such written or validated proof of consent? The proposition is nonsense.

Jack’s legal draftsmanship is equally nonsensical. He suggests university tutors should be sacked for consensual relationships with their students. Given that, typically, a student will be 19 or 20 before starting a university course and they have enough gumption to get into university, one would expect they will know with whom they want to have sex. These are not patients in a mental hospital or old folk in a care home subject to the power of their care staff, but adults. The fact that a tutor is in a position of authority is irrelevant. As a number of people have now said, if someone feels pressured or coerced into sex against their wishes, this is not consent, and normal rules of sexual abuse and rape apply. We are talking here only of voluntary and consensual relationships.

The idea that sexual partners should fill out an ‘exemption from prosecution’ form, apart from being a real passion-killer, is totally inapplicable to most spontaneous and casual sexual encounters - or will we also require a period of courtship and references before engaging in sex? Why presume it is the older person in the relationship making the advances anyway? I have very happy memories of making all the running with a middle-aged blonde bombshell in my very early teenage years. Did she take advantage of me? Ha, you’re having a laugh.

I know I wasn’t unusual and, although things are now shrouded by the legal sword of Damocles and being whisked away into involuntary detention of the laughably named ‘care system’, I am sure young teenagers of either sex still think like that.

I am sorry Tony Rees had such bad early sexual experiences (Letters, March 20), but, to be honest, his bad experience was really down to his own confused state and insecurity, rather than being some helpless child with whom some creepy old professor had his wicked way. Abuse and exploitation happens among adults, and Tony’s problem falls into that category.

Why should a person of any age having sex with a 15-year-old in Britain be subject to the most tyrannical penalties, when no other country in Europe would impose them? The CPGB sees itself as a party of the European Union, but wants to defend a peculiarly British age of consent. Why? Because British teenagers are less aware of their bodies or have some mental defect which prevents them understanding what sex is and what consent is while their continental peers do?

Many countries around the world fix their age of consent at 12 and the sky doesn’t fall in. As far as I know, nobody is particularly subject to “being coaxed” into things they don’t want to do, as Ian suggests. The odd thing is, in countries with the lowest age of consent, less young people actually do have sex than in countries where it is older. Could it be that the moralist obsession with child and teenage sexuality in Britain engenders a more precocious exposure to it?

I think your earlier position on abolition of the age of consent, while strengthening laws and culture which outlaw actual abuse and rape, is clearer than Ian’s confused proposition, which I am sure is prompted by the highest motives. I do not want anyone to get the impression that I am not interested in that either - the neglect and abuse of children breaks my heart. I simply consider the age of consent actually contributes to that.

I remember when my own daughters reached puberty and debated with me going on the pill. I assured them they had to make the decisions and choices they were comfortable with. Truth be known, I, like many dads, would never be happy with them having sex with some bloke, whatever age he was, because, apart from believing none of them were good enough, and nobody would love and care for them more than I did, I guess I wanted them to stay little children.

But life in the real world isn’t like that and sex is a normal and natural part of life. Young people need to be able to choose whether to engage in sex or not free of any legal or social pressure.

Don Browning
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Pan fight

Responding to Dave Vincent’s letter of March 13, I think we can definitely say what Karl Marx’s views on immigration controls would have been. His programme was for the abolition of nation-states and the international unity of the workers. He saw with his own eyes the effects on the British working class of mass Irish immigration and argued for their incorporation into the working class, not their exclusion.

His analysis of capital was that it always creates a reserve army of labour, constantly pushing workers out of jobs and pulling workers into exploitative labour relations. Ireland is a good example, losing a third of its population. Living standards went down for the masses because the reserve army of labour was maintained, so profits went up. Capital cannot serve the interests of the working class.

Successful resistance to capitalism makes it malfunction. Unemployed workers in Britain now have benefits, meaning that they can choose not to be part of the reserve army of labour. But the campaign for immigration controls will turn out to be a campaign to attack benefits and restore capital to rude health. It is not enough to reform capitalism; that only makes it malfunction. We have to replace it with the economy of the working class: an international task.

I have found a Lenin quote, from 1915, in a letter to the Socialist Propaganda League in the USA: “In our struggle for true internationalism and against ‘jingo-socialism’, we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the SP in America, who are in favour of restrictions of the immigration of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907, and against the decisions of Stuttgart). We think that one cannot be internationalist and be at the same time in favour of such restrictions. And we assert that socialists in America, especially English socialists, belonging to the ruling, and oppressing nation, who are not against any restrictions of immigration, against the possession of colonies …, that such socialists are in reality jingoes” (www. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/ nov/09.htm).

Dave asks if aboriginals have any rights. Not according to capitalism. Rights are a question of power, not morality. Aboriginals need the overthrow of capitalism for their interests to be properly addressed. It is a task for communism to create a society fit for all human beings.

I agree with John Smithee (Letters, March 13) that there is a very real problem, but there is no short-term or easy solution, especially because the unions are so weak at present. Capitalism has a long record of getting round immigration controls and, when they can’t, they take the jobs to where the cheap labour is. We need a pan-European fight for full employment, with equalisation of living standards up to the level of genuine subsistance.

Phil Kent
Haringey

Chauvinist

However he spins it, Dave Vincent is a social chauvinist with his call for immigration controls. He doubts that Marx would have supported open borders, but there isn’t a hint in his writings or actions to the contrary.

I cannot detect any support for immigration controls in the famous Communist manifesto, which declares: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” Nor in Yitzhak Laor’s formulation: “The nation that oppresses another nation forges its own chains.” Marx was opposed to anything dividing the working class. He was hardly likely to have appealed to the bourgeoisie for support for immigration controls! Eleanor Marx was a vociferous campaigner against the 1905 Aliens Act.

Dave Vincent points to sections of the bourgeoisie who oppose immigration controls because wages are lower for immigrants. He omits to mention that the capitalist class collectively, through the Tory Party, has always supported immigration controls. Perhaps he hasn’t noticed that his position is also that of the UK Independence Party and the far right. The right is motivated not just by immediate economic gain, but by the prospect of appealing to ‘native’ workers on a nationalist basis.

Vincent refers to “indigenous labour”. I wonder if that includes me, since my grandparents came to Britain in 1912. In an imperialist country, this is, by definition, a racist concept. The settler working class in most of the white dominions - Canada, Australia, South Africa, etc - opposed the immigration of black and Asian labour.

Vincent asks whether native Americans, Aborigines and Palestinians should accept “free movement of people”. This is a false analogy. Immigrants to Britain don’t, despite fascist propaganda, come with the aim of colonisation and dispossession of those already here. They are looking for work or fleeing the consequence of imperialist wars. The immigration of Jews to Palestine or whites to the United States was with the specific and declared aim of colonising - ie, stealing the land from those already living there and transferring or enslaving the indigenous population.

Vincent skirts round the Aliens Act by asking a totally fatuous question as to what the Bolsheviks would have done during a period of war. Clearly, when you are fighting 20 capitalist countries using spies and subversion where possible, one may not practise open borders. This is entirely different from civil society.

To remind him, the 1905 Aliens Act was brought in by the Tories under Arthur James Balfour, who was also a devout Christian and Zionist supporter. But the Jewish workers of the East End did what successive waves of immigrants have done. They organised and showed British labour the way ahead. That was why the TUC congress decision of 1882 to support the introduction of immigration controls was subsequently opposed by various trades councils, who were more representative of workers. A decade later, London Trades Council reversed its position. The Jews formed their own unions as part of this process. Some 50% of Phil Piratin’s voters, who successfully elected him as the Communist Party candidate for Mile End constituency, were Jewish. It was a radicalism born of the fight against fascism, immigration controls and other capitalist evils. There was no contradiction between the interests of the “indigenous” working class and the Jewish working class.

Vincent’s chauvinist and racist letter is premised on the idea that the world’s poor are just waiting to come to Britain. He talks of immigrant workers as ‘outsiders’. Clearly, the unity of the working class takes second place to cross-class alliances. He seeks a capitalism which is benevolent to ‘indigenous’ workers and allows the capitalists to play divide and rule.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Meditate

I am surprised by John Smithee’s reasoning (Letters, March 13), which is presumably socialist in motivation: a socialist society has a right to implement immigration controls, since managing labour resources is no different from the management of any other resource in a rational and planned economy.

We concede no such right to capitalism, because the control of immigration is a control on labour, which in turn is part of the exploitation and subjugation of the working class. The influx of cheap European labour has not depressed UK wages: UK capitalism has.

In any case, Smithee’s is a peculiarly nationalist way of looking at things, which has little to do with either Marxism or capitalism. Quite apart from Marx’s internationalism (“Workers of the world”), Lenin’s theoretical revolution makes it abundantly clear that in the epoch of imperialism there is no such thing as a national working class. This is not just an idea in Lenin’s head: it is also reality. Today, the working class and the reserve army of labour are international realities, just like capital flows.

Of course, anyone is free to continue to see things from the point of view of market-town parochialism. But there are consequences. You start by defending national borders against the incoming tide of cheap labour, motivated by the purest of socialist principles, and one day you find yourself patriotically supporting your country’s right to defend its front lines in some far-off country.

Something to meditate, as August 4 approaches.

Susil Gupta
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Unquestioningly

Commenting on comrade Mike Macnair’s article on Left Unity two weeks ago (‘Indecision and irrationality’, March 13), there is one glaring activity not considered at all. Why has the author put forward only a dichotomy between electoral activity on one side and strikes and protests on the other? Why has he given the impression that formulating and proposing long-term policies for society-wide action is tied at the hip to electoral activity?

Surely, a more reliable means of obtaining political support would entail membership recruitment campaigns based on unambiguously thorough political education? What about party members who ironically do not wish to cast a ballot for their own party, based on healthy scepticism towards the electoral system as a whole? What about ballot spoilage campaigns?

On a European note, the only reliable organisational measure to avoid being wedded to the “dominant nationalism” of the British left is for Left Unity to affiliate unquestioningly with the European United Left-Nordic Green Left.

Jacob Richter
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Misogynistic

Mark Adams brings up a straw man in his January 30 letter. He quotes Marx, who said of Georg Daumer: “… modern natural science ... has revolutionised the whole of nature and put an end to man’s childish attitude towards nature ... it would be desirable that Bavaria’s sluggish peasant economy, the ground on which grow priests and Daumers alike, should at last be ploughed up by modern cultivation and modern machines” (K Marx CW Vol 10, pp241-46).

Marx appears to characterise Daumer as some modern-day, sandal-wearing, long-haired hippy. Later in the review that Adams quotes, Daumer says: “Nature and woman are the really divine, as distinct from the human and man .... The sacrifice of the human to the natural, of the male to the female, is the genuine, the only true meekness and self-externalisation, the highest - nay, the only - virtue and piety.” Marx in his reply comes across as misogynistic and anti-environmentalist.

I doubt that by the time Marx encountered Lewis Morgan’s anthropology he would have remembered Daumer. But Daumer’s words should give us pause for thought about the contribution of anthropology and our relationship to the environment. The key insight of Engels’ The origin of the family, private property and the state, was that early human kinship was matrilineal. Our knowledge and understanding about early and extant hunter-gatherers has vastly improved. Now this is not to stay that we can go back to some “stupid rustic idyll”, as Marx says, but we can now understand what it means to look through hunter-gatherer eyes into this world.

Adams is not too subtle when he uses phrases such as “irrationalist hogwash” and “manipulation” in terms of our “future” mastery of the environment. It was as if we had not already learned to master nature, but perhaps we have forgotten in modernism’s rush to overturn tradition. For, if any group of people have got a command of nature, surely it is those hunter-gatherers which the 1850 Marx wants to bury. Extant hunter-gatherers have no or little accumulation of food. They live in a world of abundance and as such they have confidence that the environment will provide for them. We moderns don’t have such confidence. We live in a world of scarcity, where brokers gamble on food supplies and thousands die of hunger every day. Who has the better mastery of nature?

We should have a little more reverence and humility for the environment. The current trajectory of capitalism is unsustainable. There is a lot we know and a lot we don’t, but we do not necessarily need machines to command nature.

Simon Wells
London

Sick

While I can certainly appreciate the positive sentiments behind Mike Hunt’s poem, I did find it a bit lightweight (Letters, March 20). If we really want to deal with the curse of reformism in poetical terms, then we must toughen up! I am big fan of Aragon and I always loved his line, “Shoot the trained bears of social democracy”. Lately I’ve been trying to put myself in Aragon’s shoes to figure out how he would deal with today’s fake-left charlatans.

I’ve worked out a whole load of what I call ‘SPEW sonnets’, which is a play on the Weekly Worker’s own amusing acronym of the Socialist Party in England and Wales. I don’t think your readers are ready for all 300-plus lines, but here’s a quick snip:

Comrades, I’m down and feeling blue

My politics are all covered in SPEW

But, oh! Epiphany!

A Marxist sponge with a bit of bleach on it

Is a pretty good way to clean up vomit.

Lloyd Dowry
Hull