Letters

Spring weakness

The second Manchester Spring Conference took place on Saturday May 17. Though organised on a shoestring by a handful of local lefties without the backing of any organisation, there was a respectable turnout of around 80 comrades, most of whom were not members of left groups.

The first session, on the legacy of the ‘Arab spring’, was opened by CPGB member and chair of Hands Off the People of Iran Yassamine Mather. Comrade Mather gave a necessarily brief overview of the situation in the region and argued that further crises could be expected, as the change in regimes had not resolved any national or class contradictions. A comrade from Egypt gave a rather pessimistic prognosis for the country’s future, citing the decades of repression of the workers’ movement, which had suffered far more under the Mubarak regime than the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. And Esther Meininghaus, who has a forthcoming book on women in totalitarian states, presented a useful overview of the various factions involved in the Syrian conflict, but hinted that western intervention - of a ‘humanitarian’ nature, of course - might be supportable. In the discussion, comrade Mather gave this short shrift, pointing out the disastrous results of US-led interventions wherever they have been pursued. Indeed, in Iraq the result had been the replacement of a nominally secular regime under Saddam with a sectarian, Shia Islamist one. The working class was the only agency which could deliver real change, she argued.

The second session, on ‘The 60s counterculture and the culture of the left’, was more of a mixed bag. Ben Watson from the Association of Musical Marxists harked back to Jimi Hendrix and a time when politics and culture seemed inseparable. Cultural critic Mark Fisher noted the importance of the left’s political defeats since the 70s, and the abandonment of a sustaining vision of socialism in favour of simply resisting the worst symptoms of capitalism. Ashley Frawley compared the contemporary left to the utopian socialists critiqued by Marx, arguing that romanticism was enjoying a resurgence. The dynamic of constant change inherent to capitalism led to its opposite: a desire for stasis, which took concrete form in the reactionary ideas of primitivism and anti-consumerism, and the popularity of transcendental meditation and the like. In the discussion comrade Fisher noted how capital had colonised the terrain of ‘self-improvement’. As neoliberal subjects, we are supposed to be constantly recreating and improving ourselves, but this all took place in the context of an alienated and atomised society, piling further psychological pressure onto individuals.

The following session, titled ‘The death of the party’, felt somewhat surreal, as none of the speakers addressed the question of partyism, or the death thereof. Don Milligan, formerly of the International Socialists (forerunner of today’s Socialist Workers Party), the Revolutionary Communist Party and now a member of Left Unity, was first up. The comrade told us that the composition of the working class had changed - in case you hadn’t noticed, we weren’t all working in huge steel factories and mines any more - and the reason for the left’s decline was, pure and simple, that the left wasn’t in tune with a more heterogeneous working class. ‘New ideas’ were needed - but like 99% of those who make such a call, Don expected someone else to come up with them. The comrade’s repeated insistence that ‘real people don’t care about history’ and that there is nothing for us to learn from past struggles, was somewhat undermined by his admission that he worked as a, er, historian. And in fact, anecdotal reports suggest that Don is a dynamic and engaging teacher of history - a prime example of the left’s multiple personality disorder when it comes to the politics they espouse publicly.

Things didn’t improve with the opening of Felicity Dowling, one of Left Unity’s four principal speakers. Undeterred by the title of the session, the comrade focussed on her current specialist subject - namely the woman question - in an intervention which consisted almost entirely of anecdotes from her days in the Militant Tendency. While the ability of women to self-organise in struggle was noted in passing, as a whole the comrade’s intervention suffered from the same weakness as her comments about the statement by some LU officers on the Gerry Adams arrest (see ‘Keeping disagreements hidden’ Weekly Worker May 15) - she painted women as eternal victims who need to be defended from all the nasty things capitalism imposes on them.

But things really hit rock bottom with Bill Mckinstry’s speech, which has to count as the most philistine rubbish I have heard at a left event for some time. We merely had to “keep doing what we’re doing”, and there was no point trying to win over people from racist and sexist views; we simply had to get them out on enough strikes and “drag people into socialism”. Perhaps surprisingly, this economistic dross did not come in for any criticism from Dowling, who has taken a lead in witch-hunting one Manchester LU member for ostensibly ‘sexist’ views.

The final session, on ‘The commodification of radical aesthetics’, was poor - though in fairness to the three speakers, they could have done with a more focused topic. Overall, the event showed both the weakness of the left, but at the same time the potential it still has. The impressive, and largely young, turnout put paid to Don Milligan’s moan that “real people aren’t interested in our ideas”. They are - the onus is on the left to actually put them forward.

Laurie Smith
Manchester

Fairy tale

You ran a letter from Corey Ansel (April 24), under the title ‘Trot pox’, in which the writer, a young leftist in the USA, relates - à propos of an article by the Spartacist League about Lars T Lih and Ben Lewis - that he was “brought to thinking” about the International Bolshevik Tendency, and recounts “a story” about the IBT’s New Zealand section and its most prominent member, Bill Logan. Readers are not given the source of the story, nor are we told when and where the events depicted are supposed to have occurred, apart from their taking place “in a pub”. (While leftist meetings in Britain, like bad jokes, are often set in pubs, the practice is rare in New Zealand.)

Corey’s fairy tale about a robotic, hand-raising membership and, by implication, a cultish internal life of the Permanent Revolution Group is meant to tarnish the Leninism of the IBT, a political competitor of the CPGB. As I was a member of the PRG in the period in which the story supposedly would have taken place, I can categorically state that it is complete bunkum. The PRG, just like the IBT it helped create in 1990, is very far indeed from being anything like the kind of obedience cult that is projected in this sub-political yarn.

I find it disappointing, if unfortunately not surprising, that the CPGB have chosen to print Corey’s absurd lie. For all our political disagreements, you must know from your own experience of political activity alongside myself and other IBT comrades in a variety of political arenas over the two decades that the IBT has had a presence in London that, whatever you imagine our political faults to be, this kind of personal political timidity is not one of them.

Alan Gibson
Cork, Ireland

Unskilled hands

Classical Marxism is the study of essential and inevitable historical processes. To that extent the local and particular characteristics of any class struggle are secondary to a generalised analytical reading of all class struggle. The rhetorical weakness of such an approach is that in unskilled hands the generalised analysis looks like heartlessness or, worse, a blinkered acceptance of the idea that something is inevitable simply because it has already happened.

Paul Demarty is guilty of both these weaknesses in his piece about Left Unity and Gerry Adams (‘Keeping disagreements hidden’, May 15). Jean McConville’s abduction and murder by the IRA in 1972 is, for comrade Demarty, an aspect of “the inevitable bloodshed of a guerrilla war”. We might wearily agree that bloodshed is inevitable in war (and many thanks, comrade, for the elucidation), but that does not make Jean McConville’s death inevitable.

Comrade Demarty goes on to take Felicity Dowling of Left Unity to task for suggesting that women and children are often significant victims of war. Never mind that Dowling’s point is that statistics on violence against women and children in war are often hard to come by. Merely highlighting McConville’s case strikes comrade Demarty as special pleading on behalf of some casualties over others.

Is comrade Demarty really so ideologically pure that he is numb to individual tragedy? Is he so committed to a singular idea of guerrilla struggle that any and all manifestations thereof, being more or less equally likely, are therefore equally legitimate? Is he so poorly read in recent Irish history that he cannot see that the McConville case strikes at the heart of the IRA’s claim to be warden of its community? To knowingly condemn 10 orphaned children to the care of a state it considered criminally illegitimate was surely inconsistent with the IRA’s mission to ‘look after its own’.

Or is he merely using the death of Jean McConville as a jerry-rigged vehicle for his more usual preoccupations: reflexive anti-feminism, chin-pulling left sectarianism and the right to use italics where no emphasis is needed?

James Denton
email

Persuade me

I read with interest comrade Laurie McCauley’s take on recent events in Manchester Left Unity (‘What “safe spaces” lead to’, May 15). I would just like to correct one factual inaccuracy in the comrade’s report.

He states that I “refused to sign” the petition against Steve Hedley. What I actually stated was that it was a case that I was unfamiliar with and therefore I did not consider myself to be in a position to objectively determine innocence or guilt in the matter.

I did add that when time allowed I would attempt to look further into the case and form an opinion one way or the other. As I have been very busy with my own local election campaign, that remains my current position on this issue and so I guess I am still ‘open to persuasion’ on this matter.

Dawud Islam
Manchester LU

Easy step

The demise of Detroit, the US labour and black stronghold, shows what late-capitalist decay portends in the core advanced economies: deproletarianisation and lumpenisation. A communist minimum programme to protect and revive the working class must include controls to prevent the flight of capital, whose complete freedom of movement is a potentially fatal reactionary weapon in the class struggle. The flight of capital from core to periphery harms the working class, since the horizon of the international class is limited by poor communist prospects in the core.

As capitalism’s advance threatens the class existence of the proletariat, replaced by sundry ‘service sector’ employees and permanent welfare recipients, the need to demand capital controls as a measure of basic class defence seems clear, yet absent from socialist and communist programmes. Communists haven’t called for capital controls because they haven’t fully grasped the distinction between advancing and decaying capitalism; better understanding is essential today when advanced decay threatens the proletariat’s metropolitan social weight.

When capitalism went from ascent to decay, its extension ceased to be (on balance) progressive, the Marxist (rebuttable) presumption favouring the free market ceased to apply and the working class’s role ceased to be facilitating capitalist development. Capitalist relations of production became reactionary, extending the class struggle to every nook and corner of the economy. The test of any economic reform measure is: does it increase the power of workers over capital or increase the control of capital over the workers? To deny the necessity of capital controls as part of a minimum programme designed to resuscitate and remobilise the working class is to proclaim that the working class should prefer that capital operate according to the law of ‘the market’ rather than bending it, even if slightly, to labour’s will.

It is hard indeed to see how any socialist can oppose capital controls except by giving late capitalism a progressive coloration. But, once capital controls are accepted, it becomes impossible to oppose immigration controls, which serve the same purpose of limiting capital’s prerogatives: neither alone will protect workers from advanced decay. Contending that migration is a basic right really means that the left thinks the market better represents workers’ interests than state policies influenced by organised workers.

Clarity on capital controls and immigration control go together, but capital controls is the easier first step for communists.

Stephen Diamond
email

Vigilantes

I take issue with comrade Mike Macnair’s one-sided statement: “The logic of these phenomena is that the small proprietor classes - peasants and artisans, and their equivalents under capitalism - require a ‘man on horseback’ (either a ruling class or an absolutist state) to rule over them ... the natural political expression of the petty proprietor class, and the idea that this class is really ‘democratic’ in character is an illusion” (‘Exploitation and illusions about ‘anti-imperialism’”, May 15).

First, in countries where the working class is only a demographic minority relative to other classes, the small proprietors are the democratic class because they’re the demographic majority. It is they who have the democratic mandate there, in the third world, even if the rural elements tend to support strong executive power.

Second, the suggestion that strong executive power and democratic participation are incompatible is a false one. Gramsci saw past the classical socialist illusions on the subject in earlier history, writing instead of “progressive Caesarism” and its reactionary counterpart, then stressing lots of caution about episodes of such “progressive Caesarism”.

Further back, the real reason the Julius Caesar of people’s history was assassinated was not because of establishing a dictatura (which he did), but because of his plans to transfer power from the plutocratic senate to the more common man’s tribunal assembly. More recently, the strong-in-image-only executive power of the late Hugo Chávez pushed for the establishment of political communes in Venezuela, as an encouragement of more democratic participation, not just the stereotypical desire to undermine established municipalities and governorships.

Third, organising for class-based political independence is possible if the proletarian demographic minorities become the most politically visible vigilantes in anti-bourgeois crusades by the national/socioeconomically ‘patriotic’ petty bourgeoisie.

Jacob Richter
email

Too worthy

The ITV drama series Broadchurch is back in the news due to its success in the Baftas, so I decided to rewatch it right through.

Great acting, cinematography and music enhance a gripping exploration of the secrets, fears and prejudices that threaten to tear a close-knit seaside community apart after a local boy’s body is found on the beach. Moral issues are raised, from infidelity and drug usage to a ‘paedophile’ panic and the role of the media, with the overall message of tolerance, understanding and community spirit against prejudice and fear. What’s not to like and admire in this ultimately heart-warming story?

Am I just a cynical old misery guts, or is it all too glib, too pat, too easy? Oh, it’s only fiction and it is well acted, with a feel-good ending. But there was a creeping ‘religiosity’ and the ultimate ‘answer’ was an idealised ‘community unity’, where the church acted as a unifying force.

Even without that, I’d have found it all a bit too worthy. It’s obviously just me!

Alan Theasby
Middlesbrough