Letters

Yes to no

Jack Conrad seems to accept that a ‘yes’ vote in the Scottish independence referendum will further weaken the working class in Britain by cementing the nationalist division of the working class (‘Sinking loyalism and lifeboat nationalism’, June 26).

So why then is he opposed to a socialist campaign for a ‘no’ vote? Surely, it is obligatory for socialists to fight within the working class for a ‘no’ vote if they believe that a ‘yes’ vote will weaken the working class? Voting is, after all, a part of the class struggle. It is not as if the referendum question is unclear. Comrade Conrad seems to think the referendum is a fraud and not an exercise in national self-determination. It would seem that comrade Conrad thinks the left should be campaigning for a referendum with a different question (which is?) or should possibly oppose all referendums on principle. It is hard to say.

As for me, I think the referendum is an example of national self-determination and I welcome the chance to put forward a socialist and working class response to the question posed. That response is clear - against an independent capitalist Scotland - and for the unity of the working class in the fight against austerity.

Of course, within the socialist ‘no’ camp there is room for those few souls who believe that the call for a federal republic is the key to winning the struggle against the forces of Scottish nationalism and their project of an independent capitalist Scotland. I must say I have my doubts on that score. As I said in my last letter, every socialist is obliged to support a republic, but why a federal republic? If the CPGB believes that the call for a federal republic will somehow assuage or conciliate the forces calling for Scottish independence, they misunderstand the nature of the Scottish independence campaign led by the Scottish National Party. The Scottish independence movement is not a movement against national oppression or even national or cultural disadvantage. It has no democratic content whatsoever. In that sense, it is similar to the Flemish independence movement or the movement of the Italian Northern league.

The dirty secret of the Scottish independence movement is that it is based on the belief that Scotland would be a richer country if it ditched those living south of the border. That’s it, I am afraid! Nothing to do with increasing democratic rights or fighting oppression. Simply that Scotland would be the “sixth richest country in the world” if we ditched the English and we kept the oil revenue, etc, to ourselves. That is the real message pumped out daily by the ‘yes’ campaign to Scottish workers - who are, in the main, still highly sceptical of the claims put forward by the nationalists.

The call for a federal republic will cut no ice with the mass of workers who are thinking of backing the ‘yes’ camp, because the reason they are doing so has little to do with a desire for an improved form of bourgeois democracy (most workers look on in disdain and disgust at the goings-on both in Holyrood and Westminster, and understand that the rich call the shots), but a loss of faith in the British labour movement to deliver a fighting and effective response to mass unemployment, austerity, falling real wages, food banks, benefits sanctions and sky-rocketing rents, etc.

The only effective response to the growth of Scottish nationalism (and the growth of the UK Independence Party) is a reinvigorated and rearmed labour movement, which is sufficiently strong and centralised on a European scale to win significant reforms and to transcend capitalism. I don’t see the demand for a British federal republic being part of the rearming of the labour movement, since it is an answer to a question nobody is likely to ask and would, if adopted, tend to reinforce the divisive nationalist sentiment that a resurgent workers’ movement would be eager to avoid.

It must also be said that the CPGB are a bit vague on what exactly a federal republic would concretely mean in terms of Britain. What powers would be held at the federal level and what powers would be left to the national parliaments? In contrast, however, democratic demands that tend to increase the strength, solidarity and class-consciousness of the working class, such as the old Chartist call for annual parliaments, and the demand for the instant recall of representatives, are likely to feature in the rearming of the labour movement. Socialists should raise such demands, since their implementation would tend to increase the social weight of the working class movement. And, of course, we must raise the call for the unity of the European workers’ movement in the struggle for a united European socialist republic.

In Scotland a first step towards rearming the labour movement and combating the rise of Scottish nationalism is to reassert the primacy of the unity of the British working class in fighting for social advance. Calling for a ‘no’ vote and campaigning against austerity is the most effective way of reasserting the primacy of working class solidarity throughout Britain in the struggle against the capitalist class and its state.

Sandy McBurney
Glasgow

Poison

It’s good that Steve Freeman has chosen not to brazenly defend his earlier, implicitly xenophobic smears against leftwing opponents of the SNP’s separatist referendum for Scotland. But Steve, in talking about the “struggle for democracy”, merely reveals how far he has retreated from communist politics in favour of nationalism when he equates Scottish separation with an extension of democracy. He therefore affirms that an independent Scottish capitalist-imperialist state must be more democratic, qualitatively so, than the current UK state.

Steve thinks it is “ultra-left” to advocate overthrowing the bourgeoisie on both sides of the border; instead we should be advocating separation. But separation is not a democratic demand in itself; only the right to separate is democratic. It can be exercised positively or negatively. What is democratic is the freedom to choose. It is correct for communists to advocate embodying that in a federal republic in the island of Great Britain, based on voluntary unity and the right to separate.

To say that only separation is democratic is actually a pro-capitalist argument. It posits a Scottish capitalist state as in some way democratic in itself. In fact, Scottish capitalism is just as anti-democratic as UK-wide capitalism. It is also anti-democratic and contrary to the democratic spirit of the demand for the right to self-determination to assert that only votes in one direction are democratic - this is an argument that implicitly grants the Scottish nationalist bourgeoisie the right to coerce ‘its’ working class to support the ‘nation’.

If there was a real question of oppression involved, it may well be in the interest of the working class to make a temporary bloc with separatists to consummate separation and dissipate the hostility between nations that an oppressive unity generates. Even without such oppression, if the relations between the English and Scottish working class had become overwhelmingly toxic to the point that common class struggle was out of the question, then it also might be a correct tactic for communists to advocate separation in such circumstances, for analogous reasons. But there is no question of oppression involved - Scotland is as imperialist as the rest of the UK - and nor are the relations between the working class anywhere near so poisoned as yet.

The nationalists are struggling to get the support they need and to do so they have to try to actively poison relations between the working class of Scotland and the rest of the UK. Their ‘left’ supporters have to help them in this task. Hence the dog-whistling from comrade Freeman ‑against the English in Scotland and other minorities. It is a warning that capitulation to nationalism, even of one separatist component of an imperialist country like Britain, has a reactionary and social-chauvinist logic.

Ian Donovan
email

Spoilsport

Despite an earlier letter from myself and despite Jack Conrad naming Uncle Tom Cobley and all in the latest round-up of where political parties stand on the issue of the referendum, the Socialist Party of Great Britain is again omitted.

Once more, to remind your readers, our position is summed up as neither British capitalism nor Scottish capitalism. We are not advising the ‘no’ option for the reason that it will indeed be seen as an endorsement of the current constitutional status quo (as rightly pointed out in the article). Instead, we advocate a spoiled voting paper, but do not support a boycott of the referendum, which may be wrongly viewed as political apathy.

Alan Johnstone
SPGB

Past tense

Phil Kent believes my views on Marx are bizarre and puts this down to my Stalinist past, or continental anti-clericalism (Letters, June 19). My ‘Stalinist’ past consists of opposing the myth that socialism in one country came from Stalin rather than Lenin. This myth is the foundation of post-Lenin Trotskyism and has to be maintained at all cost by the Trotskyists. My past also consists of opposing the rather simplistic view that Stalin was the leader of a counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy, which the Trotskyists labelled Stalinist.

My view is that Soviet bureaucracy, like all bureaucracies, contained contradictory forces and groups. Stalin was the leader of one of these groups and frequently purged those who were perceived as a threat to social ownership and his own leadership. The purge of fifth-columnists, it can be argued, also helped the Soviet Union survive the later Nazi onslaught in the longer term. Many innocent people needlessly suffered as well. As for continental anti-clericalism, to which Kent refers, I have never studied it.

While I do have criticisms of Marx, my letter of June 5 made three references to him. The first relates to his statement that he was no Marxist, the second was a criticism of those who limit their thinking to the parameters defined by Marx and the third was about Marx’s mistaken evaluation of religion. Nowhere did I argue that Marx wanted the persecution of religious people. My position is that in the struggle for socialism the party should remain neutral in the atheism/theism debate, not that individuals remain neutral. By not remaining neutral on a political level, Marx placed a powerful weapon in the hands of the counterrevolution to fight the left with. This is one way Marxism undermines the struggle for socialism.

Is anyone surprised that fascism came to power in countries with a strong religious element, which could easily be manipulated against the left? Those Marxists who disagree with me should logically argue that adherence to atheism should become a precondition for those who want to participate in the struggle for socialism.

Tony Clark
email

Mister, mister

I write this letter to address both Mr Roberts’ (June 12) and Mr Clark’s (June 26) letters, which cover the attitude of socialists towards religion and which both contain caricatures of socialism, Marxism and the religious.

Mr Roberts states that “people who believe in god should be forewarned that all religious buildings after the revolution will be bulldozed”. It seems that Mr Roberts, as a self-described “revolutionary socialist”, stands for a war on religion. Yet he fails to tell us how bulldozing religious buildings (some of which are beautiful works of architecture and culture) relates to us achieving socialism - the abolition of classes. Mr Roberts fails to see that religion is part of the superstructure, and as such is a reflection of the economic base. Religion is a symptom of class society, a reaction to the precarious situation the lower classes find themselves in, an opioid to soothe the pain; to attack religion directly is the best way to revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really dying out.

Yes, the proletarian dictatorship must abolish the church’s control over society and fight for secularism, but it must also view religion as a private matter in relation to the state. Modern-day religion is a tool of bourgeois class rule - it is used to mask the causes of the working class’s woes and distract them from the class struggle. However, we cannot be as idealist as to criminalise religion, destroy its structures and hope it goes away. To try and eliminate religion without first eliminating the cause of religion is the pinnacle of bourgeois atheism and it is a major thing that separates Marxism from bourgeois materialism. Marxism is materialist - it is necessarily atheist - but, unlike vulgar materialism, Marxism takes into account class struggle. To repeat myself, the root of religion is class society: before the bourgeoisie, the church served the aristocracy and it will continue to exist as long as classes exist - the weed will grow back if you don’t destroy the roots. Religion will persist under the dictatorship of the proletariat, no matter how many r-r-revolutionaries like Mr Roberts wish to declare war on it. The ultra-atheist socialists have shown themselves to be as idealist as the religions they denounce.

Now on to Mr Clark, who writes: “When Marxists gain control of the left and get into power, they start their war against religious people.” Well, Mr Clark, the above two paragraphs entirely demolish that claim. The state-atheism of the eastern bloc states wasn’t at all socialist - it was an extreme policy that bourgeois atheists have taken before (the Jacobins, for example), with the intention of instilling a sense of allegiance to the nation rather than a deity. Of course, this was all carried out under the red flag and the name of Marx to legitimise the rule of the party. In case Mr Clark is still clinging to the misconception that Marxists wish to “start their war against religious people”, may I suggest that he actually reads some Marxist texts, like Engels’ Anti-Dühring: “Herr Dühring, however, cannot wait until religion dies this, its natural, death. He proceeds in more deep-rooted fashion. He out-Bismarcks Bismarck; he decrees sharper May laws not merely against Catholicism, but against all religion whatsoever; he incites his gendarmes of the future against religion, and thereby helps it to martyrdom and a prolonged lease of life.”

Mr Clark then goes on to criticise the ‘Marxist’ attitude towards religion (which he is evidently unaware of, as shown by the fact that he has made a complete fool of himself): “This is one example of how Marxism, a fundamentally flawed doctrine, has undermined the struggle for socialism.” I’m interested to see what Mr Clark sees as the alternative way of achieving the abolition of classes (ie, socialism) other than the conquest of power by the proletariat, the abolition of the law of value and the transformation of every member of society into a producer. Mr Clark ignores that Marxism is the doctrine of proletarian self-emancipation, when he writes: “I want a socialist revolution, not a Marxist one.” By rejecting Marxism, Mr Clark rejects the class rule of the proletariat; therefore, he discards socialism by refusing the means of achieving the end result. The socialist revolution will either be Marxist or it will fail in its aim.

Neither Mr Clark’s nor Mr Roberts’ letters have contributed anything worthwhile to the debate on the Marxist attitude to religion, other than showing the readers of the Weekly Worker that Mr Roberts is able to spout r-r-revolutionary rhetoric, which boils down to little more than bourgeois atheism, and that Mr Clark is merely a deluded liberal, who completely lacks an understanding of Marxism, yet is content to attack his own caricature of it. Well done, gentlemen!

Reece Lawton
email

Pope animal

Compelling evidence emerged last week of the influence the Weekly Worker exerts in high places. Within hours of my letter being published, in which I mildly chided Pope Francis for unwisely sharing his innermost thoughts with comrade Roberts, His Holiness saw fit to fire off a sour riposte in an interview he granted to the Italian daily Il Messagero. He does not name me, of course, but there can be no mistaking that his intention is to discredit me with a libel:

The communists have robbed Christians of the banner of the poor, he complains: “the fight against poverty is at the centre of the Gospels ... the banner of the poor is Christian ... Communists argue that everything is communist - yes, why not - 20 centuries after the event. So when they speak we should say to them, ‘You are Christians’.”

Quite a broadside! Perhaps the Jesuits put him up to it as a ploy to sow confusion and disaffection in our ranks. I don’t know if the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB takes these eccentric allegations seriously, but I have obviously touched a raw nerve. I suppose, in one sense, communists everywhere should rejoice in the knowledge that the Vatican now considers us some sort of kindred spirit, albeit on the basis of larceny, rather than the devil incarnate.

It would be ultra-left and sectarian not to concede that Pope Francis is a very different animal from the reactionary brutes that preceded him. He appears to have genuine concern for the ordinary man and woman. Catholics everywhere warm to him - something that has the Vatican bureaucracy very worried. Every genuine communist will want to wish him well. I can readily understand that at a time when the world’s popular classes are taking to the streets and lurching to the left, the Catholic church thinks it wise to rebrand itself as the people’s champion. But is picking a fight with communists the best way to go about it?

It would be most regrettable if a churlish dispute over the ownership of a banner spoilt what could be a fruitful relationship. Perhaps the best way to approach the pope’s ill-advised outburst would be for the PCC to draft a carefully worded reply, framed in suitably cordial tones, but firmly pointing out that if communists march with the banner of the poor it is only because nearly 200 years ago we found it abandoned on the battlefield of the class struggle, with no apparent owner in sight. And no-one has reclaimed it since. Applying the doctrine of ‘continuous unchallenged possession’ - a basic principle of international law that allows states to claim sovereignty over land long abandoned by others - we can claim that it now rightfully belongs to us. I think that is fair.

I very much fear that if communists do not set firm limits and boundaries now, we will soon have to put up with a tide of silly, ill-informed drivel about Christ being an anti-capitalist revolutionary, the expulsion of the moneylenders from the temple, the militant church, etc. I don’t think I could bear it a second time.

Who knows where this sort of thing could lead if left unchallenged? In these desperate times, when leaderships everywhere grab at anything to shore up their tottering institutions, the Vatican might well fancy claiming ownership of historical materialism on the authority of the Bible narrative.

Susil Gupta
email

Fantasy

It’s a pity that, instead of providing any facts, or dealing with the arguments presented in my article on the falling rate of profit (‘False premises, false conclusions’, June 19), Stephen Diamond instead provides us with an excursion into science-fiction fantasy (Letters, June 26).

He says: “Arthur Bough’s exegesis is reformist in implication ...” To the extent that this is any kind of argument at all, it is crass. Even if the conclusion were valid - which it isn’t - how would that change the validity of the thesis? An approach that decides which laws are valid solely upon the basis of whether the conclusions that flow from them are convenient or not, is that of the charlatan, not of any kind of scientist, and certainly not of a Marxist.

But this approach is symptomatic of the catastrophists, who see the ‘law’ as some kind of philosopher’s stone that will open the door for them to the socialist revolution, which their efforts so far have so obviously failed to do. It is basically the same approach of threat, of the religious zealot, who, having been so dismally unsuccessful in convincing anyone to follow them, threatens that they will regret it, at the end of days. Those revolutionary zealots have been promising that catastrophe for more than 2,000 years and yet here we all still are. In the meantime, the zealots are shown to have been wasting their life and their breath, whilst the ‘reformists’ have been getting on with the job of actually transforming their material conditions in the real world rather than waiting for the coming of the next, and have thereby attempted to make the real world closer to a paradise than any they are likely to get from waiting for a catastrophe leading to nirvana.

And it’s for that reason that it’s Stephen’s approach which is actually reformist. What it actually says to workers is: ‘Don’t attempt to change your immediate material conditions, because all you need to do is wait for the law of falling profits to bring about the automatic collapse of capitalism and, on that glorious day, the future will fall into our hands.’ All we need do in the meantime, it says, is to ‘build the party’ and the law of falling profits will help us do that by creating repeated opportunities for industrial conflict. In other words, it reduces the question down to the struggle here and now over economic conditions to economistic, bourgeois reformist, trade union struggle.

It’s the same kind of bourgeois reformism that Marx warned against when he wrote: “They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society.”

That is why Marx argued for workers to engage in the transformation of their existing material conditions by creating cooperatives, and using the credit system to extend that cooperative federation across the whole economy.

Stephen’s argument - that the continued development of capitalism, which Marx sets out above, provides these material conditions for the workers to bring about “an economical reconstruction of society” and could simply flow into socialism - is itself both crass and reformist, because it confuses economic processes with political and historical processes. Capitalism grew steadily for 400 years within feudalism and gradually became more economically dominant, but that did not automatically lead to the development of bourgeois societies. The feudal aristocracy did all they could to prevent the economic power of capital being turned into political power and those attempts could only be overcome by the undertaking of major political revolutions and civil wars by the bourgeoisie in the 19th century. Why does Stephen believe that the bourgeoisie will simply cede political power to the working class gracefully without a serious fight? Once again, Stephen’s conception of revolutionary struggle is totally apolitical and economistic - ie, reformist.

But what of the facts? Stephen provides us with a science-fiction fantasy scenario of a world in which there are no workers, because all production has been roboticised. Stephen doesn’t seem to realise it, but in such a world capitalism too ceases to exist, because if there are no workers there is also no capital, given that capital is a social relation based on capital and wage-labour. In which case there is also no law of falling profits. The obvious first thing to say is, when we get to this fantasy world, I will address the issues that arise from it. In the meantime, I prefer to deal with the real world.

The question then is, is this real world approaching or moving away from the scenario that Stephen depicts - of increasing automation and the falling rate of profit causing absolutely fewer workers to be employed? The answer, as predicted by Marx, is absolutely not! The number of workers employed is falling relatively, as productivity increases, but the number of workers employed absolutely is increasing and, as a result, the mass of surplus value being produced, and mass of capital formed from it, is also increasing. Far from the number of workers declining to zero, as Stephen predicts on the basis of the law of falling profits, in the last 30 years the number of workers in the world has doubled! Even in Britain’s sclerotic and relatively declining economy, hammered by the idiotic austerian policies of the Tories, over the last four years the actual level of employment is rising, not falling.

Stephen also misrepresents the argument I put forward. He says that I deny that the law applies to the annual rate of profit. No, I don’t. I said that I believe that the annual rate of profit may now be falling, much as it did in the 1960s, and has done at this stage of the long-wave cycle in the past. Like Marx, I believe that the annual rate of profit can move up or down and sideways, at different times. As Marx says, there are long periods when capital develops extensively without any change in the organic composition of capital, and other long periods when it develops intensively, with the organic composition rising due to rapid technological change. That is also why, as I and Marx say, there are no permanent crises, no permanent periods of stagnation, but that does not at all mean that there are no temporary crises, or temporary but prolonged periods of stagnation.

How this argument, put forward by Marx himself, is supposed to be inconsistent with the labour theory of value Stephen doesn’t tell us, having made that rash claim. His other rash claim is that I “impressionistically” deny that the organic composition of capital rises. But a look at what I actually wrote demonstrates that it is based on the rise in the organic composition of capital, which is a consequence of rising social productivity, which also causes the rate of turnover of capital and the annual rate of profit to rise!

Stephen’s other conclusion - that in a world where there is no labour and everything is roboticised there can ultimately be no production - is also clearly false. It is basically the old Lassallean error, which confuses value with use-value, and forgets that nature is as much the source of use-value as labour. It is, of course, the case that the owners of means of production - who, as set out above, would not then be capitalists in such a roboticised world - would be able to continue to increase production of whatever use-values they chose, and which this artificial intelligence could develop for them. The issue of competition, and profit, in such a world, where all use-values could essentially be produced without value, would disappear, because without value there is also no exchange-value, and the owners of these means of production, like any other direct producer, could simply produce to meet their own requirements or exchange with the other owners of means of production to meet their requirements. The question is, would the millions of workers simply sit by and starve while that happened?

Stephen’s comment - that “The moral of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline is that commodity production becomes grossly inefficient as the economy develops and, as societal necessities, the realisation of existing values comes to dominate over the extraction of surplus value” - sums up what is wrong with his approach. It replaces scientific investigation, with a moral imperative. As a result, blinded by the moral conclusion he seeks, he ignores the facts, and bowdlerises the theory. The law of falling profits does not say that the production of commodities becomes grossly inefficient: it says the exact opposite - that it is driven to increasingly efficient levels, as a result of technological change, and growing productivity!

And Marx and the facts are against him in relation to the mass of profit too, because the facts show it is continuing to grow.

Arthur Bough
email

Ex-devotee

Comrade Clark (Letters, July 3) lacks neither combativity nor persistence - a bit like comrade Marx. But I was surprised he didn’t realise that when Marx declared that he was no Marxist he was simply being sarcastic. He was frustrated by people misunderstanding his arguments and then still claiming to be Marxists. For example, what are the parameters of Marx’s thinking and where does he demand that Marxists shouldn’t go beyond them?

Tony Clark’s previous letter did state that Marx had a one-sided hostility towards religion, and now he says that “the party should remain neutral in the atheism/theism debate”. That is, be agnostic, not critical - or, as comrade Clark puts it, “hostile”. In this way we could have won the religious masses away from fascism. This perfectly captures the bureaucratic mindset. What slicker way of winning the hearts of the ignorant and gullible masses than to refuse to state the truth?

Communism requires, on the other hand, an educated and politically aware working class that can take power and rule in its own right. While I accept that you can have a so-called bureaucratic socialism delivered from above by a self-generating elite, it is the antithesis of Marxism and of working class rule - the first step towards a stateless, classless society.

The comrade’s first two paragraphs do establish that he was once a devotee of Stalinism. He was opposed to “the rather simplistic view that Stalin was the leader of a counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy”. It is good to see that he is trying to break away from that, but his lack of any real understanding of Marx is leading him to some bizarre conclusions. Not least the one contained in the final paragraph of his letter - that those who disagree with him “should logically argue that adherence to atheism should become a precondition for those who want to participate in the struggle for socialism”.

Marxism depends on united action in this world, not personal beliefs about our relationship to the supernatural. Communist atheists can easily live with the illusions of dedicated comrades whose actions speak louder than words. We are not anti-clericalists.

Phil Kent
London