Letters

Bourgeois cops

Mike Macnair accuses Cory Ansell of “quotation grazing” for Trotsky’s position on the cops (Letters, August 7). It turns out that comrade Macnair’s representation of Trotsky’s position on municipalities is based on an unpublished manuscript, whereas comrade Ansell’s interpretation of the quotation he offers is unequivocally substantiated. Trotsky (as is well known!) asserts his class hatred for the police in What next? Vital question for the German proletariat (1932): “Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance [of cops recruited from among social democratic workers]. The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker.”

Quotations aside, comrade Macnair expresses an incredible set of illusions in the capitalist state. He (and the CPGB programme) call for preventing the cops from being used against labour, despite this being the police’s primary function. Mike also seems to think there are police activities unrelated to the class struggle, as though part of the class struggle doesn’t consist of policing ‘crime’.

The arguments comrade Macnair presents for his revisionism on the state are, with due respect, silly. One argument: Lenin got help from some policemen, who had been Bolshevised. This isn’t a split in the apparatus, but a desertion of some of its elements. To paraphrase Mike, communists need to be able to distinguish. He could as logically argue that, because Edward Snowden performed a worthy political service, communists should call for democratising the US National Security Agency. Another argument by Mike: all parts of the state apparatus are equal. But communists have always distinguished between soldiers and policemen. Rank-and-file soldiers are conscripts or short-term enlistees. Cops are lifers. They’re also well paid, unlike soldiers, cops being in the first line of the class struggle.

For reasons not unrelated to his positions on the police, comrade Macnair surmises that the Sawant election was a (small) victory. The most overriding municipal question in America is the militarisation of the police. Yet, as comrade Ansell pointed out, Sawant defended a police chief who was quite agreeable to the use of riot cops. We’re seeing in St Louis what riot cops mean for workers. Even left liberals these days oppose the riot police. We don’t need a ‘socialist’ in office who’s okay with their “judicious” use.

Stephen Diamond
email

Ticked off

I’d like to thank Mike Macnair for his August 14 letter regarding my elaboration on the Sawant victory in Seattle. It is an arduous task to decipher which is more grating: to distinguish even minute gains from utter defeat in a period of political reaction; or to weigh the varying shades of ineptitude that have become the hallmark of the pseudo-Marxist left. However, comrade Macnair’s reply contains some very useful information regarding this and other topics, so I’ll do my best to respond in kind.

Regarding Militant’s relatively sordid history in managing Liverpool, I believe their experience highlights the impossibility of attempting to maintain the machinery of the capitalist state. Serving as oppositionists in the legislature, such as the United States Congress, revolutionaries can operate as poles of resistance. The same cannot be done by becoming an administrator of the capitalist system. I believe it’s imperative to recall what Trotsky critiqued in Lessons of October as “the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state”, while I also note that the past practice of the Third and Fourth Internationals did not properly address the issue of executive offices of the capitalist state. Neither Trotsky nor Cannon elaborated fully on the issue of what happens if a communist were to actually win said positions - I believe history has enumerated the results.

Comrade Macnair’s posing of the CPGB position is fundamentally different from that of the Taaffeite Committee for a Workers’ International, which puts forth the inanity that the cops are ‘workers in blue’. However, they certainly don’t stand alone when it comes to advocating base reformist demands calling for community control of the police, accountability and to ‘jail killer cops’, the latter of which is a slogan also used by groups like the International Bolshevik Tendency. At the core, these calls represent perversions of the Marxist understanding of the state - not as some neutral actor in society, but instead as an organ of class rule.

Programmatically, this posits the necessity for the overthrow of the state through a workers’ revolution. What comrade Macnair claims is an example of my “ultra-leftist line” is merely a sharp countering of reformist tendencies that fail the acid test of understanding the armed fists of the bourgeoisie as class enemies, not some kind of group that can be won over if the workers swoon enough in their direction. Revolutionary Marxists must have a fundamental understanding of the necessity of winning over supporters of the destruction of the capitalists without crossing fundamental class lines and treading into the swamp.

Finally, I’ll concede that Trotsky’s statement in his History of the Russian Revolution was not meant to lay down a theoretical pronouncement, but it does highlight the importance of understanding the moods of the masses during a revolutionary situation. We’re reminded on a daily basis why the “bourgeois cop”, as Trotsky put it, have aroused such disdain. I do hope that revolutionary situations, new October revolutions, are what the CPGB actually hopes to see.

Such a scenario would alter the landscape of the aforementioned litmus test, but a revolutionary party cannot forget the crimes of the establishment, nor the misdeeds of those who are the real caricaturists: those among the fake Marxist left. As for my “language tics”, I consider them knee-jerk in regards to a fundamental opposition to the reformism of groups like the CWI.

Corey Ansel
email

Anti-Semitism

Ian Donovan describes my view that Jews can be anti-Semitic as “very strange” (Letters, August 14). To him perhaps it is, but that is the problem with trying to teach an old dog new tricks.

His understanding of what constitutes anti-Semitism is simply wrong. It’s a pity that Donovan didn’t read and try to understand my letter first, rather than instantly reaching for the keyboard, because I emphasised that anti-Semitism has changed over time. It is certainly not “hatred of people of Jewish origin purely for reason of their ethnic origin”. My ethnic origins are similar to that of many British people or Polish immigrants. Nazi anti-Semitism wasn’t based on Jewish ethnic origins, but the belief that Jews, wherever they lived, constituted a people apart, as the Zionists claimed. The Nazis racialised medieval anti-Semitism, which was based on the social and economic role of Jews. I suggest that Donovan read Abram Leon’s The Jewish question - a Marxist interpretation or Israel Shahak’s Jewish history, Jewish religion if he wants to learn more.

Again if Donovan had bothered to read what I wrote, he would understand that Zionism was, quite rightly, seen by Jews as a Jewish manifestation of anti-Semitism. In the words of Isaac Deutscher in The non-Jewish Jew and other essays, “… the most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers, those who spoke Yiddish ... they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from east Europe to Palestine ... To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry, ‘Jews, get out!’ The Zionists were agreeing to get out.”

To suggest that Jewish anti-Semitism is a mental aberration is to ignore the evidence of Zionism’s record. If, as he accepts, there are Jewish Nazis in Israel, how is Donovan so sure that they consider Hitler was wrong regarding the Jews? On the contrary, a much wider spectrum of Zionists believe that the Jews of eastern Europe brought their tragedy upon their own heads and Hitler was simply the latest manifestation of non-Jewish hostility to a strange people.

To describe Gilad Atzmon as “a long-time principled defender of the Palestinians” says all you need to know about the politics of Ian Donovan. When principled Palestinians and Arabs like Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad and Omar Barghouti denounce Atzmon for his racism in the statement ‘Granting no quarter: A call for the disavowal of the racism and anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon’, it speaks volumes that Ian Donovan continues to defend the anti-Semitic rogue even after the SWP abandoned him. Donovan should read the statement and in particular the paragraph: “Atzmon’s politics rest on one main overriding assertion that serves as a springboard for vicious attacks on anyone who disagrees with his obsession with ‘Jewishness’. He claims that all Jewish politics is ‘tribal’, and essentially, Zionist. Zionism, to Atzmon, is not a settler-colonial project, but a trans-historical ‘Jewish’ one, part and parcel of defining oneself as a Jew ... we believe Atzmon’s argument is itself Zionist, because it agrees with the ideology of Zionism and Israel that the only way to be a Jew is to be a Zionist.”

Donovan also excuses, if not denies, Atzmon’s holocaust-denial politics, as in this example: “If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich … or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war? If the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative ...”

I suggest that Donovan access my guide to the sayings of Gilad Atzmon (http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/guide-to-sayings-of-gilad-atzmon-anti.html) and stop spouting such rubbish.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Ignorant at best

In excusing certain “alienated Jewish people” for casting doubt on the facts of the holocaust, Ian Donovan writes that said event occurred “decades before most people today were actually born, and which they therefore cannot have any first-hand knowledge of”.

The mass exclusion of the majority of the Palestinian Arab population from what is now the territory of the state of Israel (the Naqba) occurred in the same decade as the holocaust. I suspect that Ian Donovan would be more than a little critical of anyone who used the fact of the antiquity of the former event to excuse ‘Naqba denialists’.

Holocaust denial is generally regarded as anti-Semitic. If those doing the denying are Jews, then it seems not unreasonable to claim that this is a case of Jews practising anti-Semitism. Of course, holocaust-denial on the part of Jews is a very rare phenomenon indeed, so in claiming that “just about the only group of people who have such doubts these days [about the holocaust] are such alienated Jews”, Ian Donovan apparently demonstrates a woeful lack of awareness of contemporary anti-Semitism. Giving credence to a microscopically small group of Jews who doubt the facts of the holocaust weakens the cause of the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs, and may act to give a propaganda boost to the anti-Semites who are currently emerging from the woodwork across Europe to engage in physical attacks on Jewish communities.

Ian Donovan is being disingenuous when he writes: “… as the state of Israel descends into the level of popular odium previously reserved for Nazi Germany…” He implies that the crimes of Israel are equal to the crimes of the Nazis in their enormity, without explicitly endorsing this view. He seems to be trying to both have his cake and eat it. If he does not believe that Israel is as bad as Nazi Germany, then he should not suggest that it is. If he does hold this view, then he should say so unambiguously. I consider those who regard Israel in this way to be ignorant at best, anti-Semitic at worst.

John Cable
email

Gazan prison

Paul Demarty suggests that “terrorising the Gaza population sufficiently for large numbers to go into exile … is, ultimately, the most plausible motive for the slaughter, the plainly deliberate targeting of civilian buildings and non-combatants - to scare or force people into leaving. Over 460,000 people have been displaced so far (a quarter of the population): how many will return?” (‘Only an Arab revolution can liberate Palestine’, August 7).

Elsewhere in the article, Paul Demarty states that “Gaza is a prison”, but it is clear from the above quote that he is unaware of why the Gaza Strip has been likened to a prison: the fact that its inhabitants are not free to leave. The 460,000 people who have been forced to move by the bombardment have been internally displaced. They are free to return to what remains of their homes.

The vast majority of the Palestinian Arabs living in Gaza are stateless and are not allowed to leave. If Paul Demarty is unaware of this basic fact, then perhaps he should not be writing articles pontificating on the Palestine question.

Paul Kegan
email

Strike a blow

For those who haven’t understood the Catholic mystery of three individual gods in the single god, Jack Conrad’s explanation of the three states in one state must be equally mystifying (‘More than a union of two crowns’, August 14).

While painstakingly trying to dismiss the “myth” of a Scottish nation, he tries in the meantime to sell us the reality of a new UK nation - that Scottish and Welsh nationality, if it ever existed, is subsumed into a single, new nationality of UK Britishness. He tells us that, although Scotland had been an independent state, and presumably knows that state fought the English state for more than 300 years, a Scottish nationality wasn’t developed. That the union of the crowns was some egalitarian decision to sink the three states into one central state and henceforth the peoples of the three ‘regions’ would become one nationality, ‘the British’.

Frankly, I think the story of the holy trinity is more acceptable. What Jack is doing is simply reciting the view of the victor. James VI united the crowns of Ireland, Scotland and England in 1603. The fact that one god-chosen bod ruled all four nations didn’t mean those four nations no longer existed any more than that William the Conqueror made us all French.

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, which overthrew the monarchy, did not preside over some democratic shift of power to the nations, the regions or the people. It remained firmly a southern-based state with little or no actual control by ‘the people’. It actually continued and consolidated a process of centralisation of power in the south, which bred a rising feeling of resentment in the north that they were being increasingly marginalised. You will never make sense of the Wars of the Roses without understanding this. The north, Yorkshire, sometimes Lancashire and, more consistently, Northumberland developed differently from the south, with different religious and cultural values than the southern-based ruling class. This is demonstrated time and again in rebellions across the centuries.

But, let us be clear, little if any of this makes any difference to the actual referendum vote. It is the actions of successive governments both before and since Thatcher which have forced the Scottish working class to cry ‘Enough’. Ignored, neglected, marginalised by an arrogant southern, English-based ruling class, interested only in the welfare and prosperity of the City of London and the south, Scots - who carry a strong cultural and historic identity, no matter what Jack thinks - have decided that enough is enough. I agree it’s enough for the rest of us too and, were we given a similar choice to see the bastards off and officially live without them, as they have done to the north, we would no doubt vote to exercise some autonomy and regional controls too.

Of course, the working class of the whole island enjoy a special and linked relationship and will continue to do so, whatever the outcome of the referendum, since it is merely an attempt to strike a blow at the UK state - and all power to their elbow. We all know this isn’t real independence. The contradiction of not having a referendum on the EU too hasn’t even been mentioned and, weak though the whole affair is and riddled with contradictions, a ‘yes’ vote is in my view a progressive one.

David Douglass
South Shields

Attachment

One more comment on Peter Manson’s letter on the question of Scotland’s democracy (August 20). He says: “Unbelievably, [Steve Freeman] held up the statements of the Scottish National Party as examples of the progressive, democratic, popular movement that is sweeping Scotland.” Not quite. What I argued was that there was a national democratic movement which is “sweeping” Scotland, and which is currently led by the SNP. The SNP is the right wing of the movement. It published a draft bill on Scotland’s democracy with a written constitution, popular sovereignty, self-determination and the possibility of a constituent assembly.

Peter spins on: “Comrade Freeman was convinced that such a constituent assembly would boast a strong republican component - although he was forced to concede that the SNP’s current sycophantic adherence to the monarchy under ‘Her Majesty, the Queen’ (to quote the declaration he read out) was a ‘contradiction’. You can say that again.” This is not entirely accurate. It is likely there would be an identifiable republican component. However, there has to be a republican party which, like in England, is currently absent. He says I was “forced” to concede this. Nonsense - I volunteered the information about the pro-monarchy clause before anybody else mentioned it.

Finally Peter sees “contradiction” in a moralistic way of merely exposing hypocrisy. But I meant it in a dialectical way, as pointing to an unresolved conflict at the heart of the situation that will play out if there is a ‘yes’ vote. If you want that contradiction to become the main issue then you have to vote ‘yes’ and not sit on the fence.

The CPGB supported a critical ‘yes’ vote in the ‘Save Nick Clegg’s bacon’ alternative vote referendum under the crown. You argued it was a democratic advance. If you can do that and yet can’t bring yourself to see that this referendum is much more significant, then there is something fundamentally wrong. You have attached yourself to the British union, the British constitution and hence the British state and its ruling class. This is all because of the phrase about the “historically constituted British working class” dating back to 1820.

Steve Freeman
LU Scottish Republic Yes tendency

More profits

A proper response to Esteban Maito’s article, ‘And yet it moves (down)’ (August 14), requires more time and space than available in a letter. I confine myself, therefore, to a summary of the main points. A fuller response can be found on my blog: http://boffyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/maito-and-rate-of-turnover-of-capital.html.

I welcome Maito’s attempt to calculate the rate of turnover and its effect on the annual rate of profit. I have been arguing that is necessary for some years. However, I believe his attempt suffers from errors in theory and flaws in methodology, so his calculation of the rate of turnover is wrong and, consequently, his conclusions in relation to the annual rate of profit are also wrong.

Maito also seems to have a misconception about the nature of the argument, when he refers to “debunkers”. I do not deny the validity of ‘the law’ as such. It explains why profit margins fall, even as the annual rate of profit and mass of profit rises. It explains why the annual rate of profit falls at various stages of the long-wave cycle. I believe we are entering such a stage currently. The argument is about whether the rate of profit was falling or rising from the 1980s through to 2008, and thereby provided an explanation for that crisis, and whether the law is a basis for Marx’s theory of crisis in general.

As I set out in my book, Marx and Engels’ theories of crisis: understanding the coming storm, crises of overproduction caused by high annual rates of profit, are more likely where there are falling profit margins - one cause of which is the effect of the law. In periods of long-wave downturn, when there are few new industries capable of providing a profitable home for capital, the law explains why it does not make sense to sizeably increase accumulation in existing industries, even when the annual rate of profit itself is rising.

Maito says: “Capitalist production consists of a valorisation process (M-M’) through the exploitation of the labour force (M-C...P...-C’-M’).”

This is wrong. Marx says this is only the circuit of “newly active capital”. It is “the form of capital that is newly invested, either as capital recently accumulated in the form of money, or as some old capital which is entirely transformed into money for the purpose of transfer from one branch of industry to another” (Capital Vol 2, chapter 2). The circuit of productive capital, by contrast, is: “P ... C’-M’-C ... P”. This “signifies the periodical renewal of the functioning of productive capital, hence its reproduction, … aiming at the self-expansion of value; not only production, but a periodical reproduction of surplus-value; the function of industrial capital in its productive form, and this function performed not once but periodically repeated, so that the renewal is determined by the starting point.”

This is important when analysing the rate of turnover and rate of profit because this circuit makes clear that it is not money-capital being analysed, but a process of the self-expansion of capital-value, of the productive capital, via its own reproduction, on the basis of repeated turnovers of the advanced circulating capital. This formula also describes that it is the advance of this capital value, to the production process, that is the start and end point of the circuit, not to be confused with the payments made, of wages, or for materials, etc.

I do not believe it possible to derive a rate of turnover by working backwards from official national income and output data, because that data is not suitable for analysis in Marxist terms. It is, in part, the same problem that Marx identifies in Capital Vol 2, in analysing the circulation of the total social capital, and his critique of Smith’s ‘Trinity formula’, whereby Marx outlines that this data resolves the value of output down into factor incomes (wages, profits, rents, interest and taxes), in other words, into V+S. For Marxist analysis this is inadequate, because the value of output is C+V+S. It misses out the large and growing quantity of constant capital that does not produce revenue, falling into the above categories, because it is an exchange of capital with capital, not revenue.

More importantly, I believe that it is only possible to derive a useful estimate of the rate of turnover by using the same method as Marx and Engels, which is to analyse the working period, production time and circulation time of commodities produced by the main industries, and then weight this according to the proportion of the total social capital these industries constitute. When this is done, it becomes clear that Maito’s guesstimates are wildly inaccurate. For example, according to him, the current rate of turnover in the UK is 12 and, using his methodology and extrapolating backwards, he arrives at a rate of turnover for 1855 of 1.3.

Purely on the basis of theory and common sense, or knowledge of some of the main industries of the time, it should have occurred to him that this figure must be wrong. Such a low rate of turnover would be incompatible with the kind of mass production that Marx says is required by industrial capitalism. This rate of turnover would have meant either that productivity was so low as to be not compatible with capitalist production or massive buildings just to accommodate the huge quantities of commodities streaming from factories, or would have required circulation times so long as to be compatible only with conditions existing prior to industrial capitalism!

But we have the actual information based on immediate facts provided by Marx and Engels themselves. Engels did not have to guess, because, as a functioning capitalist, he knew exactly how much circulating and fixed capital he advanced, and knew exactly what his production and circulation time was. He tells us in Capital Vol 3, chapter 4, that the rate of turnover in 1871 for “the cotton spinnery of 10,000 mule spindles” was 8.5 - or nearly seven times the figure that Maito arrives at for 1855. Engels’ statement of the actual rate is closer to the rate of turnover of capital that Maito wants us to believe exists in 2014.

Engels also sets out why the current rate must be much higher than what Maito calculates. Engels points out that, at relatively little cost, the rate of turnover in steel production had been increased massively and, in the production of dyes, processes that previously required years had been reduced to just weeks. Engels says that shipping times to India and the US were reduced by up to 90%, and “The period of turnover of the total world commerce has been reduced to the same extent, and the efficacy of the capital involved in it has been more than doubled or trebled. It goes without saying that this has not been without effect on the rate of profit.”

So here we have both production and circulation times being slashed and rate of turnover being trebled within just a few years. Yet Maito says, 160 years after 1855, the rate of turnover has only increased by nine times. A World Bank report showed the productivity in 1965 of dock labour (prior to containerisation) was 1.7 tons per hour. Post-containerisation, in 1970, that had risen to 30 tons per hour. The average ship size went from 8.4 GRT to 19.4 GRT, insurance costs fell from £0.24 to £0.04, and capital tied up in transit halved from £2 per ton to £1 per ton. Today, 90% of goods are transported by container. A similar massive increase in the rate of turnover, slashing the circulation period in the space of five years, as that described by Engels. Yet that transformation was small beer compared with the revolution in circulation times brought about by the internet and changes in global financial systems.

Maito’s methodology of imputing a rate of turnover from the relation of inventories to total output is flawed, not just because of the inadequacies of the official data in that regard, but also because it fails to account for the massive shift in production and consumption away from manufacturing towards services and new types of production, where such inventory levels are largely irrelevant. For example, one of the largest and fastest growing industries is computer games production. What relevance do inventories have for this industry, nearly all of whose value comes from the complex labour of the programmers employed within it? But that applies to many of the new large industries - for example, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and so on.

There is a logical inconsistency in Maito’s argument because he wants to argue that it is this rise in the proportion and value of fixed capital that is behind the falling rate of profit, whilst denying that this same process causes productivity to rise sufficiently to compensate for the rise in the organic composition of capital.

Arthur Bough
email

Food for thought

I attended some of the CPGB’s Communist University for the first time in August. I’ve been a financial supporter of the CPGB since intensively researching British left groups late last year and finding them the sanest. I thought attending CU would be a good way of further assessing the CPGB’s ‘cultural tone’.

I found the wide-ranging formal sessions very thought-provoking, with discussion extremely comradely - even a heated debate on a classic question of objective and subjective factors in history: namely, had Trotsky taken power, would he have ‘become Stalin’?

Even informal discussions in breaks were extremely illuminating. One erudite comrade related the ‘anecdote’ that some workers, given control of their factories during the Russian Revolution, sold the machinery and bought land; while simultaneously pointing it up as an illustration of the persistence of peasant consciousness in recently and very partially proletarianised populations. This insightful coupling of anecdote and analysis I shall never forget.

The atmosphere was friendly in the extreme and I felt welcomed despite being slightly grumpy and withdrawn with a bout of irritable bowel syndrome. It was very useful to put faces to some of the party members, supporters and antagonistic polemicists I have read in the Weekly Worker and see them in a more fluid and interactive context.

All in all, it was a model event for developing working class solidarity and consciousness at a high political level, for which I congratulate the CPGB comrades: I materialised this view by paying well over the going rate for the sessions I attended and the excellent food supplied that I partook of.

Tim Reid
London