Letters

Fairy tales

In reply to Hannu Reime’s letter (February 12) about my article, ‘What chimpanzees can teach us about human nature’ (February 5), let me begin by expressing admiration for my critic’s courage and integrity as a political journalist, particularly on the issue of Palestinian rights, where he staunchly defends Noam Chomsky’s principled position.

In my article I touched on Chomsky only briefly, with the aim of endorsing his insistence - unfashionable on the left these days - that there is such a thing as human nature. Although I criticised Chomsky for his well-known rejection of Darwinism in relation to language, that certainly wasn’t the point of my article. I was therefore a little surprised to read Hannu’s lengthy defence of his friend and comrade on that score.

Many on the left seem to imagine that if you support Chomsky’s politics, then out of solidarity you should defend his linguistics as well. But Chomsky himself has repeatedly insisted that the two sides of his work are quite separate, without any significant connection. In joking reference to the two Chomskys, an interviewer once asked him: “What do they say to each other when they meet?” In reply, Chomsky suggested that the two versions of himself weren’t on speaking terms: “There is no connection, apart from some very tenuous relations at an abstract level …”

More seriously, Chomsky explains that the “search for theoretical understanding pursues its own paths, leading to a completely different picture of the world, which neither vindicates nor eliminates our ordinary ways of talking and thinking”. So it seems to me we are entitled to question Chomsky’s linguistics, even if we wholeheartedly support his political stance. As for his position on the origin of language, I don’t know why Hannu accuses me of giving a “completely distorted picture”. Apparently, it’s because I failed to mention that Chomsky himself categorises that “strange cosmic ray shower” story as a fairy tale.

Yes, I know it’s a fairy tale, and that Chomsky himself admits this. Here is another variant, this time not dismissed by Chomsky as a fairy tale: “Putting these thoughts together, we can suggest what seems to be the simplest speculation about the evolution of language. Within some small group from which we are all descended, a rewiring of the brain took place in some individual - call him Prometheus …” Here, as on every other occasion when Chomsky has offered a theory, he has insisted on a leap from zero language to fully complex - even ‘perfect’ - language in one step. Given that this is impossible nonsense, we need to ask why he returns again and again to the same basic idea.

It’s clear to me that Chomsky uses such stories to flatly oppose the Darwinian assumption that language must somehow have evolved. He has notoriously condemned all investigation in this area as a “complete waste of time”. Referring to the chasm separating animal communication from language, he insists that we have no reason to suppose that the gaps are even bridgeable. While conceding that humans share with our ape cousins various subsystems of language, such as memory, categorical perception, motor control of the tongue and so forth (factors correctly highlighted by Hannu in his letter), Chomsky insists that none of this has the slightest relevance to what he is interested in - the language faculty in what he terms “the narrow sense”.

Because this is a letter rather than an article, I must confine myself to one last quote. Here is Chomsky during an interview with James McGilvray in 2012: “If you look at the literature on the evolution of language, it’s all about how language could have evolved from gesture, or from throwing, or something like chewing, or whatever. None of which makes any sense.” Evolutionary approaches make no sense, because language, according to Chomsky, just cannot have evolved. His aim in regaling us with fairy stories about cosmic ray showers and inexplicable mutations is clear: he needs to mystify this whole area, deleting it from the remit of science. I was not distorting Chomsky’s position.

My article on humans and chimpanzees was intended not as a critique of Chomsky - I have done that before - but as a survey of mainstream, cutting-edge thinking on human language, thought and culture in evolutionary perspective. I am in good company here. Most specialists in these areas would consider it absurd to suggest that, say, the Vygotskian, Michael Tomasello, is unscientific, whereas Chomsky is doing real science.

Chomsky is a bitter opponent not just of Marxism in these areas, but of materialist thinking in all its forms. Although I salute Chomsky’s political stance, I cannot extend that sympathy to his professional work. To reject the whole of Darwinian science when it comes to our species is not only misguided, but dangerous.

Chris Knight
email

Arrogance

I would have thought Jack Conrad was worthy of a better response than the one we got in last week’s paper (Letters, February 12) responding to my reflection on your coverage of the 1984-85 miners’ strike. Readers need only compare what I actually wrote (Letters, February 5), and the corrections I made to his previous ‘response’.

I did not say, nor have I ever said, that calls to widen the strike beyond the ranks of the miners were wrong. When did I ever say such a thing? I spoke and wrote throughout the strike in favour of simultaneous strike action, and solidarity action and that is so clearly on record that I have no need to labour the point. The National Union of Mineworkers had reached agreement with all the major unions prior to the strike not to move coal or fuel, or burn scab coal or fuel, with national officials and national executive committees of all the major unions. We established in every city standing committees of regional bodies of all major unions to ensure the implementation of this policy and discuss any violations. We had every right to expect unions to stand to the letter of this agreement, as they had done in 1972 and 1974. Despite certain key leaders not liking it, the members were by and large enthusiastic.

Throughout the strike we took the message directly to the doors of any weak links in that solidarity chain and called directly to the workers in all industries not to cross picket lines. Those are facts, Jack, but why on earth would I or any member of the miners’ union on strike not want to seek solidarity and simultaneous action? I canvassed inside and outside the trade union movement for the opening of a second front for action on the streets and at work. Again this is so well documented that I am not going to spell this out - most members of the Weekly Worker will already, of course, know this as fact.

I did not say, nor have I ever said, a national ballot was not “advisable”. Read the bloody letter, Jack. It says we called a special rules revision conference to change the rule from 55% to 50% plus one, in anticipation that a ballot would be held. It says we had the ballot materials and propaganda printed in anticipation that such a ballot would be held. I’ve spelt this out so many times, I don’t know why you won’t get it. When we took the decision on ballot or no ballot from mass branch meetings and area meetings to national conference, the rank and file voted by a clear majority not to have a ballot. The letter is pointing out to you that this wasn’t Arthur Scargill’s decision, as you assert in your criticism of his handling of the strike. It was the miners themselves. I would have been in favour of a national ballot as late as October, but the miners by a large majority said ‘no’.

Your presentation of my criticism of your foolish assumption that, because we called the industry ‘our industry’, we actually thought it was ours - ie, because it was nationalised, it belonged ‘to us’ - is likewise distorted. We had been through more pit closures under Wilson than Thatcher. We had been moved like industrial nomads from one coalfield to another. We had fought bitter battles with the National Coal Board from 1969, 1972 and 1974. We knew it didn’t belong to us, Jack. Believe me, we all knew that. We called it ‘our industry’ because we worked, father to son, generation on generation, in it. We invested lives, limbs and health in it, we relied upon it and we believed it a worthwhile endeavour that was being wasted. We called it ‘our industry’ when Lord Londonderry et al owned it - not because we thought he shared it with us, or the NCB shared it with us, but because, morally, it was ours, and we should own and control it.

While it’s true that after nationalisation the miners’ leaders from your party and others did think somehow we had some control and ownership of it and the decisions of the NCB, by 1969 and the nationwide unofficial action their cards were marked and a period of intense class war was unleashed between then and 1993. No quarter was called for or given and the NCB displayed the most vulgar contempt for the miners and their families. Throughout that period we still called it ‘our industry’. Do you seriously think that was because we thought we were engaged in some common endeavour with a common set of values? As I said in my last letter, of course we didn’t.

I did not say we, “with the help of brick-throwing anarchists”, were winning. Such a crude misrepresentation of what I said is hard to imagine. We were winning because in the first fortnight of the strike only three Leicester mines were working - the rest were on strike and Thatcher was in a flat panic. We came closest to a negotiated settlement one month into the strike, when the closure programme was withdrawn and a wide-ranging agreement was stuck on one word. We were winning when the dockers struck and Keith Joseph said Thatcher was ready to concede, before telling him to give the dockers whatever they wanted to call off their strike. Finally, we were winning when Nacods voted to take joint action with an 80% ‘yes’ vote and Thatcher prepared a surrender deal, until the leaders of that union stabbed us all in the back.

So, yes, Jack, on a number of occasions we were on the verge of winning. Not on our own, but through solidarity action of workers refusing to cross picket lines, at pits, at ports, at power stations, on railway lines, at steel works, in transport and much else, including worldwide blacking action by seafarers, coalminers and transport workers. And, of course, the unflinching support of a million men women and children in the coalfields and, especially, the women’s support groups.

I did not say we weren’t abandoned by the TUC leadership or the leaderships of some key unions and some of their members. Why would I say that and where did I say that?

I was an official of the NUM for 25 years and a member of the area executive committee and vice-chair of the South Yorkshire NUM panel, the elected picket coordinator for Doncaster, a member of the Yorkshire area strike coordinating committee and one of the Orgreave operation team. I attended every conference and meeting throughout the strike and spoke at every one of them on behalf of the members. I have painstakingly recorded conference decisions, resolutions and who voted for what when, at branch, area and national level. Despite all of that and a lifetime in the coal industry in every battle since 1969 through to 1992-93, Jack Conrad has the audacity to say: “Actually, of course, comrade Douglass speaks for no-one except himself.”

I spoke throughout that whole period of action for the members, on mandate from the members, elected by the members, and I have recorded the facts of all those events that you feel confident to challenge us on, based upon nothing but raw assumption. My “endlessly repeated account”, Jack, happens to be the facts. Yes, the scabs in Nottingham were a problem - as if I didn’t know that - but it wasn’t because we didn’t have a ballot. They would have worked with or without the ballot; they used it as a fig leaf to hide their cowardice. If we had held a national ballot, it is well recognised we would have won it. McGregor had already prepared his scab force to carry on working despite the result.

But I was wrong in my letter. I had said that, thankfully, the Weekly Worker had lost “some of that excruciating, self-opinionated leadership arrogance you had displayed at that time”. Jack has certainly proved me wrong on that point, if on nothing of the rest.

David Douglass
South Shields

Read Kautsky

Your ‘review’ of the Wolf Hall TV series was extraordinarily shallow (‘Machiavellian manoeuvres in the dark’, February 5). It read like a bourgeois press review and went over too much of the philistine carping from the Daily Mail, etc, about ‘confusing plots’ and ‘too much filming by candlelight’ (if correctly rubbishing such trivia) and missed a major opportunity to draw some Marxist understanding from the series.

As a thoughtful, serious and well-acted drama, it does open up the chance for a good discussion of what is, after all, an account of a revolutionary period, the long-drawn-out rise of the bourgeoisie as a class and its conflicts with the ancient feudal order, which culminated in the English revolution and the overthrow of absolute monarchy (with Charles, rather than his wives, losing his head). Henry was a balancing act between the old barons and the now powerful City of London money men.

Hilary Mantel’s imagining of the circumstances usefully points to Cromwell as a much more complex manifestation than the traditional pantomime villain, and interestingly emphasises his rise from a lower middle class background (an early ‘entrepreneur’ father), something impossible in the previous aristocratically dominated feudal period. But it is a long way from a materialist analysis, still suggesting that events were driven by ‘characters’ and their motivations, and leaving unchallenged the bourgeois, subjective, idealist, historical view of the great split with Catholicism resulting from Henry VIII’s lusts.

But, as your own usually elevated hero, Karl Kautsky, brilliantly wrote in the period “when he was still a Marxist”, as Lenin put it, “… according to this account, England would still be Catholic today if Henry had been less amorous and Anne less coquettish. In reality the grounds and even the occasion of the separation of the church lay somewhat deeper. Many Catholic princes had unattractive wives and attractive mistresses ... before and after Henry ... and many popes pronounced divorces when they thought fit. We have to inquire whence it came that Henry’s divorce gave the impulse to such an extensive transformation.”

He answers with a detailed account of the material balance of class forces in Europe at the time, and in the material changes from the centuries before, and especially the rise of the Spanish Hapsburg empire, which had made the Catholic church its tool - itself possible because of a change in the degenerated and corrupted social and political role of Catholicism, as feudal society decayed and the money-based capitalist mode of production became increasingly significant. The key point was that being tied to Rome left England under a very earthly Spanish, not spiritual Catholic, sway.

But that was only one factor in a major shifting of class forces and the new mode of production, explains Kautsky in a tour de force of materialist science, which he undertakes in the book Thomas More and his Utopia.

Foreign exploration and the opening up of colonialism, new scientific understanding, the rising power of the banks and of the merchant cities (particularly London), the great advances of philosophy like humanism, driven by the Italian capitalist city-states, and much more, are all described and form part of the explanation for this English upheaval, one of the most pivotal moments in European history.

Kautsky brilliantly shows that Thomas More, far from being a bitter and twisted Catholic reactionary, as Mantel portrays him, was a multi-talented genius who was possibly the first ever modern communist thinker, hampered and limited by the earliness of the capitalist developments around him and therefore only able to go so far, but nevertheless understanding their savage effects. He set out a vision of a propertyless society as a cure which has many features of modern socialist understanding.

Kautsky contests that Thomas More ever had anyone burned at the stake, and suggests this was part of the calumny of the time when More lost favour. He was limited also in his religiousness, but again this is a material factor reflecting the conditions of the time, and his Catholicism in fact was of an ‘older type’ (before the corrupt selling of indulgences, etc) based on the social conditions of the former feudal period, when the monasteries provided alms and labour for the peasantry. This was a class which in Tudor times was being thrown off the land by rapacious new capitalist sheep farming and the wool trade. It was becoming the first desperate unemployed army of vagrants and proletarians and More sympathised with them.

Kautsky himself had his limitations too and tragically could not understand what Lenin did: that the crucial element for achieving socialism is to establish the working class in power, through the dictatorship of the proletariat. But this book is a brilliant exposition of Marxist materialist history and, as Lenin recommended, should be basic reading for all Marxists.

It certainly helps understand the TV series better, and our own turmoiled times.

Don Hoskins
Economic and Philosophic Science Review

How to vote

I read with interest the account of the discussion at the CPGB AGM of how the party should recommend people vote in the general and local elections in May (‘Planning our interventions’, January 29). However, there are changes taking place in electoral registration, which are likely to have the effect of disenfranchising a large number of people.

My personal experience thus far is this. I have been very meticulous in responding to the mailing that arrives around October each year about electoral registration at the address that I and my husband have occupied for 18 years now, and there has been no discontinuity in our appearing on the electoral register until now. Nevertheless, this last time, when a confirmation piece of paperwork arrived a few weeks ago, only my husband’s name appeared. I have done what the paperwork told me to do on a national website to ensure that I am registered, but am still awaiting confirmation from my local council’s electoral services department that I am now on the register again, a fortnight later. If I, as a very politically engaged person who is very administratively obsessive and has been at the same address for 18 years, am having this problem, what is it like for many other people, less engaged politically, less administratively savvy and less geographically settled?

I also work in local government in another authority. I have had informal conversations with staff in that electoral services department, and gather that they have changed the software they use for compiling the register three times in the last year and are publishing a complete hard-copy revised electoral register every month, apparently in reaction to national changes in rules on how the register is compiled.

I urge all labour movement comrades, however you want to vote in the upcoming elections (even if it will be by adding a box at the bottom of the ballot paper and writing next to it: “A candidate standing on a truly class-independent, working class political platform, had one been standing”, as I have done recently), to do all they can to ensure that they are on the electoral register, which may take some furious determination. And I urge the CPGB to do what it can to highlight this issue beyond publishing this letter.

Having said all this, I look forward to a formal recommendation from the CPGB on how to vote in the not too distant future.

Tony Rees
London

Human Greens

I’ve been asked who I’ll vote for on May 7.

I’ll not be voting Labour, as they are committed to the Tories’ £50 billion cuts. I’ll not be voting UK Independence Party, whose candidate is a multi-millionaire, buy-to-let landlord, with 1,000 properties in the London area. There will be no Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition or Left Unity candidate in my constituency. So I will be voting for the Green Party candidate.

The Green Party stands for a £10-an-hour minimum wage, the abolition of tuition fees and the renationalisation of the railways. Greens stand for the building of 500,000 social houses by 2020, funded by the abolition of buy-to-let landlords’ mortgage interest tax relief. They also stand for a royal commission to discuss the legalisation of cannabis. So I’ll be calling on all socialists and young people in my constituency to join me in voting for Green on May 7.

I recently attended an open meeting of my local Green Party. There were 10 of us at the meeting. Afterwards six of us went for ‘Green’ drinks in the bar of a local hotel. This contrasts with my local Labour Party, members of whom I have asked to go for a drink after meetings. On all occasions I have been given a cold ‘no thanks’. The Greens may be liberals with a small ‘l’, but going for ‘Green’ drinks shows that they are human.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Witch-hunter

If Tony Greenstein wants to dabble in astrology to divine why many intelligent people, including those with a long history in the left and the labour movement, don’t buy his decade-long, vain campaign to vilify Gilad Atzmon, I wish him well (Letters, February 12).

He certainly needs help from the supernatural, as it is perfectly obvious to any rational person with any empathy for those brought up in a state like Israel why there is a layer of anti-racist people of Jewish origin who, as part of their deep alienation and rejection of Zionism as a Jewish racist ideology, have developed doubts about the historicity of aspects of the Nazi genocide.

Tony Greenstein joins with the worst Zionist hacks in witch-hunting these courageous if flawed dissidents. Rational people - those not blinded by identity politics and chauvinism - recognise that this was an inevitable result of abuse of the genocide as a propaganda weapon to justify ethnic cleansing on a scale that is itself comparable with Nazism. The case for rational debate and sympathetic engagement with this militant anti-Zionist current is winning out over Greenstein’s witch-burning nonsense, as shown by Atzmon’s recent appearance with George Galloway.

It is worth noting in this regard that, for all its concentrated, murderous slaughter, Hitler’s regime lasted only 12 years, whereas the Israeli dispossession and persecution of Arabs is getting on for 70 years now, with no end even in sight. To Greenstein, however, for all his activism around Palestine, this has no significance; past Jewish suffering takes precedence and disagreements about events generations ago matter more than views about racist mass murder today.

Tony Greenstein also lies when he says that he has never sought to no-platform Atzmon, or prevent his right to speak or play. In fact, he has in the past even gone to the extent of threatening with violence those who announced an intention to go and hear Atzmon, as he did to me on June 9 2005, in writing on UK Left Network Yahoo discussion list, concerning a meeting at the Socialist Workers Party’s Bookmarks bookshop. Greenstein was forced to apologise, also publicly, as he suddenly realised he had implicitly threatened the SWP membership in the same way, which is very unwise for obvious reasons. But the fact that he made the threat in the first place reveals much.

He has done similar things several times more, seeking to get Atzmon’s events cancelled, at Brighton in 2008, at Bradford in 2012, each time being quite prepared to engage in strong-arm tactics and the threat of violence against those on the left who disagree with his witch-burning methods and want to engage and debate fraternally with Atzmon. This is an attack on working class democracy, and any communist organisation worth its salt would condemn Greenstein.

Ian Donovan
Communist Explorations

Chauvinist

Tony Greenstein is a Jewish chauvinist who wants to label as anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmon’s implacable antipathy toward the Jewish religion. Greenstein’s ultimate proof of Atzmon’s anti-Semitism is his conviction that the Judaic god is odious. Greenstein reasons like those Islamist apologists who find proof of racism in the expression of specific scorn for a particular religion.

Stephen Diamond
USA

No credit

The government has confirmed that its flagship welfare reform, universal credit, is being rolled out across the country. It has been piloted in Rugby for 18 months now, and we have increasingly seen that it is simply a way of getting as many people off benefits as possible to save money, without worrying about the consequences for the individuals concerned. The government itself now accepts that the number of households which will lose out under the new system has had to revised upwards from 2.8 million to over three million.

Universal credit was first outlined by work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith at the Conservative Party annual conference in 2010 as a way of reducing benefit expenditure. Sadly, this policy has the support of both the Liberal Democrats and Labour as well.

Members of Rugby Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition have been talking to claimants, as we leaflet outside Rugby job centre virtually every week, and it is quite clear that local people forced onto universal credit have suffered increased poverty as a result. Either they are forced to accept zero-hour contracts at minimum wages, or sometimes below, or they are ‘sanctioned’ for not being able to meet the demands being put on them by the job centre and are forced to live without any money at all for up to a month.

This happened to a claimant we met in January, who had been sanctioned before Christmas because he could not use a computer in the time available at the job centre to apply for jobs, and had no computer at home to try again - 20% are not on the internet. As a result, he spent Christmas in a tent on a graveyard in Rugby because his landlord threw him out, as he could not pay his rent. In another example, a mother told us how her son had been sanctioned for five months out of the last 12 - five months without any money. A man in his 30s told us he had been sanctioned for three months for missing one appointment at Rugby job centre by mistake.

Charities, including the Child Poverty Action Group, are also concerned, as we are, about the decision announced in the autumn statement to freeze the work allowance for people on universal credit. This will mean many will find it harder to make work pay. It will harm work incentives and hit low-paid families hard.

The whole purpose of universal credit is to cut spending on welfare, despite the fact that five people still chase every job. Those jobs that do exist are often zero-hours contracts, whereby workers have to turn up daily just to find out whether or not there is any work available later that day - and they do not get paid when there isn’t any. The government is happy - its unemployment figures go down and it has saved money on benefit payments. They simply don’t care about the effects any of this has on people.

Pete McLaren
Rugby Tusc