Letters

Disruptive?

At Sunday’s meeting of Left Unity’s national council a motion was put to overturn my suspension from the Manchester branch, which was defeated. I understand that that during the debate Joseph Healy, former member of LU’s disputes committee, made the point that branches actually have no right under the LU constitution to suspend members.

National secretary Kate Hudson responded by alleging that she “had heard” (from whom?) that I had been given the boot by the branch chair for disruptive behaviour at a particular meeting, which, of course, is permitted. But that is flatly untrue. For hopefully the last time, let me explain: the motion actually passed by the branch solely, singly and exclusively referred to a report I had written of the branch’s activities, which was published in the Weekly Worker. It did not refer to “disruptive behaviour”, whether prior to or during that particular meeting. Maybe it is worth publishing the motion in full. At any rate, the interpretation of Left Unity’s constitution does seem rather flexible, where some of us are concerned.

The truth is that, when challenged on transparency and the right to criticise, the comrades bringing the complaint then shifted the charge to claims of “bullying” and “disruptive behaviour” (even though, when repeatedly asked to give one concrete example of these, they cannot do so).

Rather than doing the sensible thing and overruling these particularly brittle comrades, I hear there is now talk on the NC of a ban on reporting branch meetings. Terrifying stuff - the fear of transparency threatens to make LU a laughing stock. Our leadership should think long and hard before going down a road which transforms LU into yet another sect.

If they do the right thing and overrule the Manchester branch, I might even send them one of my famous Dundee cakes.

Laurie McCauley
Manchester

GLA election

No-one should be misled into thinking that the report on the London Left Unity aggregate that discussed Left Unity’s approach to the Greater London Authority elections bore any relation to the truth (‘Standing in London’s elections’, June 11). As usual, the Weekly Worker distorts the arguments to suit its politics of the moment.

At the aggregate we had a useful discussion on how LU branches go forward after the general election and whether or not standing in the GLA elections in 2016 should be a major part of our work. There weren’t “three broad camps”, as the Weekly Worker suggests, but only two. Those who wanted to stand in the GLA elections as part of a “broad coalition” hoping to include the London supporters of Syriza, Podemos, other socialists and campaigns; and those who thought that LU was too small and not sufficiently rooted in struggles to mount a significant campaign in a major city like London.

There wasn’t a ‘third camp’, because the CPGB never put forward their ‘partyist’ position of standing as LU alone, a failure revealing in itself. Instead they voted for the Socialist Resistance-inspired broad coalition idea, quickly abandoning their ‘partyist’ principles.

The question of standing or not in the GLA elections is a purely tactical one. Can we make a significant impact, will it help to further the struggle and will it get our socialist ideas across to new groups of working people? We have to weigh against this the sacrifices we make to fight a proper election campaign across a city the size of London and the financial costs involved.

The GLA elections are probably the most expensive local elections to fight in the UK. To stand for mayor, in the list, in a few of the constituencies, and to put your election address in the postal booklet to voters, starts, yes, at around £30,000-£40,000 in terms of deposits. Then there is the campaign on top! This might be “small change”, as he described it, to a man of means like Jack Conrad, but for a party whose major source of income is members’ subscriptions donated from their pay packets we should think very carefully before spending it - even more so as it will likely suck resources from the regions of LU to the capital.

A significant number of comrades, including the Lambeth LU branch, thought that, on balance, we should not stand in the GLA elections. The Weekly Worker report distorts this position, portraying us as those who felt the elections were a waste of money and what LU should really be doing is “building the movement”. This would indeed be a strange position for those of us in Lambeth who have just fought two elections simultaneously! And indeed Simon Hardy made this clear in his contribution, saying that we were not against standing in elections.

To prove their point, the Weekly Worker then elides the second, quite separate part of the aggregate - which was discussing a resolution from Lambeth on priorities for campaigning - with the GLA election discussion. It thus invents a false counterposition between those who supported standing in the GLA elections and those “who were advocating downplaying elections and relying on local campaigning and movementism”. No such counterposition existed. Indeed virtually everyone who voted to stand in the GLA elections also voted for the Lambeth resolution.

It is interesting to note that the campaigns that the CPGB chooses to describe as “movementism” in our resolution include the struggle for social housing, preventing evictions, organising the private renters, unionisation drives and campaigning for the living wage, defending migrants and fighting Ukip racism, international solidarity with Greece, etc. We would call supporting and initiating such campaigns intervening in the class struggle.

It comes as no surprise that only the small CPGB contingent voted against such priorities and the Lambeth resolution as a whole. The passive propagandist is always more comfortable in the lecture hall than in the day-to-day struggle of the working class.

Stuart King
Lambeth Left Unity

Misreporting

Just for your information, I didn’t say any of the things ascribed to me at the LU London aggregate. They are not my views.

I said I was not convinced there was a majority for standing in the London elections - ie, the discussion should not run ahead of itself. I did not say LU should adopt the line of pulling out of the EU, although I do think the EU needs to be understood as reactionary and neoliberal. I said uniting the left was not the same as uniting the working class - the two are obviously not counterposed.

Oliver New
email

LU for Corbyn

Unfortunately, the June 15 annual general meeting of my Left Unity branch ran out of time and was therefore unable to hear this motion I drafted on Jeremy Corbyn:

“This AGM of Camden and Islington Left Unity welcomes Jeremy Corbyn’s success in securing a place on the ballot for a new Labour leader.

“We would urge LU members to become associate members of the Labour Party in order to support the Corbyn campaign. We call upon Left Unity members in affiliated trade union to support the Corbyn campaign through donations, etc.

“Left Unity needs to have a serious discussion on the Labour Party with a view to developing a long-term strategy.”

After hearing what Kate Hudson said about comrade Corbyn getting on the ballot, I have every confidence that the motion would have been agreed, though Terry Conway, one of LU’s national officers, told me she would not support it.

Naturally I will be resubmitting the motion for our next meeting. Meanwhile, I hope other Left Unity branches and regions pass it or something like it.

Jack Conrad
London

Spurious

Stephen Diamond tries a clever stratagem by suggesting those who consider immigration controls to be anti-working class are aligning themselves with the interests of the plutocracy (Letters, June 11). It is a spurious bedfellow argument similar to the one that used opposition to wage-slavery as support for the southern slave-owners.

He does, however, raise the valid criticism of those on the left who seek a regulated regime of immigration controls, such as the US guest worker legislation. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute compared the guest workers, unauthorised workers and legal permanent residents (LPRs) from Mexico and found Mexican temporary foreign workers’ employment outcomes are as poor as, or even worse than, those experienced by unauthorised Mexican immigrants. Both groups are disadvantaged when compared with LPRs.

How could working legally, in a government-sponsored programme, produce worse economic outcomes than working illegally? Because if they quit or get fired, they can be deported. Once they arrive in the US, they can’t change employers. Illegals have an advantage over guest workers - they can switch employers.

Jim Knoepp of the Southern Poverty Law Centre explained: “The main advantages of guest worker programmes from the employer perspective is that you can access cheap labour from impoverished countries where workers are desperate and that you can control the workforce through a visa system that does not allow workers to switch employers if the pay and conditions are bad. It is only logical that such a system would result in wage depression and unfairness. Employers who want to use guest worker programmes should have to compete on the labour market for workers, just like any other employer, and should not get a free pass from supply and demand labour economics via an artificial inflation of the labour supply.”

Open-borderists don’t seek the reform of immigration law, but the removal of all restrictions to permit the free movement of people to live and work where they choose and that freedom from control is, despite Stephen Diamond’s claims, not at all what the plutocracy wishes to see happen.

Alan Johnstone
email

Full rights

Stephen Diamond, in writing on the issue of immigration, made an error that ought to be corrected. He states: “Principled programmatic measures to address wage-undercutting are ignored or opposed by open-borderists. Thus, the neglect of the classic Marxist demand to prohibit employers from underpaying foreign workers. Or, in the United States, failure to demand abolition of the guest worker programmes.”

This is wholly inaccurate. The class approach to this question is to first view immigrant workers as part of the working class. This is something that Diamond has never done in his over 10 years on writing on this subject, including his view that unions ought to organise ‘workers’ defence guards’ to guard against “illegal aliens” crossing the southern border of the US.

The actual demand in the United States by pro-working class immigrant rights advocates is not ‘open borders’, but “Papers for all, full rights for immigrants”. Additionally, all groups among both socialist organisations and immigrant worker organising committees are in favour of supporting, and organising, immigrant workers into unions. Some are actually doing this.

Diamond’s rejection of this is unfortunate. His approach is essentially to treat immigrant workers as scabs. This was not Marx’s view. He opposed the importation of foreign workers to break strikes specifically, but not immigration in general. The socialist movement always opposed immigration restrictions, going back to the battle over this in the Socialist International led by Daniel DeLeon that put the international workers’ movement on the side of immigrant workers and their being organised into our class.

Lastly, on Diamond’s comments: every left group, every “open borderist” organisation I know of is against the guest worker programmes. I don’t know of any that are for them. Guest worker programmes are the opposite of open borders. They are restrictive, time-limited and generally anti-worker programmes designed to deny the right of workers to organise, move, change jobs, use any social services. They are essentially modern-day, 21st century indentured servants. Socialists, to my knowledge, the left in general, have and will continue to oppose these. Diamond is simply wrong on this.

So how should revolutionaries approach the subject then? I think Diamond’s challenge on this, as well as those British letter-writers here, should have an answer. I will only speak to the immigrant worker question in the US and it will, for the sake of space, be a kind of bulleted list. Arguments for or against can proceed apace perhaps in future letters. To wit:

1. End all deportations now. We demand the US government use every tool to prevent deportations, full stop.

2. Full legalisation and citizen rights for those that want it now. (Many, in fact, don’t want to be citizens; they just want to be able to come and go as they please. Now, they have to stay, regardless of their job or family situation.)

3. Full unionisation of all workers. For a $15 minimum wage.

4. End all guest worker programmes.

5. The right not to emigrate! Joint campaigns between US unions and immigrant rights groups with their brothers and sisters in Mexico to end the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, in order not, as is the case for the last 25 years, being forced to leave,because of Nafta’s predatory economic and social rollbacks of the gains of the Mexican revolution and workers’ and peasants’ movements in Mexico.

David Walters
San Francisco

Half-ass

Paul Demarty’s article is an excellent materialist sketch of the prohibitionist ideology - crucial food for thought for revolutionaries tackling the question (‘Legalise the lot’, June 11). Unfortunately, despite the partial measures toward reversing the drug war that comrade Demarty describes in the USA, the left is quite a distance behind where we ought to be.

Marijuana may be legal in a few states (with highly lucrative profits for newly minted, above-board pot capitalists), but Colorado police still disproportionately arrest blacks for possession above the low legal limit. Big tobacco giants are turning an eye toward becoming ‘big pot’, especially with the growing trend toward electronic cigarettes or vaping.

Pot is the acceptable face of legalisation. Rare is the left-liberal commentator prepared to call for legalisation of the hard drug - that is beyond the pale for mainstream bourgeois discourse. But even the socialist left concedes to this. For example, the Socialist Party USA calls only for ‘decriminalisation’ of drugs (which would not allow for quality control or regulation), while Socialist Alternative, the Committee for a Workers’ International US affiliate, explicitly supports only marijuana legalisation in a recent statement about black oppression and the war on drugs (maybe it’s one of those ‘transitional’ demands, with workers needing a communist position on drug use doled out little by little).

Instead of half-assing it, socialists and communists need to openly fight for ‘legalising the lot’ as part of our general struggle against the mass incarceration regime.

Gabriel Pierre
Red Party

Overstated

Moshé Machover makes an impressive case for the materialist basis of the US-Israel relationship, not least in detailing the ‘added value’ nature of Israel’s contribution to improving the efficiency of US weaponry (‘US imperialism and Israel’s role’, June 11).

However, I suspect that the technological aspect of this contribution is overstated. Undoubtedly Israel provides an electronic hot-house and it is more convenient to allow Israel to act as a scientific and electronic subcontractor, but that does not mean this will always be the case or that it has to be so. If it were necessary, the US could take back in-house much if not most of the scientific services that Israel presently renders.

If there is a unique contribution that Israel makes it is in the realm of battlefield-tested weaponry, of which drone and anti-missile technology are the best examples. However, the United States itself is not without its own experience in this field.

Where I do have my doubts is over Moshé’s thesis in respect of Iran. Even accepting that the coalition crisis that triggered the March 17 general election was deliberately engineered - and I have my doubts about this, as I suspect that Netanyahu would have received the go-ahead for his Iran speech to Congress - it raises the question of US-Israeli disagreements over Iran and how to respond to the growth in its influence.

Israel wishes to retain its role as the dominant power in the region. It is not happy with the US’s increasing reliance on Iran in Iraq. It not only wishes to see Iranian influence in Iraq and Syria reduced, but it urgently desires to lay the basis for the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon. The only military defeat that Israel has ever suffered has been at the hands of Hezbollah in 2006 and such a defeat cannot be allowed to stand indefinitely.

Together with Saudi Arabia, with which it is in de facto alliance, Egypt and Turkey, Israel wishes to see the overthrow of Assad in Syria. In practice this has meant an unwritten alliance with the al-Nusra Front (al Qa’eda) and Islamic State. Israel is openly providing medical treatment for their fighters. The US wishes, not least because of the need to safeguard key oil interests, to see a strengthened and unified Iraqi state. However, IS has captured most of al-Anbar province and Kurdistan is already effectively independent. Given IS’s recent capture of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria, this project is beginning to look increasingly unlikely. Much as it dislikes Assad, the US has no major interest in his overthrow. Support for the anti-Assad insurgency is the biggest single factor in IS’s victories in Iraq. This has forced the US to rely more and more on Iranian military help in Iraq.

Israel is on record as believing the US is aligned with the wrong wing of Islam in the Middle East. The US is not happy with the prospect of an IS state in the majority of Iraq and Syria, the reigniting of civil war in Lebanon, in addition to the probability that the Saudi state itself will become a target for IS.

There are therefore real material interests that dictate why a section of the US ruling class wishes to come to a cold peace with Iran. Of course, there is a neocon wing, which would like to see the Iranian regime overthrown, but it has mapped out no convincing alternative strategy, regardless of whether it is able to veto the proposed agreement with Iran.

US policy in the Middle East is incoherent. It relies on Israel and Saudi Arabia, on the one hand, and Iran, on the other. It is this incoherence which has allowed Netanyahu to play the role he has.

Suffice to say that Moshé’s withering criticism of those who would have us believe that the US acts against its own interests in the Middle East because of Jewish/Zionist capitalists is unimpeachable.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Overlapping

Moshé Machover’s polemic against my views, which is a more polished version of his presentation at the recent Hands Off the People of Iran day school, is indicative that he can no longer resort to mere calumny, but has to be prepared to confront my views, which he very grudgingly admits are “sort of” materialist, in a political manner. This is a step forward. I welcome his contribution to the debate and hope to explore these matters further.

Here I will confine myself to a few brief points. One is that he dismisses my concept of the existence of a Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie in the United States (and indeed in other places), in favour of Dwight D Eisenhower’s concept of the ‘military industrial complex’ as an explanation as to why US policy in the Middle East so tightly fits Israeli interests.

He dismisses the views of one duo of conservative US bourgeois ideologues, Mearsheimer and Walt, on the supposed divergence between the real national interests of the United States and Israel, as stifled by the ‘Israel lobby’. But, actually, he seems rather uncritical of the views of Eisenhower who, though from a different era, actually has quite a lot in common with this duo. Both are fairly conservative ideologues, and both sets of bugbears are characteristically not analysed in class terms by them.

In my Draft theses on the Jews and modern imperialism, written in September 2014, I did a critique of various theorists, such as Mearsheimer and Walt, who put forward this theory about the ‘lobby’ or, in some cases, the ‘Jewish vote’ as an explanation for the relationship between Israel and the US:

“In the US around 2% of the population are Jewish, and there is no reason, is strictly numerical terms, why a ‘lobby’ based on such a small percentage of the population should have the power not only to force American governments to adopt the most slavish support for very brutal actions of Israel, but also to destroy the careers of politicians who speak out against such actions.”

I pointed out that it was ownership of capital, and not atomised voting strength in the population at large, that lay at the root of such social power. Machover has no equivalent materialist critique of Eisenhower’s idea of the ‘military-industrial complex’. This idea has provided a (classless) justification for popular frontism on the US left for many years, particularly from the US Communist Party.

The military is at the core of the capitalist state, with bodies of armed men, prisons, etc, at their disposal. Ultimately, it is a tool of the ruling class; the relations of the military with ‘industry’ are its relations with its masters: in class terms, the bourgeoisie, a key part of which is ‘industry’. However, in the epoch of imperialism as defined by Lenin, there has already been a fusion of banking capital with industrial capital; and the massive interpenetration of both with the state, including the military. Why look to non-Marxist simpletons like Eisenhower for a source of explanations when you can look to Lenin?

The military is not a force independent of its bourgeois masters. Its behaviour reflects the dominant trends within the bourgeoisie. Why should the US, with its own ‘national’ interests, which it has at times exerted great military force to defend, engage in the kind of quite fantastic sharing Moshé cites of military technology with another state? The US has always been very grudging of its military technology. Ask any current or former British prime minister just who controls the US bases on British soil, for instance! The only explanation for this ‘sharing’ is that key elements of the US and Israeli ruling classes, actually overlap. Which is where my thesis comes in.

Machover correctly dismisses the idea that there is a set interest of entire ruling classes, in favour of “conflicting interests” that have to be “balanced”. But what if the ruling classes also overlap? And what if part of the ruling class of the larger power is ambivalent about the desirability of that? What does this do for the concept of “conflicting interests’? It produces a very novel variant!

Machover dismisses the idea that “rich individuals” can affect the policy of states. But what about collectives of “rich individuals” (ie, bourgeois)? Are not “conflicting interests” made up of groups of such “rich individuals”, organised politically? Obviously they are! It is good that he now reluctantly concedes that Jewish bourgeois are overrepresented in the US imperialist bourgeoisie, but why is he so determined to deny that they represent one of these “conflicting interests”?

According to some democratic concepts of citizenship, a state is the property of its citizens. We all know that this is a fiction in capitalist society. The state is in reality the executive body of the bourgeoisie, and in effect citizenship becomes the title deed of the bourgeois, not the lower orders, to the national state. That state being the body that not only maintains the exploitation of the working class, but that also wages war against other ruling classes.

But the Jewish sections of the bourgeoisie have a bit extra in that regard, thanks to the Israeli law of return. Shlomo Sand speaks very well of how this is exercised in practice in his essay ‘How I stopped being a Jew’ (2014): “It is enough to make a short visit to Israel, readily obtain an identity card and acquire a second residence there before returning immediately to their national culture and their mother tongue, while remaining in perpetuity a co-proprietor of the Jewish state - and all this for simply having been lucky enough to be born of a Jewish mother” (p84).

Again, Sand does not put this in Marxist terms. A bourgeois engaged in this activity becomes a co-proprietor of the Israeli bourgeois state, not simply the owner of a second home. But Sand supplies the explanation despite that limitation. Thus the political and material basis for the fantastic level of high-level, “cross-pollinated” collaboration over military matters Machover describes, is laid. If you have part of a ruling class in common, such things become possible.

Ian Donovan
Communist Explorations