Letters

Bloody hard work

Going through the motions for the Left Unity national conference, I was disappointed that there is only one specifically on the unions: that is, against the Trade Union Bill. Trade unions cannot, in themselves, develop socialism, but they are essential bedrock organisations for defending and advancing workers’ basic interests. Socialists and ‘left’ individuals - except for some anarchists and Maoists - orientate to the unions in some way; this is even more important for a group like Left Unity.

With the Corbyn victory in the Labour Party, the connection between unions and Labour needs renewed attention. The Communist Platform motion on the Labour Party correctly points to this, although, in my opinion, as almost an afterthought. Nowhere is it stressed that any democratic gains in the Labour Party will not be sustainable without a vigorous fight to make the union leaders accountable to members: Labour Party internal democracy and left policies are constantly being ditched by ‘left’ as well as ‘moderate’ leaders in the trade union movement.

The new situation offers socialists, communists and non-aligned militants an ideal opportunity for a big drive on broader labour-movement democracy and accountability, not merely Labour Party democracy. It is possible, given the political will, for even small groups like Left Unity, the CPGB and Labour Party Marxists to push for a recomposed left in the unions (directed at/through Momentum, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Red Labour and Socialist Labour, etc, as well as members of existing ‘left caucuses’ in the unions).

Such a drive for genuine rank-and-file control would, of course, come up against the entrenched self-interests of ‘broad lefts’ and various other left caucuses promoted by the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party, Communist Party of Britain/Morning Star, etc.

And sectarians of various types will oppose it as impractical/syndicalist/opportunist or some such, instead of trying to build a movement in which they would promote political perspectives beyond ‘democracy’ and ‘the rank and file’.

This is bloody hard work, so no surprise that such issues are of minor importance to Left Unity overall - and to ‘factions’ like the ‘republican socialists’ and Communist Platform.

Alan James
Teesside

Time for a split

Last week I suggested the Left Unity conference was about ‘To be or not to be’. Having read Sarah McDonald’s report of the national council meeting, I think the choices are not so stark (‘Taking Labour seriously’, November 12). They are not ‘continue or fold’, but rather ‘dissolve or split’. Left Unity will survive the conference. But without a radical break or change of direction it will continue to decline into irrelevance, with fewer and fewer members.

It is fashionable in the English left to think all splits are a bad thing, to be avoided at all costs. This is wrong. Sometimes a split is necessary to purge parties of outdated programmes and ideologies which are a barrier to progress. It is better to have a radical break, in which the future separates from a past which is holding militant struggle back.

A good split is one in which there is political differentiation and a clear division on grounds of policy. Many splits are premature because the political lines are unclear. But a split that has matured to the point of crisis and clarity is part of the political education of the militant section of the working class. So, as far as LU is concerned, if I had to choose between dissolving or having a good split, I would choose the latter. The problem is that LU is not ready for a split because lines of demarcation remain blurred.

Left Unity is founded on two fundamentals. The first principal idea is the recognition that in the present conditions the working class needs a militant party which unites social democratic and communist workers. This is what the CPGB condemns as a “halfway house”. The second principal idea, which follows on, is that LU is a socialist, not a communist, party. LU therefore naturally adopted the obvious ideas of ‘trade union socialism’ or Labourism. Promoting old Labour views rooted in the 1945 social monarchy were seen as a way of uniting the left and mobilising working class support. In the general election, left Labourism made LU and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition into natural allies.

The Scottish referendum and the Corbyn movement have thrown a spanner in the works. The Scottish National Party took Scotland and Corbyn has retaken the Labour Party and made it more successful than Left Unity could have imagined. All those comrades in LU who embraced Labourism are now being pulled into the orbit of Corbyn. The whole of LU is now in danger of being sucked down that plughole by the liquidator-affiliators. Labourism, which seemed to be LU’s best weapon, has now become its deadly poison.

In reporting the national council Sarah notes that “comrades Shaheen and Bluston both jokingly said they wanted to join the CPGB, as they agreed with everything our comrades said”. A line-up between comrade Shaheen, one of the main advocates of liquidation, and the CPGB, champion of affiliation, makes sense. The rise of Corbyn has transformed these unlikely bedfellows into the best of friends as Left Unity’s right wing. In Left Unity there is now a ‘hard right’ and a ‘soft left’.

Richard Farnos was quoted by Sarah as saying that “the left’s response to the Labour Party was like a child playing football: chasing round after the ball, but with no thought for positioning or strategic play”. It is not just the Labour Party they are chasing after. In general the left in England does not think ahead. It prefers to follow anything that moves. Lenin would have condemned this as the ‘worship of spontaneity’.

The Scottish referendum has begun to redefine the future - not only for Scotland, but England, Wales and Northern Ireland as well. If we are not simply going to run after the ball, we have to position ourselves in relation to the national and constitutional questions. In Left Unity this translates itself into the battle between ‘left unionists’ and anti-unionists, on the one hand, and between the Labourites and republicans, on the other.

Sarah reports that Jon Duveen wanted to invite the new Scottish party/alliance, Rise, to LU conference. The CPGB opposed this and the national council agreed not to invite them. Inviting Rise to send a representative does not change the policy of left unionism or left nationalism one jot. But it does mean we are ready at least to have a dialogue. The CPGB’s opposition to inviting Rise is directed internally in support of Glasgow South branch and against all anti-unionists in LU.

Left unionists and anti-unionists cannot be in the same party - that much is obvious. It is also clear that Labourites and republicans should not be in the same party. We have mixed and matched these politics in one organisation for a while. That time has now come to an end. Objectively it is time for a split. I do not see this happening at Left Unity conference. The most likely outcome is that the hard right will defeat the soft left and LU will agree to try to affiliate to the Labour Party. This will prove one more step on the road to dissolution. Better to have a clean break.

Steve Freeman
Left Unity and Rise

Communising

According to the CPGB’s Notes for Action (August 14), the Communist University is “the high point of the CPGB’s calendar ... an incredibly important event for us”. But neither the Weekly Worker nor NfA carried a report.

The August 28 NfA said that the first Weekly Worker after the publication break would include “a general CU overview”, but what that issue of the paper (September 3) did carry was remarks by four comrades attending for the first time. It was noticeable that this was half the length of the report on Left Unity’s first youth day school. If I were North American, I’d start a Facebook page called CU Justice.

Also only 13 videos of the 23 sessions are currently available on the CPGB website. Despite the extensive Weekly Worker coverage of Corbynmania, it is regrettable that those absent include Mike Macnair’s ‘Entryism and the Labour Party’ and the one by Pat Smith. It’s also a pity that this year’s videos are different, in being speaker-centred, without the voices of ‘the plebs’. This contrasts with SWP videos, which since their ‘difficulties’ almost always include the remarks of non-speakers.

I watched with interest the three CU videos of Hillel Ticktin’s talks, ‘Crisis’, ‘Transition’, and ‘Socialism’. I was struck by three points he made:

1. Drawing attention to the life of the individual, not just the collective: because of Stalinism the latter has acquired a “repulsive” reputation (‘Transition’).

2. Referring to “dirty labour” mitigated by automation, he said: “The actual transition to ... socialism, when it does actually come, … hasn’t got an economic dynamic, so its dynamic would have to be political - that’s to say, the population would have to be already imbued with the need to change that society, and there would have to be a period of time when people were basically doing things they didn’t like doing - … working in factories and so forth …” (‘Transition’).

3. On abolishing the state and replacing it with administration, including decentralised, devolved planning, “you would expect everybody in one way or another to be involved ... people would take part to a much greater degree in the running of the society itself. That’s to say, it’s not just a question of elections; you’d expect the proportions of the population to take turns in administering the society because only that way you can really have a democratic form. Everybody has to be involved at some time of their lives, as it were: nobody’s there permanently” (‘Socialism’).

I’m sure Hillel would not disagree with the idea that achieving socialism/communism (he treats them as synonyms) means engaging in a process of communising, which starts for us as undermining the capitalising of people’s lives, and it requires the decommodifying of goods and services. It involves the development of authenticity at the expense of alienation. Call it the integral living of the universal class for itself. Socialists need to reclaim talk of freedom, fun and pleasure, individual and collective responsibility, and be their champion. We need conceptions of freedom-from and freedom-to: emancipation from exploitation and oppressions, and the living of liberation in individual and communal projects, some even exploratory and experimental. We promote human flourishing at the expense of suffering.

We are for developing self-control, making redundant the alter-discipline of authorities; in engendering awareness that the welfare of others is a need of one’s own, the boundary of one’s self is transformed, extending and involving others; enveloping others and being enveloped develops a more collective self. It is the practising of non-erotic love: communists are philanthropists. Democracy - ie, widespread participation in decision-making - is simply the means giving us the best chance to develop the good life for the whole species, all the while respecting that freedom recognises necessity. Communising means discovering how to institutionalise enthusiasm in a non-commodity form.

If a scientific understanding of economic life requires a conception of mode of production, then that of political life requires a conception of mode of ruling. Power is simply one way to rule; leading society, invoking fear and hope, are others. Communising consists in developing anti-ruling at the expense of ruling, with the former harbouring a dynamic of re-ruling and de-ruling - and de-ruling itself hosting a dynamic of co-governing and self-governing. Each of these dynamics marks a phase in the prospective history of communising. In all this, communising requires the working class and its allies to use a mode of anti-ruling to govern both control of access to valued, thus significant, entities, and control over the quality of relations. In being anti-ruling, communists are anti-political; it makes us integral, not political.

Communising is an attempt to create a community of self-governors. The integral organisation of communist society is regulation, order, association - achieved not by ruling, but by governing, self-governing. This is the sublation of alienation. Human political history is a management struggle - the management of valued entities and relations. The scientific, communist aim is none other than to make us all managers, make us all governors, make us all administrators. This gives a new meaning to ‘the managerial revolution’.

I have explored these ideas, and the nature of politics for scientific communists, in what would have been three articles for the Weekly Worker. The editorial team wanted them rewritten as two, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to make the time to do this. They are available, however, at https://thrutheeyesofcorpses.wordpress.com.

Jara Handala
email

Energetic

Interesting debate between Tony Clark and Ted Hankin. I agree with Tony’s criticism (Letters, November 12) of Ted’s doctrinarism (Letters, November 5). I think this ‘chicken or egg’ argument over which came first - feudalism being done in by the development of the productive forces or the productive forces being allowed to develop because of feudalism - is overly scholastic. Tony misses the entire dialectic point that these two things are intertwined and they are both true. But that is not why I’m writing.

The important point Tony makes here is that none of the development of the forces of production could have occurred without better energy resources. And quite honestly it doesn’t matter if Marx missed this or not. That is only important if one is wedded to some sort of doctrinaire interpretation of Marx. Let’s examine the actual material history.

Tony’s point, however, is 100% accurate. All the productive forces advances could not have happened without fossil fuels. By productive forces I don’t mean only the expansion of the working class and the development of industry. I also mean higher educational levels, modern science and culture, and all the higher levels of productivity that flow from their expansion. At every ‘stage’ in human development you see a corresponding development, deployment and advance in energy resources. When humans moved from renewable resources (burning up the forests, cooking and heating with cow dung) to fossil fuels, as a species we started up the ladder of better and more productive use of energy.

Every stage of human development was accompanied, indeed based upon, an ever greater deployment of energy per capita in ever cheaper, ever more useful, ever more abundant and ever denser forms of energy. The energy of output per weight of coal is almost three to four times that of wood. But the ability to mine it, and process it, allowed it to be far more useful than wood. From coal we move to oil, which, around the period of World War I, proved to be far more useful. At every step energy forms got denser, more abundant - and cheaper.

Without this almost linear form of progression, such expansion could not have taken place. Energy really is the material basis for the expansion of the productive forces. If Marxism teaches us that part of the ultimate goal of communism is to ‘free the productive forces’ from the restraints of class society, then Marxists have to solve the contradiction among some that seek to reduce, and not expand, the use of energy that would be required to make this so.

I am not a climate change denialist, but using less energy is backward, indeed reactionary. We actually need more energy - a lot more - to transition our society away from fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. Anything we use to phase out fossil fuels has to be as abundant, useful and denser than used hitherto. It means not heading toward more diffuse forms of energy, but rather more advanced forms of dense energy profiles.

David Walters
San Francisco

Exactly

I am puzzled by Mike Macnair’s response (‘Masses and government’, November 12) to my article, ‘All power to the Labour government’ (October 15), and subsequent correspondence on the question of office versus power.

Mike asks how Alexis Tsipras (or Jeremy Corbyn) could possibly head a movement to translate office into power, having run a series of election campaigns in which he denied any intention of doing so. He poses this as a criticism of my position, whereas in fact it’s exactly the point I’ve been making all along.

Chris Knight
Lewisham