Letters

Bowie’s side

Toby Abse is very cross, but it seems he can’t be bothered to find out who he is cross at (Letters, January 14). He quotes David Bowie’s well-known, and appalling, praise of Hitler, and goes on to say, “that is all OK for most of the so-called left”. Now “the so-called left” is a pretty vague term, and doubtless there were some varying reactions by leftwingers. But surely the best known response to Bowie’s outburst was the founding of Rock Against Racism - in response to Bowie and the overt racism of Eric Clapton.

RAR was one of the most successful anti-racist initiatives of the period and paved the way for the Anti-Nazi League. The originators (Red Saunders, Roger Huddle, Dave Widgery) were members of, or close to, the International Socialists (forerunners of the Socialist Workers Party). So that is quite a big chunk of the “so-called left”, for whom Bowie’s deplorable, if short-lived, enthusiasm for fascism was decidedly not OK. Does Toby really not know about this, or has he deliberately suppressed it from his tirade?

Toby claims that there “is absolutely no sign that [Bowie] ever made even one political statement supporting our side”. Again “our side” is a rather vague term, but how about his performances of Brecht songs from Baal and ‘Alabama song’. Or was Brecht not on “our side”?

What Toby does not actually say, though he suggests, is that Bowie’s pro-fascist utterances made him a bad musician. Personally I would sooner have Bowie than a whole barrowload of the caterwauling operas Toby is so fond of. But then if we all liked the same things it would be a boring old world.

Ian Birchall
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Bohemian scum

Whilst I don’t like David Bowie’s music and the cultural scene he stands for, although I think that it is an social-cultural important phenomenon, I would like to state my strong disagreement with Toby Abse’s remarks on Charlie Hebdo, as quoted here: “Yet most of these very same self-defining Marxists who would not hear a word against a fascist propagandist on Facebook were more or less saying in January 2015 that the martyred leftist atheist cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were blaspheming Islamophobes who deserved what they got”.

The recent issue of Christian Science Monitor reports that Charlie Hebdo has - as a reaction to the ‘events’ in Cologne on new year’s eve - published a ‘caricature’, where the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea last summer is portrayed as an adult sexually aggressing ‘our’ women. Frankly speaking, if this is true and if I do not - contrary to all the other readers of the Charlie Hebdo - totally misunderstand the message, I still don’t feel that the terrorist attack of a year ago was OK, but I feel that the hands of this Bohemian scum should be broken - if only symbolically.

Fortunately I know damn well that their cynical attitude has nothing to do with any sort of leftism. If it had I would gladly stop calling myself a leftist, which I have done since about 50 years ago.

A Holberg
Bonn

Corbyn appraisal

Not wishing to upset the Corbynistas, I think, however, it is time for a long, cool look at what that nice Mr Corbyn has to offer.

His election as leader of the Labour Party has had an impact not only on Labour, but on the left outside. Even the revolutionary left are queuing up to pay homage to JC. Many Marxists (current and lapsed) have put aside their antipathy to Labourism and clambered aboard the JC bandwagon in the last few months. And various left groupings appear to have given him their blessing.

It is reported that Corbyn’s election triggered mass resignations in Left Unity. At its November 2015 conference, LU decided to remain a party and for the time being will not stand in any parliamentary elections in order to support Jeremy Corbyn. Salman Shaheen, one of four principal speakers, tabled a motion that would pull the plug just two years after LU was founded. Shaheen’s motion failed and he subsequently resigned.

So let’s take a look at the man whose election to the leadership of the Labour Party has had such a profound effect upon the external left, and his politics. First and foremost, he is no Marxist; he is a dyed-in-the-wool left social democrat, who has been steeped in Labour Party politics for 42 years. He is, in that respect, a latter-day Michael Foot.

There are some parallels. On November 10 1980, Foot was elected leader of the Labour Party. At last, we thought, a leftwinger - a bit doddery perhaps, but nonetheless a leftwinger - leading Labour! But really we had no illusions. Tolerated and respected by the right and mythologised among the Labour ranks for his passionate oratory skills and intellectual capacity, Foot had long been waiting in the wings - the skeleton in the cupboard, some might say - before being thrust into the limelight. He was a member of parliament from 1945 to 1955 and from 1960 until 1992. He was deputy leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980, and later leader from 1980 to 1983.

Associated with the left of the Labour Party for most of his career, Foot was an ardent supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which undoubtedly would have been of major concern to the establishment, now that he was leader, and especially as his party had a 24-point lead in the polls.

They viewed Foot’s succession to the leadership as something that urgently needed to be dealt with. His support for CND at a time when the Tory government was gearing up for a major step-up in nuclear armament with plans to buy Trident and site scores of cruise missiles on UK soil despite the recession and three million unemployed, meant that he had to be destroyed politically.

Foot was famous for his old Labour pedigree, his walking stick and his somewhat shabby appearance. His election had been greeted by Tory MP Kenneth Baker with the observation: “Labour was led by Dixon of Dock Green under Jim Callaghan. Now it is led by Worzel Gummidge”. Foot never lived down Baker’s jibe and was depicted as a scarecrow on ITV’s satirical puppet show Spitting Image.

The media now had carte blanche to move in for the kill and this they proceeded to do with uninhibited enthusiasm. Like the furore over Corbyn’s supposed misdemeanours at the 2015 Remembrance Day ceremony, Foot was lambasted for wearing a duffel coat at the cenotaph in 1981 (his coat was derided as a “donkey jacket”) and the sartorial insults added to his image problems.

The media also concentrated on portraying Labour as a party with deep divisions between the left and right, since Foot’s appointment had dismayed many on the right. However, he declared in his acceptance speech that he would not compromise his left-leaning views. He told journalists: “I am as strong in my socialist convictions as I have ever been.”

The media-portrayed split in the party, as well as the Falklands War in 1982, and an ‘ill-judged’ manifesto, contributed to a heavy defeat for Labour in the general election of 1983. Gerald Kaufman, prominent on the Labour right, described the 1983 Labour manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history”. Labour’s share of the vote was just 27.6%, the lowest since 1918, and Michael Foot resigned the leadership.

Now let us put Jeremy Corbyn under the spotlight. Ideologically, he identifies as a democratic socialist. He advocates an anti-austerity platform of reversing cuts to public-sector and welfare funding made since 2010, proposing the prevention of tax evasion and avoidance by corporations and wealthy individuals, reducing corporate subsidies, and pursuing an invest-to-grow economic strategy as an alternative. He proposes renationalisation of public utilities and the railways, abolishing university tuition fees, and financing ‘people’s quantitative easing’ to fund infrastructure and renewable energy projects.

On Corbyn’s economic policies, one of Labour’s biggest donors, JML chairman John Mills, who is normally associated with the Blairite wing of the party, said the anti-austerity policies being pursued by Jeremy Corbyn “made a lot of sense” and could be popular with the public in 2020. Mills also expressed limited support for Corbyn’s plans to implement so-called “people’s quantitative easing”. He said it was sensible to borrow for investment in capital projects, but warned against any wider application, saying that it was not a “magic trick” that could be relied upon to re-inflate the economy.

However, he also warned that Labour’s plans to increase spending would be “disastrous” if they were not matched with a wider strategy to rebalance the economy in favour of manufacturing. Mills criticised Corbyn’s recent appearance in front of the Stop the War Coalition Christmas party, but said there were other signs he could move the party to the centre ground over the next few years. Mills said he would continue to fund the Labour Party, but would now concentrate more on supporting think tanks in order to shift the political and economic consensus in his direction. However, he said he was open to playing a larger role within the Labour Party if he were asked by Corbyn.

As I see it, the left perspective presented by the Corbyn project becomes increasingly flimsy and illusory with the passing of time, as in interview after interview those around him detract from the vision. Even his backers retreat before the clinical interrogation of the hostile media. The whole Corbyn thing is looking very shaky and suspect.

David Callaghan
email

Revolutionary

The Left Unity Facebook page has seen a debate over a resolution changing the party’s position from left unionism to anti-unionist internationalism. The CPGB had opposed this resolution for LU conference. Then two CPGB members, including Tina Becker, claimed, incredibly, that their party was anti-union, citing a Weekly Worker article back in 2001.

Now that Corbyn has reclaimed Left Unity’s clothes, this question has double importance for the survival of LU as an independent party with distinct politics. Unfortunately, the two key players in Left Unity - Socialist Resistance and the CPGB - are opposing the resolution with fatal consequences.

The resolution says: “1. We recognise the Acts of Union bind England with Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. 2. We call for the abolition of all the Acts of Union, thus ending all jurisdictions by the British crown over the nations of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. 3. By ending all Acts of Union, the people of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, will be able to freely choose their future relations with the people of England, whether as independent nations or in some form of voluntary federal relationship or within the European Union or in whatever form they decide.”

The crown and the union are fundamental to the constitution, as indicated in the title ‘United Kingdom’. The British ruling class defends, promotes and supports its monarchy and its unionist laws. The monarchy, House of Lords and the Acts of Union were and remain undemocratic institutions and laws which are barriers to the sovereignty of the people.

Conservatism defends the status quo. Revolutionary democracy sweeps all into the dustbin of history. Lenin explains in Two tactics of social democracy that “the revolutionary path is one of rapid amputation, which is least painful to the proletariat, the path of immediate removal of all that is putrescent, the path of least compliance with and consideration for the monarchy and the abominable, vile, rotten and noxious institutions that go with it.”

The 1707 Act of Union is precisely one of the rotten, putrescent laws that “go with” the British crown. It binds Scotland to England “forever”, securing Protestantism as the state religion, abolishing the Scottish parliament and giving the Scottish aristocracy and merchants access to the British colonies and the slave trade. Which part is relevant today?

The European Union enables the free movement of goods, services and people across the Scottish border. The ‘Little Britain Union’ is as obsolete as the Atlantic slave trade. The capitalist market is subsumed in a much bigger European Union. It makes little economic difference if Bavaria ‘leaves’ Germany, Catalonia ‘leaves’ Spain and Scotland ‘leaves’ the UK, since all remain in a union of 503 million people. The difference is in politics.

The revolutionary class approaches the national question in a revolutionary way. Scotland is part of the process of democratic revolution across the UK and Europe. Scotland’s rebellion against the Acts of Union is directly connected not only to Wales and Ireland, but England and the crisis in the EU. The revolutionary class is the only class capable of taking “the path of immediate removal of all that is putrescent”, such as the monarchy and the Acts of Union.

The nationalists claim the abolition of the Acts of Union is for the Scottish working class acting alone. This is fundamentally wrong. It is a joint enterprise for the English and Scottish workers, aided by the Irish, Welsh and wider European working class. The central problem is that the working class in England has not stepped up to the plate. The confusion in Left Unity is no more than a reflection of this conservatism.

The working class in England must play its revolutionary part. Unfortunately, in England the working class is weighed down by middle class conservatism, trade union economism, social reformism and the dead weight of the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy. This is why the fight in Left Unity is important in starting to break the working class in England away from conservative attitudes. Only then will it be possible to unite the English and Scottish workers in a joint expedition to eradicate these laws.

The British ruling class defends the British union because their rule depends on it, both domestically and internationally. They depend on conservative ideas among the middle classes corrupting the working class. Fear of change is the main weapon in building a conservative majority. With a stake in the system, the middle classes are not going to gamble, not least given the dire warnings of economic disaster. The Tory press deployed this fear in the Scottish referendum and now against Corbyn.

Scotland’s ‘forced marriage’ to England includes no right to divorce. What will replace it? The resolution says that the people of Ireland, Scotland and Wales “will be able to freely choose their future relations with the people of England, whether as independent nations or in some form of voluntary federal relationship or within the European Union or in whatever form they decide”.

Working class action to end the Acts of Union with immediate effect is self-determination considered in a revolutionary way. No clinging to the past or nostalgia for the great days of the British empire.

Revolutionary self-determination is about democratic revolution and international action by the working class in England and Scotland. The middle classes may pretend to support self-determination, but always in a conservative way, hedged by ifs, buts, maybes and probably nots. So Tina is probably right to claim that conservative self-determination is in the CPGB programme.

Steve Freeman
Left Unity and Rise

Contradiction

Self-declared Red Party member Johan Petter Andresen from Norway asks what is the position of yourselves, and thereby the CPGB, on the European Union (Letters, January 14).

And what an extremely good question that is; indeed it’s one I’d been meaning to challenge you with myself for some considerable time now. What exactly did I think to challenge and precisely why did I intend to do so? Well, presumably your organisation opposes the retention by Britain of nuclear weapons and thus the replacement of Trident. Obviously you’re against the maintenance of any standing armed forces by our UK governments. Equally I assume you’re entirely antagonistic to the existence and therefore any prolonging of Nato.

However, if I understand these overall matters correctly, in stark contrast the CPGB regards UK membership of the EU as necessary, desirable and therefore to be tacitly supported until such time as we reach a stage of European-wide revolutionary consciousness and associated anti-establishment action that will allow the dismantling and replacement of what is, in its very essence, that neocon-centric set-up and thus anti-working class gang of countries. Not to put too fine a point on matters, those being the same countries and that being the self-same EU that will send Nato troops in to support any UK government faced with a Marxist-Leninist-driven revolutionary takeover!

Once again, if correct in my understanding, it seems to me this is a massively confused and ridiculously contradictory position to take. And at least in my humble, but also considered and entirely sincere opinion, confusion and/or contradiction, alongside a lack of any inspirational plus uplifting ‘messaging’, is not the stuff that will result in the building of an effective revolutionary movement via a truly communist party here in either the socio-political situation or the cultural scenario of the modern-day UK.

Bruno Kretzschmar
email

Then and now

“That a class which lives under the conditions already sketched and is so ill-provided with the most necessary means of subsistence cannot be healthy, and can reach no advanced age, is self-evident … How is it possible, under such conditions, for the lower class to be healthy and long lived?” - Friedrich Engels, The condition of the working class in England.

In 1844, Engels presented his Condition of the working class in England to Karl Marx. He had written the monograph from his apartment in what is now the Whitworth Park student halls of residence. We wanted to know whether his statement would resonate with local students, so we set out to summarise his work and to ask them.

A blue plaque fronts Leamington House, Whitworth Park. When they took up residence, Engels and Marx had just arrived from Brussels to visit the leaders of Britain’s Chartist movement. Having developed their philosophical position, Engels arrived at the conclusion that “the condition of the working class is the real basis and point of departure of all social movements of the present because it is the highest and most unconcealed pinnacle of the social misery existing in our day”.

According to a recent study, Manchester is one of Britain’s most “working class” cities with a high factor of so-called “emergent service workers” and “precarious proletariat”. If Engels’ underlying thesis is still at all relevant, it should resound more with our peers than with any other random sample of British people. We put this point to our peers to an initially mixed reaction. Most responses to the theme of Marxism, or even socialism, were somewhat apathetic. A substantial number had not heard of Marx, let alone Engels. To some, the terms ‘Marxism’ or ‘socialism’ seemed intimidating. We saw plenty of tentative shrugs.

When pressed on the question of class more generally, however, people grew more vocal and, in spots, visibly angry. It is estimated that, nationally, one million people rely on food banks. Child poverty in Manchester is at a 120-year high. Early last semester, Manchester hosted one of the year’s largest demonstrations. Over 60,000 people marched in protest against cuts to public services and the ‘austerity’ initiatives of the Conservative government.

It is commonly accepted that young people in England vote in low numbers. The political consequence of this is that government spending is directed away from youth initiatives. Indeed, some 350 youth centres have been closed since 2012 as a result of spending cuts. All this, while the tax evasion and avoidance of large transnational corporations has further focussed the public eye on the subject of grave economic inequality. Hence, the landslide election of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party’s helm on an anti-austerity platform. We witnessed, in microcosm, the national success of the latest, radical Labour evolution on our local tour.

The positive embrace of Corbyn’s success was tangible around campus. The ‘Westminster bubble’ appeared synonymous with political injustice and inequality. The Corbyn brand was celebrated as a welcome alternative. Political injustice was still felt to relate thematically to class identity. A marked separation of ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ was felt viscerally and appeared, until recently, to have no solution. Corbyn’s success was, to many, symbolic of a larger political fight - one for social justice - which they felt could now, feasibly, be won.

Why Engels? Why now? The viciousness of the political non-voting circle is unpleasant. Yet this has not stopped people advocating political positions in other ways. Though the political act of ‘non-voting’ is, undoubtedly, counterproductive, it is not so for want of trying.

As a hub of political initiatives and ideas, Manchester overwhelmingly qualifies. Flyers and posters for talks and marches are commonplace around the city. Students make up majorities at most events. Engels may well have been proud of the place he once called home, a century and a half down the line. Yet one does not have to call oneself a Marxist to recognise that the contradictions of capitalism that Marx and Engels once highlighted are once again emerging as issues of public conscience. The observations, specifically of Engels, were markedly astute for their time and have not lost their relevance. His work, therefore, deserves revisiting.

Marx (with Engels’ assistance) took 17 years to complete his magnum opus Das Kapital. The underlying point of the work, however, was summarised in Engels’ original Condition of the working class in England back in 1844, in which he observed that “people regard each other only as useful objects: each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker underfoot; and that the powerful few … seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.”

These words seem entirely relevant in today’s political climate, where rampant inequality has emerged as, in Obama’s words, the “defining issue of our time”. Without the reinvolvement of the 19th century’s great capitalist sceptics, serious debate about a world in which the richest 1% owns as much wealth as all others has been stymied. Engels’ legacy, forgotten so often, lives on, if subconsciously, in Britain’s radical heartland. This is the time to bring it back.

Mark Montegriffo, Fergus Selsdon-Games
email

All the rage

Just to thank you for publishing my letters and for mentions in the Robbie Rix funding column (‘Get justice’, January 14).

We should encourage people from the destroyed section of our population to write in and express the social mood there. It can’t be got from anywhere else. We need to work especially hard to cultivate people who have been systematically excluded and defamed. The authorities are attacking here mercilessly. We must protect this weak area of our population or face another loss at the next stage that is upon us now, which is to attack and defame organised labour. It’s all-out war against the people. There is no limit to what the capitalist state trash will do to us. We are all vulnerable to this trash.

And, while we are at it, let’s stop using the term ‘middle class’ without quote marks and always put ‘so-called’ in front of it. We can’t give space to those whose minds are formed in segregated housing estates and who are in fact an apartheid class. Britain is an apartheid state. I would like that examined in the pages of the Weekly Worker by its consistently outstanding writers.

All praise to the CPGB and to the Weekly Worker. I will continue to read the paper each week and to donate to its fighting fund. I urge all readers to do the same. From the most badly affected and suffering part of the population comes the anger and rage which creates the revolutionary social impulse. This is where revolutions start; this is where confrontation with the state authorities is taking place every day and all over the country. It’s an undergrowth fire.

Let’s get this into the Weekly Worker. Reflect the confrontational reality which is the driving force of the struggle. Let’s get into our estates - this is where the war is raging. It’s a catastrophic social and economic and political breakdown. Our job must be to turn this rage into a revolutionary army.

Elijah Traven
Hull