Letters

False premise

Speaking as a Jew (to use a turn of phrase that David Aaronovitch, David Hirsh and other Blairite/Likudniks regard as beyond the pale, when used by anybody with a Jewish background who does not share their adulation of Netanyahu), I have to take issue with some recent articles in the Weekly Worker.

The decision to prevent Rhea Wolfson standing for the Labour Party’s national executive committee would suggest that the interpretation of the recent furore about alleged anti-Semitism within the Labour Party being advanced by Tony Greenstein and others in recent issues of the Weekly Worker rests on a totally mistaken premise: namely the alleged dominant and initiating role of a pro-Israel lobby in this series of events.

It strikes me that this utterly absurd decision to refuse a nomination to a Jewish potential candidate, indeed the only Jewish potential candidate, for election to the NEC on the grounds of the alleged anti-Semitism of Momentum as an organisation reveals quite clearly that the prime movers are the Blairites - in this instance the ultra-Blairite and totally disastrous former leader of Scottish Labour, Jim Murphy, who persuaded Rhea’s Constituency Labour Party to withhold the nomination - without which she was not entitled to stand for the NEC, no matter how many other CLPs or affiliated organisations nominated her.

Given that Rhea, although ever critical of Israeli policy towards Palestinians in the West Bank and elsewhere, was certainly not an absolute anti-Zionist, had been an officer of a Jewish society at her university and, apparently, had the support of the so-called Jewish Labour Movement (the group formerly known as Poale Zion) for her candidacy, it seems beyond credibility that any pro-Israeli lobbyist anxious to discredit the Labour Party - or, to be precise, its left wing - by an instrumental use of allegations of anti-Semitism would have come up with this one (indeed this could have been very counterproductive if the intention was to tar the Labour left, as opposed to Labour’s Blairite right, with allegations of anti-Semitism, since it would not have surprised me if some Jewish member of the party had construed Murphy’s actions as anti-Semitic and complained to the compliance unit about his disgusting conduct). I accept that various pro-Israel lobbyists would have been happy to lend a hand to the Blairites in this systematic campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and his followers, but I really don’t think the whole thing was instigated in the Israeli embassy or by the World Zionist Congress and I fear that those who suggest this are making things worse for us by pushing some Labour and non-Labour leftists who are angry about the onslaught against the Corbynites towards some version of the ‘world Jewish conspiracy’ thesis, even if that is clearly not their intention.

Comrades whose own politics revolve around Israel/Palestine rather than the Labour Party appear to downplay the foul role of the Blairite, John Mann, in this. Firstly, we should note that anti-Semitism was only the second issue that Mann raised in his attack on Corbyn - the first slander was the suggestion that Corbyn was somehow involved in the cover-up of paedophile activity in Islington children’s homes decades ago, when Margaret Hodge was in charge of Islington council, and, as far as I can remember, Jeremy was a councillor in another borough - Haringey. Mann turned to using anti-Semitism when the first line of attack proved ridiculous.

The second point I would make is that Mann’s own position on Israel/Palestine in the days when he was a witch-finder general inside the National Organisation of Labour Students was the exact opposite of his present one. The supporters of Militant held to a version of the two-state solution (in their case two socialist states) and did not give unconditional support to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, whilst the youthful Mann was a one-stater (opposed to the existence of the state of Israel) and gave unconditional support to the PLO in the days before it adopted a two-state perspective. He accused the Militants of not being in favour of Palestinian rights - slandering them in a diametrically opposite way to his current defamation of Corbynites as anti-Semites. In short Mann is an opportunist who cares not two hoots about Israel/Palestine, but just uses the issue for witch-hunting, from whatever angle is politically convenient.

Lastly, once we see everything in a British perspective, as primarily an aspect of the factional struggle within the Labour Party, it is sensible to take a pragmatic position and on occasions when somebody in an important position says or does something which is damaging to the left in the party, as well as being stupid in itself, it is not our job to defend them unconditionally in the way we might defend an ordinary member who suddenly finds themselves under attack for a comment they made on Facebook years before. I refer, of course, to the idiocy of Ken Livingstone. Anybody who leads the general public to believe that he thinks Hitler was quite a reasonable bloke “before he went mad” - and then, instead of shutting up or apologising, gives four or five successive media interviews within a day, digging a deeper and deeper hole not just for himself, but for the entire left - deserves to be suspended. He damaged Naz Shah’s chances of speedy readmission, he damaged Jeremy Corbyn and he damaged Labour’s mayoral campaign in its last week. If that was not bringing the party into disrepute, I don’t know what is.

Moreover, he has a certain amount of form on this issue, unrelated to Israel/Palestine. I refer to the celebrated incident with the Jewish Evening Standard journalist and the equally famous occasion when he suggested that London’s Jews had all become wealthy and voted Tory - a rather over-simplified picture, and one that many would interpret as being anti-Semitic.

Toby Abse
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Stalinist

Phil Sharpe’s reply is much appreciated (Letters, June 2). In these days of a resurgence of sorts in the popularity of socialism, what it is we are striving and struggling towards makes debate and discussion of the essence.

We could get into a deeper argument on the Constituent Assembly, but, suffice to say, my view is that the Bolshevik reasons for not recognising it lay simply in a power-play, as they possessed a strong presence within the crucial urban soviets. But the repudiation of the CA vote was not to protect the sovereignty of the soviets, as both the Bolsheviks and their opposition shared the same goal: to substitute state and party power over them.

Socialism (or communism - as the Socialist Party of Great Britain agree with Hillel Ticktin that, in Marxist usage, the words are synonyms) has always been treated by many as a far-off objective - 500 years in the future, according to one Lenin quote. Perhaps that is our weakness - by not making it an immediacy, something to be achieved now.

I accept that the Bolshevik failure to develop socialism was based on a failure of the market system and their trust in a belief that they could through bold leaps bypass the obstacles of social and economic development and I’m sure Phil is sufficiently well-versed in Marxism to understand that “new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have been matured in the womb of the old society”. Those material conditions in Russia in 1917 could not accommodate the establishment of socialism. Lenin, therefore, moved the goalposts, changing the Marxian objective to suit the realities existing in Russia at the time. Capital development through state monopoly was the only option open to the Bolsheviks, but it led to a political dishonesty that had serious consequences for the worldwide working class.

I have to bow to Phil’s superior scholarship, for I have read neither Tony Smith nor Kevin Hudis, and only some extracts of Bukharin’s and Preobrazhensky’s works, such as the ABC of communism, which reads in one part:

“The communist method of production presupposes in addition that production is not for the market, but for use. Under communism, it is no longer the individual manufacturer or the individual peasant who produces; the work of production is effected by the gigantic cooperative as a whole. In consequence of this change, we no longer have commodities, but only products. These products are not exchanged one for another; they are neither bought nor sold. They are simply stored in the communal warehouses, and are subsequently delivered to those who need them.

“In such conditions, money will no longer be required. Communist society will know nothing of money. Every worker will produce goods for the general welfare. He will not receive any certificate to the effect that he has delivered the product to society - he will receive no money, that is to say. In like manner, he will pay no money to society when he receives whatever he requires from the common store.”

And their time-scale was not of hundreds of years, but “perhaps for 20 or 30 years it will be necessary to have various regulations. Maybe certain products will only be supplied to those persons who have a special entry in their work-book or on their work-card. Subsequently, when communist society has been consolidated and fully developed, no such regulations will be needed.”

So, I agree, the last word is not with Marx.

Phil wrote: “Alan Johnstone is not a Stalinist.” Well, Phil, I might well be a Stalinist, for he once explained:

“Future society will be socialist society. This means also that, with the abolition of exploitation, commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour-power - the main purpose of production in the future will be to satisfy the needs of society and not to produce goods for sale in order to increase the profits of the capitalists ... there will be no room for commodity production, struggle for profits, etc.”

Alan Johnstone
SPGB

Material basis

Sean Thurlough’s argument fails on every level (Letters, June 2). He doesn’t explain why he thinks that the fact of the expropriation of the capitalist class in the USSR “is enough to explain, at least partly, the concessions made to the working class in the western imperialist centres while the USSR stood”. It is only enough if you believe, or if the ruling class in the west had believed, that the working class was already ideologically committed to such an overthrow rather than, as was the case, and as the ruling class actually knew was the case, that workers in those countries had no such ideological commitment and were solidly wedded to social democracy. Indeed, had the workers in the west been ideologically committed to an overthrow of the capitalist class, no amount of social democratic concessions could have bought them off.

The only other sense in which Sean’s argument here could make any sense would be if the actual disparity between the living standards in the USSR and in the west were not that great and were diminishing, or if the propaganda put out by Stalinism about living standards and conditions in the USSR was actually believed by workers in the west. But neither was the case! Even if we discount the phoney statistics put out by the Stalinists about Soviet economic performance, there is no doubt that economic growth in the USSR in the 1930s was impressive. It is what enabled the USSR, after it was attacked by Nazi Germany, to win the war in Europe more or less single-handedly. The continued strength of that economic growth after the war and the failure of the claims of people like Hayek and Mises about the impossibility of planning certainly did worry western capital.

However, that is a far cry from any of that being of any benefit for Soviet workers. Even setting aside the fictions about Stakhanovite workers, the deaths of millions of Soviet peasants, and the fact that the primary accumulation of Soviet capital was also achieved on the backs of a squeeze on workers’ wages, hardly indicated any pass-on of the benefits of that economic growth for workers that might have been attractive to western workers. By the time the Russian tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956, it was apparent to all workers that things were not rosy in the workers’ paradise, and even many Stalinists in the west had to face up to that fact too, let alone the majority of western workers, who had never been that brainwashed.

If western workers had any doubt about it, they only had to look at the huge numbers of workers trying to get out of East Germany into a still shattered and occupied West Germany, and the fact that the East German Stalinists had to build a wall to keep them in. Why would anyone in their right mind think that western capitalists would even think that western workers might be attracted to such a hell hole and so have to be bought off from it?

But Sean also fails to deal with the other aspects of my response to Mike Macnair in regard to the idea that the social democratic measures of a welfare state, etc, were only introduced as concessions, wrung out of it, and out of fear that workers might be tempted by the Soviet prison camp. If that were the case, then why is it that Marx describes the actions of a regulating capitalist state in the 19th century introducing factory legislation? As Marx says in that regard, “Factory legislation … is, as we have seen, just as much the necessary product of modern industry as cotton yarn, self-actors and the electric telegraph” (Capital Vol 1, chapter 15).

And, as I pointed out, measures of social insurance were introduced in Prussia by private capitalists around the middle of the 19th century, and formed the basis of Bismarck’s proposals for national insurance. Churchill introduced the minimum wage in Britain in 1909, and the proposals for a state pension were being drawn up around the same time. How can all these measures be explained as being due to fear about workers being attracted to the USSR, when the Russian Revolution had not yet happened? Henry Ford must then have had a crystal ball too, as a pioneer of welfare capitalism, when he introduced the $5-a-day in 1914 - a full three years ahead of the Russian Revolution. But, in fact, Ford was rather late in the day, because, as with the policies of Bismarck in Germany, welfare capitalism had started to be implemented by US capitalists as early as the 1880s, much as Engels also describes the adoption of such policies in Britain, in his later Prefaces to The condition of the working class.

At the time Russia was embroiled in civil war and starving workers were returning to their villages in search of food, US workers were enjoying the start of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and hugely rising living standards. By the mid to late 1930s, workers in the Midlands and south-east of Britain were being employed in new, high paid jobs in car production and in the production of new electronic consumer goods and petro-chemicals industries, which formed the basis of the new boom after the war.

None of that was due to concessions to western workers out of fear that they might be attracted to the Soviet prison camp! What it was due to is what Marx had explained. Modern industrial capital is based upon the extraction of relative surplus value, by continual rapid improvements in technology that sharply raises productivity, and thereby reduces the value of variable and constant capital, which enables both a rise in the rate of surplus value, and of the annual rate of profit, and along with it a rise in the accumulation of capital.

This makes possible, and indeed necessary, a rise in workers’ living standards alongside a rise in profits. It is the material basis of social democracy.

Arthur Bough
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Called it wrong

I respond to Peter Manson’s article, where he reports on the historic debate at the Public and Commercial Services union conference in May concerning whether PCS should affiliate to the Labour Party (‘Edging towards affiliation’, June 2).

Firstly, it isn’t right to say the right have been in control of PCS for most of its existence. The left finally defeated the right in the Civil and Public Services Association in 1987, taking over the national executive committee, but it was stuck with Barry Reamsbottom as general secretary until legal action and a settlement eventually got rid of him.

I disagree you can reduce the debate to just the positions of the political groups only. Most delegates are not in any faction or party. It is true that the national executive is under the dominating influence of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, but there are some differences between the SPEW elements on the NEC and PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka, which explains the nuances in the conference debate that Peter did not always pick up. I was there and was one of the main speakers in that debate. I’m in no party or faction, but am a socialist independent.

It is not fair to categorise the considerable opposition as “from the right” and of “anti-politics”, as Peter did. There was a bit of that, yes, but the main opposition was delegates recalling that Labour did us no favours when, as is the case for civil servants, the government is our employer and that meant we’ve experienced Labour as our employer. Many delegates well recall that Labour did us no favours from 1997 to 2010. Their treatment of us was so bad, PCS activists who are in the Labour Party did not dare, in all that time, to raise the issue of affiliation! Only after Corbyn won the contest to be leader and addressed packed meetings across the country did they decide this was the time to raise affiliation.

To me, Labour Party members who stayed in under Blair, Brown and Miliband and are now presenting themselves as Corbynistas who argue for affiliation have no credibility. They urged a Labour vote, no matter what the policies and who is leader. I am more influenced by Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union and Mark Serwotka (and made this point at the Momentum fringe meeting), who left Labour but now rejoin because they think it is getting back to socialist ideas. They have credibility because they stuck to principles rather than auto-Labour loyalty.

Labour cut 100,000 civil service jobs, brought in various privatisations and private finance initiative building schemes. Labour ensured that Inland Revenue staff did not seriously pursue corporate tax dodgers and appointed private sector pro-business heads to most departments. It was Labour that wanted us to take on board private-sector practices and move towards being described as a business rather than a public service. In my own department - the ministry of justice (court service) - Labour brought in regional pay.

Labour did not bring back national collective pay bargaining, abolished by the Tories to force departments to negotiate their own pay settlements, which soon led to huge disparities in pay rates now between civil servants of different departments. Labour maintained pay restraint throughout their whole period in office as our employer. No wonder there is considerable resistance to the idea of affiliating to Labour.

On our industrial campaigns, time and time again PCS sought and got TUC policies of united action over pensions, then pay (‘Britain needs a pay rise’) and anti-austerity - cuts to public services. What did we see? On November 30 2011 we saw stated unity to fight the attacks on public-sector pensions when the government wanted public servants to pay more and work longer for a smaller pension. I saw non-members virtually queuing to be part of the united day of action that day. What a day it was. In Manchester, on the city-centre march after the morning’s picketing, was the first appearance of my PCS samba band, to a great reception from all the trade unions out in unity - 2.4 million workers in the biggest strike since 1926. This proved workers will take united action if it is called.

Then what happened? Within days, the Labour-affiliated unions all came to pathetic settlements, despite the original unity being on the basis of ‘no-one settles until we all settle’. They allowed the government to isolate the PCS - the union that had argued for unity in the first place! Since then, there has been no united action over pay or cuts. We see Labour-affiliated unions refusing to call national action in defence of the NHS, leaving the street protests to defend the NHS to local groups to organise. We see Labour-affiliated unions refuse to fight job cuts imposed by Labour councils.

Peter reports some of the contributions to the conference debate, but missed mentioning the softening up of Jeremy Corbyn, addressing PCS conference before that debate (and John McDonnell, who we always have anyway, but this time he is shadow chancellor). Jeremy made a number of pledges that got applause - especially restoring national pay bargaining - but pardon us for remaining cautious.

Peter totally missed my contribution to the debate, so I’ll report it myself. I was against A36 - Mark’s motion on ‘look into affiliation and report back to 2017 conference for a decision’, for A37 (non-affiliation), and against A38 (immediate affiliation). I countered Mark Serwotka’s points about “too big an opportunity to miss” and “Corbyn’s election being a political earthquake changing everything” by saying one thing hasn’t changed. That is the appalling behaviour of the major unions affiliated to Labour and their total lack of national action against austerity, their lack of opposing job cuts made by Labour councils, their selling out of the 2011 pension strike and the fact, post-Corbyn, that Unison recently consulted members who said they were up for striking over local government pay, but just went ahead and agreed a two-year deal of 1% (that meant GMB would not now take action and Unite also dropped out despite TUC policy being united action over pay).

I mentioned we need to be cautious, as we could not be in a position where Labour backtrack on all their promises to us, and then be faced with an expectation we urge our members to vote Labour in 2020. I also said that once we are in Labour the biggest unions will tell Mark to shut up, to stop rocking the boat and to just deliver a Labour vote. We have more influence outside the Labour Party and more freedom to reach and advocate our policies. I asked, would we have even called for the united action of 2011 if PCS had been affiliated to the Labour Party?

Many long-serving activists are sick and tired of united action proposed by PCS being carried at TUC congresses but not delivered, leaving PCS on its own. We want to see whether Corbyn does change Labour. Points were made that PCS should be on the inside helping Jeremy, but many feel that is fostering illusions in Labour, given the backtracking Corbyn and McDonnell have already done.

Mark genuinely feels we have to win members over, as I’d spoken to him the night before the conference debate, so you are misrepresenting him as simply referring to winning conference over. It was the same with our political fund being used to support anti-cuts candidates (actually never implemented). It took three years to get conference to that point and another year to ballot members. PCS won that ballot and still hasn’t backed any anti-cuts candidates. Mark is cautious and knows he cannot just win delegates over and plough on.

I think Peter has called this wrong and overstated the influence of SPEW/SWP and dismissed the bitter experience of PCS activists having Labour as their employer as being “anti-politics”. My contribution to that historic debate spoke for most activists there. There were few SPEW/SWP speakers.

Dave Vincent
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Time and space

Tony Clarke’s attack on Marx’s labour theory of value is absurd (Letters, June 2). The idea that time is a human construct and therefore is a pure abstraction with no real meaning is false. The concept of time was developed by humans looking at real problems and real phenomena. Saying time is not real is like saying space is not real. When we walk through air from one place to another, humans have given that the name of space. It is used by humans to describe that seemingly empty void until we bump into something made of matter, like a door.

To deny time is to deny space. When a human accountant depreciates a machine over 10 years, this is not some abstraction without existence - the machine really does wear out over its lifetime. So a machine depreciates, transfers its value to the product and eventually needs replacing. These things actually happen in real life. In fact, the only place machines last forever is in the abstract minds of gods.

Producing 200 widgets takes less time than producing 300 widgets. This is not some abstraction. Whether the grand lord of the universe believes in time or not is irrelevant - humans have to live in it and therefore have a whole army of concepts to deal with the reality.

Maren Clarke
email

Trust Cameron

I don’t think Paul Demarty’s article achieves anything at all (‘Stop treating people like idiots’, June 2). It advocates spoiling the ballot paper in the European Union referendum - what a totally useless and irrelevant suggestion, propagated by a revolutionary hack who thinks that such stupidity will bring down capitalism and usher in the Brave New World of socialism.

There are two aspects to big decisions - the rational (intelligent) and the irrational (emotional). Emotion clouds reason and so the irrational approach is not recommended. The intelligent approach to this issue is to admit that we are all totally ignorant of whether it is better to remain in or get out and to go with those most likely to know what is best based on their current appreciation of the situation. That is Cameron and Osborne.

It is intelligent to prefer to be treated by a qualified doctor rather than an unqualified quack. It is intelligent to prefer to be taught by a qualified teacher rather than an unqualified teaching assistant. Gove, Duncan-Smith, Grayling, Patel, and Johnson are not qualified to give informed comment. Farage is a boorish MEP who has little or no credibility in the European parliament. Cameron and Osborne are dealing with the issues on a day-to-day basis and are the only ones qualified to give a rational decision. Also, they have their own and their party’s long-term electoral prospects to consider. If they really believed that we were better out than in, then why would they lie?

Michael Ellison
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Fenland Labour

The North East Cambridgeshire constituency, more commonly known as Fenland, is a typical Tory shire with its four market towns. Labour has an uphill struggle. In the 2015 general election Fenland Tory MP Stephen Barclay, now a junior whip, increased his vote by 3,500 to 28,500. Ukip came second with 14,000 votes, with Labour on 7,500 and the Lib Dems and Greens on 2,500 and 1,850 respectively.

However, since Jeremy Corbyn became leader last September, membership of Fenland Labour Party has doubled to more than 300. Attendance at constituency meetings has increased from around seven to around 20. The secretary and chairwoman are both members of Momentum. A recent CLP meeting voted to send a delegate to national conference, the first for several years, by a margin of 13 to 7, in the face of opposition from the old guard.

Fenland Labour Party has started conducting work on the streets and now holds regular social events. The party also has a new, growing youth section.

Since 2004, 11,000 migrant workers, mainly from eastern Europe, have come to Fenland to work in the food processing factories. Wisbech, March and District Trades Council is working with the Eastern Region TUC and the Portuguese and Polish TUCs to promote trade union membership.

Many migrants are employed via four big employment agencies. The demand for agency workers to be directly employed on permanent contracts is essential. For those migrants already on permanent contracts there is high trade union membership, especially amongst young workers from Poland and Lithuania.

The trade unions are growing, but this is from a low base, with very little membership amongst local young people. The intervention of Marxists will be crucial in rebuilding membership in Fenland.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire