Letters

Left unity

For predominantly the entire time I have been politically active, I have looked to be affiliate with the CPGB and its views, particularly the party’s attitude on unity. Although I disagreed with the party line during the recent EU referendum, I respected the debate that was allowed between the two sides.

With the result of said referendum, however, multiple issues and fears are now raised. As a person in their 20s, I, along with future generations, will have to face both the long- and short-term consequences of the decision that has been made in relation to the EU. Although some may have indeed voted to leave the EU on leftist grounds, it is my belief that the majority vote to leave is actually representative of growing rightwing and nationalist sentiment in the UK. The ‘leave’ campaign was not publicly promoted as an attempt to aid workers, but was instead backed by nationalist groups, such as Ukip.

It is from this that I draw my first fear. From my perspective, in contrast to the publicly accepted unified right (which is continually aided by the mainstream media), the radical left is fractured. During my time being linked to the radical left in the UK, I have come across a multitude of leftist parties, who quite often prefer to argue with themselves than to unify over common ground to challenge the real threat. Although there have been movements to attempt unification (Tusc and Left Unity), these have often been undermined or failed to gain true public recognition and acceptance, compared to rightwing parties. It is therefore my fear that this inability to unify will simply aide the rise of the right.

My second issue to come out of the EU referendum relates directly to my previous point. It is my belief that the left in the UK have for too long spent time debating with themselves in the shadows, causing the entire movement to stagnate and become disconnected with the general population. This is seen through the previously mentioned fragmentation of the left in the UK, but also the apparent arrogance of certain parties, who seem to have fallen into romanticism, preferring to create images of the Bolshevik revolution and the miners’ strikes of the 1980s instead of actively engaging in the current political landscape. I therefore not only fear the continuing rise of the right and the radical left’s lack of unity: I fear that without actual change the left cannot unify.

It is my belief that the UK radical left in general must change and attempt to create a united front for the good of the nation. This does not mean that we must lose our core views, but instead update the ideology to the period we live in now, accepting that pragmatism only compromises key beliefs if we allow it to. It is not 1848 or 1917, but 2016, and we must adapt to this. Furthermore, this does not mean we should stop debating or disagreeing. On the contrary, a great strength of the left is its ability to academically justify and debate its ideals. We must, however, create a unified front; otherwise the tide of fascism will be allowed to wash over the UK by those self-publicists and unprincipled politicians who currently run this nation.

Following on from this, I would therefore like to ask the CPGB what are its intentions? How do you intend to fight the rise of fascism? What is your plan to integrate true leftist politics back into the British general public? And how are you going to unify the left?

ZT
email

Eton mess

Groucho Marx said: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” Who wants to be in a European club that has the UK as a member? But, as the UK has left, I am much more enthusiastic about joining. A few others agree, including Scotland, Northern Ireland, Cardiff, Newcastle and London.

The Brexit vote has seen the end of Cameron, the rise of Johnson, wobbly financial markets, dangers of an economic crisis, a rise in racist attacks on Polish and other migrants, the possibility of Northern Ireland and Scotland leaving the UK, and a coup in the Labour Party.

Undermining Corbyn and planning to get rid of him started the day he was elected. Before the local elections, there was the anti-Semitism farrago. This stopped as soon as the voters spoke. The line was to wait until after the referendum. Had Cameron won, the Labour right would have moved on the grounds that Labour had performed poorly in comparison with Cameron’s ‘great’ leadership.

All this adds to the feeling this is no ordinary crisis. It may prove a terminal crisis for the two-party system. Last week before the vote I said: “Most of the outcomes of the referenda are more or less reactionary. This is why a low voter turnout is better than a high one. But there is one scenario which has revolutionary implications - Scotland and Northern Ireland votes to remain (and Wales too) and England votes to exit” (Letters, June 23).

The country avoided both the worst-case scenarios - total UK-wide victory for Cameron or Johnson. It was close to a draw. We had a high, but not very high, turnout. Shame it wasn’t much lower. The good news was that we ended up with the only potentially revolutionary outcome or, as Tory grandee Michael Heseltine said on BBC Newsnight, “We have a constitutional crisis of a scale that has never existed in my life”.

The potential Irish and Scottish rebellions give us something to work with. The Tories are very worried and so appear more united than ever. They are all keeping calm in case rocking the boat will tip their wallets into the sea. In the Labour Party class war has broken out. On the streets there are increased racist attacks. A spontaneous, angry demonstration of mainly young people gathered outside parliament last Tuesday. Chanting “Eton mess” and “Fuck off, Boris”, they were demanding another referendum. It is not all over yet.

Today we are still in the EU and will be so for at least two years. This is a long time in politics. The EU is not itself a fixed organisation, either in terms of its component nations or its political constitution. So let us refer to a future Europe as the United States of Europe and fight for that.

The ‘Remain but abstain’ campaign was in favour of fighting to remain in a capitalist EU, but not by voting for Cameron’s reactionary deal. This was not for any supposed social benefits, but because it provided greater opportunities and better circumstances to build European working class unity and make democratic revolution. After the exit vote we have to redouble our efforts to support a European democratic programme including:

l A United States of Europe - the full economic and political unification of Europe.

l A European Federal Republic - including the rights of nations to self-determination.

l A democratic, secular and social republic.

l A European democratic revolution - transfer of power to the sovereign people, elections to a constituent assembly, elected workplace councils, abolition of existing European constitutional treaties.

How did the ‘United States of Europe’ figure in the Tory referendum? It was raised by Boris Johnson. He presented it as the bogey man, which every sensible person should fear. If it is so dangerous, it must be good. Yet it was not on the ballot paper. The Tory referendum was designed by the Tories for the benefit of the Tory Party. There was no progressive, democratic European option on offer.

The working class were invited to vote for two reactionary programmes: (a) Brexit - full withdrawal from the EU; or (b) Cameron’s ‘reformed’ EU - a reactionary, discriminatory, anti-working class negotiated agreement. When two cars are racing directly at each other, it is best not to be in the back seat of either or think that offering socialist directions to the Tory drivers will avoid a crash. As with the Scottish referendum, the biggest party casualty will be the Labour Party.

You might be forgiven for thinking that in a referendum to vote for Hitler or Mussolini there was nothing to do except play the game - vote for the lesser evil or if you are feeling devilish back the one that would upset the ruling class applecart the most. This is a false choice, not simply because there are options of abstain or boycott, but because the power of the organised working class, like the power of capital, is not in the ballot box, but in working class organisation.

Opposing exit does not depend on a ballot. A political general strike would be a more effective weapon. Some people thought I was having a laugh in calling on trade unionists to plan for a political strike. The Tory budget threat is real enough. At a public meeting during the campaign I asked Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, whether the TUC was planning any industrial action in the event of Brexit? You have already guessed the answer that Matt confirmed.

Was it a mistake for Corbyn not to call for strike action against Brexit and confound Labour right? So what should we do now? First, we must defend Corbyn against the Euro plotters. Second, we must challenge the democratic legitimacy of the referendum. Third, we must support the Scottish and Irish people in the struggle to remain in the EU. Last but not least, we have to win support for a republican United States of Europe and European party to fight for this.

Steve Freeman
Left Unity and Rise

Election now

After the British people voted to leave the EU last Thursday some of those who voted ‘leave’ have already said they may have made a mistake. Over three million have signed petitions calling for a second referendum. A ‘leave’ vote was not expected by many young people, and they are very bitter about it. Now we have the resignation of David Cameron, and calls for Jeremy Corbyn to step down as well. All of this is unprecedented in British politics.

The main parties are clearly in disarray. Half the Labour shadow cabinet have resigned because they feel Jeremy Corbyn did not do enough as Labour leader to promote a ‘remain’ vote in line with party policy. Increasing numbers are calling on him to resign. The Tories have been split for decades on Europe, and now David Cameron’s resignation as prime minister ‘within three months’ has opened up all the wounds.

The Scottish National Party are considering a second referendum on Scottish independence to enable continued EU membership, Sinn Féin have called for an Irish referendum on uniting the two parts of Ireland, and Spain has called for equal sovereignty over Gibraltar. The break-up of the United Kingdom, rightly or wrongly, is imminent.

The only way to prevent a serious political crisis is for there to be a general election within months. Politics should not be about leaders: it should be entirely to do with policies. But, in reality, people vote as much on who the future prime minister might be as they do about policies. The only way to end the uncertainty would be to hold a new general election.

Britain remains seriously divided as a direct result of the EU referendum foisted on the Tories by Ukip. The hate generated by the far right during the EU campaign will not easily go away. People nationally and locally are frightened. I know of local people who voted to remain, but were too frightened to tell their friends. That is dreadful. A climate of hate has developed, largely because of the demonisation of refugees and migrants during the referendum campaign by far-right groups like Ukip and Britain First. The murder of Labour MP Jo Cox was the culmination of this climate of hate. There are already reports of racist attacks as a direct result of the referendum - this could get worse.

Rugby Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition says, loudly and clearly, that immigrants are not the cause of our problems, and that they are welcome. It is the austerity policies of successive governments, not migration, that have caused poverty and deprivation. Money should, of course, accompany migrants to ensure there is no extra strain on education, housing or other public services, including doctors. As migrants pay more in tax than they take in social benefits, there is no reason why that doesn’t happen.

We need a general election, just 15 months after the last one, to elect a government that can heal the divisions by ending austerity and promote policies that would end poverty and hate.

Pete McLaren
Rugby Tusc

Out of context

Here is my point-by-point response to Arthur Bough’s latest letter (June 23).

As to summaries of Capital, I find Anthony Brewer’s A guide to Marx’s Capital (Cambridge 1984) mostly serves my needs as a work trying to summarise what is said specifically and generally in this text (trying not to fog the summary with prejudice brought to the operation by the author, though this, as any honest scholar knows, is difficult in the extreme), supplemented by various of David Harvey’s works, both books and videos available online - all approached critically, and not blindly.

In the Marxists Internet Archive version of Wage labour and capital, the following is the second paragraph after the one that Bough cites against me:

“To say that the interests of capital and the interests of the workers are identical signifies only this: that capital and wage-labour are two sides of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other in the same way that the usurer and the borrower condition each other.”

I think that this makes clear that Marx’s tone in the paragraph that Bough cites is ironic in the extreme. In general this demonstrates the danger of taking any of the Marx-Engels corpus out of context: the context of a part of a text within the particular text in question; the context of the text in question within the larger corpus of works; and the context of the whole and the parts of the corpus in the historical period in which they were written. Bough’s method is similar to that of the evangelical Christian, who grazes the Bible for quotations that support his particular position, while ignoring those that do not, or are simply rather embarrassing in a modern context, without an appropriate holistic and critical understanding of the texts that he is drawing upon: eg, citing Leviticus 18:22 against homosexuality, while ignoring 15:19-33 on the rules around the ritual uncleanliness of menstruating women.

The citation from The Grundrisse is similarly one-sided to Bough’s citation above from Wage labour and capital: it is a description of how capitalism functions when it is able to bring together the two poles of labour and capital into a productive dialectical relationship to the temporary advantage of both; but the whole point of all of Capital (which is a later and more developed formulation of Marx’s positions) is to demonstrate that capitalism as a system is not always able to bring these poles together in a productive manner, and increasingly fails to do so - hence crisis and the need for overthrow of the system, not merely the incremental, economistic improvement of the position of the wage-worker, when this can fleetingly be achieved.

As to quantitative Marxism: when I use the word ‘gain’ I am not only thinking of the very narrowly economistic quantitative gains that Bough seems so enamoured of (whether this be levels of public spending or levels of wages): I am thinking of gains of quantity changing into ones of quality, as it were, above all - the principle of universal healthcare free at the point of delivery, the principle of full employment. The former in particular has still more or less maintained its position as a point of gain despite the neoliberal turn since around 1980: the arguments still all surround the level of spending, not whether the service should exist at all.

On the Bliar government: should Bough want to hold up for any degree of praise (from someone who obviously thinks he is some sort of Marxist) a government that dragged Britain into a US-led imperialist war and failed to repeal Thatcherite anti-trade union legislation? I think to ask the question is to get the answer.

Sean Thurlough
London

Bad review

Rex Dunn reviews the new edition of Victor Serge’s and Natalia Sedova Trotsky’s The life and death of Leon Trotsky, writing that “the position of the editors of Haymarket Books is fundamentally anti-Trotskyist!” (‘Curious delay and publication switch’, June 16).

So what? When a majority of workers arrive at a socialist understanding - not spontaneously, but on the same basis as members of a revolutionary party arrive at an equal level of socialist understanding and act politically - then the ruling class will be powerless to stop them. Neither Haymarket Books nor Trotsky nor Rex Dunn will be necessary nor will be able to stop them. So the decision to publish is not “reprehensible” or demonstrative of “the poverty of a particular brand of Marxism”.

Dunn’s review was in the worst tradition of leftwing polemical ‘logic’: dogmatic prose and denunciations in place of political analysis.

Jon D White
Socialist Party of Great Britain

CPGB response?

All significant UK and European Union political figures have indicated that, given the referendum result, the UK will leave the EU. This is contrary to the expectation consistently argued for by those in the Weekly Worker group. It gives cause for pausing and wondering to what extent they understand fundamental political processes. But first some wider-scale matters.

The result was declared by the Electoral Commission as 51.9% for ‘leave’ (17.4 million) and 48.1% for ‘remain’, on a turnout of 72.2% (46.5 million being eligible to vote). So, despite all the hullabaloo, 27.8% couldn’t be arsed or actively abstained. But it is worse than this. The commission, using the 2011 census data, estimates that in the UK 7.9 million eligible people were not electorally registered at their current address. Although it is fallacious to assume that none of these would vote - they could do so using their old address - nevertheless it is indicative. The whole UK has now shifted from household to individual registration, despite that causing a big decade-long fall in Northern Ireland.

So, adding 7.9 million to the 46.5 million, the percentages now become: 32.0% for ‘leave’, 29.7% for ‘remain’, while 38.3% didn’t vote, making the turnout 61.7%. So the most popular view of those of voting age was to ignore what had been billed as the most important political event since 1939. This is important, because most of the unregistered are working class, even if they are not currently working.

The most detailed post-voting survey is probably that done by lordashcroftpolls.com. It only asked 12,369 people how they voted and, as expected, it is skewed towards those with longer formal schooling. But Andrew Flood has made a stab at making a partisan analysis, and it is available at libcom.org.

In 1972 Tom Nairn wrote: “to be in favour of Europe … does not imply surrender to or alliance with the left’s enemies. It means exactly the opposite. It signifies recognising and meeting them as enemies for what they are, upon the terrain of reality and the future” (my emphasis, ‘The left against Europe?’ New Left Review No75). He argued that the cultural insularity of British workers and social democracy was more likely to break if the UK was in the European capitalist club. This was a minority left view during the 1975 referendum campaign. It was opposed by Jeremy Corbyn, both then and until very recently (when?).

This year Corbyn’s view and that of the Labour Party was to remain. However, he didn’t even manage to make a half-hearted effort. He consistently looked uncomfortable, at times almost glad to be in the shadow of the largish Tom Watson. The email/tweet sent out by Labour on polling day encouraged voting - but ‘forgot’ to remind the recipient that the official call was ‘remain’. And the last few days have seen a drip of leaks showing that Corbyn’s office repeatedly toned down their support and that of the party for the ‘remain’ campaign. It was as if Corbyn was sabotaging his own public position.

The Labour reactionaries have provoked and won the vote of no confidence, and they are trying to turn it into a new leadership election. Strictly speaking, the leader remains; it’s just that the bulk of the MPs want him to evaporate. Politically things are untenable, so the air needs to be cleared with a new election - and, if Corbyn wins, by now he surely realises that appeasement is useless and he needs to go on the offensive. There obviously has to be a new constitution, new rules, and the political emasculation of the Parliamentary Labour Party. But amongst Corbyn supporters who has the stomach for that? Momentum called the demo outside parliament on Monday, but control needs to be wrested from the unelected grip of Jon Lansman. Who has strategic intent to organise all this?

The referendum result has no legal status - not even that of an advisory opinion. Its nature is purely political. Do the “constitutional requirements” noted in article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty require the prior repeal by the UK parliament of the 1972 European Communities Act? Court cases could drag out the earliest time when notification can be made by Her Maj’s government to the European Council. ‘The markets’ may have to get used to uncertainty - just like ‘the precariat’ do every day.

Lastly, the Weekly Worker response to the referendum issue has puzzled me. Over the years, the commendable open policy of the paper has encouraged those within the group to offer different views, but this time no-one has taken the opportunity. I thought a letter from Moshé Machover might have cajoled someone, but no. After all, he simply said, “you have not so far published any analytic article assessing the consequences of Brexit - if it does come to pass, contrary to the professor’s prediction - for the interests of the working class and the struggle for socialism. Surely, this is a most interesting and vital theoretical question, on which you have been strangely silent. What is stopping you?” (Letters, April 21). Within the fold, is it really that monolithic?

And the regrettable CPGB response to the result: no ‘Notes for action’; no statement; no ‘CPGB political report’ podcast; no call to join Monday’s demonstration. Just a headline, “Why we boycotted the EU referendum”, added on Sunday to your February statement. Why? Is the group as paralysed as the major political parties and the ‘leave’ campaign?

Jara Handala
email

Time illusion

Maren Clarke, while not arguing whether Marx’s concepts can explain the current crisis or not, and not denying that the price of energy can trigger recession or crisis (he is referring to high energy prices), nevertheless proceeds to defend the labour theory of value, or the law of value on which Marxist economics is founded (Letters, June 23).

Maren argues that Marxism’s use of abstract labour time doesn’t mean that time itself is abstract. However, if time is not abstract it must therefore be its opposite. The dialectical opposite to the abstract is the concrete. So Maren is arguing that time has an objective material existence. If time is real, as Maren argues, will she please inform us what this time is made of: that is, what is its substance? Is she in possession of a microscope that can reveal its true nature, and if it exists beyond the range of the five senses, like many things do - for instance radio waves - is there some way we can detect its existence?

In regard to Marx’s explanation of the relationship between concrete and abstract labour, Maren argues that what is being abstracted is the concrete labour embodied in the commodity. But I did not deny this. I merely pointed out that this abstracted labour was indeed abstract and therefore mental. Maren, like most people, seems to confuse movement with time and argues that eight hours of tailoring labour is not abstract and if the worker continued non-stop they would collapse from exhaustion. However, while such labour is not abstract, exhaustion, like the bodying aging, is not a function of time but of how the body is constructed.

Of course the illusion of time is something we cannot do without. The fictional seconds, minutes, hours, days and months and years are indispensible requirements to order our lives. It is from these that we derive the illusion of time, which has no objective existence. What I am suggesting, therefore, is that, if time is an illusion, so must be the labour theory of value, which relies on the commodity having some mysterious internal value posited by labour time independent from the true source of value - demand. Those who doubt this should try making and selling something that no-one wants.

Tony Clark
Labour supporter