Letters

Formulas

None of my critics (Letters, November 3) address one of my most important points, which concerns the limitations of literally defending Marx as the infallible word in relation to the character of a socialist economy.

What they fail to recognise is that the issue of elaborating the details of a socialist economy was a secondary issue for Marx. This point is indicated by the fact that David Harvey in his brilliant discussion of Marx’s political economy, The limits to capital (Oxford 1984), does not outline any conception of what Marx meant by a socialist economic formation. Such an omission was an acknowledgement that other Marxists had contributed more seriously to an elaboration of this subject.

One of the innovations after Marx was that of guild socialism, which was developed by many people, including GDH Cole. In his book The world of labour (London 1915) he made the comment: “On the other hand, it is evident that the consumer may have an indirect interest in industrial processes ... He cannot therefore afford to leave the whole control to the producer, unless he can secure that the producer’s interest shall be to supply to him as cheaply as possible. If the trade union is a trading body, dealing with the consumers, collectively or individually, the consumer’s interest will be adequately safeguarded by the commercial relation between him and the consumer” (p359).

Thus, the heresy of market socialism has a long historical pedigree. But most importantly Cole outlines how industrial democracy and the role of the market are not in contradiction. Instead they can complement each other. The role of the producer is to create goods that are wanted by consumers, and this can be ensured by low prices for goods. This means the assumption is that high quality goods will realise a successful market allocation if they are sold at the lowest possible price. Such a view is an effective defence of market socialism. The dogma of my critics does not provide any alternative to this perspective.

However, it is sobering to have a history lesson. The war communism of the Bolsheviks was an attempt to develop an economy without the market. Bukharin provides a theoretical defence of this situation in his Economics of the transition period. The problem was that this policy could not work because the economy did not create goods wanted by either the workers or peasants. Instead people barely survived on meagre rations. But it was realised, as Tony Clark contends, that economic development could only occur with the introduction of the incentives provided by the market. In this manner goods that people needed and wanted began to be produced. What was the result of the abolition of the market and the supposed acceleration of movement towards socialism? The outcome was horrific, with widespread famine, intensified exploitation and a continual lack of high-quality consumer goods.

Obviously, we could conclude that this experience is irrelevant and that with the development of the productive forces Marx’s model of socialism becomes topical. But the point is that in our contemporary socialist economy supply and demand still have to roughly correspond, and in order to ensure this possibility the role of prices and a market is needed. The lessons of history indicate that the alternative to this situation is the imposition of coercion by an over-centralised economic apparatus. This means the democratic socialist economy wanted by Tony Clark can only come about in terms of a decentralised model of workers’ cooperatives producing according to market mechanisms. But the market will be regulated in order to ensure that exploitation is not generated. This is why a workers’ state will be initially necessary in order to supervise society, but the major economic activity will correspond to the influence of the market in order to promote quality of goods and the ability to meet consumer need.

Thus he is admitting that economic efficiency is connected to the role of the market. But the choice is not between maintaining socialist principles alongside accepting austerity. Instead we can relate what is progressive and effective about the market to the principles of cooperation and solidarity. Only dogma denies this potential relationship.

Robin Cox (Letters, November 3) bases his argument according to the view that Marx cannot be wrong about a society without commodity production and exchange, or prices and markets, and instead he advocates: “Rather, the alternative is a non-market mechanism of supply and demand involving a self-regulating system of stock control and a polycentric system of planning. In other words, the pattern of consumer demand in a socialist society is principally governed by the rate at which stock is cleared in the distribution stores in accordance with the consumer’s own self-defined needs without any kind of market transaction intervening in this process whatsoever.”

This approach is a recipe for people to quickly take goods beyond their own needs, or for the state to impose its own form of coercive distribution of use-values. The progressive alternative is for a proper price system that enables the distribution of goods to realise a rational level of allocation without the necessity to impose effective rationing. We do not have to be followers of Hayek to recognise that the market is the most efficient form of distribution. Instead our task, rather than promoting unreal fantasies about socialism, should be to reconcile the market with our goals for a new social formation.

Adam Buick suggests that I am saying Marx was wrong about socialism. I agree that to argue in this manner would be crude. Marx may be describing the classless society of communism, but not a transitional society that has emerged from capitalism. The limitation of Marx was to be very brief about the economics of socialism/communism.

In contrast, he is quite detailed about the political aspects of the future society because of his study of the Paris Commune. This is precisely why his political approach is more constructive, and still represents an effective basis of an understanding of the future. However, I would agree with Tony Clark that to define this future society as the dictatorship of the proletariat is controversial, and possibly democratic socialism would be more appropriate. Ralph Miliband’s Socialism for a sceptical age (Oxford 1994) makes useful points on this issue.

The problem with Alan Johnstone’s arguments about abundance is that he does not recognise the importance of the fact that capitalism as presently constituted could realise the needs of the people of this planet. However, low wages in the major capitalist countries, combined with the adverse location of poor nations within the international division of labour, means that material requirements are inadequately realised. How do we change this situation? Firstly, by struggling for world revolution, and, secondly, by establishing transitional economies that are based on practical policies, and therefore not expressing the illusion that communism is an instant possibility. In this context the question then arises: how to allocate the ‘scarce’ resources of a planet with serious ecological problems? The answer is that there is no alternative to the role of the market, but this will not mean the promotion of anarchic levels of production in order to realise the highest level of profit, but instead the process of consumption will be based on need.

Vin Maratty’s utilisation of a quote from Stalin is unfortunate, because he abolished a perfectly rational development of market socialism in favour of a new type of exploitative society. I would also suggest that Lenin was not an opportunist, but instead recognised that only the introduction of the New Economic Policy would enable the Bolshevik regime to continue.

This situation has a lesson for us all. It will be practical problems that will continually modify how we conceive of socialism in relation to any future attempt to construct a better society. At the moment we know that the most authentic attempt to construct socialism was based on the acceptance of the role of the market. The end of the NEP did not advance the prospect of socialism, but instead consolidated the basis of a Bonapartist regime, which we can either define as a degenerated workers’ state, bureaucratic collectivist or state-capitalist.

Phil Sharpe
email

Phases

Phil Sharpe’s ‘market socialism’ is obvious nonsense (Letters, October 27). He uses an impoverished Russia and adoption of the New Economic Policy as proof. But the Soviet Republic’s strategic retreat back to the market has as much relevance for us today as does the Bolsheviks’ forcible requisitions of surplus grain from peasants under war communism or the suppression of free speech and banning of opposing parties.

However, that does not mean that his Socialist Party of Great Britain critics are right (Letters, November 3). Together all of them unscientifically conflate socialism and full communism. As if, once the working class comes to power, we can instantly do away with every feature, every limitation inherited from capitalism. In fact, the struggle for the communist mode of production begins after the political victory of the proletariat and the establishment of a regime committed to socialism.

Our starting point is therefore wage-labour, money and the market … under the rule of the working class. However, we seek to establish the communist principle of need.

Contra the SPGB, the generally accepted Marxist term for this replacement of capitalism by communism, this period of transition from one mode of production to another, is ‘socialism’. Eg, in his Critique of the Gotha programme (1875), Marx distinguishes between a first, lower, phase of communist society and a higher phase (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, pp81-90).

In the lower phase of communism the ruling principle is: “To each according to their contribution”. Individuals receive back from society - after necessary deductions - exactly what they have given in terms of labour contributed. There is, therefore, inequality because there is unequal labour time. Only in the higher phase does the principle, “From each according to their ability, to each according to his needs”, apply.

When Lenin came to write his State and revolution (1917), it was “usual” to call the first phase of communism ‘socialism’ (VI Lenin CW Vol 25, Moscow 1977, p472). It was an orthodox Second International formulation. In other words, it was not the “opportunism” of Lenin and the Bolsheviks which introduced the distinction between socialism (communism - lower phase) and communism (communism - higher phase).

As Marx recognised, life demands such a distinction. One can give the two phases of communism whatever name one likes - first and second, lower and higher, socialism and communism. What matters is the distinction.

Jack Conrad
London

No socialist

Tony Clark’s dismissal of Marx cannot pass without comment (Letters, November 3). First, he claims that Marxism is “a doctrine which falsely claims that capitalism came about primarily because of the circulation of money, rather than the energy revolution”. Let us lay this to rest with a simple quote from Marx:

“In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist” (Poverty of philosophy, chapter 2).

Note he is not talking about the earlier mercantile capitalists who can trace their roots back to Phoenician times or the bankers with a history back to the Knight Templars or Medicis and a lot earlier, but modern capitalism, given birth to by steam energy.

Secondly, Tony says Marxism is “a doctrine which simplistically places being before consciousness”. Certainly, the whole argument of the materialist conception of history is that ideas of a given epoch are the product of social conditions of that epoch. As these conditions change, so do the ideas. So, yes, saying one has to exist to think is simplistic, as much as science tells us we require air and water to be. But Marx and his epigones were not simplistic in describing the relationships. Joseph Dietzgen points out: “The universe is in every place and at any time itself new or present for the first time. It arises and passes away, passes and arises under our very hands. Nothing remains the same: only the infinite change is constant, and even the change varies. Every part of time and space brings new changes.” He goes on to explain that ideas and thoughts are just as real (material) as tangible phenomena.

Thirdly, I assume that Tony is referring to Marx and his very rarely used phrase, “dictatorship of the proletariat”, when he says: “On the revolutionary left we were all misled by Marx and his dictatorship theory.”

Sorry, Tony, if you were misled it wasn’t by Marx, but by the Lenin. Do you blame Darwin for the abuses committed from the phrase “survival of the fittest” by eugenics promoters, Tony? I thought by now most who claim to know Marx’s ideas understood that ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was used merely as a synonym for the working class conquest of political power and the democratic exercise of political power by the working class. Very different from Lenin’s application for the dictatorship of the party over the proletariat.

Marx’s theory of socialist revolution is grounded on the fundamental principle that “the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself”, a view Marx held throughout his political activity. Don’t take the SPGB’s word for it. Check out Hal Draper’s study on the expression. But, perhaps, there is a case for us Marxists to rehabilitate the term, ‘social democracy’, to make clear our position.

Tony’s forlorn hope that a now avowedly pro-capitalist political party can be won over to “the idea of a democratic socialist society” entails discarding the concept of socialism and replacing it with some version of capitalism that he and others wish to confusingly describe as “democratic socialism”. The term ‘socialism’ is found for the first time in English in the Owenite Cooperative Magazine of November 1827, arising from debates with JS Mill and it was to describe the elimination of the system of individual competition via the abolition of remuneration/the wage and holding the results of production in common, as well as the means of production. We in the SPGB have stuck to this original meaning - common ownership - not because we are dogmatic, but because it consistently provides an insight into the contradictions of capitalism.

On this occasion, it is Tony who should come clean and admit he is no socialist, democratic or otherwise.

Alan Johnstone
SPGB

Soviets

Moshé Machover credits Daryl Glaser for a “ground-breaking” article on the limitations of “council democracy” (Letters, November 3). But this point was made as far back as July 1920, as this extract from an article in the Socialist Standard of the time shows:

“The word ‘soviet’ is used by many supporters of the Bolsheviks as though it denoted some newly discovered magical power. When one is told that it merely means ‘council’, the magic vanishes.

“At the base of this system are the urban and rural councils, directly elected by the sections qualified to vote. The delegates are elected in the proportion of one delegate to every 1,000 members in the towns (up to a maximum of 1,000 councillors), and one delegate to every 100 in the country.

“Above this comes the volostcongress. A volost is a group of villages, and the congress is composed of delegates from the councils of these village groups. Next above in the order is the district congress composed of representatives from the village councils. Still higher is the county congress consisting of representatives from the urban councils and the volost congresses. Overriding all these bodies is the regional congress, made up of delegates from the urban councils and congresses of the county districts. At the apex of the system is the All-Russia Congress of Councils, which is the supreme authority of the Russian Republic. This is formed of delegates from the urban councils and the congresses of county councils.

“We have, then, six grades of authority in the Russian system. But note how they are elected.

“The ‘labouring masses’ vote once - namely, at the local councils, urban and village. This is their one and only vote. All the other grades are elected by the delegates of the congress immediately below it. The volost congress is elected by the village group councils; the district congress by the general village councils; the county congress by the urban councils and volost congresses; the regional congress by the urban councils and congresses of county districts; and the All-Russia congress by urban councils and congresses of county councils.

“We see, then, that ‘the supreme authority of the Russian Council Republic’ is removed five stages beyond the vote, reach or control of the workers” (www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1920/no-191-

july-1920/russian-dictatorship).

Adam Buick
SPGB

Cooperative

Vin Maratty states: “Marx’s Capital reveals the nature of a commodity and how a wage represents the exchange value of a worker’s labour-power. Money is a commodity used to mediate the exchange value of all other commodities As long as the market exists, workers will exchange ‘labour-power’ for a wage” (Letters, November 3).

That makes me wonder whether he has ever actually read Marx. If he had, he would be aware - and Engels discusses this at length in his supplement to Volume III of Capital - that markets, along with commodity production and exchange, have existed for around 10,000 years! In other words, commodities and markets have existed for far longer than capital or wage-labour, or, therefore, labour-power as a commodity.

To claim, therefore, that as long as markets or commodities exist, labour-power must itself assume the form of a commodity, or that labour must be exploited as wage-labour, is ridiculous. Marx himself in Capital volume 3 talks about the contradiction between labour and capital being resolved positively within worker-owned cooperatives, as a result of the workers being transformed into their own capitalists - ie, as with commodity producers during that previous 10,000 years of history, they own their own means of production.

Furthermore, Engels wrote to Bebel: “Marx and I never doubted that in the transition to the full communist economy we will have to use the cooperative system as an intermediate stage on a large scale.”

Such cooperatives operating within a transitional society necessarily produce commodities, which are sold into a market, albeit a market that is increasingly being regulated by a self-governing working class.

Arthur Bough
email

Democracy

“The Brexit battle is intensifying,” says Ian Birrell in an article entitled ‘The battle for democracy’ (The Independent November 7). He says: “At the heart of Brexit lies one word: democracy.” This is now becoming more contested, as “The debate throws up deep issues over the nature of democracy”. It is no simple matter. “Democracy, of course, goes far deeper than simply voting every few years, something underscored by despots who get their regimes rubber-stamped in dodgy elections.”

During the referendum, ‘leave’ campaigners appealed to alienated sections of the working class. They “tapped into a visceral sense of popular unease over elitism and the lack of power”. Trump has played the same card. Brexiteers claimed that “our democracy” was stolen by the European Union bureaucrats, as jobs and pay were undercut by EU migrants. “This was the rallying cry of the triumphant campaigners against the EU, declaring in the vaguest terms that Britain must ‘take back control’.” The Brexit case was thus a strange brew of democratic, British nationalist and racist arguments.

Of course, democratic arguments appeared on both sides of the EU debate. Both could agree that the EU was not democratic. Yes the bureaucracy in the EU and UK serves corporate interests. However, we have not lost ‘democracy’, because we never had it. The relationship between the EU bureaucracy and the feeble European parliament is a mirror image of Whitehall bureaucrats and Westminster ‘democracy’. The UK is an oligarchy, not a democracy. To find the origins of the problem we have to go back to the 17th century.

In making their decision over who has the legal authority to trigger article 50 to leave the EU, the high court judges say: “The bedrock of the British constitution is ... the supremacy of the crown in parliament.” They say this “was decisively confirmed in the settlement arrived at with the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and has been recognised ever since”. The people did not figure in the equation of power. Today the crown, parliament and people might seem like a circle with power moving around between them. Now the power of the people appears momentarily in elections and referenda.

On June 23 a majority of people in England and Wales voted to leave the EU. The crown lost control of the situation. With typical speed and ruthlessness the Tories dumped Cameron and gave his job to May. With the slogan, ‘Brexit means Brexit’, the crown took back power as surely as if they had mounted a coup. Now they will negotiate in secret and inform parliament and the people at a time of their own choosing after the ‘best’ deal is signed and sealed.

So far the British left has largely failed to take up the democratic questions either correctly or seriously before, during or after the referendum. They conceded hegemony to the Tories and UK Independence Party. The Labour Party accepts and supports the constitutional monarchy. The revolutionary left has no track record in fighting to extend democracy. It is the party of protest, not the party of power. Left Unity has to break from both those kinds of politics.

The people of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales were given a binary choice. With a myriad of motives and levels of consciousness they voted between the two options. The Tories and Ukip give racist interpretations to serve their own interests. But democrats point out that the people were not given a choice over what was the best kind of exit. They have not been consulted over managing the process or on the terms of leaving. The nations which want to remain have not been offered self-determination.

At the recent LU conference the party called for a democratic exit and rejected the rightwing slogan of Brexit. Socialists must fight for a people’s Dexit against the City’s Brexit. Demanding a fully democratic exit must include mobilising for a democratic revolution, the transfer of power to the people, combined with the struggle for workers’ rights. Scotland is still the key democratic battleground.

Republican socialists endorse Ian Birrell’s claim that “At the heart of Brexit lies one word: democracy.” This means nothing unless it becomes a programme for a democratic revolution which rejects the sovereignty of the crown-in-parliament for a commonwealth in England founded on the sovereignty of the people. The ‘battle for democracy’ did not end with the Tory referendum. It has only just begun.

Steve Freeman
Left Unity and Rise

Rampages

If he’s anything like the rest of us, your comrade Paul Demarty will experience episodes of personal failure in life, and certainly won’t be without his own inherent limitations, flaws of character, or even deeper fault-lines. Maybe the man throws stones at noisy neighbourhood kids or something even worse.

But setting any such considerations aside, to my mind the article of his featured in last week’s edition (‘Sow the wind, reap the windbag’, November 3) was nothing far short of a left work of art. The only possible ‘high gloss’ burnishing of its content would have been to mention the angle of how the derailed rump of the Republican Party hierarchy and Hillary Clinton’s gang have something central in common - thus in objective terms binding them together almost as close as twins.

Because, behind their deviously contrived hybrid of pretend pro-feminism-style ‘outrage’, crossbred with 100% non-existent moral superiority, both of those seemingly opposed entities regard Donald Trump’s refusal to peddle long-established mainline propaganda as his real and indeed his very worst crime.

As arrogant, hubristic, power-abusing, boorish, gross and rightfully illegal as it is, forget about any uninvited and unwelcome fondling of women’s breasts. It’s letting the cat out of the bag - about how and at least partially why the US political circus operates the way it does - that constitutes Trump’s biggest and most unforgivable crime in the eyes of those kindly ‘American patriot’ folk.

Bruno Kretzschmar
email

Trumped

So the media and the pollsters don’t run the world: the ‘impossible’ happened. It was a tight race, but in the end, along with no doubt the ‘cultural’ issues (though the black vote was down and the Latino vote divided), the establishment lost because it was indeed - Democrats take note - ‘the economy, stupid’.

Mike Belbin
email

SWP haters

Those ‘intersectionalists’ who tried to recruit Jeremy Corbyn to their all-consuming anti-Socialist Workers Party campaign by demanding a boycott of the October 8 meeting of Stand Up To Racism were sorely disappointed. While Owen Jones withdrew, Corbyn did not.

Whatever their intentions, quite predictably, they were forging another weapon to be used by the rightwing anti-Corbyn camp. Now, in addition to condoning anti-Semitism, Corbyn can also be charged with condoning the alleged ‘rape culture’ of the SWP. If you don’t join their boycott campaign, you are a ‘rape apologist’ - McCarthyite guilt by association.

Despite the blanket lifting of thousands of suspensions in the first weeks of November, some in my Ravenscourt Labour Party branch (Hammersmith CLP) do not seem to realise that the bullying campaign against Corbyn is counterproductive, has failed and backfired, massively increasing his support. Tabling a motion expressing “dismay at leadership attendance at a conference organised by the SWP”, they “call on the party leadership to apologise to survivors of sexual assault”; “to decline ... to speak at events organised by members of the SWP”; and to make the SWP “deeply unwelcome at any event this CLP is involved with”. Ingenuously, the motion expresses “strong but critical support of the leadership for as long as it is receptive to and respectful of criticism from the grassroots”.

Many SWPers attended the post-Brexit local anti-racism march to Ravenscourt Park organised by Hammersmith and Fulham Labour council, and Labour activists have been mixing with SWPers in the west London Save Our Hospitals campaign, as well as on trips to the Calais ‘jungle’, where the council has played a key role in support of refugees.

Thankfully, the SUTR meeting was a success. Jeremy Corbyn joined in the chanting of “Say it loud, say it clear - refugees are welcome here”. Sure, the SWP regard SUTR as a recruiting ground, but it is much more than that. Thanks to Jeremy’s participation as the lead speaker, I expect many more will join Labour. Diane Abbott is the chairperson, Kate Osamor is one of the vice-chairs. The TUC is sponsoring a SUTR march in early 2017. Claude Moraes MEP is a SUTR committee member.

Among the other speakers who, presumably, should “apologise to victims of sexual assault”, was our very own Lord Alf Dubs, of ‘Dubs amendment’ fame - a fellow member of Ravenscourt Labour branch - who addressed the rally as “comrades”, and who, on November 1, personally presented the SUTR petition on refugee children in Calais to the home secretary. The Ravenscourt right seem to have shot themselves in the foot.

Stan Keable
Hammersmith