Letters

Seismic

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States has confounded both the media and the pollsters. This raises two important questions.

Firstly, why did the establishment get this so badly wrong? This can be explained partly by the fact that 62% of Americans - the majority of whom are working class - now get their news from social media, not traditional sources. But the problem with the former is that it allows people to read (and discuss) what they want to hear, which is illusory - eg, vote for Trump and he will ‘drain the swamp’, get rid of the bureaucrats on Capitol Hill, who help destroy their jobs and living standards; lock up Hillary Clinton, because she is a ‘crook’, etc. They chose to ignore the fact that their ‘saviour’ is a billionaire businessman, who until recently ran his own reality TV show - an American version of The apprentice (‘You’re fired!’) - no less. Moreover, he says he will scrap Obamacare, which at least provides a basic health service to America’s poorest (who hitherto had nothing); as well as overturn international agreements intended to protect the environment - eg, reduce carbon emissions, arrest global warming, etc (whether they would do this is another matter).

Secondly (and more importantly) - shock, horror - Trump’s victory showed that the working class still exists, even though it has succumbed to rightwing populism. So does this represent a seismic shift in the class struggle or merely a seismic shock? In Britain, for example, the day after Trump’s victory, Channel 4 News and Newsnight raised the spectre that the neoliberal agenda might be at an end; vis-à-vis the free market, globalisation, austerity, identity politics and even political correctness. If only.

The bourgeois media let slip their greatest fear: that the white working class of America (including 42% of women), the so-called ‘left behinds’, had finally woken up. Like Peter Finch, the rogue newsreader in the film, Network, they are saying, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more’. But, like Trump, they also want to throw out millions of illegal immigrants; build a wall to stop ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’; then make Mexico foot the bill, etc. Everyone is worried about his foreign policy, which could spell disaster.

But within 24 hours, Trump was already making soothing statements to reassure the neoliberal establishment. Some sections of the media began to relax a little, in the belief that the institutions of state are strong enough to deal with Trump. He might be a demagogue; but once he is ensconced in the White House, his bark will lose much of its bite. Yet, just in case, a few days later The Guardian ran a front-page headline which read: “Fightback against Trump begins”. By that it meant sections of the military, senior state department officials, not just young people demonstrating in the streets (so much for the US constitution, which some describe as ‘the most beautiful constitution in the world’). Worse still, the left is completely clueless and marginalised. It is unable to unite the working class in a struggle against neoliberalism, regardless of whether they are white, black, Latino or women, let alone the struggle for socialism. Thus it is a safe bet that the rule of the neoliberal ‘political class’ - or the managerial bureaucracy - will probably live to see another day. They are already contemptuous of bourgeois democracy as it is.

Before long it could be business as usual. (However, we shall have to see how Trump’s rightwing populist counterparts fare in next year’s European elections - eg, Marine Le Pen in France.) But, if Trump, the reality TV host, doesn’t show up for real as president of the United States, how will the ‘left behinds’ react after a year or so? If there is another meltdown like 2008, what would happen then?

Rex Dunn
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Keep it simple

Homer’s the safety officer at a nuke plant. He plonks down his lunch box on the control panel, obscuring buttons and indicator lights. Some start flashing. Homer just knocks them off. We all laugh. If Homer knew what he’d done, he’d laugh too. But he doesn’t: he’s Homer.

Trump’s in the White House. This isn’t a cartoon. He’s the leader of the free world. A winner. A role model. Commander-in-chief of the most destructive machine ever known. Which brings us back to buttons.

His campaign managers took away his Twitter account; now he’ll be given the nuclear codes. Competence is not a condition for office. The winner takes all. His campaign seemed poorly organised, thin on the ground, unsystematic, erratic, hyperbolic, implausible to most. Yet the Trumpanzee won. Why? Perhaps more importantly, what can anti-capitalists learn from the biggest defeat they have suffered in the US since the 1980 election of Reagan?

I concur with the popular explanation centred around Clinton being a lacklustre candidate, Trump representing a break with politics-as-usual, and Sanders being the only contender with a chance of beating him. The strong possibility of Trump winning, and not just in the ‘Rust Belt’, had been long predicted by Arlie Hochschild and Michael Moore, who like Cassandra were ignored. Hochschild’s book, Strangers in their own land: anger and mourning on the American right, should be reviewed in this paper.

With the Trump supporters, the pious and Brexiteers, there’s not much point saying they’re ignorant, stupid, manipulated, conned, duped, mystified, bearers of false consciousness. It won’t persuade them that they’ve erred. Moreover, name-calling, in reinforcing, not challenging, is politically counterproductive. One needs to explain such behaviour and then devise political strategies and tactics to confront it. And the first step in explaining is meta-strategic: deciding which conceptualisations and knowledge to use. It means recognising that the science of mentation applied to politics has discovered that reasoning, logic, is less influential upon both the person and the collective than is their awareness of their feelings and other affective states. As we have seen, living in a largely fact-free reality has palpable consequences.

Trump’s campaign was notoriously light on policy - why disrespect the voter, even confuse them, by burdening them with detail? - and even the sound bites were sometimes contradictory. But its success has a crucial lesson for both capitalist and anti-capitalist political organisations: it shows the weakness of political campaigning that is over-cognitive and under-affective in its orientation, in its intended effect. When considering the persuasive quality of political activity and explicit messaging, an unwarranted emphasis is placed on what is said - rather than what is not said and the non-discursive dimensions of what is happening. Academia is not alone in this discourse fever: social democrats and anti-capitalists are preoccupied with the ‘battle for ideas’, using programme and policy as orientating devices, as they try to persuade.

Thoughts, beliefs, opinions, ideas and arguments are important, but anti-capitalist politics, to its cost, has relied upon them. Anarchists and communists disable themselves politically by failing to systematically and knowingly invoke the requisite affectivity. Yes, it is true, as with the Bolshevik revolution, that political success can outpace the campaign methods derived from scientific knowledge, but it is foolhardy, even arrogant, to ignore it. Despite this, anti-capitalist organisations have never demonstrated that they are even aware of the existence of a science of political persuasion. If their practice coincides with it that’s probably fortuitous.

Most of the science is preoccupied with discursive messaging, the power of words, framing with a phrase. The effects of language are not just cognitive, but affective, and this runs through the work of social scientists, such as Drew Westen and George Lakoff, and has been applied in day-to-day politics by the Republicans’ focus group organiser, Frank Luntz - the lesson being, it’s not what you say; it’s what people hear and feel. Corbyn can say all the right words, but do they persuade, do they convince? The causal force of the affective dimension of verbal messaging is well established. Importantly this can be generalised to media other than language, thereby widening the scope of the science of political persuasion. The scientific point to be borne in mind is that, although you can’t change how the brain works, you can change how you appeal to people.

So what are the basics? In politics, words and symbols are readily recognised as useful in promoting a message, in encouraging ‘the right’ cognitive practice, for the right thoughts, ideas and opinions to spring forth. But affectivity - it just happens, right? Well, no. In an affective encounter people exercise their affordance to be affected, to experience affects, feelings, emotions, moods and sentiments; and what they experience are often the potential feelings, etc, as it were, that are being actively presented to them - borne, evoked, by what can best be called pathophors. This is almost never an automatic process: people have to be sensitised, to be trained, ‘to feel the right way at the right time’. The obvious political prescription is that we systematically identify which pathophors would be useful in our work. Wilhelm Reich and Ernst Bloch sensed this when trying to explain the success of fascists in Germany.

If cognitive processes can generate representational consciousness, then affective processes produce presentational consciousness. The consciousness of experience is acognitive, because it is solely affective: what’s experienced requires interpreting before we have a thought about it - but it’s felt immediately. Lastly, necessary conditions of successful activity and passivity include two mental aspects of being-becoming: both a practically adequate consciousness and non-consciousness (the unconscious and more), all being the result of the exercise of psychic forces. The constituents here are cognitive and affective, conative and averse, and the fantastic. As the Trump campaign showed, we must never forget the political salience of wishes, daydreams, longings, fantasies - and of their impoverishing, pervasive absence. This is a rich area for political communication.

This conception corrects the ‘being determines consciousness’ formula, which has become a dualist, dichotomous, torn-asunder, mechanical, unidirectional causal complex, either denying or denigrating the prospect of mental activity being causal, of it becoming leading, of it being other than derivative: reasons, feelings and longings are indeed causes. Albeit requiring practice, hope is a potential not-yet.

The most effective way to challenge affects is not with words, but invoking counter-affects. Reasoning has its place, but it has its limits of persuasive possibility, and that is why affective political practice is both necessary and invaluable - even decisive. Perhaps Clinton should have stopped campaigning, disappeared for a while: her presence was only making things worse.

It’s not clear what Trump wants to do in the next four years. He didn’t say much, did he? Some of the soundbites were even contradictory. So who’s putting ideas in his head? Is there anyone to compete with Breitbart’s Steve Bannon? There’s every chance Trump will get bored with the job, leaving it to competing power centres within the administration. After all, there’s only so many foreign trips he can make (and tours of the country telling rallies that America is getting great again).

And what happens when a sizeable number of his supporters feel betrayed, especially when a recession starts in the next year or so? Heaven forbid, but will someone try to give him a bullet?

Jara Handala
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Name calling

In this time of disaffection with ‘continuity politics’ (c/o Trump and Brexit), we shouldn’t lose our nerve. In opposition to populist, rightwing analysis and solutions - thin and self-contradictory as these are - we surely can’t just use insults and character-assassination, but must offer explanation and alternatives.

The workers of the poorer countries are now exploited by the corporations that have left behind so many workers in the rich countries. Let our global class seek to expropriate the wealth-making technology developed through the riches of past enclosure and slavery. But, as Lenin realised before World War I, it wasn’t enough to oppose the tsar and capital: you had to expose opportunism and reformism. (For us, these are the New Democrat/Labour trick of multicultural neoliberalism.) Voters and workers want more than name calling.

Mike Belbin
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Depravity

At times of significant development like these, for some peculiar reason the cartoonist in my psyche bobs up to the surface, so to speak.

Right now that ‘scribbling’ in my mind is of Wall Street elites, plus aggregated CEOs from the industrial-military complex, saying to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on the other side of the lay-out, ‘Well, that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into!’

The fact that Donald Trump has been voted ‘best new act of 2016’ in the apparently ever-popular talent show of the US presidential elections also reminds me of the profound truism that the all-engulfing and wholly absorbing reality of one person can be just a mildly diverting backdrop to life for another. Put in slightly more philosophical terms, we are here on this planet purely for the occasional amusement of others.

None of this is really a laughing matter, of course, because an eventual aftermath is lurking down the road. One generated by multi-millions of yet again severely disappointed, even more deeply disoriented, working class Americans following the collapse, implosion or even just a fizzling out of Trump’s big ’n’ brash, plus barmily revamped, American dreaming.

An aftermath stemming from his November 2016 supporters, who then will lunge down who knows what alleyways of socio-political depravity, career along who knows precisely which 10-lane highway of desperation and dangerous reaction. Of course, that’s assuming no properly Marxist intervention comes along in the meantime to divert things dramatically for the better.

Fingers firmly crossed, everyone?

Bruno Kretzschmar
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Two transitions

Jack Conrad has confused two different transitions (Letters, November 10): that from capitalism to the first phase of communist society; and that from the first phase of communist society to the higher phase.

Clearly, when the socialist-minded working class majority wins control of political power, capitalism would still exist and with it markets, wages, banks, money, etc, and would not finally disappear until the basis of society had been changed from class ownership to common ownership. This done, communist society has been reached, in which commodity production, markets, money, etc would no longer exist, not even in its first phase.

Marx, in the 1870s, did envisage this period of the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society into communist society lasting a while. This might have been a reasonable supposition at the time. Today, however, given the immense development of productive techniques and organisation in the intervening 150 years, this period wouldn’t need to last very long. Communist (aka socialist) society can be reached fairly quickly after the winning of political control. After all, capitalist corporations are legal constructs that can be dissolved literally with the stroke of a pen.

Jack also asserts that the distinction between “socialism” and “communism” was “an orthodox Second International formulation”. He will have difficulty demonstrating this, as not even Lenin made it before 1917. But if he’s got any evidence from the writings of Bebel, Kautsky, Hilferding, Guesde, Luxemburg and the others (including pre-1917 Lenin) I invite him to produce it.

Adam Buick
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Invalid

Phil Sharpe still doesn’t get it (Letters, November 10). I was not suggesting that there is some patent on the term ‘socialism’ and that this taken out by Herr Marx back in the 19th century. I was simply making the point that what Phil calls ‘socialism’ is not an elaboration on what Marx meant by socialism, but a departure from it. He is entitled to advance his own definition, but he is not entitled to insinuate this would somehow merit the blessing of Marx. For Marx and the Marxists there can be no market in socialism; ‘market socialism’ is an oxymoron.

With that in mind I should, perhaps, tackle Phil on his claim that the “war communism of the Bolsheviks was an attempt to develop an economy without the market”. This is the kind of poorly researched argument often put forward by libertarian ignoramuses, such as the late Murray Rothbard. According to Rothbard, “The Russians, after trying an approach to the communist, moneyless economy in their ‘war communism’ shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, reacted in horror as they saw the Russian economy heading to disaster. Even Stalin never tried to revive it, and since World War II the east European countries have seen a total abandonment of this communist ideal and a rapid move toward free markets, a free price system, profit-and-loss tests, and a promotion of consumer affluence” (‘The death wish of the anarcho-communists’, 1970).

This is delusional. For a start, it makes the fatal mistake of extracting one particular generic feature of capitalism from the constellation of interlocking features and then brashly asserting that the absence of this feature somehow signifies the existence of communism. But communism means more than just the ‘absence of markets’ - much more. In any event, what was established in the period of so-called ‘war communism’ (1918-21) - a term that was not used at the time, but retrospectively introduced by Lenin - was a system based on state ownership, not common ownership, of the means of production. State capitalism, in other words, which Lenin redefined ‘socialism’ to mean.

By a decree passed on November 29 1920, any industrial concern employing over 10 workers was to be promptly nationalised. Control of the economy became increasingly centralised in the hands of the state, and labour, far from being the freely associated labour of a communist society, was increasingly regulated and dragooned by the state and later subjected to Trotsky’s infamous ‘labour militarisation’ programme. Wage labour was not abolished, but up to 90% of wages were paid in kind. The collapse of the rouble in hyperinflation meant that money was largely, but not entirely, replaced by barter. This is hardly what a communist society is about since, obviously, barter presupposes private property too and a market.

Indeed, cause and effect are nicely put into context by another, slightly more clued up, libertarian: “The financial burden of the civil war and industrialisation, moreover, called for the nationalisation of the banks, and the subsequent devaluing of the currency. ‘The printing of notes,’ Carr argues, ‘remained the sole serious available source of funds to meet current public expenditure and to make advances to industry.’ So, although the financial policies of war communism produced the ‘virtual elimination of money from the economy’, it would be quite mistaken to view this result as the product of any anti-market intention. The destruction of the rouble, according to Carr, was ‘in no sense the produce either of doctrine or of deliberate design’. The collapse of the currency had originally ‘been treated by every responsible Soviet leader as an unmixed evil, against which all possible remedies should be invoked’. It was only after no remedy could be found that Soviet leaders began to make a virtue out of the elimination of money, and ‘the view became popular that the destruction of the currency had been a deliberate act of policy’” (PJ Boettke, ‘The Soviet experiment with pure communism’ Critical Review Vol 2, No4, 1988).

Quite simply, there never was any serious intent to introduce a genuine moneyless, communist society - either by the Soviet authorities or, more importantly, by the masses, the vast majority of whom were peasants, whose political focus centred on land reform rather than the transformation of society along communist lines. That is important, because there is simply no way in which you can impose communism (aka socialism in its classical sense) from above in the manner of Lenin’s vanguardism. The Marxist view, by contrast, is that the masses themselves must be the agents of their own emancipation. A significant majority have to both understand what the norms of the new society would entail, and endorse the values that underlie these, for a communist society to be realised at all.

In no way did Russia post-1917 remotely meet this crucial precondition and, consequently, Phil’s claim that “The war communism of the Bolsheviks was an attempt to develop an economy without the market” must be judged invalid.

Robin Cox
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Keep it real

“None of my critics 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,” asserts Phil Sharpe.

But Phil paid no heed to the replies. Robin Cox answered: “Let us be clear about this. It is not because I have some dogmatic attachment to what Marx wrote that I say this - there are actually quite a number of things that Marx wrote about where I think he erred badly.” Adam Buick responded: “Of course, Marx is not infallible and he could be wrong.” It was Marx’s counsel to “Doubt everything” and I am sure he never exempted himself from his adage.

I’m well acquainted with ‘guild socialism’, having been in the only trade union to support GDH Cole’s proposal. Being state employees, postal workers were not going to accept nationalisation for a solution, as would many on the railways and in the mines. But the adoption of the ‘Whitley councils’ - a watered-down form of workers’ participation in management in perhaps the most conservative of organisations, the British civil service - prevailed. I do concede, though, that Cole’s blueprint did provide for close links between consumers and producers, which could be interpreted as ‘production directly for use’, but it still envisaged the continuation of finance, prices and incomes as intermediaries in the process. And it would come into being through the guilds out-competing capitalist industries in the marketplace - something the cooperative movement has consistently failed to achieve.

Phil reverts to the Bolshevik experiment of war communism as an economy without the market. Indeed civil war and famine required the temporary suspension of economic laws and the introduction of various emergency measures, such as the forcible requisitions of grain. And Phil is quite right that a stable society cannot be maintained for long under such a system. If it had not been for the civil war, the Bolsheviks would have acted in 1918 as they did when the New Economic Policy was introduced in 1921. Phil’s analysis transposes cause and effect.

Some made-believe that they were on course towards the realisation of socialism, for during this period there was hyperinflation, so that money was of little use, goods were bartered and workers were paid in kind. This, the Bolshevik theoreticians deceptively argued, was a prelude to a moneyless society. Some went so far as to welcome inflation as the end of money. What did it matter if the rouble was worthless? The end of the civil war brought the Bolsheviks to reality and these policies ceased. The ‘war communism’ experience of Russia confirmed the Socialist Party of Great Britain analysis that Russia was ready at that time only for some form of capitalism with its “market and monetary categories” and not for socialism.

Let us not conflate this misdirection by Phil with his assertion that a market is indispensable to the smooth running of a socialist society and that a price-free, wage-free and money-free society is untenable. The preconditions for socialist revolution did not exist in Russia back then. They do now.

How sad it is that Phil’s rebuttal resorts to the bourgeois ‘greedy/lazy human nature’ critique, when he tells us that people will “quickly take goods beyond their own needs” and consequently it causes Phil to fixate upon the complex and wasteful system of checks and balances under “market socialism”. He is unwilling or unable to accept that, if given the right economic framework, people can consciously cooperate, work and consume together. Phil lacks the confidence that either there are sufficient resources on the planet to provide for all, or that humanity can work voluntarily and collaborate to organise production and distribution of wealth without chaos, and consume wealth responsibly without some form of rationing through the prices and wages system.

“Market socialism” is attractive to those who dislike capitalism, but it is a convoluted construct to offer as an alternative to capitalism. The SPGB will continue to struggle for a society where people accept mutual obligations and generalised reciprocity, where we understand our universal interdependency and fully realise that our decisions arising from this will profoundly affect all our choices and attitudes, and greatly influence our behaviour.

Unlike Phil, we are still real socialists.

Alan Johnstone
SPGB

Time and need

In his letter Alan Johnstone says: “In socialism, calculations will be done directly in use-values, without any general unit of calculation. Needs will be communicated to productive units as requests for specific useful things, while productive units will communicate their requirements to their suppliers as requests for other useful things” (November 10).

Alan misses another factor to be taken into account: namely, time. As Marx put it, all economy is the economy of time. Planning is not simply some matrix, where variable one is need and variable two is productive input. Capitalism has been successful in increasing wealth, because it has mechanisms for setting aside resources for research, for giving impulses to innovation (however unsatisfactory these are), etc. Socialism cannot proceed along the lines of input/output tables. It must develop mechanisms to deal with reducing the time it takes to produce things, to making things more efficient; it must also have mechanisms for saying, ‘No, we will not be producing this, even though there is a need for it.’

In this way socialism subverts the market: it says no! So I imagine a socialist society will look at car production, see a need for cars, but come to the conclusion that car ownership is so inefficient and damaging that public transport will be prioritised over it and people will realise the actual need is to move around and not to own a private car.

In other words, if a socialist system is really going to be a fundamental change from capitalism, then people will have to develop a culture where need is considered and argued over rather than being simply a reaction to the immense collection of commodities before our eyes, from which we pick what we feel we need.

I do not imagine a socialist society that responds to demand - ie, where there is a separation between producer and consumer. If you have stores where the technology determines what is demanded this week or the next and responds to this change in demand, then all you really have is a system of sale and exchange in another guise. A non-market system will ensure that those doing the demanding are absolutely involved in the discussion about what gets produced in the first place. In other words, consumption will no longer be the final step in the process, an act of satisfying need, but consumption itself will be a debated and discussed action, and will not simply be a signal for stores to produce more widgets.

Maren Clarke
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No future

Hopefully, you may wish to encourage CPGB members (and others) to read Marx: capitalism no future. This restates, in an abridged and easy-to-read manner, the basic argument of Capital. See www.capitalismnofuture.co.uk.

Jim Drysdale
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