Letters

Lame duck

Carla Roberts writes that ‘Corbyn should speak up’ (March 14). She notes that he is the reason why hundreds of thousands of members have joined the Labour Party and he still has a voice. Furthermore, if he spoke up in defence of Jackie Walker, for example, he could make a massive difference to the outcome of the Labour civil war.

However, that civil war is only one hurdle that Corbyn has to overcome. The main opposition is the British establishment. Parallels can be drawn with Tony Benn’s experience in Harold Wilson’s 1970s government. Benn was appointed industry secretary in 1974 with ideas about workers’ control contained in his ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’. Journalist Chapman Pincher wrote in the Daily Express at the time that he was aware that a vigilante group had been set up by the ex-deputy chief of the secret service, George Young, that included senior ex-military figures. Pincher was aware that their raison d’être was to protect the country from a ‘communist takeover’. Just like the military coup that removed Chile’s socialist government in 1973, any government that put Benn in a position of power would have to be dealt with in the same way.

Similarly, when Corbyn was voted Labour leader, an unnamed general said: “The army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that.”

Like Corbyn, Benn was smeared daily as a Marxist and a threat to parliamentary democracy. And he soon found himself increasingly isolated and conspired against by the civil service and fellow Labour MPs, who diluted his proposed radical policies. Corbyn is not even in government and he does not even raise his head above the parapet to face those who are conspiring against him, such as the media and the Labour right. If not now, when?

It is increasingly apparent that the Labour right and establishment will do all they can to stop Corbyn forming a government. And, in the unlikely event that he should come to power, there is next to no chance that any of his legislation would be voted for in parliament. He would be a lame-duck premier - just as now he appears to be a lame-duck opposition leader. I will not give up on Corbyn though - I will do everything to support him and keep alive the possibility that Britain will vote for a socialist premier.

Mick Hurst
Manchester

Become witches

Davis Shearer’s piece about me in your last issue is irritating on so many fronts, I barely know where to start (‘Reinstate Peter Gregson’, March 14). We need fewer armchair socialists with little knowledge of activism and more pragmatists, who have actually thought about how to change the world in which we live.

The first and most glaring fault is that he is too lazy to contact me to clarify tactics. If Mr Shearer even bothered to look at the petition he sneers at, he would perhaps realise that the names of those who sign are only visible for the length of time it takes for the next to sign. And nobody at Labour HQ or the Jewish Labour Movement is going to spend the seven months since the petition opened (the day the Labour Party adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition) sitting night and day, screen-grabbing every three hours (yes, every three hours, on average, another Labour Party member joins this project). The upshot is that only the petitioner (ie me) knows the names of the 1,632 who have signed.

And I will not lightly share those names with the party. For why should I? At this point, all the NEC need to know is the number of members who are standing up to them and are prepared to face expulsion, if needs be. It is the scale of the revolt that matters here, not the identities of those up in arms. If push comes to shove and it looks like the NEC are genuinely considering abandoning the IHRA, and they can give me assurances there will be no leaks or victimisation, then I will share the names of the signatories with the party’s executive director of legal affairs, Gordon Nardell QC. His reputation will be on the line if he fails to keep these people safe. And he will receive those names on the day the fate of the IHRA is to be discussed.

Indeed, at some stage the party will need to decide if and how the IHRA is going to be incorporated into the rulebook, for that challenge has been dodged. Until it does, the IHRA cannot be fully implemented: it is there in theory, but not in practice. The official advice to members is that anti-Semitism is bad, but in the absence of any other definition being given out in written form by HQ, I cannot see how anything but the Oxford English Dictionary definition that anti-Semitism is “hostility to or prejudice against Jews” can prevail. Expulsions for anything that does not reflect this definition will be open to challenge, since members can’t be expelled for something that is not in the rulebook.

Many of the party’s 550,000 members might find themselves under investigation for criticising Israel, but I think disciplinary action against them, such as the expulsion I have suffered from in the GMB, would be a step too far, because it would result in uproar. The Labour Party is saner than the GMB, thank goodness, thus far at least - and Jennie Formby is a very different kettle of fish from the GMB’s Tim Roache, which is also very fortunate. However, we must still get the party to abandon the IHRA - for, until we do, criticism of Israel will be muted, Corbyn will continue to be vulnerable and, once prime minister, his hands will be tied on ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ measures.

If only the Weekly Worker could find writers that had at least a modicum of life experience, the paper would be all the richer for it. What else has David Shearer said that galls me? Well, he misquotes and misrepresents me. Whenever I say that Jews in the UK have leverage because of the holocaust, I always make crystal-clear that it is only the Zionists that exploit that leverage. Yet Shearer fails to provide your readers with the latter part of that rationale. He also fails to understand that people are defined by their oppression and Jews are no different from us Scots in that regard. Thus one can make generalised statements about Jews without being anti-Semitic. Leverage is conferred upon smaller tribes by the bigger tribes for a number of reasons and guilt is a powerful motivator on this regard. I argue that leverage from Zionists is what has led to so many UK bodies giving up our freedom of speech on Israel so willingly. I note that all Jews have leverage, but only Zionists use it.

Shearer, like others who scribble for your august organ, has never bothered to ask the key question - one that we must all consider - why have so many British politicians embraced the IHRA definition? It is partly due to Zionist zeal, for sure, but we must understand that many in the UK believe that anti-Semitism is rife and that special measures are needed in order to protect Jews - measures which are denied to Muslims, gays, lesbians, transgender, disabled people, etc. Not for these marginalised groups do we see a two-page definition full of ‘possibles’ and ‘maybes’.

No, we in the UK kow-tow to special measures because we think Jews are more vulnerable than anyone else. And that is because they have been the most persecuted race in human history. I believe they are no longer, but I am in the minority and, of course, the Israeli government are very successful in convincing the world that they still are, and that, in order to prevent another holocaust, we must give them a country exclusively for Jews - well, one in which Jews are the master race, at least.

And it is this canard of the two-state solution that we must all rally to trash. As long as the two-state solution is on the table, we shall see what South Africa would have been, had it followed the Bantustan option. For that is what Gaza and the isolated towns of the West Bank will become, should the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Israeli government and Palestinian Authority have their way. For then we shall see an officially sanctioned apartheid state, where the right of return for the Palestinians will have been confined to the dustbin of history. If the Weekly Worker could perhaps focus on the real issues, the Palestinians would be the better-off for it. That Shearer sees my politics as eccentric is the depressing fact here.

He has not even begun to understand that, until we question the reasons behind the wholesale adoption of the IHRA, we will not be able to get those bodies who have adopted it to abandon it. And if Mr Shearer had the foggiest clue about protest and how the Overton window can be shifted, he must begin to understand that it is only when many speak as one that society listens. We must, I believe, all become witches for the witch-hunt to end. There needs to be a critical mass of trade unionists, local Government staff, party members, police, students and lecturers who are prepared to loudly and publicly breach the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism (whilst not being anti-Semitic in the OED sense), on an ongoing basis, before the governing bodies of these organisations realise they have been challenged in a manner whereby their persecution of ‘anti-Semites’ must exhaust their resources if they are to continue their various witch-hunts.

In order to defeat Israel’s scheme to undermine the BDS movement, we must take back control of the language around anti-Semitism. We must expose the IHRA definition as the fraudulent and politicised vehicle that Israel has confected in order to maintain its status quo and we can only do that by a mass campaign of civil disobedience. For no other measure will work. And as soon as David Shearer and the rest of the Weekly Worker scribblers understand that, the closer our victory will be. Who knows? Maybe even Jewish Voice for Labour might join in. Now that would be a day to celebrate.

Pete Gregson
Edinburgh

Incorrect

I disagree with Tony Greenstein in his article in last week’s paper, where he calls for a single Palestinian state (‘No longer part of left’, March 14). By doing so, Tony only pushes working class Israelis into the arms of rightwing reactionary politicians in Israel.

The single Palestinian state idea derives from the incorrect position of the Socialist Workers Party. To win over the Israeli working class to a Marxist position it is necessary to overcome their fear that Marxists want to drive the Israeli working class into the sea.

Whilst I am not a member of the International Marxist Tendency, I do agree with their position regarding Israel/Palestine. As I wrote in my letter three weeks ago, “What is needed is a socialist Palestinian state alongside a socialist Israel, as part of a socialist federation of the Middle East” (February 28).

The key word here being socialist. The call for a single capitalist Palestinian state, as put forward by Tony and the SWP, will get Marxists nowhere.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Phenomenal

What is value? According to Arthur Bough, value is a property of products. ‘Value’ means the same as ‘labour-time’ (Letters, March 14). He argues that labour-time will exist in every conceivable society - including a communist society. It follows that the law of value must also operate under communism.

This is a crude version of Smith and Ricardo’s theory of value. It has little relation to Marx’s. For Marx, value is a social relation connecting all forms of private labour when production is for exchange. Fetishism makes the value relation appear to be a commensurable property of things.

Value is the form that abstract labour takes within a society based on generalised commodity production. In other words, abstract labour is the substance of value. What does this mean? It means that, as Marx says, human labour-power is “expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure”. Unlike the concrete labour that makes use-values, abstract labour is homogenous human labour-power. Amongst other things, this means the expenditure of human labour-power is measurable by the duration required for a commodity’s production. The time necessary for the production of a commodity is not realised until that commodity is exchanged for another. In other words, exchange is a necessary condition for the realisation of the value created in production.

Contra Bough, ‘value’ is not another word for ‘labour-time’. The relation between the two depends on the mediating category of abstract labour. Like many of Marx’s categories, it has an origin, an evolution, a decline and death. Communism signifies the death of abstract labour, value, the commodity form, money and capital.

Abstract labour came into being with the generalisation of the commodity form to the expenditure of human labour-power itself. Bough ridicules this idea by suggesting that if the category of value presupposes the commodification of labour-power then it could not have existed in pre-capitalist societies. He suggests that only an ignorant or stupid person would argue that value did not exist before capitalism.

If he is asserting that there is evidence of the employment of hired labour in order to produce commodities in the ancient world, he is clearly right. Geoffrey de Ste Croix provides this in his book The class struggle in the ancient Greek world. If so, it makes sense to refer to the existence of undeveloped value relations operating at the economic periphery of the ancient world. These were based on embryonic forms of abstract labour.

However, the point is that, at the centre of a slave mode of production, the expenditure of human labour-power on the production of a surplus was value-free. Labour-time could be measured roughly (slaves in the mines of ancient Greece rarely reached their 15th birthdays), but there was a forcible extraction of a surplus, no exchange of capital for labour-power and no abstract labour. Where there is production for use and not for exchange, there is no value created and the product of labour is not a commodity.

Finally, what is the relationship between value and exchange-value? Bough attacks Maren Clarke for stating that “exchange-value is ... the form of appearance of value” (Letters, March 7). Bough denies that this is what Marx says. If so, what did Marx mean when he wrote that exchange-value is “the phenomenal form of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it” (Capital volume 1)? Does Bough not know that “phenomenal” refers to a form of appearance?

Paul B Smith
Ormskirk

Parliament coup

It is impossible to overstate what happened in parliament last week. What we witnessed was a coup against the will of the people, the overturning of a democratic vote over Brexit. This is as blatant and as dangerous as if a government was elected by majority vote, but the MPs decided to get together and deselect that government before it could take office. The implication of this development is horrendous. It is saying in brief that democracy is too good for the people, and we cannot be trusted with it. So they - our betters and masters - will take the decisions for us.

For people ostensibly on the left - folk who call themselves socialists, communists and even (God help us) anarchists - who are cheering to the rafters the most dangerous act of anti-democratic politics since the franchise, I have to say, ‘You have seriously lost the plot.’ How can people - whose base principle is supposed to be that the people, en masse and at large, should govern themselves and make their own decisions - welcome that principle being crudely overturned? They have decided that the European Union is such a progressive institution - against all the facts of its structure and role and super-capitalist motivation - that defending it against the majority votes and views of the people takes all political precedence.

I used to hear similar arguments about the so called ‘workers’ states’. Those, although not perfect, bureaucratic outposts of party rule were nonetheless ‘progressive’. Despite the despicable things they did and the effective dictatorship over the working class, they must be ‘defended’ - even when their tanks rolled in to crush rebellions of workers. With even far less paper-thin justification, I hear my erstwhile ‘comrades’ on the left defending the EU, with its unelected commission, which takes all serious policy decisions, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which set its every agenda. You people really need to take a cool, long look at the camp you are standing in.

Behind this thinking is the rotten cancer which has corrupted every attempt at creating a people’s democracy and genuine socialism. It caused the democratic workers’ committees and councils of the soviets in revolutionary USSR to be deconstructed and destroyed - by a party leadership which decided that workers were not suited to make their own direct decisions; that the party of ‘special people’, who understood things the masses didn’t, would make all the decisions on their behalf. That working people are too thick, racist, xenophobic or uninformed to be allowed to decide serious political matters; that a special political class of liberal, self-designated intellectuals, born to know better and rule over us, will decide what’s good for us and make the decisions on our behalf.

Well, we beg to differ, Labour has shot its bolt now, especially in the traditional working class regions which voted heavily to leave. Working class folk in these regions will never vote Tory, but are unlikely now to turn out to cast their votes for a party which has just ignored them on the question of the EU. Perhaps our betters and masters think we are so loyal to them because of class instincts that they can piss up our backs and we will still tip a reverential forelock to them. I hope people in the 6 out of 10 Labour-voting areas which voted ‘leave’ will now abstain from voting for the MPs who have treated them with such gross contempt.

I am reminded that the bulk of this political class are the self-same individuals who berated the National Union of Mineworkers for not holding an individual ballot before the launch of the 1984-85 strike, and that many of our self-declared left leaders also ballot-mongered us, as that sacred principle is apparently embodied. Now here we have a nationwide secret ballot, the result of which they don’t like, so they simply ignore it and hold in complete contempt all those millions who voted ‘the wrong way’.

I never ever held any faith that parliament could ever usher in fundamental changes in the balance of class power in the first place, but what happened last week is certainly a reactionary and dangerous step in the wrong direction. I tend to think that, had this happened in almost any other country in the world, there would be riots in the street, and a couple of MPs hanging off the equivalent of Westminster Bridge.

They think they have got away with it, but they are clearly unaware of the real anger, which is ‘out there’ and especially in the north. The next general election may yet be the riposte workers deliver in these areas. If it happens, it will be well deserved.

David Douglass
South Shields

Alienation

Last week’s manifestation of aberrational bitterness, anger and resentment - linked to profound personal inadequacies - was, of course, an outrage beyond description. However, the other significant truth immediately to glower out from those events in Christchurch, New Zealand, is how the elites of capitalist society have nothing of any real value to offer as a ‘counterbalance’ - nothing either by way of genuine comprehension or meaningful guidance in circumstances such as this. The only thing on offer is impotent and empty sentimentality - where purely emotional responses are not only 100% diversionary, but also highly dangerous.

The actions of the alleged perpetrator - as is almost always the case with atrocities such as this (whether of a white supremacist or Islamist-style origin) - is a youngish male. Whilst anything and everything to do with human behaviour is never simple (to say the least), the alleged actions of this individual most probably stem from deep-rooted isolation in life - alienation - as well as from an ignorance fostered by the poisonously hyper-individualistic, predominantly self-serving and thereby hugely insular nature of capitalist society.

Oh, for that long-gone era before the dominance of industrialisation and its associated urbanisation, when life primarily was a community affair - as such communistic. Oh, for those long-ago days when religion was merely the “opium of the people”, rather than the grand-scale diversion is represents here and now in modern times. Any and all religious or race-based superstitions provide a heaven-sent smokescreen for ‘globalised fascism by proxy’ - the imperialist atrocities ordinary working citizens find themselves assaulted by all around the world.

Our capitalist nation-states are the perpetrators of terrorism in its categorically most gross form - atrocities of many kinds and permutations, as inflicted upon the poor and disenfranchised in their own lands, countryside and homes. They do so almost unhindered and virtually unchallenged.

Strange as it may sound, if the alleged perpetrator of the Christchurch atrocity had grown up in surroundings that included a visible, dynamic and thus attractive Communist Party, he may well have been saved from that dreadful fate of his - from his destiny under capitalism.

Bruno Kretzschmar
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