Letters

Siren call

A tediously familiar trope of Israeli hasbara (propaganda) is the ‘Hamas!’ ploy. In virtually every public meeting on Palestine/Israel, when a speaker dares to unmask the Zionist project of colonisation and its Israeli apartheid regime, a well-rehearsed advocate of ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ will pop up and cry “Hamas!”

The evident purpose of this simple tactic is to create a diversion by making it seem that the essence of the Palestine/Israel issue is a choice between Zionism and Hamas. If you oppose the former, you must be a supporter of Hamas, which relentless propaganda has managed to depict as somehow worse than the oppressive, murderous, colonial regime that gave rise to it.

A nice illustration of how this trick operates is Daniel Lazare’s anti-BDS diatribe (‘A Hamas popular front’, February 17). What on earth is the connection between the BDS campaign and Hamas? Well, here is Lazare’s argument:

“So let us begin with the first question: what is BDS? The campaign is based in Ramallah on the West Bank. Its nominal governing body is called the Palestinian BDS National Committee, which consists of a couple of dozen Palestinian organisations, one of which is the Palestinian Council of National and Islamic Forces, which includes Hamas. So, as Hamas is part of the governing structure, I think it is worthwhile looking at what it stands for.”

Just look at this sleight of hand: BDS has a nominal governing body consisting of “a couple of dozen” (in fact it is some 30) organisations. Does this body actually run BDS? Not really; it is admittedly “nominal”. One of the 30 bodies on this nominal governing body is the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces. If you look it up, you will find that this is a paper umbrella body of 15 Palestinian resistance organisations, including all those you have ever heard of (as well as some you haven’t), including Hamas.

So Lazare’s answer to the question, “what is BDS?”, is a very long spiel about Hamas - an organisation which is one of 15 members of an umbrella grouping, which is itself one of 30 members of a nominal governing board of BDS. Moreover, the BDS campaign is based in Ramallah, on the West Bank, while Hamas is based mainly in the Gaza Strip and has virtually no presence in Ramallah.

Then why does he devote so much time to a discussion of Hamas, as though it is somehow running the BDS campaign? I think the answer hardly needs to be spelt out. He is arguing like a hasbara operative, except that he has adapted the usual fake ‘Israel versus Hamas’ dichotomy to the sensibility of his socialist audience: the super-fake ‘Israeli working class versus Hamas’.

The rest of his anti-BDS arguments are not much better. He brands BDS as a cross-class “popular front”. Nonsense! BDS is not a front, but a campaign. While Marxists rightly keep out of cross-class fronts or alliances aiming to exercise political power, why should there be a taboo against cross-class campaigns on democratic and human-rights issues?

Don’t listen to this siren call aimed at undermining BDS, the most successful campaign for Palestinian rights!

Moshé Machover
London

Pro-Nato

I’ve just skimmed through the latest issue of Solidarity, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty publication. The editorial is entitled ‘For Ukraine, against Putin!’ In making its arguments for Nato and against Russia it quotes from the British Chatham House policy institute against the implementation of the Minsk II agreement. This ‘independent’ think tank is funded by corporations, government departments and wealthy individuals, some of whom have withheld their names. Members of the AWL perhaps?

John Major, the late Paddy Ashdown and George Robertson are cited as past or present honorary presidents. Robertson, the former Labour MP, was secretary general of Nato from 1999 to 2004. Clearly this institution is independent of any whiff of opposition to British or US imperialism - like the AWL itself.

But the editorial finishes with an assurance that this is not the case: “of course, in general, we are against Nato”, we are relieved to hear - although the “in general” bit sows the seeds of doubts. These are further fuelled by Eric Lee’s article, ‘Bernie Sanders is wrong about Ukraine’, which chides poor, misguided Bernie, because, although he names Putin as “the culprit in the current crisis”, he is soft on him and is worried about “the familiar drumbeats in Washington, the bellicose rhetoric that gets amplified before every war, demanding that we must ‘show strength’, ‘get tough’ and not engage in ‘appeasement’”.

Now frothing at the mouth politically, Lee demolishes the pathetic snowflake, Sanders - “appeasement” was not a good strategy in 1938, he assures us in Churchillian fury and finishes with this flourish: “The bottom line is, we must do everything possible to prevent a Russian war in Europe ... The only threat worth talking about is Russian aggression - and the answer to that threat is a stronger, not a weaker Nato.”

A clear warning shot across the bows of those European snowflakes, Germany and France. But hold on - Eric Lee is “writing in a personal opinion column”, we are relieved to hear. Of course, any half principled left publication would tell him where he could shove such ‘personal opinions’.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Chauvinist

On Monday, Vladimir Putin condemned Lenin for having given a state to the Ukrainians (and other non-Russian nationalities) after the revolution of 1917. He was right - from the point of view of a great-power chauvinist. Here’s Lenin at a congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919:

“We concluded an agreement with the red Finnish government, which existed for a short while; we made certain territorial concessions. And on account of these concessions I have heard no small number of objections of an essentially chauvinistic character. ‘There are good fisheries there, and you are relinquishing them’ is one such objection. It’s this kind of statement that I was thinking of when I said: ‘Scratch every second communist and you will find a great-power chauvinist … He sits inside many of us and he has to be fought.’”

By “red Finnish” Lenin is referring to the Red Government of Finland (Kansanvaltuuskunta in Finnish) that governed southern Finland during the Finnish Civil War from January to April 1918. Lenin’s Soviet Russia signed an agreement with the Finnish Reds, although it had also recognised the independence of Finland under the bourgeois government at the end of 1917.

Hannu Reime
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Catastrophism

Steve Cousins is simply wrong in every point in his letter (February 17) - apart from his criticism of Michael Roberts for failing to consider the rate of turnover.

Catastrophism most certainly is not code for scientific socialism. No part of Marx’s analysis of capitalism or its growing over into socialism is founded upon catastrophism or crises. And Marx’s criticism of the theories of Smith, Ricardo and Malthus, in relation to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, is indeed a criticism of their catastrophism. Smith argued that the existence of profit itself was due to the fact that labour was abundant and capital scarce, but that capital would grow faster, so that wages would rise and profits fall, leading to crises. Marx notes that this is indeed the basis of crises of overproduction, in Capital volume 3, chapter 15:

“… there would be a steep and sudden fall in the general rate of profit - but this time due to a change in the composition of capital not caused by the development of the productive forces, but rather by a rise in the money-value of the variable capital (because of increased wages) and the corresponding reduction in the proportion of surplus labour to necessary labour.”

But such crises do not destroy capitalism and even less lead to socialism, because they simply stimulate innovation and a rise in productivity. As Marx says, refuting the catastrophist view Cousins advocates,

“A distinction must he made here. When Adam Smith explains the fall in the rate of profit from an overabundance of capital, an accumulation of capital, he is speaking of a permanent effect and this is wrong. As against this, the transitory overabundance of capital, overproduction and crises are something different. Permanent crises do not exist.”

Cousins needs to explain how crises and catastrophe lead to socialism, as against leading to a strengthening of reaction - which is what happened in the 1830s, 1870s, 1920s-30s, 1970s-80s and so on, and as was described by Trotsky in Flood tide. He needs to explain his argument, as against the position set out by Marx and Engels in Capital volume 3, chapter 27, and in Anti-Dühring, of the development of large-scale socialised capital, and its adoption of planning etc, and Marx’s description of these forms of capital as the transitional forms between capitalism and socialism. Cousins fails to say how the tendency for the rate of profit to fall has any relevance to that.

How Cousins goes from the law explaining the allocation of capital between spheres, to me saying it is the basis of everything that causes imbalances and disruption, I don’t know. Marx, in explaining the way the law works by capital moving towards low organic composition spheres, makes clear that this process happens by capital accumulating more quickly in them, over time, not by some sudden disruptive reallocation.

Finally, in calculating the rate of profit, Marx uses values - ie, current reproduction costs, not historic prices - and that is the only real basis that can be used that is meaningful, because, as Marx sets out, social reproduction occurs by replacing consumed material balances “on a like for like basis”, and the replacements are all bought at their current values - not to mention that any expansion of capital (ie, accumulation, which is the whole purpose of profit and the real measurement of the rate of profit) - is necessarily at current prices.

Marx’s analysis of moral depreciation, and its role in raising the rate of profit, is the clearest example of that.

Arthur Bough
email

Basic proposition?

I’m not sure what point James Harvey is making in his ‘Me and We’ diagram, which seems to show that somehow mining is motivated by the individualist, and so called ‘renewables’ by collectivism (‘Charting the way forward’, February 17). If that is what is being suggested, it is nonsense of course. It is not a “basic proposition” to this communist at all.

Just to focus on his ‘problem’, the diagram is an illustration of coal mines, oil wells and presumably gas extraction in contradistinction to his ‘solution’, which is solar energy and wind turbines (amazingly the trees in his CO₂-free world are blooming and those where the air is richer in CO₂ are dying, which is the reversal of reality, of course). But I want to challenge his ‘solution’ as fossil fuel-free.

Is he aware that you can’t make solar panels without coal and graphite; or fix them in frames without steel and coal to make the steel, and diesel to ship the components; or coal and steel to manufacture the vessels and vehicles; or wind turbines without steel, iron and coal; or cement to house them without coal; or the propellers without petro chemicals to make them; or rare earth metals to make the rotors, etc? Neither solar panels nor turbines are renewables. The sun and wind are, but the machines to utilise this free power are man-made, using minerals and ores, which are mined.

I also challenge the notion that somehow BP investing in an ocean full of bird-chopping wind turbines is collective and presumably communist, while extracting oil (which is an integral part of their construction) is capitalist and individualist. I would suggest to you that the worker-cooperative coal mine, Tower, was a far more collective effort than anything the ‘green’ capitalist global manufacturers are doing. The world’s consumption and production of coal is rising, while gas and oil demand is at a peak.

It might seem a jolly spiffing idea for Billy Bunter public schoolboy Johnson to offshore all our coal mining, gas production and steel manufacture to someone else’s backyard, and pretend somehow we have reached carbon zero, but the truth is the world is using and needs fossil fuels. What we have to do is not sit like Canute commanding the sea not to come in, but demand that clean coal and clean carbon technologies are applied to fossil fuel usage. We need, of course, control of all resources and human invention and the ingenuity of the people of the planet through common ownership.

But do not pretend by telling countries like India - 50% of whose population have no electricity and have to heat their homes and cook their food on camel dung and waste wood fires - that not mining coal to produce the electricity they desperately need is some answer, while exploiting their vast coal reserves and making modern power systems is the problem.

Dave Douglass
South Shields

Solidarity

Grup Yorum is a revolutionary band from Turkey created in 1985. Since then it has been creating songs for social justice and giving concerts to millions all over the world. In between all the concerts and albums, Yorum members have been jailed, their members have died on hunger strike in 2020, and their concerts have been banned.

Most recently, on February 18 2022, Grup Yorum members Betül Varan and Sultan Gökçek have been given sentences of 10 years, seven months. The Turkish government accuses them of being part of a “terrorist organisation”, because of the songs they create!

Grup Yorum Solidarity Committee
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