Letters

1917 fantasy

The people of the Ukraine must rise up and overthrow the government of Zelensky. This government led the country to war, and is consequently now unpopular. Following an overthrow of the Zelensky government, a provisional government should be elected that must negotiate for peace, and convene a constituent assembly voted for by all Ukrainian people.

There is a marked similarity between the present situation in the Ukraine and that in Russia in early 1917 just prior to the February revolution that overthrew the tsarist government.

The war in Ukraine is a proxy war where the two sides consist of capitalist countries. On one side is predominantly Russia, on the other, a Nato alliance of countries that the Zelensky government has sided with.

In the document, ‘War and the Fourth International’, written in June 1934, the programmatic position of the Fourth International is stated. Below, we quote the first paragraph of a section of this document, ‘Defeatism and imperialist war’:

“In those cases where it is a question of conflict between capitalist countries, the proletariat of any one of them refuses categorically to sacrifice its historic interests - which, in the final analysis, coincide, with the interests of the nation and humanity - for the sake of the military victory of the bourgeoisie. Lenin’s formula, “Defeat is the lesser evil”, means not that defeat of one’s country is the lesser evil as compared with the defeat of the enemy country, but that a military defeat resulting from the growth of the revolutionary movement is infinitely more beneficial - to the proletariat and to the whole people - than military victory assured by ‘civil peace’. Karl Liebknecht gave an unsurpassed formula of proletarian policy in time of war: ‘The chief enemy of the people is in its own country.’ The victorious proletarian revolution not only will rectify the evils caused by defeat, but also will create the final guarantee against future wars and defeats. This dialectical attitude toward war is the most important element of revolutionary training, and therefore also of the struggle against war.”

Let us be absolutely clear what the above position states on the question of “revolutionary defeatism”: “… a military defeat resulting from the growth of the revolutionary movement is infinitely more beneficial - to the proletariat and to the whole people - than military victory assured by ‘civil peace’.”

Western mass-media ‘propaganda’ wishes to bring about a “military victory assured by ‘civil peace’”. As opposed to this, revolutionaries in the Ukraine must not accept Zelensky’s “civil peace”, but develop the revolutionary movement that western ‘propaganda’ keeps quiet about when it pretends that the Ukrainian people all support the ‘democratic’ government led by Zelensky - a government that was established by a coup, backed by the USA, in 2014.

Today’s ‘official’ Fourth International conveniently ignores its June 1934 document by now being “against all imperialisms”. In Britain, the section of the Fourth International (USec) has liquidated itself into Anti-Capitalist Resistance (ACR). Indeed, it is not made clear whether a distinct British section of the USec still actually exists.

A British section of the USec did exist, as a sect of 90 members, since its foundation in the 1980s from a split in the International Marxist Group. It has been involved in numerous “party-building” exercises that have witnessed a progressive degeneration of its politics, as it increasingly liquidates itself in order to gain more members, at any expense. It has recently liquidated itself into the ACR, which now has about 350 members, we are told.

The website of the ACR chooses to address the question of the proxy war in the Ukraine, by means of a main article on ‘The political logic of Russia’s imperialism’. In essence, the ACR chooses to further demonise Russia, thus following western mass-media hysteria, which is Russo-phobic and pro-Zelensky. The ACR breaks with Leninism, and breaks with Marx’s understanding of class, as is clear from its programme. It is a supporters’ club for the apparatus faction that runs and controls it.

The war is not a war for ‘self-determination’, but a proxy war between two groups of capitalist countries. It therefore appears as a rehearsal for a third world war.

Self-determination of nations can be carried out, in peacetime and under capitalist rule, by means of a constituent assembly elected by all of the people of the given nation. In the UK, the present government denies the right of nations to self-determination, by, for example, resisting Scotland’s desire to resolve matters by means of a referendum.

Also, the UK government denies the right of the Irish people to self-determination by continuing with its annexation of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, and its continued support for its colonial interests there. Likewise, the European Union also does not support the right of nations to self-determination, but rather restricts this right to its presently constituted national states, not to the nations within these states.

In other words, the EU’s and the UK’s professed defence of Ukraine’s right to self-determination is sheer hypocrisy. The claim by members of the ACR that the main issue in Ukraine is the right to national self-determination is but a smokescreen for a de facto support of the Nato alliance against Russia. The ACR thus tail-ends the Nato bloc.

Instead, we must call for ‘Victory to the Ukrainian revolution!’

Roy Wall
Leeds

Subjectively

Arthur Bough defends Sean Matgamna’s dual defeatist line in the Malvinas war and applies the same to the Ukraine-Russia conflict today, whilst claiming that the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has collapsed to the right since then.

The Socialist Organiser 1982 position of dual defeatism - that is, of neutrality - between British imperialism and a semi-colonial country and its “self-determination for the Falkland Islanders” policy was a clear, straightforward repudiation of the anti-imperialist Trotskyist programme. As it is today in relation to Ukraine; again, Russia is not an imperialist country, but an advanced semi-colony. In SO No83 (1982) they claimed that Argentina was also imperialist, or “nearly” imperialist, not a “typical” third world oppressed country, and that Galtieri has “mini-colonialist” motives. This was the first mooting of the theory of ‘sub-imperialism’, with which they have since degenerated into mere apologists for global imperialism.

In the current issue even those Revolutionary Communist Group/Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism anti-imperialist stalwarts view Russia as imperialist by rejecting Lenin’s definition, and regard those of us who defend it today as “essentially ticking boxes”, putting forward other boxes to tick - and then telling us in the same issue how imperialism robbed the Congo/Burkina Faso and murdered Thomas Sankara in 1987 because he repudiated the rule of the International Monetary Fund foreign debts extortion and urged all of Africa to do the same. Neither Russia nor China can do that stuff: they are not Lenin’s imperialisms; just the imperialisms of the Mail, Express and Sun.

Alan Thornett’s Workers Socialist League back then, like many groups today in relation to Ukraine, failed to distinguish between what was objectively progressive about the invasion directed against an imperialist power, or its proxy, despite the subjectively reactionary motivation of Galtieri then and Putin today.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Climate threat

The June 19 pronouncement by Germany’s government (a Social Democrat/Green/Free Democrat coalition) to bring back into operation coal-fired power plants shows its true colours: saving capitalism at all costs and to hell with humanity! This reversal will increase the country’s dependence on coal-fired electricity generation by a third.

This decision was made a few days after Gazprom reduced NordStream1 gas supplies to Germany by 60%. Germany’s economics minister, Robert Habeck (Green Party), wholeheartedly supported his government’s move, saying, “This is bitter, but in this situation essential to lower the use of gas.” Mealy-mouthed words that boil down to ‘We are comfortable giving full support to Nato’s proxy war on Russia, while ditching climate change targets’. Italy’s lash-up government is likely to react similarly and enact emergency legislation, reneging on those recent oh-so-firm pledges to reduce CO₂ emissions. Illusions in social democratic or green parties ought to fade fast in face of such double dealing and blatant ‘profit before people’ and warmongering decisions.

Marxists must prioritise the demand that the fossil fuels, coal, gas and oil, stay in the ground. The most urgent question facing humanity is imminent destruction of habitable environments, where tens and hundreds of millions of us currently live. While it is true that obtaining energy by burning gas and oil produces less CO₂ than burning coal, this is like the old argument that smoking cigars or pipes is safer than smoking cigarettes. There is still a negative outcome - a certainty in the case of fossil fuels. Burning them produces planet-overheating CO₂ and must be curtailed rapidly toward extinguishment. Burning wood and polymers (plastics) must cease immediately. As well as unwelcome CO₂, pollution of the air with carcinogenic particles and vapours arises from all these sources in varying proportions (apart from direct combustion of gas products, that is).

Carbon capture is a complete diversion, a chimera. It would be potentially calamitous, should stored CO₂ leak from capitalist-provided storage - this is simply a political diversion by capital’s desire to carry on as before. Imaginary technology conquers all … or (much more likely) not. Children may believe in unicorns, but the rest of us have the burdens of reality to carry. As for carbon credits, they are just another licence for polluters to go on polluting, actively suborning less developed or robust economies that might otherwise be part of humanity’s collaborative efforts on this front.

The choice is stark and urgent. Life on Earth is under threat. Two centuries of capitalist exploitation of the natural world have seen an accelerating loss of habitat, extinction of many species of animal and plant life, degradation of the environment, and increasing risk of disease. Industrial spoliation of soils and water tables, the seas and oceans, the air we breathe, and the food and drink we need continues apace.

Climate change has already started to illustrate the stark future that faces us all if capitalism continues. Capitalism is killing us. The liberation of humanity through scientific socialism and a cooperative social system - communism - is our only feasible future. We really do have to make the urgent choice: socialism or barbarism.

Jim Moody
email

Catastrophism

The rump National Union of Mineworkers and more importantly the mining community of Whitehaven have thrown what weight we have behind the campaign to develop Woodhouse Colliery. The mine aims at producing ‘steel coal’ - that is, coal used to produce steel.

Lots of shit is being thrown about concerning non-blast furnace steel. As a lifelong vegetarian and a vegan of 34 years, I would once have regarded myself as ‘green’ and I had a certain respect for Greenpeace. During the course of the enquiry into Woodhouse, which is now five years in the running, I have had the scales removed from my eyes. Greenpeace has thrown into the mix a scattergun of sheer myth and invention in the hope that some of the shit will stick. Part of this was the imminence of non-blast-furnace steel, but specialist evidence was submitted from the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, which systematically blew the theories out of the water. So do they now revise their propaganda? No, because, even though they know it is nonsense, they also know that you don’t know. The eco-catastrophists think this is a way of combating one of the fundamentals of all industrial production: you can’t make steel without coal, and you can’t produce much without steel.

Recycled steel is, of course, already made (using coal), but can be reused, and about 60% of steel in Britain is recycled, but two things stop it replacing ‘primary’ steel. One: there isn’t enough of it; it’s bound to be a law of diminishing returns, as demand for steel grows, but amounts of old steel declines and we don’t recycle all of it anyway. More importantly, if you’re building a new structure like a high-rise block of flats or Boris’s bridge from Scotland to Ulster, you don’t use old steel from Steptoe’s junk yard. Such a structure will fail monumentally if it carries too much weight - with disastrous effects. So nobody uses recycled steel for capital projects like that. So if British steelmakers are abandoning blast-furnace steelmaking it’s because they are coming under political pressure to do so. So much of the steel will either be produced abroad using blast furnaces or the finished steel or the products made from it will be imported. Coal is used in steel production exactly as before, only someone else will be doing it; green consciences will be eased because we aren’t actually making it here. The effect on the atmosphere will be the same (or worse), because you have to add on transport emissions.

There is an experimental system of non-blast-furnace primary steel production, using ‘hydrogenisation’ - ironically developed at Hatfield Main colliery by Richard Budge - to design an emissions-free coal power station (the Don Valley Project). The system takes the CO₂ out of the process and sends it into abandoned gas and oil wells, where it becomes solid and is trapped underground forever. The North Sea has the capacity to take all CO₂ emissions in Europe for the next 300 years. It would have produced coal power minus the two thirds emission taxes and produced the cheapest energy in the world, at around £34 per megawatt, as against £92 for nukes and £160 for wind (without subsidies).

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth circulated their anti-coal message to all its trade union contacts, asking them to pass an anti-coal mine resolution and organise workshops at which their lies can be propagated. As far as I can tell, only the obscure Calderdale Trades Council has done this. What is galling is that they never asked the union likely to organise the workers concerned, the NUM, or the mining communities campaigning for this mine, for any comment. Those who side with Greenpeace against the NUM and workers from the coal industry show how far an understanding of class and basic trade union principles has declined.

Only eight people were present at the meeting of Calderdale Trades Council that passed the motion, and two of them voted against. I doubt that any of the union branches they represent were even consulted on it, although it will now go forward as if a strong section of the unions are campaigning against the mine. They aren’t, but if they were that would be a travesty.

This is typical Greenpeace fare. Firstly no country has agreed to phase out steel production - to do that you would have to phase out the use of steel! Greenpeace advocates wind turbines, which require millions of tonnes of steel and cement to forge and build - neither of which is done without blast-furnace steel. Some countries have decided to phase out coal power electric generation, but it is actually rising, not falling. But the problem is not coal power, which can be used without CO₂ emissions. Ways of using coal power without emissions were worked on in the past, but first Margaret Thatcher and then David Cameron pulled the plug on schemes to do so, because it would have ensured the survival and growth of the coal industry, and with it the NUM.

The truth is that before the mass closure programme British coal produced over 80% of national power - from the cheapest, safest deep-mined coal in the world and employing almost 200,000 people. We now have no coal mines and only four old coal power stations, relying on heavy restricted and costly coal imports - they produce the same power as thousands of wind turbines at a tiny fraction of the cost. When they closed down 80% of our home-produced energy supply, what did people think was going to happen to energy prices, which are now totally dependent on the whim of international energy markets and the fate of world political conflicts? Yet Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace believe the energy crisis is caused because we haven’t closed all the coal power stations and are considering a new steel coal mine whose coal isn’t used for power generation.

The mine does not, of course, produce the CO₂ - it’s the process of turning it into coke and using that in the blast furnace to make steel which does that. So the real target should be the steel works and the production of steel from blast furnaces. Why are they not saying close down the steel works? The biggest lie is in the fact that CO₂ is already being emitted without the mine. So it’s not CO₂ emissions as such which are the target: it’s actually the fact that we want to mine our own coal to do it. Something like 0.5% of steel production comes from importing coal, so if we mined our own coal we would reduce the amount of CO₂ by not shipping it across the Atlantic.

David J Douglass
South Shields

Principle

Why has Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, decided to dissolve the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), facing the country with the fifth general elections in less than three years?

Do not take any notice of explanations involving trivial personal rivalries and ambitions. There is one simple overriding reason for Bennett’s step: he is a man of ‘principle’ - at least where it concerns Israel’s apartheid legislation. He is prepared to lose office, and perhaps put an end to his political career, if that is what it takes to keep the apartheid regime in the West Bank safe on its iniquitous legalistic basis.

Israel has so far avoided annexing the West Bank: there are too many Arabs there. (Before doing that, Israel will want it ethnically cleansed, as were the Syrian Golan Heights prior to being annexed.) In the meantime, Israel operates in the West Bank a regime of harsh military tyranny, an elaborate system of rule by military edicts, kangaroo courts and brutal physical repression. But in order to exempt the Jewish colonists from this regime, Israel enacted in 1967 ‘temporary’ emergency regulations, granting to these Israeli citizens living outside Israel’s territory the same legal status as that of citizens living inside the country. They have the same civil rights and are subject to the same civil and criminal laws as Israelis living in Tel-Aviv. These regulations - which form the legalistic basis of what is patently an apartheid colonial regime - are valid for a limited period and must be extended every few years. For the last 55 years, this has been a virtually automatic affair. But, this time round, extension, due this month, has come up against a political obstacle.

Bennet’s hotchpotch coalition government - formed one year ago on the basis of a single ‘principle’: anyone but Bibi (Netanyahu) - has a paper-thin majority. All its Zionist members (including the ‘left’-Zionist Meretz) agreed to vote for extending the apartheid regulations. But for the Islamists of the United Arab List (the first ever Arab party to participate in an Israeli ruling coalition) this was a bridge too far. When renewal of the regulations was tabled in the Knesset on June 6, the government did not have a majority. This would have been no problem if the rightwing opposition, which zealously supports the apartheid regime, had voted according to their ideology. But Netanyahu, a sly tactician, asked his Likud party and its allies to vote against extension, thereby causing its defeat. He knew that Bennett, a committed rightwing religious Zionist supporter of colonisation, would refuse to lead a government devoid of the legalistic instrument of apartheid in the West Bank.

Israel now finds itself back in the tumult and uncertainty of the two years preceding June 2021. Unless Netanyahu manages to form a government, the present coalition is likely to continue as a caretaker government led by Yair Lapid, with Bennett as alternate prime minister. The emergency regulations will be frozen until a new Knesset is elected, probably in October or November. What government will emerge then is uncertain, but it is a fair bet that it will continue Israel’s long-term shift to the extremes of rightwing, obscurantist Zionism.

Moshé Machover
London

Woman question

I would like to thank Anne McShane for both her engaging presentation at the June 12 Online Communist Forum and her subsequent article on Marxism and feminism, with its discerning discussion of the work of Lise Vogel (‘Women, wages and reproduction’, June 16).

As McShane points out, Marxists like Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Bebel and Kollontai did give attention to the role of social reproduction (the family, female care structures) and its importance to the production of capital. Today’s capitalists no longer want to pay overmuch for the necessary care and maintenance of workers through the family, still done mainly by women. This is yet another sign of the system’s neglect of the human side and its ultimate self-destruction.

Many socialists, however, along with radical feminists (and especially since the 1960s), have neglected or outright rejected this unitary view for a ‘dual systems’ approach. Dual systems is a simplification of ‘domestic labour’, in which alongside the economic class system (capitalist/proletariat) there is a gender class system, where all men are the rulers and beneficiaries of all women - a point of view which promotes an ahistorical analysis of family and community structures. This view has also been coopted by liberal feminism, where equality means parity: that is, some bourgeois women competing for and winning top jobs.

I was glad to see that Jack Conrad and Anne McShane seemed ultimately to agree on the unMarxist nature of the dual systems approach, which unfortunately is still characteristic of such groups as the Radical Anthropology Group. RAG views human history as beginning with a (benevolent) female class duplicitously controlling the early human horde, who are then usurped by arrogant caveman types. This implies the creation of a ruling elite of males, who then run society for the rest of human history, regardless of the mode of production.

Mike Belbin
London

Character

Jack Conrad says the Draft programme of the Weekly Worker group “moves on to the character of the British revolution” (‘Our own programme’, June 16). No, it doesn’t.

Well, it is true that it moves on to a chapter entitled ‘The character of the British revolution’, but it conspicuously fails to say anything about “the character of the British revolution” itself. The closest it comes is in its first sentence: “Capitalism can only be superseded by the working class uniting itself internationally and rallying all who are oppressed.” Yes, very good, but then what?

In his article Jack says 100% more about the “character of the British revolution”, when he (rightly) says: “The working class smashes the old state machine of the bourgeoisie, constitutes itself the ruling class and begins the transition to the communist mode of production.” But that is it - nothing more.

The truncated version of the WWG’s ‘What we fight for’ says: “The capitalist class will never willingly allow their wealth and power to be taken away by a parliamentary vote.” True, but what does this then mean for the required “character of the British revolution”?

We get a better clue reading the full, no longer published, version of ‘What we stand for’:

“The capitalist class will never allow their wealth and power to be taken away by a parliamentary vote. They will resist using every means at their disposal. Communists favour using parliament and winning the biggest possible working class representation. But workers must be readied to make revolution - peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must.” That is better, although too unclear - confused even - about the potential role of formal bourgeois democracy in the socialist revolution for my liking.

The Draft programme itself moves seamlessly from the minimum programme, to a discussion of the class structure in Britain and the role of classes in any socialist revolution, and straight to a workers’ government and the maximum programme, socialism, without any discernible join or qualitative process to bring this about.

So, despite the claims that the Draft programme is this big, bold, upfront, straight-talking, open and honest, revolutionary, programmatic document, which will help create the mass Communist Party we need and the working class into “a class for itself”, it seems the WWG is somewhat afraid of saying anything in it whatsoever about what it thinks about the likely or possible character of the British revolution, despite having the gall to entitle chapter 4 ‘The character of the British revolution’!

Perhaps candidate members or members of the WWG are at some point inducted into the secrets of the “character of the British revolution” as part of being assimilated into the organisation, not to be openly shared with the wider class, but this would make the WWG sound awfully like one of those “confessional sects” it often rails against.

Jack’s subsequent comments about the duplicity of the Socialist Workers Party and the contempt in which it holds workers are more than a little ironic in this context.

Andrew Northall
Kettering