Letters

Back to 1970s

There have been three types of response to my previous letter in the Weekly Worker (September 22). No sooner had it appeared than the social imperialists like Andrew Coates were shouting from the rooftops - at least from his blog anyway - that I had gone “CPGB (Provisional Central Committee)”, in agreeing with Mike Macnair that Nato was involved in a proxy war in Ukraine, aiming at the encirclement of China. Then we have the equally hysterical, Stalinoid/red-brown outpouring of Steve Cousins in last week’s letters (September 29), with all of his usual failure to understand basic concepts; and finally we have a more rational response in the same issue from Mike Macnair himself.

I won’t bother again setting out the response to the social-imperialists, other than to repeat that a look at what the US itself says in terms of its global objectives, or the analysis of its statements by another pro-imperialist like Paul Mason, shows that it makes no secret of wanting to destroy the ability of both Russia and China to resist US global hegemony, and how it intends to achieve it.

So let me turn to the nonsense from Steve Cousins. He accuses me of saying that the European Union is currently challenging US hegemony. A cursory look at what I actually wrote shows that not to be the case, as Mike in his letter was able to see and acknowledge. What I wrote was that it is the EU - not China, and certainly not Russia - that, currently, is the main “economic” challenger to US imperialism. If Cousins understood anything of Marxism, he would understand that it is from this economic, materialist base that everything else flows. Indeed, inter-imperialist wars, such as the two world wars, are fought between states or alliances of states, not on the basis of “constructing an alternative model”, but on the basis of which states would hold the dominant or hegemonic position within the existing model! Unless, of course, Cousins believes, along with the likes of Paul Mason, that World War II was actually a war against fascism!

Cousins, in that same framework, does tell us that “China and Russia are competitors to US hegemony, because they seek to build an alternative system”. Really? What new system would that be? Is Cousins asking us to believe that Putin’s vile, reactionary, gangster capitalist regime in Russia is still some kind of workers’ state, or some kind of socialism? Does he think that China is some kind of socialist state? Because that is the only basis upon which these states could be considered to be seeking to “build an alternative system” - or has Cousins come up with some new kind of social formation that is neither capitalist nor communist, upon which this alternative world system is to be based?

In the 1920s, as Trotsky describes, the general view was that the next war was going to be fought out by the two leading economic powers of that time, which were Britain and the United States. The reason everyone believed that to be the case was precisely the fact that the US was the rising economic power, and was thereby challenging the existing economic power of Britain and its control over the global market. All the signs of this looming war were present, as both states spent large amounts on building up their navies - seen at the time as the basis of exerting military power beyond their own borders, especially given the Atlantic Ocean that stood between them. None of that had anything to do with Cousins’ nonsense about the US seeking to “build an alternative system”, unless you consider it to be the Monroe Doctrine, and the US commitment to break apart colonial empires, in the interests of a development of imperialism based upon the needs of industrial capitalism. Nor did it prevent, in the actual inter-imperialist war that came, both states fighting on the same side.

The truth is that, similarly today, it is the EU that is the main economic competitor to the US, not China. Just as in the 1920s it was the US, not Germany, that was the main economic competitor to Britain - and from a Marxist perspective it is that fact which determines the fundamental faultlines upon which imperialist conflicts arise. Does that mean that a subordinate imperialism may not have immediate similar interests to the more dominant imperialism, as with US alliance with Britain in the world wars? Clearly not. Mike in his letter sets out the need for the EU to establish a single state, much as was achieved in Germany by Bismarck (though, as Engels describes, this was far from being completed) or by Lincoln in the US. In World War I, Britain had an incentive in supporting the subordinate French imperialism, to prevent Germany establishing such a European state, because it would have then quickly relegated British imperialism to a subordinate position, and US imperialism, coming in at the end of that war after all the existing powers had exhausted themselves, had an interest in supporting France and Britain, for a similar reason. By World War II, it was the US that was already the leading imperialist power, and again it had an incentive in preventing Germany creating a unified European superstate that would have challenged its hegemony. None of this was about “creating an alternative model”.

There is so much nonsense in the rest of Cousins’ letter that it would require a book to deal with, so I won’t bother, and instead turn to the more rational contents of Mike Macnair’s letter. Mike says that the EU could only turn its global economic rivalry with the US into an hegemonic rivalry if it created a unified state, such as those created by Bismarck and Lincoln. Well, of course, at the start of the last century, Lenin believed that a voluntary association of European states could only be formed on such a basis, given the inter-imperialist rivalries between them. He was wrong, and Trotsky was right, and Lenin himself later adopted the demand for a United States of Europe, and those states did voluntarily create such a European proto-state in the EU - which has been, again, voluntarily, forging ever closer union since its formation. Indeed, Marxist theory tells us that the economic laws must drive it necessarily to such a unified state, just as it’s driven to a single market, single currency, single monetary system, and is now driving towards a single fiscal regime, European army, and so on.

Indeed, it’s the fact that this inevitable drive is having to increasingly remove the individual states’ rights - including those of the dominant state, Germany - that has been grist to the mill of various Eurosceptic and nationalist economic forces, in Britain and elsewhere. Every crisis has formed the basis of a more rapid movement towards such a centralised state, and has done so without the need for any Bismarck or Lincoln. As Marx describes, these evolutionary developments of social forms arise behind men’s backs, as a result of the unfolding of material conditions, and not on the basis of conscious acts of individuals whose ideas simply come to them out of the blue.

The fact that the US and EU have engaged in significant trade wars against each other, imposing tariffs and other barriers on leading industries in each bloc, is evidence of the global competition between them. Nor should the divergence of interest in relation to the war in Iraq be understated. It is no accident that the war was opposed by the dominant EU powers, France and Germany, whilst being most clearly promoted by the US and its puppet, Britain. The EU was quite content to deal with the Bonapartist regimes across the Middle East and north Africa (Mena), as it sought to draw them in via the Union for the Mediterranean. The Iraq war blew all of that process apart, followed then by the involvement of the US, and its proxies in the feudal Gulf regimes that Cousins seems so enamoured by, in stoking civil war in Libya and Syria, which destabilised not only the EU’s economic ties to Mena, but its own southern borders.

Mike may be right about the need for effective party organisation. However, I think he may again have it back to front, and what is important here is to understand the historical context and stage of development of the long wave cycle. After World War II there was again a lack of such a party - and indeed a class memory, other than one suffering some form of dementia. Yet it was the material conditions, economic prosperity followed by boom in the 1950s and 60s, that led to the spontaneous rebuilding of workers’ organisations and spurred a renewed interest in Marxist ideas - however muddled and indeed deliberately bowdlerised by Stalinism many of those ideas, as communicated to workers, might have been. It is only in the 1970s, when development reaches the stage of crises of overproduction of capital (when wages rise to the extent that additional capital cannot function as capital), that the requirement for clear political leadership and solutions becomes crucial, because, at that point, the old solutions of industrial struggle can no longer be effective.

But we are not at such a point. We are indeed at an equivalent point to the late 50s or early 60s. Profit margins are at historically high levels currently, as they were then. There is no requirement, as there was in the 70s and 80s, for capital to look to a new technological revolution to replace labour, so as to reduce wages, in order to rescue those profits. It is driven by competition, and increasing demand from an expanding labour force, as US jobs numbers continue to demonstrate most clearly, to accumulate additional capital based on existing technologies - and to continue to employ more workers as it does so, giving workers precisely the position to begin to rebuild, and to mobilise.

Indeed, as I have been arguing for some time, it’s that which is causing interest rates to rise, and asset prices to crash, much as also happened in that earlier period from around 1962 onwards. It is this development of the class that will be the basis for the rebuilding of its political organisations, and of a revolutionary party, in the fire of that struggle. The task is to avoid the errors of that previous cycle in the 1960s and 70s, in which the political organisations that developed were characterised by economism, syndicalism and statism.

Arthur Bough
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Lefty monarchy

I very much enjoyed reading Paul Demarty’s deconstruction of the purpose of the royal family in holding together a country straining at the seams for change (‘On to the red republic’ September 22). But he needs to think: why do folk like modern monarchies? Is everyone really as stupid as Mr Demarty thinks? Working class people admire the queen - and not just because they have been told to.

We live in a (very flawed) democracy and everybody knows that the monarch does what the prime minister tells them to. So, if we’d managed to get Corbyn into Downing Street, she’d have been subject to the will of parliament and she’d have signed into law the free broadband and the four-day week, without batting an eye (she’d only be giving us what her own family enjoys). But we need to acknowledge that, by having a monarchy, we do away with elected presidents. Now, my ideal monarch is one that lives in a council house and survives on the average wage. If we managed to achieve such a thing, is there any reason why it would not work?

The current royal family is a lot more lefty than we realise. Of all the countries and colonies we created, the queen refused to ever visit Israel. In her 70-year reign, Queen Liz criss-crossed the globe visiting over 120 countries, but purposely skipped the Zionist project. In 1984, during a visit to Jordan, it appeared she found the Israeli settlements “depressing” and the airforce’s planes frightening (see Ha’aretz September 9). The queen worked like a dog to keep on top of things - that much we know.

I grew up in Aberdeen and enjoyed hiking up Loch Nagar as much as our present king did. Did your readers know that HRH lets anybody who likes to roam the Balmoral estate? That Lilibet built bunkhouses, so that wayward old hippies like me can crash free? I was trying to hitch-hike on her estate when I was about 17 years old and she cruised by on her way to Sunday service at Crathie and, whilst not stopping to offer me a lift, as least gave me a wave. My oldest brother had a nasty accident on his mountain bike a few years ago at Balmoral. No bones broken, but bad bruising. What happened after he crashed? A nearby landrover screamed to a halt and out jumped Charles and Camilla who ran over to offer help.

These people are far more human than Demarty realises. I myself met our present king back in 1980. I - along with youth workers from across the UK - was invited there, because the prince’s trust had given us a grant for community media work to run projects with disadvantaged young people making films. King Charles has done a lot more for the UK’s young people than any one of the lefty scribblers that adorn the pages of the Weekly Worker. Sure, he has all the power and privileges that have been conferred upon him by birth, but the Windsors know they have far less real freedom than you or I.

Most of the royal family are indeed parasites, but the king or queen has the job of legitimising the will of parliament. These folk do more than just sign bills - they need to do the PR work that gives 66 million UK citizens some pride in being British. So let’s stop sneering at poor people who admire the royal family - we live in a world which discovers liberation in small steps.

Personally, I prefer to see a monarch who does what they’re told by parliament rather than an elected president. Presidents come and go - every few years republics elect a new national leader, who can turn out to be shitty or nice - and who wield significant power. I mean, do we want to live in a republic that could elect Boris or Putin? I don’t. What’s the alternative? Why, someone who represents the nation for a lifetime, but always does what he or she is told. That gives continuity and allows the personification of the state.

I want to see a UK led by a monarch who, like the exiled king of Rwanda, lives in a council house in Manchester, and who does what he or she is told by the government we elect. That’s got to be better than having a president and a prime minister, which Russia has. Why go to the expense and stress of two national leaders, who will always award themselves the best of everything, when we might get one in Downing Street and the other in a council flat, with a 70-year ‘reign’ that costs a fraction of whatever Putin pays himself.

Pete Gregson
Edinburgh

Stand by Iran

Is the violence in Iran internal or external in its inception?

The reaction here in Ireland and the UK to the tragic death of a young woman in an Iranian police station has been almost instantaneous and universal. Rallies and marches defending the right of women to choose whether or not to wear the hijab are taking place in towns and cities in the UK and Ireland. The irony (or hypocrisy) of these rallies is open to debate. There are no rallies for the millions starving in Yemen. No rallies for the besieged people of Donbas (but we do have rallies to support Ukrainian fascists). No rallies against the daily brutality of the unelected, unmandated Gulf monarchies or the excesses of Mohammed bin Salman, including the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. They did have rallies against Saddam Hussein, against Gaddafi and against Assad - all heading countries that had to fight national wars of liberation to free their people from foreign imperialist military occupation. They had rallies against Serbia. They had rallies in favour of ‘colour revolutions’, etc.

The common denominator here is western imperialist foreign policy. The west supports and indeed arms Saudi Arabia in its grotesque war on Yemen, because its suits the regional aspirations of Nato, the EU, America and Israel. They destroyed Libya and Iraq, while balkanising Syria and sanctioning Iran. China is bad, Russia is bad, Iran is bad, yet rightwing governments in Kiev, Warsaw and Budapest are good, as are the death squads in Colombia and the assassinations of Iranian scientists.

Syria has been destroyed by external forces, using internal divisions to destabilise the government. The same happened in Libya, Ukraine and most recently in Belarus. The last thing the people in Iran need is violence orchestrated by Israel, the UK, US, France and Germany, etc - using the hijab as a pretext - not to liberate women from religious domination, but to destroy the country.

Be careful what you call for, at a time when the imperialists want war with China, Russia and Iran. If you stand against the Iranian government at this time, you will be supporting the destruction of another sovereign nation and all that entails - refugees, death, injuries and destruction. Is that what you want? Can you not see past the soundbites and propaganda photos? Wake up, wise up and grow up to the realities of where this might be going.

Now we have western media claiming the young woman, Mahsa Amini, who died in a Tehran police station, was beaten to death by the police. That might happen if you’re black and living in America, but it doesn’t happen in Iran - unless, of course, you choose to believe the BBC, Fox News, CNN ... If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

Ultimately the Iranian establishment must release all available evidence into how Mahsa died, including the post mortem results. If there is foul play, people must be held to account. If she died of natural causes, then the western propaganda must be discarded

Iran has been under sanctions and siege since 1979. The only people who want destabilisation in Iran are not the Iranians, but the enemies of Iran. I have issues with the religious aspects of the government, but, as the regional bulwark against Zionist expansionism and as leaders of the axis of resistance, we need a strong, just, civil rights-compliant Iran, helping to create a more multipolar world and equitable planet.

Let’s not destroy Iran on false allegations. Let’s stand by the leader of the resistance in west Asia and the cultural values of Persians.

Fra Hughes
Belfast

Razzmatazz

We had an interesting account of the Labour Party conference at the October 2 Online Communist Forum, where the conference was “assessed and dissected”. It was also possible to follow events on TV (if you were really looking for pain) and in the press.

A highlight, for Sir Keir, was the minute’s silence and the national anthem (at a ‘Labour’ event!). This was perhaps in memory of Jeremy Corbyn not singing the national anthem in 2015. I remember a letter to The Guardian at the time, in which a woman said that she wouldn’t sing to god because she’s an atheist and, even if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t ask to “save the queen”, because she’s a republican. Would that Corbyn could have been so brave.

A traditional feature was the standing ovation, or the ‘stander’ as they were proudly reported in Tony Blair’s day. There were 13 of them apparently for Sir Keir’s speech - all no doubt carefully stage-managed without any spontaneous ‘standers’, except perhaps a small crowd of the witchfinder generals who stood up for the big lie - he’s cleansed the party!

However, it does seem that British politicians are going (even more) overboard on American razzmatazz. Now we have had Sir Keir with a supporting cast of characters behind him on his platform. This is a long-standing practice in the US: the president, senators, mayors, police chiefs and the proverbial dog-catcher all have a bunch of folk behind them when they speak to the world (or the press). Why? I don’t know - perhaps it is to show that they do have at least a few friends.

Boris Johnson had no crew behind him at Conservative conferences and the like (did he?), he just had the flags - lots of big ones. When Theresa May danced to that Abba song, she spoke alone on the stage, even when the party slogans were falling behind her. But Sir Keir! A big, big flag - bigger than the Tories can come up with – and, behind him, his gang. Just like an American dog-catcher.

Jim Nelson
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Parasites

The buy-to-let market is heading for trouble. Following the recent mini-budget, amateur landlords will face a choice - either to increase rents or sell up.

Buy-to-let landlordism took off in the early 1990s with the introduction of six-month assured shorthold tenancies. This was compounded by Tony Blair and his chancellor, Gordon Brown, who believed that the expansion of buy-to-let was more efficient and cheaper than building council houses. They could have stopped it in its tracks by removing mortgage interest tax relief for landlords, but refused to do so. A whole generation of potential first-time buyers were therefore outbid by buy-to-let landlords, who could claim mortgage interest tax relief, whereas first-time buyers couldn’t.

There are now 2.7 million buy-to-let landlords in the UK, housing four million people. Because of record low interests rates on savings since the credit crunch of 2008, many people have put their savings into buy-to-let, which gives a return of 7%-9%. However, the day of reckoning for these parasites is nigh.

According to estate agents Hamptons, a high-rate tax-paying landlord will have their profits slashed to just £212 a year if the 2.25% base rate of the Bank of England is passed on in mortgage costs. At the same time, according to Moneyfacts, the number of buy-to-let mortgages available went from 1,942 on the day of the mini-budget to just 862 a week later.

If interest rates rise to six percent as is predicted, by the summer of 2023 buy-to-let landlords will be making massive losses. The alternative is to raise rents, which are already at unaffordable levels, or, more likely, sell up. Buy-to-let landlords doing that in large numbers will lead to tens of thousands of tenants being evicted. These people will turn to local council housing departments for help.

At the same time, a collapse in house prices of 20% or more is likely. Buy-to-let landlords who make up the base and membership of the Tory Party will look to the government for help. It is therefore fitting that the Trussonomics proposed by Kwasi Kwarteng will lead to the destruction of buy-to-let landlordism and the parasites involved in it.

I just feel for the tens of thousands of tenants who will soon be made homeless through no fault of their own. The private rental market is estimated to be worth £1.4 trillion. A collapse will send the UK economy deep into recession.

As communists, we see no social benefit in buy-to-let landlordism. Communists should call for the requisitioning by local councils of all buy-to-let properties, with compensation only being paid to former landlords on the basis of proven need.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Strasserites

I was struck by the serious article by Paul Demarty on Frank Furedi and the degeneration of the Revolutionary Communist Party (‘Original takester’, September 29).

I have encountered another form of political degeneration by the Sparts (International Communist League), whose latest publication, the Spartacist magazine (August 2022), is simply so off the planet politically that I have characterised it as neo-Strasserism (see below). The British publication (Workers Hammer winter 2021-22) was the first in two years and the US Workers Vanguard had likewise ceased publication, whilst factions fought out internal disagreements. The outcome was a full overturn of the previous central committee’s lines; now they are totally opposed to all lockdowns, meaning they attacked Johnson, Trump and Bolsonaro from the right. They were for compulsory vaccinations and supported Donald Trump on the truckers’ blockade of January-February 2022.

There is no doubt that if their line on lockdowns had been adopted from the beginning the death rates would have at least more than doubled in the west. And in China it would have reached almost 10 million. Ah, but all this “conceals the hundreds of millions locked up in their homes for weeks on end without proper food, medication or other basic necessities”.

What is Strasserism? The Nazi brothers, Otto and Gregor Strasser, identified finance capital as the main enemy of the working class and sought to rid capitalism of it. They claimed finance capital was controlled by Jews (the Rothschilds), so socialism could only come about by eliminating the Jews. Spartacus Educational (an independent source, not a front for the Spartacists) tells us:

“Adolf Hitler was highly suspicious of the brothers and disapproved of their socialist views … Gregor Strasser called for the destruction of capitalism in any way possible, including cooperation with the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union … On June 30 1934 Gregor Strasser was arrested by the Gestapo as part of the purge of the socialists ... He was taken to Gestapo headquarters, where he was shot in the back of the head.”

Although Otto escaped to the west and died peacefully in 1974, our ‘revolutionary socialist’ Trump supporters might take warning from what happened to the ‘socialist fascists’, once the fascist state was firmly established and the Gestapo given free rein in April 1933.

The Sparts-ICL have no orientation to the head of the working class in struggle at all; they follow and seek to lead its rump, as the Strassers did in the mid-1920s until the 1934 Night of the Long Knives. The Trump-supporting lumpenproletariat are the US equivalent of the German Strasserites.

Gerry Downing
London

Two sides

As Paul Demarty notes of Frank Furedi, “taking the culture war seriously” can be “the very death of moral and intellectual clarity” - for conservatives like Furedi and left liberals alike. After all, war implies two sides, like Furedi’s ‘tradition’ of the west versus ‘wokism’, or Nato versus Putin, or ‘leave’ versus ‘remain’.

Then there’s the gender clash, where reactionary sexists assert that your female or male body defines all your capacities and social roles - as opposed to the idealist social constructionists, who trivialise material concerns over wombs, penises, miscarriages and abortion as merely ‘gender-critical’ attempts to prevent self-identified women from claiming their rightful place in clinics, changing rooms and sports.

Mike Belbin
London