Letters

Better offer

There have almost never been good guys, but when have the people who have suppressed peaceful protest been the less bad guys? Why enact the Public Order Act, or the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, or the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, or the Nationality and Borders Act, or the Elections Act, or the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act? Why seek to enact the Online Safety Bill, or the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, or the National Security Bill? Why empower the home secretary to strip people of their British citizenship without having to give any reason, even if that rendered them stateless (and now without even having to tell them)?

The only possible reason is so that those powers should be used. Where they already exist, then they are already being used. Wayne Couzens could not now be arrested. He used his valid warrant card, and his police-issue handcuffs, so nothing that he did with them could ever now be a criminal offence. That is the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, on which Labour abstained and which it would not repeal. It would not repeal any of the measures listed above. It would use them to their full extent, and it would turn a blind eye when they were exceeded, if they could be.

Thankfully, there is going to be a hung parliament next year. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

David Lindsay
Lanchester

Next election

Labour is on course to make gains in the general election next year. Its leader likes to make comparisons with the party’s successes in 1945, 64 and 97, but a result like 1974 seems more likely. A broken economic model and a global conflict have combined to cause high inflation, a ‘cost of living’ crisis and consequent industrial unrest. Unlike in 1974, no-one on the left has any illusions as to what Labour will do in government, and its leadership will immediately move to a deal with the Liberals to freeze out any influence of the left in parliament.

In his report on the local elections in England, Kevin Bean passes over the left-of-Labour candidates other than those of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Tusc) and thus misses commenting on the remarkable fact that for the left - both reformist and ‘revolutionary’ - there is near-unanimity on the hopelessness of intervention in Labour (‘On course for No10’, May 11).

To their credit, the comrades of the Socialist Party again acted within Tusc to ensure that all candidates with left-of-Labour politics - notably those of the Communist Party of Britain and newer post-Corbyn formations - were included on Tusc’s list of recommendations to electors. Its draft report on the local election results says that, although Tusc candidates mainly were drawn from the ranks of the Socialist Party, individual members of the Socialist Workers Party and Anti-Capitalist Resistance stood as part of the coalition.

The decision to carry out electoral work independent of the Labour leadership is to be applauded, even if we may be critical of the groups to which they belong. These comrades are to be commended for putting themselves forward in their communities, speaking to other members of our class as communists, socialists and trade unionists who are critical of the Labour leadership and resolute in siding with workers in struggle.

While it is true that Labour is and has always been a bourgeois workers’ party, engagement with it on the part of the vanguard of our class - active trade unionists and class-conscious proletarians - has returned to the transactional approach of the New Labour years. The lack of enthusiasm for Starmer is somewhat indicative of the widespread realisation of the kind of government he may lead.

It seems unlikely that sufficient numbers of active members will be able to get the big unions to split before a general election and Labour proving itself a failure to the movement when in office. Instead, most affiliated unions will continue to have a scaled-back relationship with the party. So there will be no big ‘Labour Party mark two’ effort on the part of trade unions themselves.

Some class-conscious workers may - if not forced to vote tactically to stop or remove the Tories - increasingly back Green candidates as a protest, given their occasional left-reformist positioning. Thousands may join or donate to the Greens if nothing else presents itself.

This does leave open the political space for the left to put forward a more radical workers’ list of candidates rather than a blanket endorsement of the official Labour candidates. John Smithee’s suggestion that Weekly Worker comrades stand as Communist Alternative candidates is perhaps not so outlandish (Letters, May 11). If the aspiration is the formation a mass Communist Party, why not do electoral work in preparation?

Ansell Eade
Lincolnshire

Gold and paper

Michael Roberts correctly says that the current policy of central banks, of raising interest rates, will not reduce inflation (‘Rates up, economy down’, May 11). But, Roberts’ argument as to why that is the case is totally fallacious. He gives us simply the bourgeois economics explanation of the determination of prices by the interaction of supply and demand. His explanation is basically the Keynesian theory - except, where the Keynesians are usually to be seen arguing the case that it is wages causing costs to rise, Roberts argues that it is supply bottlenecks that have been responsible.

In other words, according to Roberts, as with the bourgeois/neoclassical economic theory, prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand. It is the theory expounded by Lord Lauderdale, and dismissed by Ricardo, as set out by Marx, in The poverty of philosophy. The only difference is that Roberts applies this to the general price level, rather than to the prices of individual commodities. In other words, where the bourgeois theory explains prices of individual commodities on the basis of the demand for and supply of those commodities, Roberts seeks to explain the general level of prices on the basis of the interaction of aggregate demand and aggregate supply for all commodities.

In fact, he is not consistent even in that, because what he gives is not an explanation of changes in the general price level (inflation), but only an explanation of changes in the prices of certain commodities - primarily energy and food. It’s quite true, as Marx explains in A contribution to the critique of political economy, that the prices of some commodities can rise, because their costs of production/value rise: ie, more universal labour is required for their production as a result of a fall in productivity, but that is not the same as inflation nor a rise in the prices of all, or the majority of, commodities. For one thing, social productivity generally rises each year, so reducing the aggregate value of all commodities.

For it to explain a rise in the general price level - ie, a rise in the prices of all, or at least the large majority of, commodities - it would have to be the case that social productivity as a whole, fell: ie, the universal labour required for the production of all commodities rose. Even then, that would not explain a rise in prices, as against a rise in values. If we take Marx’s explanation of what price is, as against value, it is the value of a commodity expressed indirectly in terms of a quantity of the money commodity, say gold.

If we call all commodities A, and the universal labour required to produce one million units of A is 1 million hours, and the value of an ounce of gold, as the standard of prices, is equal to 10 hours of universal labour, then the money equivalent/price of the one million units is 100,000 ounces of gold, which, if we call the ounce of gold/standard of prices £1, is then equal to £100,000. If, as a result of a fall in social productivity, the value of A rises to 1.2 million hours, this same fall in social productivity would increase the value of an ounce of gold/£1 to 12 hours and, consequently, the money equivalent of the one million units of A remains 100,000 ounces of gold/£100,000, with the average unit price of a commodity remaining as £0.10.

In fact, Roberts talks not of a general fall in social productivity, but of a rise, albeit “low productivity growth”. But any productivity growth, low or not, should result in values, in aggregate, falling, not rising. The only basis upon which prices could rise, then, is if there is a difference in the change in the value of commodities in aggregate, as against the value of the standard of prices, which indirectly measures those values, in the same way that a metre or a yardstick measures lengths.

Marx set out two ways that could happen. Firstly, the value of gold itself might fall, and so the value of the standard of prices would fall, causing all prices to rise; or, alternatively, the quantity of gold represented by the standard of prices could be reduced, thereby reducing the value of the standard of prices. But today, with fiat currencies, the standard of prices is not determined by any quantitative relation to gold or any other precious metal. The standard of prices, in each country - be it dollars, pounds, euros, yen - is simply a direct representative of a certain quantity of universal labour/social labour-time, and what that quantity is determined by is the quantity of these money tokens thrown into circulation.

As Marx put it, “Whereas, therefore, the quantity of gold in circulation depends on the prices of commodities, the value of the paper in circulation, on the other hand, depends solely on its own quantity.”

Roberts says that he and others have argued “with evidence” that “this monetary tightening policy will have little effect on getting inflation down, because its causes do not lie in excessive money supply”. But that is not what Marx’s analysis and theory suggests - nor is it what the evidence itself suggests. Raising central bank interest rates does not constitute monetary tightening, particularly where real interest rates (nominal rates minus inflation) remain significantly negative, in conditions where liquidity continues to be expanded, either as a result of continued QE or other central bank liquidity or as a result of expanding credit.

In May 2021, Roberts’ model of inflation, he told us, predicted US inflation rising above 3% that year and next. Well, of course, strictly speaking, it did go above 3%, but the implication of his statement was that it was not going much above 3%, especially in conditions in which he was also predicting that the ending of lockdowns was going, yet again, to result in a slump. In fact, even by the time Roberts’ words appeared in print, US inflation had risen to 5%, and, as I predicted at the time, were set to rise much further. My prediction that US inflation was set to hit not Roberts’ 3% figure, but 9.6%, was more or less spot on, as it came in at 9.1% a year later, in June 2022.

Marx’s theory and analysis that inflation is a monetary phenomenon - caused by an excessive amount of liquidity thrown into circulation, devaluing the standard of prices - has again been entirely vindicated. In the period from the 1980s that excessive liquidity caused a huge inflation of asset prices, and now, as it has been fed into the real economy, following the ending of lockdowns, it has created the current commodity price inflation.

Arthur Bough
email

Baby’s bathwater

During the debate over Mike Macnair’s evaluation of György Lukács at the May 14 Online Communist Forum, I made the point that Martin Heidegger, with whom Lukács had debated, was a card-carrying Nazi from 1933 to its dissolution by the Allies in 1945 and that it was impossible to separate his politics from his philosophy - both were equally reactionary. Not so, Daniel Lazare protested - I was “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. So here, presumably, the bathwater is his Nazism - a secondary feature of his entire persona, practically unrelated to his real historical essence, his philosophy, from which humanity apparently still has a lot to learn.

This was certainly Lukács’s position; it was the line taken by Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and other semi-Stalinist, anti-Trotskyist French philosophers after the war. There once was a magazine in Ireland called The Heidegger Review, edited by a close friend of mine who was later a Maoist and then a member of Brendan Clifford’s British and Irish Communist Organisation. It went to three issues and had articles from many of the great and good of Irish society. I attacked it ideologically in the above terms and I think this may well have contributed to its demise. This is John Minahane defending Heidegger:

“Gerry Downing misrepresents the philosophy of Martin Heidegger by saying that it ‘found its logical expression in the death camps’ ... I have shown that this idea is a misrepresentation ... What found its logical expression in the death camps was high technology linked to the modern ideology of conquest, exemplified by Great Britain, which was Hitler’s model ... Heidegger’s thinking did not cultivate aggression. There is no logic in connecting him with death camps. It would be more logical to make that connection with John Locke, whom Downing cites favourably, since he was an important ideologist of colonial plunder.”

György Lukács’s History and class consciousness endorses Heidegger’s Dasein and its irrational idealism. Here is my take on this from a 2015 article:

“This is one more illustration of how reactionary was the mysticism of the famous Dasein (‘being’, ‘self’), supposedly lodged in the distant past of pre-Socratic philosophy …, lost in the intervening centuries by false interpretation of the ‘self’ and what it is to be yourself, now rediscovered by himself alone. If that seems ridiculous, it is because it is ridiculous. But apparently in Nazi mysticism some traditions did preserve this ancient ‘self’ or ‘being’ in a true form and one of these was the Cathars of the Languedoc in the south of France, who were apparently the keepers of the Holy Grail. The last of them perished in the mass fires of the Inquisition in 1244 at the end of the so-called Albigensian Crusade.

“So we are told: ‘On March 16 1944, on the 700th anniversary of the fall of Montségur [the Cathars’ last redoubt - GD], Nazi planes are reported to have flown patterns over the ruins - either swastikas or Celtic crosses, depending upon the sources. The Nazi ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg was reported to be on board one of the airplanes.’

“And that emphasises to what a dead-end the ‘greatest philosopher of the 20th century’ has led modern philosophy: existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism and postmodernism - all petty bourgeois opponents of Marxism and dialectical materialism - developed to keep the middle classes on the side of finance capital against the global working class in its revolutionary mission to overthrow capitalism and forge a communist future.”

In 1980 Cliff Slaughter published his book, Marxism, ideology and literature, with chapter 4 consisting of 35 pages on György Lukács. Here he spells out that the essence of the man is his rejection of the Russian Revolution ideology of world revolution and his adherence to socialism in a single country, the rising bureaucracy’s self-defence against Trotskyism and that heritage. He explains that Lukács’s 1928 ‘Blum theses’ - advocating the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, rejected by Lenin in his April theses - was merely his Stalinism spelled out before Hitler’s victory in 1933 and the adoption of the popular front. Bela Kun and Stalin were then applying the Third Period social-fascist ultra-leftism, which divided the German working class and allowed Hitler to take power without a shot being fired.

The popular front was the abandonment of the class independence of the working class. This is the point at which Stalinism as an ideology ceased to be communist in any meaningful sense of the world.

I note that Lawrence Parker attacks Zinoviev from the right in his Weekly Worker article, ‘Scenes from history’ (April 27), at the point when Zinoviev tacked briefly to the left against the alliance between Stalin and Bukharin from 1925, while the rightist, capitalist-restorationist Bukharin was supporting the Kulaks and the NEP men (‘enrich yourselves’), when the dissolution of the communists into the Kuomintang was obviously now endangering the Chinese communists.

When the inevitable outcome of the appalling policy resulted in the massacre of the Shanghai Soviet in April 1927, Zinoviev commented to Trotsky that now we will win: we have won the argument and “you have been proved correct”. No, said Trotsky, “the revolution never wins by defeats”.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Personal analysis

I take exception to Tony Greenstein’s representation of the Combahee River Collective - a political organisation which was active in the 1970s on the east coast of the US (Letters, May 11). Notwithstanding the political aspects which might be opposed from a 21st century perspective, their basic politics consisted, categorically, of a socialist analysis.

They had a keen understanding - incompatible with current identity politics - that the embodiment of the enemy oppressor is in the capitalist, imperialist and patriarchal systems: “We realise that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe the work must be organised for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses.” The collective made an attempt to correct and push back on the white racism and class nature of second-wave feminism. Tony, in his criticism, quotes them as saying “radical politics come directly out of our own identity” - this is to their credit and is a trenchant example of ‘Marxist identity politics’ to be celebrated, not criticised.

One can arrive at a class analysis via “one’s own oppression” without succumbing to identity politics - one way to view and understand the world is precisely “via the prism of one’s own oppression”. The personal and political spheres, in terms of theory, are not mutually exclusive, but are often coequal principles which work in tandem; the social and political should not always be emphasised at the expense of the personal, and politics shouldn’t be counterposed to personal consciousness. Many of us are living witnesses to the transformative nature of personal issues, related to gender oppression, when these issues are politicised in the process of an internationalist understanding of class. Additionally, an awareness can develop from personal oppression that other people’s oppression doesn’t need to be experienced in order to fight against it: this doesn’t characterise identity politics.

The genius of the women’s movement of the 60s and 70s in the US, despite its pitfalls, was its distinctive concepts: ie, ‘The personal is political’, which led to prolific political evolution (or counterrevolutionary separatism, as the case may be). The defining issues which were examined included: psychology and consciousness; bodily autonomy; sexual and erotic expression (which led to the anti-pornography movement with its proponents and critics), etc. Personal experience was the fundamental lynchpin of political practice and theory, and it made feminism a potentially revolutionary and liberatory project.

There’s an important personal dimension to politics, which is often downplayed. The Marxist approach is to combine the subjective organisation - in essence personal resistance - with the objective goal: namely the conquest of state power. Tony is right to say (to paraphrase) that identity politics prioritises the individual situation over a change in society and has the effect of preventing change - I would concur that there are no individual solutions to structural problems, but I want to keep in mind the notion that personal forms of awareness and struggle can lead to socialism as well as to bourgeois individualism.

The importance of political circumstances shouldn’t automatically take precedence over the personal elements. It doesn’t contradict Marxism: it in fact explains it - to advocate for a fight against oppression which is not subordinated to a fight against exploitation. The struggle for gender rights, racial justice, etc in a multiracial, socialist organisation is not ‘identity politics’ and is not oppositional to Marxist class struggle. Marx wrote in 1844: “Workers formed a class which cannot emancipate itself without ... emancipating all other spheres of society.”

The personal identity struggles within a socialist movement can only strengthen that movement and make it possible, viable and necessary.

GG
USA

London recruits

Comrades may remember the 2012 book, London recruits, edited by Ken Keable, which told the story of a group of young comrades, mainly from Britain, who went to South Africa to help out the African National Congress - the entire operation directed from London by the ANC’s Oliver Tambo and the South African Communist Party’s Joe Slovo. A private showing of the film of the same name, directed by Gordon Main of Barefoot Rascals, was held last weekend for the recruits and those who took part in its production, along with their friends and families.

The recruits went because the ANC had been decimated by the apartheid government, their secret police and stool-pigeons. The young people were to bring with them leaflets from activists in exile to let those who were suffering under apartheid know that the ANC was still there, still active, ready to regroup and continue the struggle.

The recruits were mainly from the Young Communist League, as well as from other left groups. They were to fly in as innocent tourists, leave a pack of leaflets in devices which would explode in a place where many black South Africans would be leaving their workplaces. No-one would get hurt, but people would know that the ANC was still there.

The film follows several of the recruits as they go about their clandestinity. In one case, four leaflet bombs were to go off at the same time, while two recruits were arrested in another clandestine operation, and spent several years in prison. The filming is wonderful - young actors are juxtaposed with the real (now much older) recruits giving some background. And the exquisite South African scenery adds to the lustre of the emotional tenor of the story.

Although told to keep the information secret from everybody, one recruit, Tom Bell, felt he had to tell his mother. While she was washing the dishes, he came into the kitchen and said: “Mum, I’m going to Cape Town to do some underground work for the ANC. We could get caught.” Not even turning around, she said, “Oh, okay. Let me know when you will go.”

Another scene had the audience totally silent. Sean Hosey, in solitary confinement after interrogation, could hear the other (black) prisoners in a nearby cell. Every Wednesday night eight men from that very crowded cell were given notice of their hanging the following day at 6.30am. The prisoners stayed up all night singing with the men who were going to be hanged, and the singing got louder and gained strength as the night went on. The determination of the men singing together was truly awe-inspiring.

Every person involved in this work, which went on for several years, was sworn to secrecy. And it remained completely secret until Ken Keable decided, around 2000, that the time had come to reveal what happened. He wrote his own story, then contacted other recruits and had them each write theirs.

Apparently the film will be shown to other private audiences and, assuming that all goes well with the film festival, it should be more widely released in October. Where, nobody knows yet - whether in art houses, on Netflix, etc is still to be decided.

In the meantime the book is still available and it is a thumping good read. Both the book and the film show how the best of committed people are willing to put themselves in danger for the sake of international solidarity. The recruits can be proud of what they contributed to a struggle for freedom.

Gaby Rubin
London