WeeklyWorker

Letters

Finance whip

Arthur Bough’s explanation of the current inflation issue is bizarre in the extreme (Letters, May 18). Instead of analysing the concrete events, recent history and empirical data, he resorts to the textbooks of a 19th century economist, whom he distorts completely, and then applies that distortion to concrete events in the here and now. As if Marx had a final and permanent theory of inflation to apply here, there and everywhere and to all points in time.

Not once in his explanation of the current inflation did Bough mention the demented proxy war against Russia and the bizarre and futile strategy of curtailing China! China is a nation of 1.4 billion highly industrious people, whose society is led by the Communist Party applying logic and directed planning - as well as being ruthless in its exploitation of Mother Earth and Father Labour. A nation that applies for more patents than the entire imperialist centre combined, and that regularly wins the maths and science Olympiads, and who lead the world in green technology. I could most definitely go on!

The fact they are so deluded to think this is a winnable strategy just shows the desperation of the empire to hold onto its hegemony. And the client states hold on for dear life.

So once again Bough is wrong. Current inflation is being caused by the west’s demented attempts to manage its relative decline, its demented woke ideology, its demented sanctions regime and its demented proxy wars. Of course, this being the capitalist epoch, the masters and rulers of the world use monetary and financial instruments to crack the whip. They do this because, short of the actual whip, this is all they have - well, that and ideology.

As an aside, the growth in asset prices is not primarily the result of inflation, as Bough presents it. For example, in the stock market, most of the growth in the last 40 years has been as a result of financialisation and not inflation - ie, the transfer of capital and money from bank deposits and the like into stocks and shares and financial instruments. This explains the history of banking and global institutions for the last half-century.

To illustrate for simplicity, if you were to move £100 from your bank account and into shares, this would count as growth, even though it is existing money. And if you were to then add in another £100 from your bank account the following year, this would be seen as 100% growth year on year, even though it is all existing revenue! This explains the majority of so-called asset inflation Bough talks about. It is a derivative.

We are currently in a grand and epic battle of historic significance, where the ‘oppressed’ nations are throwing off the masters’ finance whip, and are attempting to replace it with their own financial regime. Notice they are unable to get rid of the whip, as no nation has ever succeeded in doing that - not even the Soviet era managed it. Nowhere near. But this is currently where the class struggle resides and will reside for years to come.

I have long argued that what we are seeing now is the first phase of a prolonged war - but not one that is ultimately between the empire and its rivals, but is instead a war against the masses at the imperialist centre, who are being softened up for immiseration.

For the moment we are in phase one, which is primarily aimed at the rivals, but already the precursors for phase two are emerging via woke ideology, with its zero tolerance of criticism and its assertion of irrationalism, and the construction of a degrowth police state.

When phase two arrives in earnest, the war will well and truly be brought home. Maybe at that point the communists at the imperialist centre will finally wake up and smell the Kool Aid?

Steve Cousins
email

Lynching rights

Dan Lazare’s article on the killing of Jordan Neely is shameful (‘Blame the system itself’, May 11). In his effort at a contrarian take, Lazare manages to offer a confused position of self-defence absolutism.

In fact, Jordan Neely’s killing is fraught with the long history of lynching in the United States, and inextricably bound up with the longstanding threat of vigilante violence from the political right. By eliding these features, Lazare appears to defend Neely’s death - ‘blaming the system’, but overlooking just these key features of that system. By defending Daniel Penny against demands for prosecution, while staying silent on the lynch-like features of his killing of Neely, Lazare winds up defending the right to kill under similar circumstances. This is unacceptable. Socialists must be the most ardent and reliable supporters of democracy and resistance to the vigilante violence of the right.

The event has been a sort of Rorschach test. Across the press, politicos see crystallised their cherished issues. Cynical liberalism sees an opportunity to promote its divide-and-rule identity politics, which became its official programme in 2016. The right sees one more in a long line of violent crime justifying the virtuous, property-holding citizen’s vigilance - attack, destroy, root out evil directly. Lazare’s pathology is manifest upon his response to the stimulus: ‘Dangerous! Neely was dangerous! Penny was justified!’ Any other response is a violation of socialist principle! This places him in the latter camp.

Lazare hand-waves about due process and the presumption of innocence, but neither of these issues are remotely in play with respect to Penny. Contra Lazare’s implications, Penny is not threatened with a violation of any rights to which socialists assign primary importance. Penny was questioned by the police at the station and released. No mention is made by Lazare of the police infringing on Penny’s fourth, fifth or sixth-amendment rights. He is not in need of defence, as he has counsel. No socialist principles were violated there.

Instead, what Lazare complains about are the cries that prosecutorial discretion should not be exercised to favour vigilante violence. Presumably, Lazare thinks that, even if Penny was lawfully deprived of his liberty by being sentenced to a prison term after a trial, it would still be unjust. What Lazare can’t explain is why socialists should accept an act of extrajudicial violence in these circumstances. Rather, Lazare retreats into making an absolute form of self-defence into a principle. This is a grave mistake.

Any criminal or tort law must permit the argument that force was used only in defence of oneself, it’s true. However, any cursory study of the law reveals that contained in that principle are the logical corollaries: the duty to retreat before the application of privileged force in defence of yourself or another, and the duty to use proportionate force in self-defence.

When viewed in the light of self-defence-doctrine corollaries, it becomes clear that none of the facts that Dan recites in his letter justify the degree of force used by Penny. It is very difficult to see what Neely could have done that would merit killing him. He would have had to threaten great bodily harm or death, and done so credibly. Slamming your jacket on the ground and screaming do not give private persons licence to kill, nor should it. Maybe there are other facts, but we don’t have them.

It gets worse. It is just these components of self-defence doctrine which are at issue in the media fracas, but which seem to have eluded Lazare. The qualifications to self-defence are age-old doctrines, which have only recently come under scrutiny from none other than Lazare’s own lifelong foes in the National Rifle Association. Lazare seems unaware that the very people he’s critiqued have been on a multi-year project to promote gun ownership as a response to the corporate media’s lies that violent crime is on the rise. How are they promoting this? In part, by citing approvingly any high-profile examples of self-defence, no matter how patently evil their deeds, including figures like George Zimmerman. But they don’t stop there.

The vigilante right draft, lobby for and sponsor legislation in the US that not only removes any duty to retreat, but affirmatively bars a trial, where the defendant claims self-defence. The NRA is largely responsible for the passing of Florida’s infamous ‘stand your ground’ law, for example, which gives defendants immunity from criminal prosecution for use of force in self-defence from harm. This is different from a standard self-defence claim, which is raised at trial and permits a jury to weigh all the evidence. So-called stand your ground laws are deranged - they encourage the exchange of bullets and blows, rather than de-escalation. Lazare seems oblivious that key components of self-defence law at issue here relate back to the very system he entreats us to blame. Thus, if Dan Lazare’s self-defence absolutism was accepted, then a judge would rule on the question as a matter preliminary to trial, and keep the material facts from going before a jury. An interesting position for a socialist opposed to the second amendment to take. Even more interesting for one concerned about due process.

With his self-defence absolutism, Lazare can’t bring himself to suggest that what Penny did was wrong. Instead, Lazare writes, “Make no mistake about it - Neely was both desperate and dangerous”, before reading us his rap sheet. The central issue with this is that not a single one of these past wrongful acts is material to the issue of whether Penny used self-defence. Instead, it aims to make the victim’s character an alibi for the killer’s crime.

In this way, Lazare reminds us of the age-old technique of vigilantism. For an example of this, we might consider Rebecca Latimer Felton, who was the first woman member in the US Senate. She was a staunch suffragist, but also a despicable, white-supremacist celebrator of lynchings - that quintessential form of bourgeois American vigilantism:

“When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organise a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue - if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts - then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.”

After all, wasn’t Penny merely putting “a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue”? Wasn’t he protecting the public from a “ravening beast”? The essence of vigilantism in US history is the extra-legal use of force to secure the ‘safety and virtue’ of the class of white property-owners. While vigilantism is not unique to America, its form has a familiar and bleak outline - the lynching of a black man by a white mob, whipped up by a demagogic press. Lazare’s focus on Neely’s past, wrongful acts is well summed up by Eugene Debs’ remarks on the evils of white supremacy - it is easier to forgive the man who robs you than to forgive the man you rob. Having abetted robbery of Neely’s life, the rightwing press can’t bring themselves to forgive him - and so it must heap scorn and ridicule on top of the basest wrong, as appeal to justification for the crime. Lazare disastrously follows suit.

We might guess at why he got it wrong. Three blind spots can be suggested. First, he misses the military connection. Penny was an ex-marine. Why wasn’t he adequately trained in the non-lethal use of force in a tough situation? Easy - because the US military isn’t interested in that. Empires aren’t built on respect for the dignity and humanity of their subjects. They’re built on lethal force - aerial bombardment if they can get it; ground troops if they must.

Aside from churning out killing machines on an annual basis to police (the worldwide capital accumulation process), the fact of American empire has decimated our cultural soul. Ex-military people languish in depression, suicide and drugs. The entity itself cultivates a fatuous and evil sense of global entitlement, which domestic conditions can never satisfy. This apparatus, which underwrites the US claim to visit death and destruction to any people across the globe, sends home a mass of broken people - and the lies which it must peddle domestically constitute demagoguery on a scale unprecedented in human history. Every few years there is a new people against whom we must make amends with bombing indiscriminately, because they’ve made peace with being led by a foe or foes we must dislodge. Alongside every other atomising aspect of capitalist social relations this tips the scale further away from empathy.

Second, Lazare criticises liberal ‘race-baiters’ and “social-justice warriors” who vote for war but decry the failure to charge Penny. Fine. But where is his criticism of the utterly despicable problem of vigilante violence that has characterised the US bourgeoisie from its very beginning? This vigilantism is the cell form of settler-colonialism and slavocracy. It has recurred in the US to oppress racial minorities and destroy the working class’s aspirations for political liberty and self-rule. Lazare’s indifference to the fundamental principles of self-defence sees him carry water for a disgusting acid reflux of lynch sentiment in the modern day.

Lazare can’t see this event for what it is - the drive to vigilante violence in its modern form. While vigilantism in the form of lynching was mostly smothered out in the United States, that outcome took major sacrifices by the American working class, with black workers in the vanguard. The peak of this struggle was the department of justice’s partial and limited attacks on conspiracies to deprive black citizens of their democratic rights in the hallmark case of the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964. Here we see that resistance to lynch law is a matter of socialist principle. Three voting rights organisers - two Jewish and one black - promoting voting rights in Mississippi directly by registering people to vote were murdered by the local sheriff, some deputies and private citizens.

As early as 1871, the US Congress recognised the problem such crimes posed - and they passed a law to regulate it: the Enforcement Act of 1871, known colloquially as the KKK Act. It criminalises deprivation of rights under the colour of law. Related legislation also criminalised conspiracies of private persons or public officials for the same purpose. The law went unenacted for decades, as Republicanism collapsed under corruption and the contradictions of the labour question during and after the US Reconstruction.

The FBI reluctantly got involved in the case of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner after much pressure. Similar cases may get prosecuted from time to time in the US, as this established some degree of precedence. The result, in part, is that extrajudicial killings now typically take the form of either police excessive use of force or private citizen conduct like George Zimmerman.

We have no reason to believe that Penny was formally engaged in anything like the KKK. But we can’t deny that the gloss on this by the right is that it is further evidence in support of their full-throated vigilantism. Lazare might be encouraged to read about the history of organised labour in a place like Tampa, Florida. Workers there suffered under lynch law for a variety of reasons - their race, their nationality and their political association as workers and socialists. Among the nameless masses of people lynched in US history stand labour leaders like Frank Little. But, even were this not so, it wouldn’t adjust the issue one bit. Marxists stand for the democratic rights of oppressed people, as the only possible basis for socialism to come into being. This shows clearly where vigilantism stands - opposed to working class self-rule.

Finally, Lazare might be implored to handle carefully sharp-edged, fundamental rights like ‘due process’. These cut both ways. Sure, Penny is entitled to a presumption of innocence and due process. But where was Neely’s due process? Police shoot unarmed suspects they claim are dangerous all the time and socialists understand that to be a deprivation of life without the due process of law. Does it change when a vigilante does it? Isn’t the deprivation of the constitutional rights of workers and oppressed minorities under colour of law a classic feature of ‘the system’?

Due process - requiring notice and a fair hearing before depriving anyone of their life, liberty or (personal) property - is a matter of socialist principle. What process did Neely receive before being denied healthcare? Housing? Food? The answer is none, because, however capacious ‘due process’ is under bourgeois law, it does not provide any protection from a deprivation of these necessities. Changing this is also a socialist principle.

But the major impediment to changing this is the formation of a working class political movement in the United States. In turn, a central barrier to such a movement’s growth is the ineffective and fair-weather character of socialists’ defence of democratic rights. The right cowers socialists into tailing the liberals by constantly threatening vigilante violence. That problem requires our opposition to such violence, and that we take leadership of such opposition from the do-nothing liberals - who mouth platitudes, but offer nothing of substance.

If socialists can’t do this, then we deserve to lose.

Anton Johanssen
USA

Lukács’s faults

Following up on Mike Macnair’s article last week (‘A hundred years of muddle’, May 18), let me make the following comments.

In his 1967 introduction to his work, History and class consciousness (1923), György Lukács is clear himself about the faults in the book: his neglect of the objective existence of the economic world and natural science. This doesn’t mean that cancels out his contributions on social alienation and class-consciousness. Nor should we give in to the inadequacies of interpretation his work has suffered over the years.

HCC and his book on Lenin are not ‘western Marxist’ in the way Theodor Adorno went. Lukács rejected the fatalism of the Second International and the ultra-leftism exposed by Lenin and also wrote about Rosa Luxemburg and the “spontaneous” mass strike. “Her mistake”, he writes in HCC, “was merely to overestimate the organic nature of the process [of revolution], while underestimating the importance of conscious organisation.” Yet in his Leninism nor does Lukács make class-awareness something only the party injects; instead, it’s initially produced by the effect of the objective world on the proletariat and the struggles to which class society subjects the human being.

Consciousness is something that develops - sometimes manifested in lashings out, like the Luddites smashing factory machines (mentioned by Lukács), or even support for the right (like Brexit). This can, however, reach “trade union consciousness” - a high form, but which nevertheless neglects the need to change the system. “The revolutionary form of consciousness of the proletariat is a process by nature,” he writes, and it is finally in working for a party (or the possibility of such) that enables consciousness to continually develop, to understand and move against the “totality”: that is, the system and history of capitalism.

In HCC, Lukács counsels that “the development of society constantly produces new phenomena”, and “every communist organisation must be prepared to increase as far as possible its own sensitivity and its own ability to learn from every aspect of history. It must make sure that the weapons used to gain a victory yesterday do not become an impediment in future struggles.” Later, Lukács may have sided with the Stalinist bureaucracy as the only alternative to fascism, but from 1923-25 he neither followed an ethic of little organisation (as with the new left in the 1960s) nor became a contemplator of alienation without class-consciousness like the Frankfurt school. Theory and practice - praxis - is what matters, using the study of the open-ended interaction that is human history, which, because it’s open, cannot be just a copy of the physical sciences.

“The Communist Party,” he wrote, “does not function as a stand-in for the proletariat even in theory.” Meanwhile one of his opponents at the time, Abram Deborin, went on to support the iron determinism of ‘diamat’, as imposed by Stalin, while in China, Einstein’s relativity was officially declared ‘idealist’.

Mike Belbin
London

Mish-mash

I would like to thank Ansell Eade for his support for my suggestion that the Weekly Worker registers the name, ‘Communist Alternative’, with the Electoral Commission (Letters, May 18). This would allow readers and supporters of the Weekly Worker to stand as Communist Alternative candidates in local elections. Whilst the aim would be to garner as many votes as possible, a secondary (more important) aim would be to sell the Weekly Worker to as many people as possible.

I agree with Ansell when he applauds the Socialist Party and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition for standing 254 candidates across 64 local authorities in the May 4 local elections. Amongst the candidates were members of the Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Workers Party and the Anti-Capitalist Alliance.

For Marxists the best result for the next general election would be a hung parliament leading to a minority Labour government dependent on Liberal Democrat support. As a condition for their support, the Lib Dems would ensure that proportional representation would be introduced for both parliamentary and local elections. Proportional representation has the support of the last few Labour conferences as well as being the policy of most trade unions. PR would allow leftwing parties to get their candidates elected in local and national elections. Standing Communist Alternative candidates would be part of this process.

However, I am sceptical that Tusc will get the support of major trade unions following the next general election. Whilst the doctors in the British Medical Association and the nurses in the Royal College of Nursing have widespread support in the population, this cannot be said of trade unions generally. Having the words ‘trade unionist’ in the Tusc name puts people off - especially the older, retired voters, who make up the bulk of people who vote in local elections.

The Socialist Party, rather than wasting time trying to establish a Labour Party mark two through their Tusc front, would be better off standing under their registered name, ‘Socialist Alternative’. The same goes for the Socialist Workers Party, which should register their name. Similarly, Socialist Appeal should register their name, given they are no longer in the Labour Party. I’m sure there must be many dissenting voices within the Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Britain and the SWP who disagree with being involved in a Labour Party mark two project.

There is a growing constituency of young people who see themselves as communists. Socialist Appeal now recruits people by asking, ‘Are you a communist?’ in its paper and website. It is therefore heartening to have someone like Ansell Eade support my suggestion that the Weekly Worker registers the name: ‘Communist Alternative’ with the Electoral Commission.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Hydra-headed

I write this in the conviction that we should concentrate more on practical measures to meet the hydra-headed challenge we are facing. What is the CPGB’s policy in this area? My friend, Martin Carroll, argues for an emphasis as follows:

I would very much like to hear other comrades’ ideas (the status quo means famine years).

 

 

Chris Gray
London