Letters

Diverted

Marx made assertions throughout his work, likely the result of time and space. I think he expected a level of honest intellectual discourse that is simply not possible in this day and age.

One of the assertions made by Marx is that oppressed nations stand in the same relation to oppressor nations as does the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. Marxists have spent a century and more putting the meat onto those bones.

But where is this monetary theory of inflation that Marx presents us? Where is the outline? Marx was clear that things that appear as monetary phenomena - that present themselves as monetary phenomena - are in fact the surface appearance of a deeper truth.

The monetary theory of inflation as an excess of liquidity is not a Marxian theory, but a bourgeois one, stemming from all their prejudices, interests, superficiality and false assumptions, and can be read in any of the mainstream, corporate media. One of the false assumptions is that these phenomena are somehow natural, eternal and always applicable to every given situation. They just arise like the seasons.

This bourgeois theory of inflation was trotted out endlessly to explain the inflation in Zimbabwe, for example - presented as a problem with the economic and financial mishandling of successive governments, rather than the result of western sanctions, US imperialism and economic warfare imposed on the nation, as well as droughts and other impacts. Reading between the lines of the oh-so-woke west, the natives simply shouldn’t be trusted with important things like land ownership or financial instruments, and instead should leave everything to the higher beings! And if that makes me a Mugabe apologist so be it.

There are no monetary phenomena as such (though they can develop a life of their own): this is just the form of appearance or the mask, behind which lie power structures, social relations, system prerequisites, production processes, global institutions and rules, military bases, etc. Arthur Bough, in his reply to me (Letters, June 1), wants Marx to remain at the superficial level of analysis, as it serves the apologia.

To say that inflation is a monetary phenomenon based on excess liquidity is the distortion of Marx by Bough that I was referring to. In fact, it is a typical attempt by Bough to water Marx down - to reduce him to the level of an econometrician, rather than a radical critic with an historical perspective and understanding of power relations. Under Bough, these power relations become irrelevant, and everything boils down to technical, financial management.

I have criticised this about Bough before - the way he tries to reduce Marx to the bourgeois level. Bough seems intent on rescuing Marx from Marxism and reassuring the bourgeois that Marx is really just like them. I seem to remember Bough going out of his way to argue that Marx had a theory of inelastic demand, as if this was a pressing issue of Marxism! You really have to laugh.

I am happy to be called a Beijing apologist, as the battle currently taking place between the US empire, with assistance from its client states and the oppressed nations, is one between a future based on profit-driven, neoliberal, hegemonic supremacy and a people-based, mutually cooperative, planned, anti-liberal order. It comes as no surprise which side of the fence Bough stands on.

I fully expect that Bough subscribes to the irrationalist, woke ideology and has absolutely nothing to offer in the way of criticism, as this is the perfect accompaniment to his pro-neoliberal, pro-imperialist outlook.

Steve Cousins
email

Trotskyist error

Mike Macnair makes a classic Trotskyist error when he suggests “Stalin made a zigzag” and “proceeded to steal a version of their [ie, the Left Opposition] clothes”, when he launched the programme of mass collectivisation and rapid industrialisation from April 1929 (‘A hundred years of muddle’, May 15). This implies such a programme would have been correct in 1922‑23 when it was indeed advocated by the Left Opposition, but that is absolutely wrong and reflects the errors made by the ‘lefts’ then and later by the ‘rights’.

The programme of the ‘lefts’ in the early 1920s completely ignored the damage done to the Soviet economy in both industry and the countryside by the civil war. It would have led to economic disaster within the young Soviet Union, having to rely on its own resources to fund industrialisation, which could only have come from a shattered, shrunken peasant economy, which surely would have been completely destroyed by any attempt to collectivise and introduce socialist farming.

But that was always the ‘left’s’ grand scheme. Socialism in one country was for them impossible, so why bother to even try? Let’s nationalise everything that moves, let’s completely abolish the market, let the state control every aspect of what little economic activity was taking place - this will either stimulate proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries or we will go down to heroic defeat.

However, this was never the strategy of the Leninist core of the Communist Party, headed first by Lenin, then later by Stalin. The New Economic Policy period initiated was intended to represent a whole period of “restoration of the national economy”, where market relations were allowed to a certain degree, but only within certain limits: the state ensured that private trade remained within certain limits, that the role of the state was as a regulator of the market.

The so-called ‘left’ saw the NEP unambiguously as a ‘retreat’ which should be ended as soon as possible and mass collectivisation and industrialisation launched. But Lenin saw the NEP dialectically as a programme with specific aims and objectives: eg, “We are now retreating, going back as it were; but we are doing this in order, by retreating first, afterwards to take a run and make a more powerful leap forward. It was on this condition alone that we retreated in pursuing our New Economic Policy ... in order to start a most persistent advance after our retreat” (speech at a plenary session of the Moscow Soviet, November 20 1922).

It was precisely by the late 1920s that industry and agriculture as a whole had recovered to such a degree, that the party had made such good use of the NEP, that it became possible to organise that change, to successfully launch that offensive against the growing capitalist elements in both town and country that Lenin had talked about. In fact it not only became possible but essential to launch mass collectivisation and rapid socialist industrialisation, to move from the period of restoration to a period of socialist reconstruction of the entire economy, to wage class struggle on a very broad front - against all the capitalist elements in the economy.

Lenin had always advocated a class alliance between the industrial proletariat and the mass of poor and middle peasants, against the capitalists, the landlords and the rich exploiter peasants, the kulaks - an alliance, of course, always opposed by the Trotskyists. Read any of Lenin’s writing on the peasantry after 1917 and he consistently argues that the soviet regime had first to rely on the peasantry as a whole, including through immediate land reform, but, over time, to encourage the development of agriculture, which would itself lead to greater class differentiation and proletarianisation among the mass of the peasantry, and then enable the class struggle to be taken to the kulaks and socialist agriculture fully established and developed.

By 1928, capitalist elements in both industry and agriculture were growing in absolute terms (but not in relative terms, compared to socialist sectors) and, critically, were becoming strong enough to actively resist and oppose those socialist forms of ownership, production and distribution and the Soviet state itself. In the towns and cities, there were increased attacks and sabotage of socialist industry. In the countryside, while the richer peasants, the kulaks, had previously freely given grain to the Soviet state up to 1927, from 1928 this was being withheld due to the pricing policy of the state, and the kulak class by now had sufficient strength to manipulate the market and in effect threaten to starve the urban population.

Of course, by then, the ‘left’ had been completely routed and dispersed; the principal danger was from the ‘right’, who made the precise equal and opposite error to the ‘left’, having complete faith in the market to develop the productive forces in both town and country and that the economy would somehow ‘grow into socialism’. Plus, they completely failed to understand the rising class danger from the capitalist elements in both sectors and their relations with ominous class changes at the international level.

The ‘right’, of course, opposed the mass collectivisation and rapid industrialisation launched in 1929, which both rapidly transformed and developed the whole socialist economy and represented that very broad class offensive against the capitalist elements Lenin had talked of earlier as part of the NEP strategy.

It’s fascinating that both the so-called ‘lefts’ and the ‘rights’ appeared incapable of dialectical thinking: every process or event has a dual aspect, interacting and determining each other, and in an ongoing process. That evolutionary changes can both create the conditions and necessitate revolutionary changes to those conditions. Fortunately Lenin and the Leninist core of the party headed by Stalin were capable of the dialectical thinking, theory and practice that is essential for any socialist revolutionary.

It would have been wrong to completely abolish the market in 1922-23 and implement total socialist relations of production. The market had both positive and negative aspects, which had to be kept under tight state control and regulation. It would have been dangerous, indeed fatal for socialism, to have allowed market relations and the capitalist sectors to continue to grow after 1928.

By 1928-29, the economic conditions for socialist transformation had been created and it had become essential to launch socialist revolutionary transformations in both the industrial and agricultural bases of what then very quickly became a strong and mighty, socialist USSR.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Peace-bringers

Class politics is the only game in town. The mental infrastructure of the western so-called ‘middle class’ is diseased and provides every atom of the ‘atom bomb approach’ of western regimes. This ideological insanity is most pronounced in the UK and US - the biggest nutcases on the planet.

They’re taking the human race to the edge of nuclear extinction through their concocted confrontation with Russia and China. We will never get working class militias in the UK until the colonial regime is destroyed. This calls for a resistance movement similar to the French resistance in the war against Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Whether this would involve sabotage of the industrial machinery is open to question.

We are up against depraved beasts who need incineration before they incinerate the human race in a nuclear conflagration. Russia is acting on behalf of the world in military resistance and China through its economic superiority. They are proving themselves as peace-bringers in many regional conflicts.

The only political party in Britain that has the requisite understanding of working class power is the Communist Party of Britain - a product of Lenin’s supreme vision and Stalin’s extraordinary success as leader of the USSR in destroying Hitler’s hordes and wiping out the mass majority of the vermin who dared to challenge the working class. We need a regimented approach and this is being supplied on the streets by the Young Communist League in their uniform marching.

We need the end of liberalism as well as the end of conservatism. Let’s plan for victory.

Elijah Traven
Hull

Tony’s shortfall

The Combahee River Collective has an important place in the history of socialism and black women’s struggle in the United States, but Tony Greenstein mischaracterises and stereotypes the CRC (Letters, May 31).

They were a socialist-feminist black lesbian organisation whose politics developed out of their personal experience: “Identity politics grew out of our objective, material experiences as black women,” they say. I don’t find it to be egregious or a contradiction for them to say that their radical politics did not come from “working to end someone else’s oppression”. Their personal experience led to socialist formulations, actions and alliances, and therefore, in my mind, the CRC has been vindicated in the validity and import of their personal struggles.

The problem I have is that Tony paints the CRC with a contemporary ‘identity politics’ brush. They coined the term, but they are not responsible for how they have come to be defined, exploited and coopted. As a matter of fact they did not “go on to counterpose” their radicalisation “to ending someone else’s oppression” - Tony is patently mistaken. The CRC used its radicalisation to produce a socialist analysis which opposed the multidimensional issues of racism, heterosexism, classism and gender oppression. These aforementioned concerns were reflected in their strategy of making alliances, and coalition building with other organisations, oppressed groups, etc. Their identity politics and intersectionality were organically a part of their politics - not as a function of an anti-revolutionary or bourgeois programme. They were socialist ‘warriors’ who championed the rights of others and who believed in collective liberation for all people by challenging the systems of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and imperialism.

Tony could be right that, for the CRC, class may not have been the “central means of understanding oppression”, but to say that they were “lost in a sea of subjectivity - complete conceptual chaos” strikes me as a gross exaggeration. They were a product of their time and their politics does not conform to our modern standard of theorisation. I have a problem with his unambiguously negative reaction to the CRC, which has no room for acknowledgment of accomplishments - only room for the levelling of criticism.

My view is that “personal identity struggles within a socialist movement can only strengthen that movement”, but Tony says this is not true. My statement is meant to indicate that a socialist movement needs to be inclusive of all identity struggles: ie, trans, queer, cis, bisexual, whatever. Identity struggles (as opposed to current identity politics) is simply another term for the alteration of consciousness: how does that not involve the masses and how is that not part of socialism? I expect that there will be a growth of consciousness and revolutionary process within a disciplined organisation.

Tony has expert knowledge of Zionist colonialism and the Palestine question, but he betrays a shortfall in knowledge when it comes to women’s (gender) liberation. He appears to have no notion of the foundation, and methodological basis of second-wave feminism (initially a serious fight for liberation) and its unqualified genius, which was indeed the method known as consciousness raising - the premise was that the personal was political and the political was personal. This approach was a reinvention of the Marxist linkage between theory and practice; the Marxist mode of analysis was used by the second wave movement to look at how personal life was related to the social structure of society, and political action necessarily followed. Tony’s cursory statement which denigrates the ‘personal is political’ concept is ill-informed. And “personal selfishness” wasn’t an issue which existed at the beginnings of the movement and wasn’t caused by the small consciousness-raising group.

Unfortunately, the second wave women’s movement failed (although there is a large grassroots legacy), because it was a very difficult task in the given historical period to change gender organisation and the relations of power. Mistakes need to be analysed without a deterministic attitude, in regards to both the second wave women’s movement and the Combahee River Collective, in the light of an historical, materialist view that fosters insight and the socialist way forward.

GG
USA