Letters

Celebrate

There is unease in French society at the many attacks on magistrates and judges - a trend noticeable also in the United States and, of course, in the UK.

In 2019, prime minister Boris Johnson was found by the UK Supreme Court to have unlawfully closed parliament when he prorogued it for five weeks ahead of an October deadline for Britain leaving the EU. Tory tabloids raged at the judiciary. Recently secretary of state Shabana Mahmood, faced with a row over guidance to improve consistency on sentencing by the courts, chose a populist narrative, openly threatening the powers of the Sentencing Council. On the gov.uk website she described the Sentencing Council as promoting “greater consistency in sentencing, while maintaining the independence of the judiciary”. Obviously too much for the Labour leadership.

Democracy is threatened and old certainties are fracturing. Communists do not defend state institutions under capitalism, but, being democrats, we always push for more and better suffrage, more and better political representation. This goes much further than bourgeois democracy, but does not mean shying away from critical involvement and tactical positioning vis-à-vis the various parliamentary parties in any nation-state.

When a party like National Rally is found to have committed fraud, we do not defend that party because their fraudulent practice was committed under capitalism: we look at the overall context. The context is that a rightwing party of ‘law and order’ has been caught out after years of brazen contempt for the very laws it brandished in the faces of everyone else. We rejoice. At the same time, we echo our French comrades, insisting that Marine Le Pen and the National Rally can and will be beaten at the ballot box.

Paul Russell
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No transition

Thanks to Jack Conrad for providing a link to the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s explanation of its aim and principles (endnote 6 of his ‘Rediscovering our words’, April 10). This will enable readers to see exactly what the SPGB’s position is on what the working class does on winning control of political power:

“2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.”

“3. That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.”

“5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.”

“6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.”

In other words, the working class, on winning control of political power, democratises the machinery of government and uses it to dispossess the capitalist class (which needn’t be a lengthy process, as demonstrated by the recall of parliament last Saturday to legislate in a single day some government control over British Steel). This done, socialism (also sometimes called ‘communism’), as “the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people”, has been established.

Jack Conrad, who seems to want to establish a “mass Bolshevik party”, rejects this traditional definition, insisting that socialism is not a system of society to replace capitalism, but some sort of lengthy process, during which capitalism is gradually abolished or, as he puts it, “socialism being the transition period between capitalism and communism, or of socialism beginning as capitalism, but ruled over by the working class”.

Socialism as “capitalism ruled over by the working class”! What next?

Adam Buick
SPGB

Truth and justice

In his first Labour conference speech as prime minister last year, Keir Starmer promised to pass a ‘Hillsborough Law’ bill in parliament before the 36th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster itself. That anniversary was on April 15, but, the day before, Downing Street said that it needed “more time” to create the “best version” of the legislation.

The ‘Hillsborough Law Now’ campaign is demanding a bill that puts into law a “duty of candour” - a legal obligation for public authorities and officials to tell the truth and proactively cooperate with official investigations and inquiries, with officials who knowingly provide false information or obstruct justice to face criminal penalties.

Such a bill would assist ordinary people at the receiving end of wrongdoing, involving the state, to fight for truth and justice - including publicly funded legal representation to create a “parity of arms”. As well as Hillsborough victims, other examples would include the postmasters (victims of the Horizon scandal), victims of the infected blood scandal, as well as Windrush and Grenfell victims and their families.

One can only hope that the government is indeed making the legislation ‘watertight’, although - given their record in regard to previous pledges, such as the ‘New Deal for Working People’, and Starmer’s personal history in regard to pledges - it is more likely it’s being watered-down. One aspect of the bill campaigners fear is being amended is that of the sanctions on individuals, meaning those accused under the new law could seek to hide behind organisations - a loophole likely to be exploited.

As Hillsborough campaigner Margaret Aspinall said, a “watered down” version of the law would be of “no use”. Importantly, it would also be a good indication of whose interests Starmer and his government truly represent. Again, a short glimpse into the past - in particular to his handling of the Jean Charles de Menezes and Julian Assange cases - offers me little hope that he’ll side with the ‘ordinary working people’ he so often claims to care about.

Carl Collins
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Mike’s coalition?

It ought to be a fundamental principle for the labour movement that work should not only pay, but that anyone who works physically and mentally hard for 40 hours a week should earn enough to cover not only all basic living costs, but sufficient to fully participate in society - including through leisure, culture and continued education and learning.

The Loughborough University Centre for Research in Social Policy has devised a minimum income standard (MIS) calculator, which assesses for different family types what they would need to have a decent life. So, for a couple with (say) one primary and one secondary school child, the MIS indicates they need total earnings of £85,699 or net income of £1,321.86 a week. If both adults worked full-time, that would imply an hourly wage rate of over £20.

One might reasonably take a view that in the interests of having adequate time for leisure and to devote to bringing up children, it is unhealthy for both to have to work full-time, so the required hourly rate would need to go up accordingly to compensate. If they were to work (say) 30 hours each, that would equate to £27 an hour. One might question the detailed composition of the calculator, but overall we appear to be talking of minimum rates of pay which are way above the current national minimum wage of £12.21 an hour.

Our immediate counter should surely be that these rates completely fail to achieve the basic production and reproduction of our class, and are self-destructive even from the perspective of capitalist society. Clearly, the state should also take direct responsibility for funding many of the costs of bringing up children: eg, through an enhanced system of child benefits, as clearly not only having children, but ensuring they are well looked after, well and healthily fed, kept warm and dry, as well as being well educated in a balanced way with necessary relaxed, leisure and play times, is essential to the reproduction of society.

How much should be funded via the state as opposed to wages is open to debate, but must surely be set far higher than what applies now and paid for all children. But, if the principle is correct that all workers should earn enough to reproduce and enhance their labour - and society has a basic interest in this as well - then surely this should be one of our basic minimum demands?

We should be demanding and insisting what we actually need, not what capitalism, the media or politicians say is ‘affordable’ or ‘realistic’. If such demands require deep inroads into the wealth and power of the capitalist class, then so be it. If they require a fundamental change in system to one run by and in the interests of working people - socialism - then let’s make that change!

As a long time reader and subscriber to the Weekly Worker, I have long understood this basic approach to minimum or immediate demands is core to its basic approach and that of the rather tiny group which exists behind it. I was pleased to see this basic approach clearly reiterated by Jack Conrad (‘Labourism without Labour’, April 3) - and, I have to say, in vivid contrast to the voluminous confusion and obfuscation of Mike Macnair, who, in far too many self-indulgent wordy confusing and obscure articles, reveals no real communism at all, but more a throwback to 19th century social democracy, and two of its later key outputs - the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Mensheviks in Russia.

In the past year or so, Macnair has become increasingly open about how he opposes (indeed hates and detests) virtually every decision and action the Bolshevik Party took after assuming power in October 1917 - and, of course, his utter contempt for the entire role, function and purpose of the Communist International. Macnair both officially (ie, without declaring it is a personal view only) and unofficially (allegedly writing as an individual) manages to undermine and contradict many of the Weekly Worker group’s positions and yet remains as a senior member. His articles on the role and purpose of the minimum programme are clearly at great variance with the WWG - and indeed the mainstream communist movement, which sees the minimum (or immediate) programme as part of a strategy to help develop the working class in the here and now into a class that is ideologically, politically and organisationally capable of taking state power and establishing socialism.

For Macnair, the minimum programme is a set of conditions for the “working class to take governmental office”! Can there be a more blatant example of utter reformism and constitutionalism? And just who is the working class bargaining with to “take governmental office”? Presumably parties of capitalism. So he’s a capitalist ‘coalitionist’ to boot!

One really does wonder how or why Macnair manages to remain with the WWG. Maybe it is as simple as the fact that it provides him with a weekly print and online journal where he can profusely and confusingly pontificate and add so very little on so many subjects. I wonder how many readers actually do manage or choose to struggle through his social democratic and Menshevik meanderings. I guess it’s just seeing the words in print, rather than who or how many actually reads them which matters to some people.

For real communists, the minimum or immediate programme (which does, despite blatant lies by Macnair, include a comprehensive range of economic, social, political and constitutional demands - his so-called ‘high politics’ - and his utterly contemptuous and dismissive attitude to what he considers ‘trade union’ or economic struggles) starts from what we as the working class genuinely need in the here and now, but is absolutely not limited by capitalism’s claimed ‘realism’ or ‘affordability’.

As socialists and communists, we can do the basic maths, even with existing capitalist society, about the production and distribution of real wealth. We know it is even today possible, practical and indeed necessary to establish a society and economy run by and in the interests of working people. Removing the entire capitalist class - with their parasitical accumulation of vast amounts of income, wealth and power - would more than ensure that the basic needs of working people can be met.

Raising immediate demands, which are driven by what working people actually need, proceeds from where the class is now, but also challenges and potentially breaks the current artificial restrictions imposed by bourgeois society, also providing a real glimpse of what a socialist and future communist society can actually be like. This. of course, has been the essence of all political and strategic programmes and manifestos produced and sought to be applied since the establishment of the (real) Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920 to the present-day Communist Party of Britain.

Have we always got the exact composition, detail or wording right in all cases? No, obviously not. But we are a million times closer to the real communist tradition, programme, strategy and tactics than any of the ultra-left gnats, blowflies and fleas which try to irritate us and take us off course. More importantly, none of the irritants have anything like a credible strategy of programme to seriously revolutionise this society from capitalism to socialism.

One has grave doubts that they have any such wish or intention. They exist solely to attack, sabotage and undermine every real effort by the working class movement to improve conditions in the here and now, not build a real movement for socialism.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Stalinist democrat

Before I reply to Gerry Downing (Letters, April 10), I would like to say that, where it can be avoided, we should oppose the strategy of fighting on two fronts. Graham Durham, the editor of Socialist Labour Bulletin, believes that the working class should have fought on two fronts during World War II; ie, opposing Hitler and Churchill at the same time (Letters, April 10). A sure recipe for defeat. I assume that Graham is a Trotskyist, or sympathetic, because this was the Trotskyist position in World War II. They blindly adopted Lenin’s defeatist position from World War I, regardless of the changed circumstances.

As for Gerry Downing, like all Trotskyists, he views Trotsky as the ‘Miss Snow White’ of the Russian Revolution, but people who have studied Russian revolutionary history with a bit more depth have a more balanced view. Most Trotskyists are not even aware that Trotsky sided with those who wanted Lenin removed from the leadership of the party during the period of the anti-Lenin conspiracy in July 1917.

After the premature attempt to seize power in the July days, which Lenin opposed, warrants were issued for his and Zinoviev’s arrest. They went into hiding after rumours spread that Lenin was an agent of the German General Staff. There was a debate in the party about whether he should give himself up and present himself to the courts. Lenin was charged with high treason. He was wavering about handing himself in. Stalin was firmly against Lenin surrendering. According to the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Kamenev, Rykov, Trotsky and others, even before the congress, had argued for Lenin to appear before the counterrevolutionary court.

In his biography on Stalin, Trotsky confessed that those who opposed Lenin handing himself in were proved right, but he remained silent about his own position, claiming he took no part in the discussions. The fact that Trotsky voluntarily handed himself in suggests that he would have had the same attitude towards Lenin. This question was discussed at the 6th Congress of the Bolsheviks, when the Trotskyist group joined the party. Even if Trotsky was absent from the 6th Congress, his position on whether Lenin should appear in court would have been canvassed. His silence on his position can only mean he was in favour of Lenin handing himself in.

In her memoirs Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, wrote that Stalin saved Lenin’s life. She should have also said that by saving Lenin’s life Stalin saved the revolution. We all know what would have happened, had Lenin surrendered. Look what happened to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht later. Although Stalin led the camp of those opposed to Lenin delivering himself up, later in the anti-Stalin campaign, Khrushchev went beyond exposing some of Stalin’s misdeeds and attempted to crudely falsify history by claiming that Stalin wanted to hand Lenin over to the courts. Khrushchev disregarded the evidence provided by Krupskaya, and indeed by Trotsky himself, about Stalin’s role in the July Days.

The Trotskyist world view stemmed from his method. During the debate about the role of trade unions under socialism, Lenin made a remark about Trotsky’s method: “All his theses are based on ‘general principle’ - an approach which is in itself fundamentally wrong” (Collected works Vol 32, p22).

The lack of concrete dialectical analysis had earlier led Trotsky to oppose Lenin’s theory that socialism was possible in one country as part of the world revolutionary process. See Lenin on the slogan of a ‘United States of the World’ (1915, Vol 21, p342), where he suggests the possibility of socialism in a single country; and see Trotsky’s later argument in Nashe Slovo (February 1916), where he argues that it is hopeless to struggle for working class rule in any country taken separately.

Trotsky wrote The Stalin school of falsification, but forgot to mention that he himself falsified history by claiming that the theory of socialism in one country was invented by Stalin and expressed the counterrevolutionary interest of the socialist bureaucracy. Regardless of whether we agree with Lenin or not, Trotsky was prepared to mislead a whole generation of communists who followed him about the origins of socialism in one country. Stalin was definitely not going against Lenin when he put forward this line. He was going against Trotskyism.

This is not about denigrating Trotsky’s role in the revolution. He played a very important and leading role, regardless of the later anti-Trotsky campaign by the Stalinist faction. However, in the light of the collapse of the Soviet Union what is needed now is an objective, balanced appraisal of these events and the participants. Part of the reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union is that after the banning of factions in 1921 - proposed by Lenin with the support of Trotsky and Stalin - Leninism left the camp of democratic socialism.

We need to totally oppose the way Stalin treated his political rivals in the party, but claiming he was a counterrevolutionary is going too far, in my view. His ultra-left, mistaken support for the social-fascism line is not what we would expect from a counterrevolutionary. And the nuclear blackmail directed against him at the end of World War II should also be taken into account, when explaining his restraint in openly aiding revolution in the western sphere of influence in the immediate post-war period.

As for Downing’s continuing claim that Donald Trump is installing a fascist regime in America, I will take Downing seriously when president Trump purges Congress, and bans all political opposition.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism

Steel and coal

So at long last it seems that Sir Keir Starmer has finally worked out that you cannot make new steel without a blast furnace. More than that, the blast furnace requires coke, which apparently comes from coal!

So, with the government having created a hostile environment for coal mining and made it clear it did not approve of the proposed new mine in Whitehaven, the West Cumbria Mining company did not bother appealing against the very silly legal objection to the mine placed before the High Court. This comes at the end of seven years of objections by Lakeside environmental campaigners and Friends of the Earth, three regional county council public enquiries, an independent national legal and technical enquiry, and reconsideration by the secretary of state - during which every legal, technical and environmental hurdle was cleared and found in favour of the new mine.

Then came the Labour government’s pledge to stop all coal contracts and licences. Energy secretary Ed Miliband (whose obsession with coal is worse than Margaret Thatcher’s) promised a coal-free, oil-free, gas-free Britain. Seizing on a judgement for a new oil well that the drillers had not taken into account - all the emissions which would result in the lifetime of the well - the learned judge turned down the application. Oh joy, as Friends of the Earth and Lakeside campaigners rushed to court yet again to object the mine on the same grounds. By the way, Friends of the Earth et al are not short of a bob or two - they have a permanent team of top barristers and solicitors working for them. In all the legal enquiries and objections, they never asked about those emissions. If it was so vital, why not?

It is very easy to work out the answer. The response would not matter, because they know and we know we need the steel: it will be made, and so the coal via coke will be burned, and those emissions will take place. If you want to conclude from the answer that in order to stop such emissions we must not produce steel, fine - but then the country would rapidly comes to a halt: no building construction, no wind turbines, no railway lines, no planes, ships, cars, buses, etc. So they know, and we know, that the intention was only to stop emissions in Britain: only to stop coke from coal being produced here, only steel production here. The problem is that the world needs virgin steel and the UK’s use of it is essential.

So has Starmer really learned basic metallurgy at last? Of course not - the stopping of all primary steel production has been planned for at least the last three years. What has happened is that the Scunthorpe steelworkers have finally seen through the lies that everyone, including Unite the Union, has been telling them; that closure of the furnaces means unemployment.

Despite the long garden path that offshore workers have been led on, there is no ‘just transition’ - electric arcs do not make new steel, and in any case, their production would mean the need to employ 200 workers, not the 2,500 employed by use of the blast furnace. If the use of oil and gas wells ends, whole areas of industry would shut down and steel production would end. Unite has even invited Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Just Stop Oil onto its Save Our Industry platforms and marches. It has been riding two horses going in opposite directions with one arsehole (not that there is any shortage of arseholes in the trade union movement!).

So Starmer might nationalise steel and keep the blast furnaces, but if he retains the 2/3 carbon tax on steel, its production will always be in debt. The reason the Chinese cannot continue hacking it is that they are crippled with a carbon tax which nobody else carries. You cannot make primary steel production work in either private or nationalised industry with a carbon tax and net-zero perspectives. Does he seriously think we do not know this?

What about coal? Are we going to develop new mines after all? No, just ship it in from Japan! But carbon emissions will be much greater, as it will be shipped in via diesel tankers, following what is anyway a much higher rate of emission from Japanese mines (or Chinese mines, because we are not sure whether this would actually be Chinese coal being retitled Japanese coal to avoid the higher Trump tariff). It seems that ‘cutting our nose to spite their face’ is part of the sorry story of this whole saga.

It is time to start telling the truth. The workers in steel and offshore industries must take control of campaigning themselves rather than leave it in the hands of full-time officers with another agenda. My book, Coal, climate and the total destruction of the British mining industry, which plots the trajectory of this wilful betrayal is available from douglassdavid705@gmail.com if you want to read that sad, sorry story.

David Douglass
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