WeeklyWorker

Letters

Green left

Carla Roberts has provided us with another useful update on the yet-to-be-declared Corbyn party (‘Privileged information leaks’ June 26). Her earlier report from the We Demand Change event in Sheffield (‘Everyone wants to join’ May 22) made me think that one reason for the delay in Corbyn declaring a new party is the current leadership contest in the Green Party of England and Wales. The hope may be that a left-led Green Party would be willing to engage in non-aggression pacts with various groups of independent ex-Labour councillors.

Zack Polanski, running as the left candidate, is viewed as a credible enough threat for supporters of the rightwing ticket in the Green leadership contest. Unlikely as it may sound, the Green right is fearful of entryism by the left groups, with many of the same complaints about Corbyn’s supporters in Labour now being made about Polanski’s backers.

Grumbling from the old guard in the Greens centres on an alleged attempt to capture the party and turn it away from a concern for the climate and conservation - which can have a non-threatening, cross-class electoral appeal - towards the rhetoric of the ex-Labour left, which is more eager to make an appeal on the basis of class. The Greens have attracted leftists for a long time, with a particular spike in membership after Starmer replaced Corbyn as Labour leader, and it hasn’t impeded a growth in the party’s electoral representation. The substance of the complaint is therefore that more leftwing members will mean inner-party competition for positions.

Polanski describes his politics as ‘eco-populism’ and he has been recruiting eagerly, using his position as deputy leader over recent years and now his leadership campaign - people who join the Greens before July 31 will get a vote in the leadership contest. Polanski’s team are suggesting that the party’s four MPs could be joined by a dozen or more defectors from Labour if he wins.

The House magazine has reported that suspended Labour MPs have been in talks with the Greens about joining: “Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum are seen as the most likely candidates for defection, particularly if Polanski wins” (May 17). Given that the other MP alleged by The House to have considered this move, Richard Burgon, has since regained the Labour whip, it may be that the threat to defect to the Greens will instead be used as a bargaining chip by the Labour left MPs, allowing members of the Socialist Campaign Group to retain the whip and therefore their potential vote for a soft-left leadership candidate to replace Starmer.

The makings of a broad and informal alliance of the left are clear to see: Corbyn, Burgon and Polanski have all appeared on the platform at events of the Socialist Workers Party’s ‘We Demand Change’ front. It appears that the new generation of SWP leaders has reached the conclusion that consistent electoral work is necessary. Their current argument that a number of points of unity should form the basis of the endorsement of candidates is a sign they realise that a programme is required to hold representatives to account.

This realisation may soon dawn on the Green left if its leadership candidate is victorious: the party’s current programme, ‘Policies for a sustainable society’, is a lengthy list of stances the party takes, lacking a clear perspective of how these reforms are to be implemented, and it is no longer published on their website for all to read.

The return in October of The World Transformed festival, now separate from Labour’s conference, may offer an opportunity to reflect on Corbynism in Labour, this tendency resurfacing in the Greens, and the question of a new party and its programme. But what’s needed is an annual delegate conference, open to the whole of the left, to forge a formal socialist alliance - if not yet a mass communist party - out of the fragmented groups.

Ansell Eade
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Not party time

In my letter of May 1 I asked why it is that the CPGB’s political priority was “forging unity between itself and two or three micro-political sects in the belief that it can create a new Marxist party”. I described this as “the political equivalent of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” and accused you of having “next to nothing to say about building a left that can begin to address the political situation as it is”. Your “main priority is in building another left sect”.

I accused you of turning your backs on the living political struggle in favour of an irrelevant unity project. It didn’t surprise me that no-one in the CPGB wished to engage with my argument, because to do so would raise too many uncomfortable questions. But today I learn that Talking About Socialism (the name itself speaks volumes!) has broken off unity talks with you. Have you learnt anything from this debacle? It would seem not, as you are now imploring them to reconsider - all two or three of them.

We are living through the first live-streamed genocide in history. International law - the framework of western imperialist morality since World War II - lies in tatters. The Israeli settler-colonial state has lost any shred of justification for its existence and the holocaust/anti-Semitism card has been well and truly played - coupled with the fact that Zionist militarism has suffered a defeat at the hands of the Iranian state. We also face, for the first time ever, the prospect of a far-right government in Britain.

What is the CPGB’s response to all this? To pursue doggedly unity talks with completely irrelevant micro-sects. Perhaps a few observations are in order. We have had working class quiescence for some 40 years. No strike since the miners’ of 1984‑85 has challenged state power. At the same time we have seen the growth of a mass Palestine solidarity movement.

This week sees Yvette Cooper introducing the proscription on Palestine Action. From Friday it will be illegal to support it. Palestine Solidarity Campaign has just announced that it will comply with the proscription. This is meeting fierce resistance from the activist layers of the movement. What is the CPGB’s response? Nothing, because, of course, it plays no part in the Palestine solidarity movement.

The struggle against British imperialism and its support for the Zionist regime and the United States is the class struggle of our times. Key questions such as defiance of the law raise themselves, yet the CPGB is more concerned with creating a mass communist party.

Let us be clear. We do not live in revolutionary times or even pre-revolutionary times. Our first and foremost task is preventing a far-right government and rebuilding the left. We have a Labour Party government which is simply a continuation of the previous Tory government.

The distinctions between reformism and revolutionary socialism are theoretical abstractions today, when the need to defend democratic gains won in past ages, such as freedom of speech, are all too obvious. Yet the CPGB insists, like the ostrich, on burying its head in the sand and believing that unity between sects will somehow affect the balance of power.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Kautsky crisis

In ‘Completely different foundations’ (June 26), Mike Macnair describes “the SPD’s ‘orthodox’ theory of the inevitable collapse of capitalism”. In fact the orthodox centre of the German Social Democratic Party had no such theory, though Luxemburg (not in the orthodox centre, but on the left) sought to develop one. Elsewhere in ‘Anti-Bernstein’ Kautsky explicitly disavows such a theory and attributes it to a fiction of Bernstein’s.

Further, Lenin did not believe in such a theory either, and in his positive 1899 review of Kautsky’s work he recognises the centrality of that question to the debate, writing: “Kautsky deals with the so-called Zusammenbruchstheorie, the theory of collapse, of the sudden crash of west European capitalism, a crash that Marx allegedly believed to be inevitable and connected with a gigantic economic crisis. Kautsky says and proves that Marx and Engels never propounded a special Zusammenbruchstheorie, that they did not connect a Zusammenbruch [collapse] necessarily with an economic crisis. This is a distortion chargeable to their opponents, who expound Marx’s theory one-sidedly, tearing out of context odd passages from different writings in order thus triumphantly to refute the ‘one-sidedness’ and ‘crudeness’ of the theory.”

Those interested in the evolution of Kautsky’s views on crisis and collapse would do well to read as well his Theories of crises and Finance capital and crises. A broad overview of the debates on this topic in the Second International is given in the initial section of Simon Clarke’s very good Marx’s theory of crisis.

Gary Levi
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Socialism ASAP

Adam Buick of the Socialist Party of Great Britain comments: “With regard to rejecting ‘all notions of transition’, the SPGB position is that, once there is a majority of workers who are determined to establish socialism (a precondition for its establishment), capitalist ownership of the means of production can be abolished - and socialism (as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production established, aka communism) - fairly rapidly after that majority has won control of political power and democratised it. There need be no period of working class administration of capitalism” (Letters, June 26).

I cannot see how anyone can reasonably dispute the point Adam is making here. Assuming you have a majority supporting socialism (aka communism), what else is possibly needed for it to be implemented? The only other fundamental precondition I can think of (and one that, indeed, would need to be met for socialism to happen) is developing the technological capacity to produce enough to satisfy the reasonable needs of the population.

But that capacity has been around for decades, if not more! Engels was alluding to this way back in the 1880s. People’s needs remain unmet - not because we are somehow lacking in the technological infrastructure required to meet their needs (we already, for instance, produce more than enough food to adequately satisfy the dietary requirements of the entire global population). On the contrary, people’s needs continue to remain unmet for the simple reason that capitalism continues to exist. It’s as glaringly simple and as straightforward as that.

Consequently, it is not particularly logical to argue that workers need to institute some kind of transitional social arrangement that still retains capitalism (our present-day buying-and-selling system) on the pretext that this is needed to “further develop the forces of production” before socialism can be implemented. That overlooks why human needs are unmet today, which has everything to do with economics and nothing to do with the level of technological development as such.

Not only is that argument illogical: it also overlooks something else - namely, the already enormous and steadily growing structural waste that is built into capitalism. This entails the diversion of more and more resources - human and material - away from socially useful production into socially useless and even downright harmful production (like armaments). Think, for example, of all those occupations involved in one way or another with handling money (all of which would no longer be needed in a socialist society and would completely disappear). Conservatively speaking, we could easily double socially useful output (or, alternatively, halve the working week), once such a society is established, without putting any additional strain on our already overstressed environment.

So where is the need to implement some so-called “transitional programme”, following the capture of political power by a socialist-minded working class majority? Why retain capitalism (which is what such a programme implies), even if we might comfort ourselves with the pretence that, some sunny day in the future, we will eventually get round to phasing it out? There is no justification whatsoever for such an approach that I can discern. On the contrary, what is needed is to get rid of capitalism and its class divisions ASAP.

Robin Cox
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Haste makes chaos

In footnote 1 of his article, ‘Completely different foundations’ (June 26), comrade Mike Macnair attributes to me the assertion that “the transition from capitalism to a planned economy will be a complex and difficult process of trial and error”.

May I give a more accurate formulation of my view? The claim I was trying to make is that the transition from a market economy to a planned one will be a complex and difficult process. The point is that, while capitalism operates via a market economy, the converse is not true: a market economy need not be capitalist. The road from capitalism to communism must clearly involve both the abolition of capitalism and a transition from a market economy to a planned global economy. It is the latter that is by far the more complex and difficult.

Capitalism is essentially based on the extraction of surplus value by exploitation of wage labour. Under extreme democracy, the political rule of the working class, the abolition of capitalism is relatively the simpler task. It would involve expropriation of major firms, taxation of all firms, establishing workers’ control of production, transforming small firms into cooperatives, and so on.

This will still leave in place a non-capitalist economy functioning to a considerable extent via the market, in which money-based supply and demand regulate the flow of commodity-products, nationally and globally. This is no longer capitalism, nor yet fully fledged communism.

The transition from this market economy to a democratically planned, communist, global economy is far more complex than many socialists realise. And it cannot be achieved in a hurry: haste would make waste and chaos.

Moshé Machover
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First phase links

To attribute the fallacy of state socialism to Marx, the following line of reasoning is often employed:

The first and second propositions are both correct. However, the conclusion drawn from them is false. While the division of labour does persist in the first phase of communist society, the state does not.

This reasoning attempts to establish a logical link between the first two propositions via the term, ‘division of labour’. Had the term carried the same meaning in both instances, the link would have been valid and the conclusion compelling. However, the term is used in different senses in each proposition. The argument, therefore, rests on a semantic fallacy - an instance of equating apples with oranges - and is consequently mistaken in both its logic and its conclusion.

In its conventional sense, ‘division of labour’ refers to the allocation of distinct tasks among producers within the labour process. This is the meaning intended in the second proposition. Cooperation and division of labour among producers are intrinsic to the labour process and fundamental to its operation.

Marxist theory, however, employs the concept of division of labour not only in this straightforward technical sense, but, more importantly, in a specific and critical sense. In the first proposition, division of labour denotes the deep historical and social fragmentation that the theory identifies with alienated human activity.

The division of labour, in this sense, is a manifestation of alienated activity that fragments society into classes. It simultaneously isolates individuals, while binding them through mutual dependence on one another’s labour products. Marx connects this socially fragmenting form of the division of labour - which governs people - to exchange in the following way: “Exchange and division of labour reciprocally condition one another. Since everyone works for himself, but his product is nothing for him, each must, of course, exchange, not only in order to take part in the general productive capacity, but also in order to transform his own product into his own subsistence. Exchange, when mediated by exchange value and money, presupposes the all-round dependence of the producers on one another, together with the total isolation of their private interests from one another, as well as a division of social labour whose unity and mutual complementarity exist in the form of a natural relation, as it were, external to the individuals and independent of them” (Grundrisse, 1857-58).

Marx, in the passage below, illustrates direct social labour in a communal society through the example of a peasant family that produces use values for its own needs. The combined labour-power of individual family members is naturally considered to belong to the family as a whole. Consequently, every labour activity carried out by family members constitutes part of the family’s collective labour - that is, direct social labour:

“For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go back to that spontaneously developed form, which we find on the threshold of the history of all civilised races. We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour-time of the several members, depend, as well as upon differences of age and sex, upon natural conditions varying with the seasons. The labour-power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour-power of the family, and therefore the measure of the expenditure of individual labour-power by its duration appears here by its very nature as a social character of their labour” (Capital Vol 1).

Using the example of the family, Marx makes the following observation about the division of labour in the communal labour activity of the future: “The distribution of the work within the family and the regulation of the labour-time of the several members depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions varying with the seasons.” Here, the division of labour, in its literal sense, refers to the allocation of various tasks among communal producers within the labour process.

The division of labour that fragments capitalist society through alienated activity is one thing; the distribution of tasks among communal individuals in the production process of a communal society is quite another.

Alienated activity has fragmented society into classes, isolating individuals and confining them to specific segments of labour through which they earn their livelihood. This reflects the reality created by the social division of labour, which dissects society into isolated entities.

By overcoming this fragmentation of activity and restoring it as a unified whole under the control of the associated producers, the socialist/communist revolution seeks to abolish the social division of labour - the very mechanism that fractures society and sustains its rigid structures. It is not the functional distribution of tasks within production that is to be eliminated, but the social division of labour that perpetuates societal disintegration.

In the first phase of communal society, individuals have freed themselves from the domination of dehumanising social relations and the social division of labour that fragments society. However, they have not yet transcended the limitations of their own productive capacities. At this phase, the productive forces are not yet sufficiently developed to permit free movement between communal tasks - particularly between mental and physical labour. As a result, individuals remain subject to a functional division of labour within the production process, shaped by the constraints of their individual capabilities.

In this first phase, subordination does not stem from the isolated individual’s submission to the social division of labour, as in capitalism. Rather, it arises from the communal individual’s subjection - within the production process - to the unequal productive capacities with which they are naturally endowed.

As the productive forces of communal labour advance, the necessity of submitting to the functional division of labour imposed by these limitations will gradually diminish. The multifaceted development of communal individuals in the later phases of communal society will enable them to undertake a variety of communal tasks, without erasing the inherent distinctiveness of each. As communal needs diversify, so too will the forms of labour. In response, the communal will shall continue to allocate labour rationally across a range of evolving tasks.

Usuf Zamir
Union of Turkish Progressives in Britain

Spart defence

Ian Spencer’s article, ‘Carnival of the oppressed’ (June 26) featured a picture of the Spartacist League’s contingent at the June 21 pro-Palestine mass demonstration in London with a caption reading: “Some want to defend, not Iran, but the theocratic regime”. The article also claimed that our contingent flew the Iranian flag “because of a warped version of anti-imperialism”. This is a demagogic and dishonest polemic.

Our contingent, whose main banner read “Stop the Zionist bloodbath! Stand with Iran and Palestine”, together with placards calling on trade unions to defend Iran, did not fly the Iranian flag. What happened was that our unambiguous stand against imperialism attracted multiple Iranian people who took our leaflets, marched with us, chanted our slogans and waved their flag - something we welcomed. This is what the photo in the Weekly Worker shows. As Iran was being bombed by the US and Israel, the CPGB’s denunciation of those waving the Iranian flag in a London anti-war demo is the kind of thing one would expect to see in the tabloid press, not in a so-called Marxist newspaper.

Furthermore, if Ian Spencer had bothered to actually read what the Spartacist League says on Iran, he would have quickly realised that we do not support the Iranian clerical regime. Here is what our comrades in the US wrote the day after the US bombing: “Many cite the reactionary character of the Iranian regime as an excuse to pull back from the defence of Iran against the US oligarchy - by far the most reactionary force out there. The Iranian regime does deserve to be ended - not by the much bigger US sponsors of ‘state terrorism’, but by Iran’s working and toiling masses” (‘Defend Iran against US/Israel!’ Workers Vanguard supplement, June 22). While the CPGB denounces our straightforward and principled line, its own position is a confused mish-mash, which refuses to say openly ‘Defend Iran’. Rather, the CPGB insists on the need to defend the peoples of Iran. The implication of such insistence is that the Iranian defence forces and military - that is, those who are actively fighting the US and Israeli aggression - are fair game, as opposed to ‘the people’. This is a complete capitulation to imperialism, comrades.

Just look at what happened in Iraq or Libya. The imperialists brought down the regimes in order to subjugate the people, laying waste to both countries. Does this mean that Marxists supported those regimes? No. However, it does mean that Marxists had to take a side with the regime’s forces against the imperialist aggressor. The same is true for Iran today. In contrast, standing with the “Iranian people” is a meaningless phrase which everyone can utter. Netanyahu and Trump claim to be for the Iranian people. So does the ayatollah. So does Keir Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn and the far left. What draws a clear class line is to call for the defence of Iran against imperialism.

This is not only essential in Britain, but is also key to building a revolutionary movement in Iran against the regime itself. No Iranian worker is going to follow so-called communists who defend “the people”, but who refuse to take a side in the war and help the armed forces defend the country against imperialism. Any conscious worker would see this as treachery, no different than that of the monarchists and liberals. Such a stance discredits communists and only strengthens the authority of the mullahs. The only way communists can aspire to lead the Iranian masses and turn them against the reactionary regime is if they place themselves on the front lines of the struggle to defend Iran against the US and Israel, putting forward a revolutionary strategy against that of the mullahs.

As far as we know, our contingent at the June 21 demonstration was the only one on the British left which marched under the straightforward call to defend Iran. Most other left groups either ignored the question or else limited themselves to pacifist platitudes (“No war with Iran” or “Hands off Iran”). Such pacifist slogans remain perfectly compatible with liberals and Labourites, whose politics dominate the pro-Palestine demonstrations. Yet Ian Spencer uncritically praised the demonstration and, of all the contingents present, the only one he deemed objectionable was ours! This is quite telling.

This all goes to show that the main concern driving your position is not to take the strongest stance against the imperialist rulers, but rather to not offend the opinion of petty-bourgeois liberals and Labourites, who might accuse you of softness on the regime.

Comrades, communist unity will be forged in the struggle against the pacifists and Labourite lackeys who dominate the British left. Not through demagogic and false polemics against those who oppose them.

Vincent David
Spartacist League