Letters

Liberation

I cannot agree with the anti-drugs line implicitly being pushed by comrade Mary Ward in her review of Kevin Williamson’s book, Drugs and the party line (Weekly Worker January 8). The comrade’s comments indicate that in her haste to castigate the venal hypocrisy of bourgeois politicians she has thrown the baby out with the bathwater - the baby being, in this case, human liberation.

While I am sure that the book contains all manner of useful information - and that its intentions are subjectively honourable - comrade Ward seems to have imbibed the liberalistic, quasi-puritanical agenda of Williamson. Ironically, this means Mary ends up propping up the very ‘party line’ that fills her “with a sense of frustration and disgust”.

Comrade Ward seems to believe that drug-taking is a problem in and of itself - a ‘problem’ that needs to be eliminated. Unsurprisingly then, she applauds Williamson’s “harm reduction”-centred approach. Adopting this perspective, we should be opposed to the prohibitionist ‘war against drugs’ on the grounds that it is not an efficient way to prevent “substance use”. The message seems to be that anybody who takes drugs must automatically be ‘fucked up’. Get them off drugs and they will become ‘good citizens’ again or, as comrade Ward puts it, “function as part of their communities”.

The implicit message is that communists support an ‘alternative’ war against drugs. Legalisation as the continuation of the prohibitionist war against drugs by other means perhaps. The (more stupid) bourgeois want us to ‘just say no’. Mary, instead, wants us to say no after a little think.

Thus, comrade Ward writes: “Prohibition, Williamson argues, does not stop substance use; it only criminalises the users.” Why on earth do we want to stop “substance use”?

People take drugs because they like it - what is so wrong with that? The plain fact of the matter is that for very many people drug-taking makes life a hell of a lot easier. A better way of looking at this question is, possibly, to work out a ‘pleasure-enhancing’ strategy, not a “harm reduction” one.

However, comrade Ward believes that “there is much more to harm reduction than needle exchanges and methadone programmes” - “harm reduction”, thinks comrade Ward, comes as a “package of education, facilities and legalisation”. Apparently, the only reason why people take drugs is because of a bleak awareness of “alienation under the death throes of capitalism”.

Communists should support legalisation not because of some austere master-plan to reduce “substance use” or increase “harm reduction”. If we did, we could end just being a mirror image of bourgeois politicians. We do so in order for “substance use”, like every other aspect of social and cultural existence, to become fully socialised and humanised. Whether that leads to an increase or decrease in “substance use” is an open-ended question.

It is also illuminating that comrade Ward does not classify alcohol as a drug. Yet it is probably responsible for more damaging, and sometimes anti-social, behaviour than all the other drugs put together. But because of a certain cultural history, it is a drug that is eminently respectable - even worth advertising and praising. Oscar Wilde said that one person’s poison is another person’s poetry - the same with alcohol. Yet only a “temperance fanatic”, to use Marx’s words, would want to banish alcohol from human culture and society - though I am aware that Arthur Scargill hankers after such a ‘utopia’. We should, fundamentally, treat non-alcoholic drugs in the same way.

I get the impression that comrade Ward believes we are ‘products of society’ in some crude, mechanical sense - mere copies of the wider bourgeois society. Alienated society “under the death throes of capitalism” equals alienated people, equals substance use. Conversely, I presume, non-alienated socialist society equals happy, non-alienated people or, at the very least, vastly reduced “substance (ab)use”. In reality, of course, people fall into society’s interstices: the family, the church, peer pressure, etc - and just as well, otherwise socialism would be a virtual impossibility. Miserable, hopelessly alienated people cannot make and build socialism - whether they have a clear head or not.

The working class must be won to legalisation as part of a project of universal human liberation, not out of a commitment to “harm reduction” and dull sobriety.

Danny Hammill
South London

Original slogan

May I point out to comrade Frank Vincent (Letters Weekly Worker December 18) the slogan, ‘Fight for what is needed’, was used some time before the Scottish devolution campaign and, far from being meaningless, is as appropriate as ever in light of the attacks on social benefits today.

Apparently, he knows what his attitude is to what the Draft programme does not say, but what is his attitude to what it does say? - ie, does he suggest the various benefits for pensioners, claimants, and payment of the minimum wage to be subjected to the proviso, ‘if possible’?

If our comrade seriously believes leaving out ‘possible’ from the slogan means demanding all the things he describes about colonising planets, etc, all I can say is he has lost his way in thinking about cloud cuckoo land.

Whilst I think the working class has ever been far too modest in their demands during the whole of my lifetime, I am confident they appreciate the original slogan more than our comrade.

Ted Rowlands
Bishop Auckland

Lukács

As someone who is only on the outer fringes of the CPGB, I do not necessarily feel very well placed to comment on the interpretation of the Scottish referendum campaign. I do however feel moved to write about the attack made on George Lukács and his History and class consciousness in Linda Addison’s article, ‘Strengthening the theoretical roots of our propaganda’ (Weekly Worker October 9 1997).

Addison writes: “Given the history of the Second International and the tragic distorted development of the Third International, we should be aware of the shortcomings of deterministic, mechanistic and productivist approaches to political practice. Yet neither should we fall into the crude voluntarism which led Lukács to theorise a view of the party as the ‘methodologically indispensable subject-object’, replacing the working class as the subject of history, with a man-made deus ex machina.”

This is all highly misleading, given that the essay Addison is quoting from is actually entitled, ‘Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat’, where Lukács argues that it is only “when the consciousness of the proletariat is able to point out the road along which the dialectics of history is objectively impelled, but which it cannot travel unaided, will the consciousness of the proletariat awaken to a consciousness of the process, and only then will the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will change reality” (my emphasis History and class consciousness Cambridge USA 1975, p197).

There is no sense in the Lukács of this period, of ‘replacing’ or mechanically counterposing Party and class, in that he takes their indivisible unity as read. I find it weird that Addison can come to such conclusions on the basis of reading ‘Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat’, in that Lukács is concerned in this essay with methodologically unifying and overcoming (through conscious practice) the various ‘antinomies’ of bourgeois thought - subject/object, theory/practice, fact/value, ‘ought’/‘is’, etc, of which Party/class is but another reified example.

Many other criticisms of Addison’s article could be advanced, not least her undialectical construction of two dualistic poles around her own measured approach and that of the so-called ‘voluntarists’ rather than seeing the need to unify the artificial poles of freedom and necessity in a dialectical whole (this is Addison’s presumed intention; it is however squandered by her rejection of Lukács).

But to finish I would like to say that Addison’s method is possibly not so far from that of the PCC as some might feel. Witness the absurd (and unprovable) assertion in the ‘What we fight for’ column: “We are materialists: we hold that ideas are determined by social reality and not the other way round.” If social reality is a totality, then it would presumably include conscious practice. So where does that leave the above statement?

Perhaps the seeds of liquidationism are closer to home than the CPGB majority may think.

Phil Watson
Liverpool

Althusser

I would like to make a response to John Dart’s contribution to the Weekly Worker entitled, ‘Political inventions’ (Letters, December 18).

Although interesting and supportive of the CPGB, he opines that the theoretical advances made by Althusser are to be viewed as “scholastic idiocy” and amount to little more than academic prostitution whose prime concern was to conceal the crimes of conservatism and bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union.

Not claiming to be an expert on Althusser, I would like to advance the position that Althusser’s project was in fact to strengthen up a structuralist cast of thought in order to fill what had been a glaring gap in previous Marxist theories of ideology and, in contrast to John Dart’s proposition, I would argue that Althusser achieves this by remaining broadly within the Marxist problematic.

I do not want to rehearse the basic tenets of structuralism, except to state that it proposed that meaning is generated through difference. For Althusser this emphasis on difference and its mirror opposite, unity, then gives us the notion of articulation, and it is this notion of articulation which is central to this reply.

The classical formulation of base/superstructure which dominated previous Marxist theories of ideology are all based on the idea of a necessary correspondence between one level of social formation and another. Althusser, however, proposes that there is no necessary correspondence, which means that there is no law which will guarantee that the ideology of a group will correspond to the position which that group holds in relation to the capitalist mode of production.

I think that it is also worth noting here that it was Marx and Engels who set this work of revisionism in motion, as can be seen from the documentation in Althusser’s For Marx. Engels says: “It would be absurd to claim that a social totality is dependent solely upon an economic determinism, and to do so would be to ridicule the whole works of Marx and myself.”

I think that Althusser’s work clearly shows the importance of contemporary theory related to present-day practice, and shows Althusser strengthening a Marxist-Leninist position and not a Stalinist one.

To address the final criticism made by comrade Dart concerning the early and mature Marx, it derives from comments made by Althusser in 1965, when he separates the early ideological and decidedly Feuerbachian Marx from the mature and scientific Marx - that is, the Marx who discovered the science of history, or historical materialism.

Kevin Graham
South Cheshire