Letters

Elementary, my dear Watson

Phil Watson (Letters, February 5) says my reply to him was “rather odd” because I dared cite Marx’s Preface to the Contribution to the critique of political economy. Appar­ently I did so as if it were “scripture”. It is indeed odd then that, after chiding me, the comrade immediately cites the Polish Marx­ist Franz Jakubowski as an authority on that very preface ... I will resist the obvious temp­tation to say ‘as if it were “scripture”’.

Let me assure comrade Watson that I do not regard anything Marx wrote or said as “scripture”. Everything must be questioned. Nothing should be taken for granted.

Why did I turn to Marx? Because comrade Watson, rather flippantly, accused us of be­ing “liquidators” - here something that can only mean liquidating the theory of Marx­ism. We carry a formulation directly adapted from Marx’s 1857 preface in our ‘What we fight for’ column in the Weekly Worker that greatly offends comrade Watson. Evidently therefore the purpose of my letter needs re­stating. I merely wanted to show that Marx - and it was not only once - stressed the pri­macy of social being in determining con­sciousness. “It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the con­trary, their social being that determines their consciousness,” we read in the celebrated preface.

Comrade Watson is right to insist that Marx’s work - like that of any thinker - must be considered in its totality. Here in my opin­ion Marx should not be read to mean that social consciousness mechanically or pas­sively reflects social reality. Nor that con­sciousness has no effect on social being. Rather that social being is the determined determinate of the last instance. We commu­nists do after all pay a great deal of attention to and put great store by the role of con­sciousness in changing social being ... “We’ll change forthwith the old conditions.”

Comrade Watson finds Marx’s preface “im­mensely problematic” because it could be “utilised in a reified, anti-humanist reading”. This is indeed true ... but not only of the preface. Virtually every well honed slogan and passage in the writing of Marx (and Engels, Lenin, etc) has been used against the working class. From ‘Workingmen of all lands unite’ to the ‘expropriation of the ex­propriators’, social democracy, ‘official com­munism’ and degenerate Trotskyism have turned ‘Marxism’ into an ideology which ob­jectively excused or justified the oppression and exploitation of the working class. That, however, does not mean we should junk Marx or Marxism along with opportunism.

Finally in reply to my friend Phil Sharpe and his brave defence of Althusser. He main­tains that Marx’s early works such as the Paris manuscripts “represented” the ideal­ist and mechanical “hangover” from Hegel and Feuerbach. I beg to differ. Marx em­ployed many Hegelian phrases and con­cepts. Nevertheless, as argued by István Mészáros in his outstanding study Marx’s theory of alienation, he had by 1844 given them a profoundly different content. A con­tent that was neither idealist nor mechani­cal, but dialectical and materialist. Though Althusser denies it, the humanist Marx of 1844 points directly to the humanist Marx of Capital.

Jack Conrad
London

Vindicated

The article by Jack Conrad headed ‘Open­ness and organisation’ (Weekly Worker Feb­ruary 12) made interesting reading. The report from the PCC spin doctor quite frankly gives a one-sided and unbalanced view of the realities of the debate. Reading this, one would be forgiven for thinking that the PCC and Jack had scored a major victory, having wiped the floor with those Mancunian up­starts who had the insolence to pile onto Virgin Trains and invade London in order to do battle with the infallible PCC.

The reality however was rather different. The opposition from Manchester was origi­nally against the theses presented by Mark Fischer which contained clauses threatening to suspend revolutionary openness on occasions, was full of pompous moralism and threatened expulsion against dissenters.

Manchester comrades, away from the hot­house atmosphere of London, could not see the need for this diatribe with its dangerous lurch towards the Stalinist bureaucratic meth­ods of ‘official communism’. For the Man­chester comrades the crucial point was that criticism and self-criticism are the right and duty of comrades “so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action”, a point so obviously missed out of the Fischer docu­ment - hardly an oversight!

By the time it got to the December aggre­gate the PCC had taken some of the worst excesses from the Fischer document and adopted it as its own, but it still got a right good leathering. When debate resumed at the February aggregate the PCC position had changed again, reluctantly, to accommodate the criticisms led by Manchester. The threat to suspend openness and expel dissidents was out, but still the PCC-backed theses were badly formulated.

In the debate much noise was generated around the right of the editor to edit, and the need to assert this among comrades in Lon­don. Manchester understood this concern, and backed the PCC in restoring a strong editorial policy. So it is rather crass for the comrade to now say that he had to assert editorial prerogative against Manchester.

Far from Manchester retreating, we feel the end result fully vindicated us in our opposi­tion to the Fischer theses. And still, the new theses fail to draw a clear distinction between our practice of revolutionary openness and liberalism, thus leading to the wrong conclu­sion that correct revolutionary practice can be damaging to the pro-Party project. And they failed to locate the guiding principle that openness is damaging when it disturbs the unity of a definite action.

This major point which prompted our ini­tial objection to the Fischer document was still missing. There has never been, as far as we are concerned, any hint of disunity with the Party and we continue to remain commit­ted, to the CPGB Party project and its leader­ship. As for ‘I am honest Jack - trust me’, we will be keeping a very careful eye on you.

Manchester branch
CPGB

State racism

Comrades Alan Fox (‘Racism or national chauvinism?’ Weekly Worker January 15) and Joe Reilly (‘Both wrong’ Weekly Worker Feb­ruary 5) in their different ways attempt to justify their head-in-the-sand denial of the British state’s racism.

A leader in the paper comrade Reilly sup­ports states: “In May a report from the New York-based Human Rights Watch reveals that Britain has one of the highest rates of racially motivated crime in Western Europe” (‘A reservoir of reaction’ Red Action, au­tumn 1997).

It rather spoils the thrust of comrade Reilly’s contribution in this debate when he states: “British ruling class racism was al­ways opportune.” Indeed, the argument that seems to be emerging from both comrades is that the state is neutral in terms of its ideo­logical attachment to racism, picking it up and putting it down as it finds it politically expedient, a tool to be used as and when necessary. But then, on the contrary, if the bourgeois state is always prepared to use racism when convenient, that means it finds no moral, political, or ideological objection to racism: a racist approach in anyone’s book, suggesting conclusively that the British state is indeed racist. ‘Neutrality’ toward rac­ism is racism. But then we do not even have such ‘neutrality’ in actual fact: only racism more or less disguised.

In the Human Rights Watch’s document mentioned, Racist violence in the United Kingdom (Human Rights Watch, New York 1997), Newham Monitoring Project tells of racially motivated police abuse from particu­lar police stations: “For example, in 1994, NMP received 59 complaints against Forest Gate, 51 against Plaistow, 46 outside the bor­ough of Newham, five against East Ham, and 35 were unclear.” And in a lengthy section on the role of police, the document precedes a catalogue of deaths in police custody with:

“A number of deaths have been reported in police custody, indicating that officers are inappropriately trained or in some cases en­gaging in racially motivated police brutal­ity... Members of the ethnic minority communities expressed deep concern about the numbers of individuals, especially Afri­can and African-Caribbeans, who die under suspicious circumstances while in police cus­tody.” Helen Shaw of the British organisa­tion concerned with deaths in custody, Inquest, notes: “To date there has only been one prosecution of a police officer involved in a death-in-custody case.” What does all this amount to, if not racism expressed by an integral part of the British state, the police?

Racism cannot be reduced to the beliefs and actions of individuals and groups; nei­ther can we afford to confuse appearance with content, nor the state’s representatives’ blandishments with reality for those at the receiving end of the state forces’ racism. Despite the race relations apparatus set up over the years, British immigration policy remains racist (it is also anti-working class). In fact, a ‘sound’ liberal/social democratic premise about good race relations insists on a tough immigration policy so that numbers of ‘the other’ (eg, black people) do not ex­ceed arbitrary norms in Britain, the host coun­try. The fact that British immigration policy is anti-working class does not pre-empt its being racist too, or vice versa.

Whether Tony Blair and the rest of his gov­ernment may be formally anti-racist or not is hardly the point (though, given the lack of condemnation in their ‘tributes to the late arch-racist, Enoch Powell, we can begin to wonder). They are in office, not power. Power rests with the state and capitalism proper, of which governments are but the executives. They are not the state, but its minions.

Let us explore a little further the case of the British state’s treatment of Roma living here. Sites for indigenous Roma were pro­vided under legislative reform by a Labour government 30 years ago (Caravan Sites Act 1968). Despite racist hostility from rural and urban reactionaries (of all bourgeois parties), local authorities were given the mandatory duty of providing sites for Roma, though heel-dragging was ever-present. Some sites were even built over old garbage dumps and often at some distance from gadje com­munities, creating problems for Roma old folk shopping, etc. Local authorities were also given additional powers to remove Roma from unauthorised land.

However, Section 80 of the Criminal Jus­tice and Public Order Act 1994 (CJPOA) has since repealed the duty laid down in the Cara­van Sites Act to provide sites for Roma, and also removes central government funding in­troduced in 1980. The removal of this obliga­tion is a racist act directed against Roma.

It is exactly in the example of the Roma, as events around Roma from the Czech Repub­lic underlined, that the racist nature of the British state shows through its ‘anti-racist’ raiment. Or are we to say that since there are only 100,000 Roma in Britain it is an insig­nificant matter?

The lack of imminent revolution does not mean that the state can afford to slough off its previous useful ideological tools, like rac­ism, even if it could. What is to be gained by pretending otherwise, except fostering lib­eral, social democratic or Eurocommunist il­lusions in the bourgeois state? This is the fantasy world that comrades are in danger of populating by pig-headedly ignoring the im­plicitly racist nature of advanced capitalism (if it were explicit we should not be having this discussion).

Finally and frankly, I cannot be overly con­cerned if in the discussions preliminary to comrade Conrad’s “Draft programme... the majority did not share Tom’s view” - a point comrade Fox regales us with. Being in a mi­nority does not necessarily mean being wrong, a truth which as partisans of the CPGB we surely never tire of repeating. These are early days in the reforging of our Party and truth will out. 

Tom Ball
London