Letters

Red Green

I am writing you to let you know that I disagree with the article, ‘Fight for a red planet’ (Weekly Worker July 15). However, I should say that I am not completely surprised you published it. It fits into what I believe has been a traditional position of communist parties vis-à-vis the environmental problematic, which I believe should be changed, because the world has changed and we must face new realities.
I would start by claiming that classical Marxists were never interested in the environmental problems, nor in the question of relations between mankind and nature, with the exception of Karl Kautsky, who published a book on these issues in 1910 - quite bad in my opinion. The first Marxist who did publish a good work on these subjects was the German, Wolfgang Harich: Kommunismus ohne Wachstum (Communism without growth), published in 1975, and never translated into English.

Communists should take environmental issues seriously, and in this I mean accepting the existence of limits - not necessarily of population, but of natural resources: water resources, desertification, and so on. The catastrophist claims - for example, about the greenhouse effect - cannot be lightly dismissed. Also, the suggestion that socialism requires a higher level of development of the productive forces was made in the 19th century, and they have developed enormously since - in this I follow Harich. Therefore what is needed is probably a radical restructuring that would eliminate waste of resources and limit environmental contamination.

I agree completely, however, on one point: the bourgeoisie cannot offer any serious programme to solve these problems. Therefore it is the communist movement that defends the long-term interests of all mankind, that has the duty to defend radical environmentalism or to join in defending radical environmental solutions. By this I do not mean using bombs to destroy whale processing factories. I mean a programme of limitation of the use of the automobile and gradual extinction of the use of fossil fuels. Of course this might mean loss of jobs, but the answer is to reduce the labour journey.
Only socialist parties with weight and authority within the working class could mobilise for such a programme.

Red Green
Red Green

White ken

Whereas I largely share your concern about Ken Livingstone (apart from the diversion on Northern Ireland), it is much more fundamental than that (‘Ken pays the piper and now calls the tune’, August 5).

The World Social Forum and those supporting it are notorious for failing to address the fundamental global problems, but opting instead for wishy-washy attempts at an alternative which amount to cooperatives. They fail to address the fundamental problem of the onset of the ‘free market’, its massive promotion by the US and the EU power-elite and the IMF/World Bank’s adjustment programme - ‘economic fundamentalism’, I believe, is the phrase I’ve seen - causing economies to implode and go into continuous recession.

Also Ken has an alter ego - ‘White Ken’, as shown in his track-record on Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Total support, in spite of the fact that everything we warned about American covert operations and involvement has proved to be totally true. The key issues of the ESF have to be the “leveraged” implosion of the economies of eastern Europe, and the assault on and break-up of Yugoslavia and occupation - I repeat: occupation - of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
None of this is likely to be effectively addressed, and I foresee a complete diversion of running off after the UN, entry of third world goods into the EU, discrimination against third world countries, etc. Result - yet another ineffective leftwing body.

White ken
White ken

White ken

White ken
White ken

Zero degrees north

There is clearly something wrong with the collective perception of BBC TV programme makers, if 55 degrees north is anything to go by (the six-part series finished on August 10).

An attempt to make yet another cop programme different, by setting it on Tyneside, starts off by making the lead character a black cockney. Then, because it wishes to be politically correct, it feeds in large doses of ethnic minorities, so it looks like scenes from East Enders. In fact I don’t know why they just didn’t paint out the Queen Vic and paint in the Tyne Bridge and move the cast over en masse.

But what about Geordies? This is supposed to be Newcastle upon Tyne - we know that, because we keep seeing fancy shots of the Tyne Bridge, but have you discovered any Geordie speakers? Nope, not a one. Lots of sort of ‘somewhere up north’ accents that they teach in the acting schools, and some Geordie-ish accents, but working class Geordie dialect? Not a ‘gaan’ or a ‘yem’ or a ‘hoose’ to be heard.

So where’s the political correctness in relation to Geordie folk then? We can be excluded from our own city in order to paint a totally unreal picture - in fact make it like any other southernocentric programme with the Tyne as a backdrop, and a few northern vowels: that’ll do ’em. I get heartily sick of this painting out of local and regional differences in order to fit some imaginary image of us all being the same everywhere you go. Doubtless that’s the way they would like it to be, but nobody who lives north of the Watford Gap believes this to be anything other than a totally artificial picture.

Ha-weh, if Glasgow can have Rab Nesbitt and his genuine Glasgow twang, and East Enders can have genuine cockney, any chance of a bit of Geordie for Tyneside? Incidentally, apart from the total destruction of the Northumbria dialect, the programme itself is like watching paint dry. Dull? To the point of suicide.

Zero degrees north
Zero degrees north

Conscience?

I just wanted to put some thoughts down after a distressing discussion relating to the purchase of goods from Israel. The reason given was “What am I supposed to do when they were offering the cheapest price?”

Does capitalism have a conscience? Is it morally bankrupt? What are its business ethics? Is anything allowed to obstruct the profit drive? Does it have an acceptable ‘face?’ It certainly has a disregard for occupational health and environmental consequences. Social responsibility is not much in evidence either.

Prior to World War I asbestos was known to carry risks to health. Asbestosis and mesothelioma are life-debilitating and life-ending diseases. The manufacture of asbestos products, their use, transportation, removal and disposal all carry grave risks, and because of its nature, the risks remain. Asbestos does not become less dangerous with time. Even as the knowledge of the problems associated with asbestos exposure grew, its popular use was not curtailed and controlled for many decades.

Tetra-ethyl lead, the anti-knocking agent in leaded petrol, provides another example of capitalism’s callousness. It was Thomas Midgeley junior who discovered the use of this compound whilst working for General Motors in 1921. Lead is a neurotoxin, and acute lead poisoning causes terrifying hallucinations, coma and death - it’s a bad thing! In its early days of production, at the Ethyl Corporation, workers immediately began to exhibit symptoms, and at least 15 died. Despite press interest, the company embarked upon a policy of calm and unyielding denial that served it well for decades.

During research, Clair Patterson discovered that prior to 1923 there was almost no lead in the Earth’s atmosphere, and 90% of that present at the time of his study was the result of car exhaust fumes. The trouble with lead in the human body is that it is not excreted: it accumulates in bones and blood. It isn’t eliminated from the atmosphere either. Americans today have 625 times more lead in their blood than people a century ago.

The next in line is the tobacco industry. This product is a little different: it doesn’t have a useful purpose whatsoever, except for making money. The proven health risks are still disputed by those who stand to lose profit in this industry.

This brings me onto capitalism’s trading partners. The US, EU and the British all have preferential trading agreements with Israel - a nation that stands accused of ethnic cleansing, state-sponsored assassinations, a brutal military occupation, and the flouting of numerous UN resolutions and the Geneva Convention on human rights. The people with whom you choose to do business can indicate your ethical and moral standing. It will also show the level of your conscience.

The Caterpillar Corporation is Israel’s primary supplier of bulldozers, one of the most destructive weapons in Israel’s arsenal. Israel has used Caterpillar bulldozers since 1967 to demolish nearly 9,000 Palestinian homes, leaving 50,000 people homeless. Caterpillar is complicit in the war crimes perpetrated by the Israeli army. Physical distance between the aggressor and victim, even if the act of killing is mediated by machine, still implicates the manufacturer of the instrument of death as much as the soldier behind its controls.

The Israeli Supreme Court agrees with this assessment - it stated when sentencing Adolf Eichmann: “The extent which any one of many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, the general degree of responsibility increases as we draw away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands.”

Caterpillar has a special division devoted to ‘social responsibility’, its purpose being to enable “positive and responsible growth around the world, and we believe in the value of social and environmental responsibility”. But Caterpillar spokesman Benjamin Cordani maintained: “We do not and cannot base sales on a customer’s intended use for our product.”

I think this just about sums up capitalism’s ethics, morals and conscience.

Conscience?
Conscience?

Social democracy

It’s all very well accusing all other ‘Marxist’ groups of being cults and sects. But those who constantly hark back to Lenin and Engels are at risk of being accused of the same messianism.

I agree with your general theoretical approach. Lenin’s definition of Marxism is a great pithy classic which posits a hierarchy of struggle from the political through the cultural/ideological to the economic at the bottom. That truth has been ignored in British socialism for the last 100 years with catastrophic effect. However, unless you ignore the history of the Soviet Union, you are asking people to accept that a model used in a backward semi-feudal state is appropriate for 21st century Britain/Europe.

This is a bit deluded. Of course, Lenin, Marx and Engels dissected the revolutions of 1789 onwards, as any revolutionary must. Today’s socialists have perhaps less material of the classic type because there has been no revolution in an advanced capitalist country for a long time. At best 1968 was an uprising. Anti-communist and anti-totalitarian revolutions there have been aplenty.

But you’ve got to address the contradiction between the democratic programme, which I heartily support, and what you call ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. It cannot be like the Bolshevik dictatorship, because that was founded on terror. It might have been necessary at the time, but it is not a model. Democracy, social democracy and peace are all revolutionary in today’s context, if led well by a coalition of working class and petty bourgeois parties in which Marxists should play a major role.

But no one is going to sign up to democratic centralism, because it doesn’t work. The argument has to be one politically and ideologically in society at large, and then the ideology of socialism can become the ideology of society - and the class enemies, mainly the private media, will have to be defeated. Once it grips the masses, to paraphrase Marx, an idea becomes a material force. Look at Venezuela - a battle for democracy and social justice against imperialism in the media age.

Somehow I suspect that Chavez and the mass movement doesn’t quite fit your ideologically pure, monolithic view. Thank you, Lenin, may you rest in peace. As Marx said, I for one am not a Marxist.
There is no doubt that we have to openly discuss what kind of new formation is needed on the left to bring us into the 20th century - never mind the 21st - with an avowedly socialist organisation that is mass, broad, inclusive, democratic and responsive to its activist base. Whether it has initially to be a party I am not sure.

Respect has shown that for the first time in more than half a century the left can effectively challenge at elections. The whole political spectrum seems to be moving left - look at the Lib Dems (republicans according to their party conference vote too) and even Howard and IDS’s incredible Commission for Social Justice.

I think Che Guevara said that unity is a strategy and, whatever you think of his politics, there is no doubt that Marxists must seek to take the lead on all fronts - democratic, cultural, political, economic - to create unity, as did the likes of Lenin and Ho Chi Minh. You rightly criticise economism, which is a disease the Stalinist and Trotskyist left long suffered from. I am a media worker, so I may be biased - but the struggle of ideas seems to me to be critical in addition to the struggle for power itself.

I just don’t think you can apply putschist tactics now - and October was essentially a putsch. It may well have been the only option, given the circumstances in Russia at the time, and who can deny Lenin’s audacity and his ability to revise classical Marxism for Russia then. The same must be true for Marxists today. What is new and particular about conditions now?

Ticktin has the nub of it, I think. The times are promising. But the version of dictatorship of the proletariat I prefer is social democracy. Abolition of wages and markets - that is too big a jump, and it is not something you can put in a programme. The superseding of capitalism by a new system is surely a process aided by revolution, social and economic change and the crisis of the system itself. It cannot be declared. The law of value may be around for a while yet. Surely the main aim is the abolition of the dictatorship of capital, and the introduction of thorough-going social democracy? The historical comparison I see today is with that of immediate pre-reformation Europe, when the spread of the printing press undermined the traditional social order, and allowed millions to interpret the bible without official intermediaries. New technologies can do that now in the realm of ideas and politics. But standing in the way is the capitalist mode of production and a revanchist imperial reaction. The wars of religion were of course not obviously class-based, but they did give rise to the new class in Holland, England and elsewhere.

It took a good 300 years to abolish feudalism (1530-1848). And if we take the Commune as the first attempt to abolish capitalism, we only have 160 years to go! After all, it is, according to a recent New Left Review article, only in the next year or so that the majority of the world population will live in urban areas, mostly in highly marginalised, non-traditional forms of subsistence, often below that. And they are muslim or protestant rather than socialist. That fact - along with the internet, demographic explosion in the developing world (they are nearly 90% of the world population, making your United States of Communist Europe a bit of a marginal effort), rising inequality of asset and income wealth and the integration of global production and markets - defines our age.

Social democracy
Social democracy