Letters

With pleasure

Boris Kagarlitsky is always a pleasure to read. Always clear, unpretentious and honest (Weekly Worker March 16).

He always has the most useful analysis of what is going on in Russia right now. I look to him for a certain leadership, even if I have never seen anything much by him in the alternative media since the fall of the Soviet Union.

So thanks for interviewing him.

With pleasure

No threat

It is splendid that you manage to translate the grim verbosity of the 1970s Trot sheets to the internet.

Your efforts will help to ensure that the liberal democracy that lengthens our life expectancies and gives us iPods is under no threat.

No threat

Same as

Liz Hoskings is obviously a highly intelligent human being (Letters, August 31). She does after all read the Weekly Worker. So I cannot for the life of me understand why she thinks the CPGB has the “same position” as Tony Blair on Israel-Palestine.

The CPGB does not stand for “two ethnic states” with no right of Palestinian refugees to return. Nor does the CPGB want Israel to “remain” a non-cultural and mono-ethnic state. Where does she get this nonsense from?

The CPGB is for two states, yes. But that hardly adds up to calling for ethnically pure states. Today Israel has a 20% Arab minority within its pre-1967 borders. Communists support them having full and equal rights along with the rest of the population.

Communist also support the right of people to freely move to any country, as they see fit. That, of course, includes refugees. Once again Liz is either inventive or simply ill-informed.

She goes on to say that the CPGB favours a Gaza/West Bank Palestinian state. A “Bantustan”, she call it. Once again, no, the CPGB favour redrawing the borders and a contiguous Palestinian state.

Lastly, there is the small matter of agency. Something Liz seems to entirely forget about with her cosy binational federation. The Palestinians and Israeli Jews are at this present moment in time at each other’s throats. Blood is flowing. They are in no position to arrive at a Swiss-type solution won by nothing more than good will on both sides.

By contrast the CPGB has called for Arab unity under the leadership of the working class. When did Blair last make such a call? I eagerly await enlightenment.

Same as

Bursting bubbles

New figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders show that buy-to-let mortgages have jumped by a fifth in value, or a record £17.5 billion.

Buy-to-let investors have responded to rising rents, in turn caused by large-scale migration from eastern European countries. Poles and the like are the new tenant class, especially in London and the south-east.

The main reason that the buy-to-let craze started a few years ago was because rents were high relative to property prices, giving nice fat yields of 10% or more. Now, the average yield in Britain is down to five percent, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Once you deduct running costs, agents’ fees and so on, you get to an average net yield of four percent. You also have to pay stamp duty and solicitors’ fees on the way into the investment, and capital gains tax, estate agents’ fees and more solicitors’ fees when you sell.

What the average yields show is that many investors are making no income from their property investment and are relying exclusively on capital growth to provide a return. For example, house prices have fallen by 13% in Nottingham over the past year. Estate agents there blame the bursting of a bubble in buy-to-let.

Property prices can go down as well as up. They have fallen over the past couple of years in parts of Australia, in Florida and many other parts of the USA, and the markets in Spain and France are also starting to wobble.

Buy-to-let is an accident waiting to happen. A stampede out of it could trigger the housing market collapse that I have been predicting for the last few years.

Bursting bubbles
Bursting bubbles

Class agenda

John Smithee highlights the devastating impact on human health of social-class differences.

We need to do more to highlight such injustice. The evidence is out there. The work of people such as Richard Wilkinson provides further proof of how inequality impacts on our physical and mental health. This is all relevant, factual stuff.

Wilkinson points out that more egalitarian societies are happier and healthier for everyone too, not just better for the working class. He is also good at refuting alternative explanations of health problems.

Let us put inequality back on the political agenda.

Class agenda

Upbeat, downbeat

Did anyone else notice something strange about Socialist Worker’s report of the rally to launch Tommy Sheridan’s new Solidarity party last weekend (September 9)?

As you might expect, the report, by Esme Choonara, is brimful of hyped up enthusiasm for the bright new future. But there is one area where the paper is very careful to dampen its excitement - and that is when it comes to the role of comrade Sheridan himself.

According to Socialist Worker, “The opening of his speech seemed a little downbeat compared to the mood of the meeting”, and a Dave Sherry is quoted as saying that, while he thought the meeting had been “very positive and proved that it is possible to build a vibrant campaigning organisation in Scotland”, he was “a little disappointed not to have heard Tommy Sheridan spell out more about what we need to do over the next few months”.

Another (implied) criticism comes from Akhter Khan, described as “an activist with Friends of Lebanon”, who says: “I will probably join the new organisation. But it needs more young people and more creative thinking, and there need to be strong people around Tommy Sheridan who can challenge him.”

In fact out of the 500-600 who attended the rally it seems Socialist Worker was unable to find a single person who uttered a word of praise for the leader of the new party - totally at odds with reports in the mainstream press, which noted the rapturous applause and revivalist atmosphere when Tommy was speaking (no doubt largely generated by the Socialist Workers Party itself).

Could it be that the SWP has noted the widespread comment about comrade Sheridan’s lack of accountability and the promotion of his own persona and is now trying to counter the impression that it has been prepared to go along with this?

Upbeat, downbeat

Barbed wire

I should like to take issue with Jason Dao’s comments about the CPGB’s line on religion, as outlined in its draft programme (Letters, August 31).

Jason tells us that he might call himself a Marxist “except for Marx’s position of atheism”. Marx’s position on the question of religion resulted from the fact that he belonged to the materialist school of philosophers rather than the idealist school. This means that, when it came to the question of the primacy of matter or spirit, he concluded that it was the case that matter had primacy over spirit.

For Marxist materialists this means that we believe our conditions create our consciousness (“The [idealist] philosophers have interpreted the world as it is; the point, however, is to change it”), whereas those embracing an idealist philosophy believe that our consciousness creates our conditions. It follows that a spirit - in the form of some supreme being - created the world that we live in, and rules and controls this world, including the human race.

But we are more than capable of changing conditions in the world to improve the lot of the human race. Unlike religious people materialists do not believe that some supreme force governs us or - through some divine order - appoints those who do.

Jason also accuses Marxists of not seeing “the positive aspects” of religion that have “helped bring forward humanity’s development”. Frankly, I would be hard put to find many historic examples of this. Certainly some examples of progress in humanity’s development in the last century would include: steps toward the emancipation of women; access to divorce; access to birth control and abortion; the partial eradication of racism; the acceptance of homosexuality; and similar phenomena. All of these occurred not because of, but in spite of, religion.

At the time of writing we still have a pope who forbids the provision of condoms to combat Aids in the third world because they are a means of birth control. We have a senior government minister who belongs to the largest christian sect, which denies women a career path in that organisation. Not satisfied with this, she belongs to a pressure group within that sect that has some members who feel obliged to wear a barbed-wire garter! The present incumbent at the White House leads some 40 million ‘evangelical christians’ who believe that we should progress to the final apocalypse because their adherents will be ‘raptured’ to heaven - while the rest of us will, of course, burn in hell!

Given these facts, how can Jason urge us to “cohabit, cooperate and coopt” with the forces of religion? Other than forming temporary alliances with religious people in the anti-war movement, and occasionally in liberation struggles, Marxists must keep the forces of religion at arm’s length.

Barbed wire

‘Leaderless’ SPGB

I understand Alan Johnston’s points that his Socialist Party of Great Britain is relatively open and democratic (Letters, August 31). However, given that the official position of the SPGB is to advocate the revolutionary establishment of socialism and nothing else, I just wonder how embarrassed he is that presumed members of the SPGB are using their internet discussion forum to advocate Fabian ideas such as the “building of socialism” within capitalism and Owenite “socialist communities”?

This is the inevitable further reformist development on the ideas of a “practical socialism” to be designed within the parameters of capitalism, as peddled by one of the SPGB’s clan leaders in recent years. What is even more revealing is the fact that such reformist, gradualist and accommodating views have not yet been challenged by other allegedly sound and orthodox members of the SPGB, leading or otherwise.

Perhaps when Mr Johnstone says the SPGB is “leaderless” he really means ‘rudderless’. In fact, he is being disingenuous. Just because there are no officially designated ‘leaders’ it is well known there are leading, albeit antagonistic figures, who regularly pronounce on the ‘correct’ position of the party, and there are people who obviously follow and tail them.

It is sad to see a once principled socialist party being led down the reformist road and ultimately organisational liquidation, given the political basis for its existence is fast disappearing. Is Mr Johnstone content for this process to be played out so publicly?

‘Leaderless’ SPGB
‘Leaderless’ SPGB

Expurgated

In a reply to Mike Macnair, who argued that the first and foremost lesson of the “short 20th century” is the impossibility of socialism in a single country (Weekly Worker June 15), we objected and pointed out that the real lesson for the revolutionary movement was “the emergence of a new bourgeoisie in the apparatus of the Communist Party and socialist state, who would take advantage of the transitional nature of socialism to restore capitalism. The struggle of the bourgeoisie to gain control of communist parties and socialist states under the banner of anti-Stalinism is the real lesson, which the left in the imperialist countries must learn.”

As if to confirm this position, the Weekly Worker published our reply in its July 27 issue, while expurgating the above passage: that is, the main lesson gained in the struggle against modern revisionism. Most Marxist-Leninists know that the bourgeoisie have used and are using ‘anti-Stalinism’ to gain control of communist parties and socialist states. This lesson has not yet been learnt by most of the left in the imperialist countries. But no one can deny that this bourgeois policy has met with undoubted success, albeit temporarily.

Exposing the meaning of the ‘anti-Stalin’ policy of the bourgeoisie requires open, principled debate with those individuals on the left who participate in this campaign. Unfortunately, our experience is that most of those who participate in this bourgeois campaign against Stalin fear open, principled debate like the devil fears holy water.

Expurgated

Petty bourgeois

Jack Conrad again raises the question of “national rights for Israeli Jews or the British-Irish in the Six Counties” (‘The determination of revolution’, August 31).

The problem is that the ‘separateness’ of these two cross-class entities and the states that their upper layers control are based on their supposed superiority over and systematic discrimination against the indigenous populations, backed up by the overwhelming military might of a world imperialist power (not to mention a huge financial subvention). These two racist states could not possibly exist without the above mentioned - indeed, if it were not for the wider interests of imperialism.

In order to smash the Orange statelet of Northern Ireland and the Zionist state that is Israel, revolutionaries must dispense with this (essentially petty bourgeois, nationalistic) talk of ‘national rights’ and fight for a socialist, post-nationalist solution. How will we win a section of the ‘protestant’ working class of Ulster or of the Jewish working class in Israel to a post-border future of equality while we are cosying up to their prejudices, at the same time as winning the majority of those directly oppressed by the existence of these racist states?

Petty bourgeois