Letters

Hedge bets

Two weeks ago hedge fund Amaranth Advisors of Greenwich, Connecticut managed to lose $4.6 billion, about half its entire value, in a matter of just a few days. This occurred through a sensational miscalculation of the price of natural gas futures in the spring of 2007. Apparently Amaranth’s losses have now grown to $6 billion.

Star trader Brian Hunter bet the farm on the idea that the gap between the March 2007 natural gas price and the April 2007 would increase. Instead, it fell from $2.60 per 1,000 cubic feet to about 80 cents, wiping out Amaranth’s 20%-plus yearly returns in one fell swoop, to a 35% loss. Like Long Term Capital Management, the energy firm which blew up in 1998, Amaranth held such large positions in the market that it could not unravel its positions.

And today, hedge funds have spread like a tropical parasite, so that there are now 8,000 or so of them, infesting even institutional investors and pension funds, and sucking in total assets of about $1.2 trillion. Meanwhile, hedge funds specifically engaged in energy trading, like Amaranth, have proliferated, soaring from about $5 billion to a stratospheric $100 billion.

An implosion centred on hedge funds could be the trigger that plunges the world economy into recession or even slump.

Hedge bets
Hedge bets

Conference joke

Have you heard the joke of the Labour Party conference? The union that donated £43,000 to Labour last year turned up on Sunday with their delegates and general secretary and were refused entry by the police!

Unbelievable? Yet this has happened to Aslef. Despite frantic phone calls to all and sundry, including John Prescott and Hazel Blairs, as of writing (Tuesday) they still haven’t got in. The Labour Party blame a computer error, but say they cannot remedy it, as the police are in charge of who gets delegate’s passes.

So a national union delegation is barred from conference, disenfranchising 18,000 train drivers and leaving the TSSA as the only rail union on the conference floor.

Nice to see democracy is alive and well in the people’s party. I doubt the CBI and associated businessmen were similarly debarred.

Conference joke

Confusion

In August Peter Manson wrote an article titled ‘Fight for two states, fight for Arab unity’, which argued for the novel idea of two democratic, secular states (Weekly Worker August 3). It could equally have been titled ‘Fight for god, mother and apple pie’.

The article was almost wholly irrelevant to what is happening in the Middle East, had no purchase on reality, contained no analysis of why Israel moves from war to war, war crime to war crime, and thus substituted slogans and platitudes for analysis and socialist politics. The idea that the actions of Israel, in relation to Lebanon and the Palestinians, are the product of “national antagonisms” is fanciful and suggests that the CPGB is going down the road that the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty have pioneered.

The contrast with Martin Jacques, theoretician of the Eurocommunists, in The Guardian was striking. Jacques may have been at the cutting edge of Blairism, but he also understands international relations. Jacques described Israel as “a western transplant sustained by an American life-support machine …. Israel has been the primary means by which the US has exercised its hegemony over the region. It has, using the classic imperial device of divide and rule, vested its means of control over the Middle East … in a small but privileged ethnic minority state, namely Israel” (August 14). In these few phrases the essence of the Israeli state is laid bare.

Israel is not a normal bourgeois state. And here Manson displays either sloppiness or ignorance. There is a fundamental difference between the British state and its privileging of the Church of England and the position of the Jewish religion in the Israeli state. One relates to the historic identity of the British ruling class. The other relates to racial superiority. I am surprised that Pete Manson makes such a trite and crass comparison. How can you compare the (deplorable) institution of collective worship in schools with the systematic racial apartheid of Israel?

When I went to non-Jewish schools, I stayed behind in class whilst the rest of the children went off to do whatever they did in assembly. Did I feel disadvantaged or oppressed? Quite the contrary! But if someone had said to my parents that, no, you cannot live here, you cannot buy or rent this house, your child benefit will have to be two-thirds less because you are Jewish and these are christian privileges then that would have been an entirely different matter. Yet this is the situation, and worse, for Arab citizens of Israel.

Pete Manson should also avoid the temptation of defining his and presumably the CPGB’s political position on the basis of the Socialist Workers Party’s acrobatics. The fact that the SWP is constrained by its unholy alliance with muslim clerics in Respect from advocating secularism is all the more reason that we should advocate it. Yet Pete argues, without (as far as I can tell) a trace of irony, that not one but two secular and democratic states can be established in Palestine! If two such states can be established, what possible reason can there be for partitioning Palestine? The whole point of such a border would be to cement Israel’s role as the oppressor. That is the root cause of the conflict in Israel, brought about by Israel’s settler colonial role. What we are talking about is not national conflict, but racism born of imperialism and colonialism.

Other elements of Pete’s article are simply wrong. The role of the Jewish people-class (not people-religion) disappeared under capitalism and were not in existence, as far as is known, in slave societies. It was this very act of disappearance and the transition from feudalism to capitalism that led to a racial form of anti-semitism.

No-one suggests that Israelis be denied the right to self-determination because of religion. It is the argument of both Zionists and anti-semites that all Jews, Israeli or otherwise, form one seamless thread that we disagree with. If it is true that British, French and South American Jews are all part of the same nation, despite speaking different languages, having different customs, etc, we are accepting the primary thesis of those very world Jewish conspiracists that Pete rails against in Hamas and Hezbollah!

As Pete Manson confirms, there can be no self-determination for a nation that will use its freedom merely to oppress another. The Israeli settler ‘nation’ is an oppressor. Its identity is forged in that oppression, not the experiences of the holocaust. The latter was a powerful ideological weapon, but the attitude of Zionism towards the victims of the holocaust was that they were ‘soap’ who went meekly to their deaths.

Pete Manson is equally wrong when he repeats the AWL canard that the Zionists fought equally against British imperialism and the Palestinians. The Zionists only established their state with the assistance of British imperialism, to wit the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the subsequent British mandate. In the 1936-39 Arab general strike, the Zionists scabbed on the Palestinians and used the occasion both to train and equip their militias via the Jewish Settlement Police. The post-1945 fight of the Zionist terror militias against the British was the fight of settlers anxious to remove the imperial hindrance to total domination of the natives. If Pete is correct, then socialists should have supported both the Boers in the Boer war and Verwoerd in turning South Africa into a republic, to say nothing of Ian Smith’s UDI in Rhodesia!

Pete spends some time on the infantile anti-semitism of Hamas and Hezbollah. Infantile because it is a mere repetition without thought of the ideology of European anti-semitism. But unlike European anti-semitism when it mattered, these are the mirror reflections of organisations of the oppressed. It is no accident that the Israeli internal security police, Shin Beth, consciously sought to boost Hamas in the 1980s when Zionism’s main enemy was a secular PLO. Likewise Hezbollah, operating in the Lebanese confessional state, didn’t exist before the Israeli invasion of 1982. It is in Israel’s interest to divide the region along confessional lines, even if it promotes anti-semitic ideology in the process.

Israel is an artificial state, implanted in the Middle East by western imperialism. As long as it is a Jewish state - ie, a state which is based on racial superiority - then it can never be at peace with its Arab neighbours or its own Palestinian subjects. The key to the overthrow of Zionism undoubtedly lies in the overthrow of the reactionary Arab regimes. After all the Israeli state is financed by the US precisely in order to help preserve these very same regimes. With their overthrow the Israeli state would have lost its purpose or role.

It is not for socialists to try and preserve what is politically and morally unsustainable because of confusion and guilt over the national issue.

Confusion
Confusion

Frightened

Mike Macnair seems to be frightened that if Critique’s call for a Campaign for a New Marxist Party gains enthusiastic support from activists that identify themselves as Trotskyists (or have been labelled in a threatening manner as such), then it will “rehash ideas” which left­wing sects have had in common. He seems to think such a campaign will prevent the emergence of any original thinking concerning transition (‘Three political commitments’, September 14).

The rehashed idea he fears the most is the notion of a Marxist party with a transitional programme aiming for the abolition of the law of value. He fears this will lead to “a Cambodian ‘Year Zero’ or Chinese ‘cultural revolution’ or to carry out forced collectivisations”.

This would be a rational fear if most former members of leftwing groups attracted to Critique’s call are so intellectually, psychologically and emotionally damaged through an engagement with Stalinism that they conceive of the abolition of the law of value as a policy to be imposed on workers by the decrees of a bureaucratic elite in charge of a totalitarian nation-state.

Personally I doubt that the majority of people who turn up at the meeting on Saturday November 4 imagine themselves as potential members of such an elite. Moreover, even if they do, Macnair needs to give reasons why they would act to prevent a democratic and open discussion of the nature of the transition to a global society within which the law of value would cease to operate.

He also needs to convince readers why joining Respect is a more effective means of bringing into being a new Marxist party than a separate campaign. Surely, any serious campaign would support those SWPers that want to leave the group or are struggling for democracy and a Marxist education within it? No-one wants to see any more sincere and dedicated activists drifting into a demoralised, bitter and hateful attitude to Marxism, as so many former SWPers have done,

Frightened
Frightened

Sectarian split

Hugh Kerr’s letter deserves the label “peevish” far more than comrade Fischer’s article on the break-up of the Scottish Socialist Party (Weekly Worker September 14).

Comrade Kerr makes no concrete criticism beyond saying that comrade Fischer “knows nothing other than his own anti-Scottish prejudices”. Just what was it he got wrong, Hugh? Comrade Fischer placed the collapse of the SSP within our common European experience of the ingrained opportunism and economism of the European left. They all think they are unique and they all behave in much the same way. The petty nationalists in the SSP and Solidarity may find it unpalatable, but they are intimately bound in with the most asinine currents of the broader world movement.

A few short months ago, when comrade Kerr was still in the SSP, he was singing its praises and talking about a “resurgence in activity and recruitment” (Letters, May 18). Then, on June 1, he admitted this had been a “tad premature” in view of the civil war that broke out before the ink had dried on his letter; yet he still insisted: “… now that the national council has taken the sensible decision to back Tommy Sheridan in his libel case against the vile News of the World, I am confident he will win his case and help restore the SSP’s fortunes in time for next year’s election.”

Now we have two groups competing for the same ground with virtually identical, left nationalist politics. There is no way you can pass that off as a step forward. The CPGB defines sects as organisations that put their own interests above the long-term interests of the working class. The Solidarity breakaway is a classic example of sectarian splitting, not to mention ego overload. Politics - zilch, acceptance of personal responsibility - nil. Usually the masses targeted by these groups walk away in disgust and confusion, making the building of a genuine socialist (ie, communist) project even more difficult.

You can see what Hugh Kerr’s agenda is from the way he dismisses John McDonnell’s campaign for the Labour leadership. Comrade Kerr says that McDonnell has no chance of winning, so his campaign is worthless. He’s obviously lost none of his old Labourite instincts. Politics is about winning positions and seats in parliament and hanging onto them by any means necessary, isn’t it, Hugh? The success of Solidarity, as with the SSP before it, will presumably be measured in this way first and foremost.

While we communists do not underestimate the importance of actually getting elected, we subordinate everything to the strategic aim of building what the working class really needs: a single, united, all-Britain Communist Party - the only force that can take on and defeat the UK state.

Sectarian split
Sectarian split

A nobody

Scargill, Livingstone, Galloway ... now the nobody, McDonnell. Why pander to these prats? Are you so disillusioned about yourselves or the working class that you always look to these people, who always let you down?

A nobody

PC politics

Plaid Cymru’s annual conference in Swansea this year was held within an atmosphere of confidence: According to recent opinion polls, the party has recently increased its share of support by 6% - a figure which would easily maintain Plaid’s representatives in the Welsh assembly elections next year and, possibly, even add to its tally. Of course, for nationalists that may be good news. For socialists, the allure and rise of a nationalist politics in Wales is hardly inspiring.

Unsurprisingly, keynote speeches from Plaid’s leadership, notably from the party’s president, Dafydd Iwan, and its group leader in the assembly, Ieuan Wyn Jones, rallied to Plaid’s raison d’être - the fight for an independent Wales. The party may have claimed socialist credentials in its recent election manifestos, but talk about “a new patriotism”, “an outward-looking nationalism” and a “country united by hope” throughout their speeches left nobody in any doubt that the political message is that of country and nation, and certainly not of class. Adam Pryce MP even spoke of creating a society “built on Welsh values” - whatever that is supposed to mean.

What was noticeable was the invisibility of Plaid’s left platform, Triban Coch. At previous conferences, it had arranged fringe meetings which had at least generated some debate on controversial issues within the party. Not this year. Indeed, the many fringe meetings that did occur were overwhelmingly dominated by the politics of liberalism, as organisations such as Shelter Cymru, Citizens Advice Cymru, Carers Wales and Oxfam were often found introducing discussions from the top table. I noticed only one workers’ organisation, the National Union of Teachers, taking a lead role in a fringe meeting.

PC politics
PC politics

Horrible outfits

I have several problems with comrade Mike Macnair’s article last week, in which he gives his reasons why the prime intervention of Marxists on the issue of the party should be directed at the existing sects - “in spite of the god-awful politics of the SWP/Respect and the Socialist Party/CNWP”. Presumably this also includes the Committee for a Workers’ International and Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity.

The first point concerns the whole bureaucratic nature of these horrible outfits. Externally they operate almost as parasitic attachments to the movements of the working class: their method in most campaigns or other organisations can reasonably be described as ‘control or destroy’ - they seek to seize control and impose their own politics to the exclusion of all others or they seek to destroy whatever they do not control. Internally they are sterile - no debate or political development of the membership is permitted for fear it might imperil the grip of the longstanding bureaucratic cliques in control.

As the Weekly Worker has recorded, the regime of the SWP has degenerated to such an extent that members can be thrown out not even for asking questions, but for daring to publish a record of what was said by a member of the privileged bureaucratic clique at the top of the organisation. We can guess this was to avoid embarrassment in case any part of the ‘line’ had to be changed at short notice. As you would expect of such a degenerate organisation, SWP members are not encouraged to work at understanding Marxism - a process which requires debate, etc - but instead are trained to follow orders from above.

The Socialist Party and the rest of the Militant tradition are slightly different in that the organisation is held together by a combination of reformist politics and a contempt for the rest of the left which is driven into new members. Only by the hammer blow of the disintegration of the SSP project has this political carapace begun to crack among former International Socialist Movement/Militant members in Scotland.

The implication of these caricatures of organisations are twofold - firstly their members have to leave them if they are to develop themselves politically. Secondly these organisations are literally repulsive - not only to us, but to honest militants, many of whom are interested in Marxism.

The second main point is that the role of these organisations, which, as Mike himself points out, are tiny by any serious measure, is that their main role is to impede the possibility of building real campaigns or a proper Marxist party. If any of these organisations was of a real scale with thousands of members, then things would be different, but without the backing of a major state bureaucracy and at least the implied threat of force, there is no way these rotten regimes would be able to control even a moderately sized party. We have to state clearly that these organisations - particularly the SWP and the SP/CWI - are obstacles to the building of an honest, democratic, Marxist party.

Thirdly debate around and interest in Marxism is largely pursued outside these organisations. If members of the sects are to develop themselves as Marxists, the first thing they have to do is leave and unshackle themselves from the rotten internal regimes. In Glasgow we can see this quite clearly - the people of different left traditions and none who are interested in debating and discussing Marxism and world events in a serious fashion are with very few exceptions not members of the SWP or CWI. There are numerous people who have either left or been expelled by various sects over the years, or in the case of younger comrades been repelled by their practices, either without joining or after a short period of membership. These are the comrades who maintain an interest in Marxism, who want to read, debate and develop politics. I know Glasgow is not exceptional in this.

Fourthly we have to question whether some of these organisations are still on the left. This is particularly the case for the SWP - the organisation has attempted to put together a popular front in the shape of Respect. To do this it has allied itself with a reactionary muslim organisation, the Muslim Association of Britain, the British arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a populist, George Galloway. To facilitate this alliance the SWP has refused to defend women’s rights, gay rights and the left in many countries who are in mortal danger from armed muslim groups or, in the case of Iran, the government. Under these conditions, and where there is no real resistance from the membership to the reactionary line of the leadership clique, we have to ask: is this now a rightwing organisation?

Finally I would say that, while Mike may see the working class hankering after the Labour Party of old, in fact it is the left, particularly the Socialist Party, which does most of the hankering. As the SP is a reformist sect, it requires a reformist party to operate in - this is clearly what the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party is designed to provide. However, the SP cannot actually properly launch CNWP in any serious fashion - as an organisation with members, a constitution, etc - because above all they are petrified by any possibility that the SP and its leading clique might lose control. Therefore they are reduced to paralysis.

In conclusion we need a new Marxist party - the time is overdue for a renewal of revolutionary organisation in Britain and Europe. Please support the Campaign for a New Marxist Party conference in London on November 4.

Horrible outfits
Horrible outfits

Elitism

There are a few Trotskyist ghosts haunting the political imagination of comrade Mike Macnair (‘Bringing about a Marxist party’, September 21).

Mike is proud to be associated with the politics of Mandel rather than what he sees as the inheritors of the anti-Pabloite tradition. For him the only way to a Marxist party is not by directly pursuing what he sarcastically describes as the “uncorrupted workers”, but through the organised Marxist activists. Presumably, mainly the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party. We should be willing to fight as an organised minority - with its own public expression - within groups, particularly where the activists identify as Marxists, no matter how bureaucratic or “god-awful” the politics of these organisations and their loyal members are.

The effects of decades of bureaucratic centralism on the active members are ignored or they are seen as uncorrupted activists. How we carry out influential and effective entry work with these tightly controlled sects and their fronts is not explained. Again the leaders must be seen as uncorrupted or susceptible to be advised that ideological unity causes splits and disunity where unity is required among Marxists.

Mike certainly does not chart an independent route for the Campaign for a Marxist Party. This would simply lead to duplication and lack of efficiency and useless competition that would cut across the grain of the workers’ need for unity. We would be saying the same or similar things about capitalism, imperialism and the unions. It is rather like we were able to transport Mike in a political tardis back to a meeting to discuss the formation of the Weekly Worker. He would have told the comrades, ‘Not another leftwing newspaper in competition with all the others. You are wasting your time. You would be repeating points made by others. The last thing we need is another editorial board.’

According to comrade Macnair, the working class masses have no memory of the lessons of the past to apply to the future. Workers’ consciousness lags behind objective reality. The masses have very little political memory, no continuous political experience to draw on. When they do enter activity, they rely on the activists or the vanguard for leadership. The memory of the class is in the heads or experience of the activists who identify as Marxists. This is why the only route to a Marxist party is through them and not the masses. The workers have little free time, lack resources through unemployment, find it difficult to free themselves of consumerism or are systematically excluded from politics by capitalism. The vanguard have a body of ideas to add to the trade union instincts of the workers.

The pessimism and elitism of all this is obvious. Mike invokes Trotsky’s philosophical point about consciousness lagging behind material reality. But this aspect of Trotsky’s philosophy sees material reality as fundamentally the productive forces - essentially technology free of ideas and social relations. Ideas and consciousness are part of the superstructure which lags behind, but are brought into line by the development of productive forces. Workers’ consciousness is conservative and lags behind objective developments, which only the party activists - particularly the leaders and especially the world leaders - can understand, since they are by training political and not limited instinctively by trade unionism or immediate interests. This approach helps create the very bureaucratic centralism Mike wants to avoid.

But inconsistently Mike points to the Socialist Party’s Campaign for a New Workers’ Party - which aims to create a Labour Party mark two and makes propaganda about the golden age of the Labour Party - as an example of activists lagging even further behind reality than the masses. Just so! More to the point, this campaign by the SP miseducates the workers and misleads them. The lack of response by reformist workers to their call and the decomposition of the classical social democratic/left Labour constituency shows the workers are ahead of the SP in terms of understanding political reality. Yet comrade Macnair sees the politically ossified structure of the SP as an instrument of working class advance to a Marxist party. Ditto for the SWP and Respect. The lessons of the popular front have been lost on the leaders of the SWP and their followers.

Comrades Macnair’s proposals would have us believe these bureaucratically distorted organisations are not obstacles to a democratic Marxist party, but imperfect instruments which will represent workers’ historic interests with our help. Sometimes Marxists do find themselves in a minority and this cannot be bypassed in supposed short cuts, such as using existing structures - particularly the SWP and the SP. But at least Pablo had the excuse of attempting to use parties with mass roots among workers. By contrast the social roots of the SP and SWP are shallow and tiny.

Comrade Macnair likes to misquote me and put words in my mouth. I have not written a letter to the Weekly Worker stating numbers do not matter. I did write a letter, in which the majority of words were cut and put back together badly, that argued that Macnair was arbitrarily putting the number of 2,000 on attendance at the November conference for a Marxist party for it to be worthwhile, when he was one of the leaders of the CPGB who regarded the Bolsheviks’ methods in building a party to be a model and they often had far fewer than 2,000 - and sometimes very few - comrades in attendance at their conferences. This was when the CPGB were not sponsoring the conference. Like the majority of DSA comrades I welcome this change of mind.

The negative lessons of Stalinism have taught us that the dynamic of bureaucracy is not just generated by capitalist economics and politics. A democratic Marxist party based on general Marxist principles with a culture of comradely debate, freedom of criticism, factional rights, the right to publicly criticise the leaders and maximum democracy for the members will not be just one party among others. Just like the Weekly Worker is not just another left newspaper. Workers’ consciousness is not limited to trade unionism and workers do not always wait for their traditional leaders to act. If we are to prevent further bureaucracy in the workers’ opposition to capitalism, then we should take the step of campaigning for an independent democratic Marxist party.

Elitism
Elitism