Letters

Ivory towers

The semi-mystical lessons in supposed philosophic Marxism you reproduce from your guru figure, Hillel Ticktin, give a good indication of exactly why your analysis of real world events is so ponderous, mechanistic and without understanding (‘For realism, for humanity’, November 8). It is total confusion dressed up as cross-legged, ‘grasshopper’ wisdom. It underpins the grotesque reactionariness of your actual real world confusion on most questions, like Iran at present - lining yourselves up to attack it just when imperialism has it in sight as its next major victim, and helping give the warmongers a ‘left’ justification.

Ticktin’s opening theme sums up all his ignorance, suggesting supposed limitations of Marxism and the notion that it would be “absurd” to talk about Marxist physics or literature. Its methods apply only to history and political economy, he says. This immediately reveals that he knows nothing about the subject, since it destroys a fundamental element of Marxist philosophy - that everything in the universe is interconnected.

It certainly goes against all the greats of Marxism. If the physical sciences cannot be helped by Marxism (and vice versa) and its philosophy, why did Frederick Engels begin writing a book on the Dialectics of nature? Why did he and Marx and subsequent Marxists constantly battle with the concepts of matter in motion and other physical world developments? Why did they so admire the achievements of Charles Darwin? (And why do the neo-cons so hate them?)

Why did Lenin write one of his greatest books - the 1908 Materialism and empirico-criticism - almost entirely around the then prevailing theories in rapidly emerging physics with such chapters as ‘Did nature exist prior to man?’, ‘‘The discovery of world elements’, ‘The crisis in modern physics’ and ‘Space and time’, and specific analyses of great physicists and physiological psychologists such as Helmholtz, as well as many other philosophers tackling such subjects?

If culture is devoid of (or neutral to) a class basis, why did Lenin and other Bolsheviks constantly refer to ‘bourgeois culture’ and insist on the importance of not destroying it, but taking hold of its best developments and taking them further as the foundation for cultural development in the workers’ states? Why did Lenin write about language? And so forth.

Marxist philosophy will stimulate greater art and science when the bourgeoisie has finally been swept from the world stage - art and science which will be ‘Marxist’. It was beginning to be seen in embryo from the Soviet Union, for all its Stalinist, revisionist shortcomings (film-making, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, the Bolshoi, etc).

Of course, Lenin’s complex book was not written to create a “Marxist physics”, but to understand the class basis of the most basic philosophies and push forward Marxism by teasing out the very fundamental (class) confusions of idealist versus materialist philosophy then emerging via physics.

But everything is interconnected and Marxist philosophy would push physics forwards just like any other aspect of human knowledge. Like all subjects, physics would benefit from conscious dialectical materialist philosophical underpinning. It gets part of the way, as Lenin said, because material science, being so close to the real world, is constantly pushed towards materialism, but can never get there.

Conscious dialectics would help solve some of the mind-boggling difficulties that it is currently in with its ‘dark matter’ concepts, even more elaborate ‘string’ theory and the so far non-existent heavy particles (‘The hunting of the Snark’). It would help see where, as in art, bourgeois philosophy and influence holds things back by constantly trying to push the science agenda to mysticism and subjectivism (as at the famous pre-war Copenhagen meeting on quantum mechanics). Ticktin even briefly acknowledges this when he talks about the dominating influence of positivism in modern physics.

Dialectics would be nothing to do with the long paragraphs of semi-(Gerry) Healyite mumbo-jumbo which Ticktin expands upon with much obscurantist talk of “essences”, “phenomena”, “neo-teleologies” and so forth. It would begin with the real world, as all Marxism must. But when Ticktin strays near such, telling us correctly that neither oil nor neo-conservatism is enough to explain the Iraq crisis, but that the “overall political situation” is to blame, he then signally fails to grasp the nettle and explain what the dominating elements of that situation are. It is complex, agreed.

He says the system is heading to war. Correct. But what is driving that? How about starting (as Marx did) with some attempt to understand and explain the devastating economic crisis of the capitalist system and its looming collapse into the greatest slump and warmongering disaster in all history? How about talking about imperialism’s aggressive and deliberate drive towards World War III as the only answer it knows to the overproduction crisis?

Ah, but the CPGB does not even believe that financial crisis “would help the left” and derides such theories anyway as “catastrophism”. Pity that the mounting debt crisis, sub-prime disaster, bank failures and growing world warmongering (Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iran, Burma, Darfur) say differently.

But that is real revolutionary Marxism, what is happening in the real world. A million miles from your ivory towers.

Ivory towers
Ivory towers

Leninist

How can the Stop the War Coalition have any kind of future when it is dominated by Stalinists like Andrew Murray? His lamentable behaviour over Hands Off the People of Iran should occasion no surprise.

Murray’s prohibition of socialist criticism of the Ahmadinejad regime’s despotic clerical neoliberalism and its treatment of socialists, trade unionists, women and gays is at one with his continued admiration of the tyrannical Soviet Union.

Murray’s magnum opus The Communist Party of Great Britain - an historical analysis is instructive. In it, he characterises the Hitler-Stalin pact as “in the traditions of Leninist foreign policy”. He refers to the “counterrevolutions of 1989, which swept away most of the existing working class states”, as an “historic setback for human progress”.

Do ordinary supporters of the STWC (and readers of The Guardian) realise just who is running the show? What do the SWP think?

Leninist
Leninist

Bankrupt line

Lindsey German and Andrew Murray write in The Guardian that Hands Off the People of Iran “opposes the work of the Stop the War Coalition” (Letters, November 8). This, they claim, is why last month’s conference voted to turn down Hopi’s affiliation. Clearly not so.

True, comrades in Hopi oppose the politics of German and Murray. But STWC is meant to be a broad organisation with a tolerant culture. The fact that German and Murray - ie, the SWP and the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain - were willing to provoke a row with Hopi and its sponsors obviously casts serious doubt on that claim.

Nor is it possible to treat seriously protestations by German and Murray that STWC “has consistently denounced the repression in Iran”. In fact, the STWC has done nothing more than side with those like Campaign Iran who wish to reform an irreformable regime. Worse, as was revoltingly on display at the STWC’s October 27 AGM, the SWP itself has become a full-blown apologist for the Tehran theocracy.

Excluding Hopi is obviously meant to send a message: criticising the theocracy is the equivalent of siding with US imperialism. In other words, the STWC leadership peddles the same formula as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nothing could be more absurd. It is not only possible to denounce both the crimes of the theocracy and the war plans of the Bush administration. It is essential to do so, while all the time recognising that it is US imperialism which is our main enemy.

But instead STWC has taken up that old, bankrupt line: my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

Bankrupt line
Bankrupt line

Iron hand

On Thursday November 8, New Zealand’s solicitor-general announced that no charges would be proceeded with against 17 activists arrested under provisions of the Terrorism Suppression Act. The peace, environmental and Maori activists had been held without bail since October 15 and could have spent up to a year awaiting their cases coming to court.

The arrests involved swoops by gangs of armed cops in Wellington, Auckland and the central North Island. Labour prime minister Helen Clark had waded in with two public statements designed to prejudice their court cases. In one she even claimed the activists had napalm.

The move of the solicitor-general was interesting. It indicated the system of checks and balances in the capitalist state apparatus. If one section of the apparatus screws up - as the police clearly had - another part of the apparatus comes to the rescue. While declaring there were no grounds for terrorist charges against the political activists, the solicitor-general claimed that the police had been right to take some form of pre-emptive action against what appeared to be very dangerous planned actions.

In fact, the cops had a number of activists bugged and under other close surveillance for 18 months. The most they have come up with is some loose talk by anarchists - “whacky bakky bravado”, as one former top cop opposed to the raids described it - and a few people holding and letting off guns without licences (much of NZ possesses guns and engages in stuff like shooting rabbits and so on).

To cover the cops’ arses, it has been announced that firearms charges will be proceeded with against some of the activists. However, if the cops attempt to do this, their ‘evidence’, such as it is, may prove inadmissible, having been gathered under the provisions of the TSA. If they don’t proceed with charges, the whole thing appears as a state attempt to intimidate and demonise people involved in legitimate political activity.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this whole debacle, however, is that it shows that even in the most politically correct bourgeois democracies like New Zealand the iron hand of the state is ever present, no matter how much show is made of the velvet glove.

Iron hand
Iron hand

Luxury

Fiona Harrington reminds us that memories do “run deep” with anarchists. Why should they not, considering the brutal mistreatment of anarchists and other dissidents after the 1917 revolution - being variously jailed, executed and exiled as reward for their support prior to and during the revolution?’

As Lenin once said, the party is the memory of the class and therefore it should come as little surprise that without that very type of organisation she repeats the myth that all anarchists supported the communists in Russia. To prevent any criticism of being biased, let me call upon the opinion of one of the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World (an organisation recently annexed by anarchists as ‘one of theirs’), William Haywood:

“White Guards and interventionists, finding the ‘anarchist’ belief identical with their own, began to finance and assist them in their exploits. This sort of ‘anarchist’ forgot to have their representatives in the soviet; all they were concerned with was plunder. Makhno and his anarchists believed in no discipline but their own and indulged in excesses and debauchery. He joined forces with Denikin in the drive north, and at the time these forces were within 70 miles of Moscow. A bomb was thrown by anarchists into the Communist Party executive offices in Leontovsky Place, resulting in the killing of 12 responsible workers and the wounding of 55 others, many of whom were employed in the factories of Moscow.”

The bitter truth is that the so-called anarchists killed in the victory of the Red Army would have rather seen the Kronstadt garrison fall to the White Russians and the Allies than have Communist Party members in the soviet. As Haywood reminds us, “There is no doubt that many of the participants who called themselves anarchists and Socialist Revolutionaries were sincere in their notions. Subjectively they were doubtlessly highly moral revolutionists. But objectively it was a filthy counterrevolution.”

The indiscipline to which I referred was the seeming inability of different anarchists to settle disputes in a comradely fashion. It was an open secret that during the book fair one of Northern Ireland’s leading anarchists was then victim of what only could be called ‘happy slapping’ by some political rivals fuelled by cheap cider.

Finally, far from wanting to censor the internet, I was very impressed by a leaflet called Towards a bill of rights, published by an anarchist bulletin board that has used its knowledge of IT to support a strike by cleaners at a theatre. For the working class, discipline and organisation is essential; for anarchists, it still seems to be a luxury.

Luxury

Wonderful

I wish to make a correction to a letter of mine in last week’s issue.

When I mentioned the ‘World Solidarity Movement’ I actually meant the Irish platformist group, Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM). Apologies for the error.

A ‘Workers’ World Solidarity Movement’ would be a wonderful thing, though!

Wonderful

Peace pledge

I’m surprised that James Turley’s article made no mention of the white poppies produced by the Peace Pledge Union as an anti-war symbol (‘National fetishes’, November 8). See www.ppu.org.uk/whitepoppy for further information.

Peace pledge

Realpolitik

Ron Heisler claims that Harrison Birtwistle “above all others is the avant-garde composer who is anathema to the Philistine press of bourgeois England”.

If this is the case, perhaps Heisler could tell us why that very same bourgeois establishment awarded the composer a knighthood, and why, if Birtwistle claims to follow such a radical aesthetic, he gladly accepted it - rather like his college chum and fellow musical revolutionary, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, master of the queen’s music? Or is this an example of the kind of realism and Realpolitik that Heisler recommends we should all adopt?

Realpolitik
Realpolitik

Obscene comments

Last week Gerry Sutcliffe, the sports minister, singled out Chelsea football club for paying John Terry, the England captain, “obscene” wages. He said: “Good luck to John Terry, but I think it is obscene to be on £150,000 a week. I understand that a footballer’s career is limited in time, but people in the street cannot understand salaries like that. Chelsea are £250 million in the red and they may be able to cope with that, but it’s not the real world - £250 million in the red is not sustainable.”

It was ironic that his comments were made at a Financial Times sports summit. The sports minister also criticised Manchester United for increasing season ticket prices by 13%, and for “taking the game away from the ordinary grassroots supporter”, because: “Ultimately, ordinary working class people will lose out. They will be priced out.” And “There is a danger there will be a move away from the game. We don’t want to be in a position where people are alienated.”

Russian oligarch and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich is believed to have demanded that Sutcliffe retract his remarks, but only on the grounds that the financial information he quoted was inaccurate.

David Gill, Manchester’s chief executive, said: “The minister is speaking without full knowledge of the facts” - season tickets prices were reasonable and good value for money.

The sports minister had to partially retract his comments because he had got the figures wrong (John Terry earns £130,000, not £150,000 per week), but later said: “I have an opinion and I’m entitled to that.”

The Adam Smith Institute was unapologetic: “Top footballers are paid a wage that reflects their value. John Terry is the highest paid player in the Premiership for a simple reason: Chelsea believe he is worth it.” Furthermore: “His pay packet is not obscene - it simply reflects supply and demand” (www.adamsmith.org/blog/index.php/blog/politicians_foot-ball_dont_mix_2/).

Sutcliffe also aimed his fire at the premier league, which attracts huge sums from foreign investors and lucrative broadcasting rights for the domestic league.

Of course, the Labour minister would not challenge the capitalist system - he only wants it to be moderated, to avoid negative publicity, so that people don’t get “alienated”.

Since the introduction of the premier league in 1992, and the commercialisation of top football in the UK, money has been rolling into the clubs from TV rights,  sponsorship and endorsements. Eight hundred million people worldwide watched Arsenal play Manchester United last weekend. For the past 17 years it has been like a series of non-stop wins at the casino for football agents, players, managers, directors and the media.

We should not criticise those whose natural tendency is only to seek greater rewards for the entertainment they provide. We cannot forget that money has brought in very talented players from outside the UK, such as Didier Drogba, and helped to construct fantastic venues such as Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and Sunderland’s Stadium of Light.

However, not only ticket prices, but also the refreshments and paraphernalia at the game, and subscription costs to watch football on television, have become exorbitant. The spontaneity of deciding to watch a game has been removed as the costs have increased, to almost a third of a weekly wage packet for an adult and two children.

We should demand that supporters and players control football clubs, and that everyone should have the opportunity to demonstrate their talents at their club. We should also demand the best stadiums to accommodate the fans, watching the most talented players.

Football should be a game for everyone, a place where there can be a sense of community and pride and passion. That means it must become a democratic game.

Obscene comments
Obscene comments

Foolproof

I think maybe Mike Macnair misses a key element in the ‘anti-imperialist, national liberationist’ front perspective which many of us shared in the 60s and 70s (‘Ditch the strategic illusion’, November 8). That is, that US imperialism represented imperialism per se in the world. It had subsumed all other mini-imperialisms and potential imperialisms.

The class struggle on a world scale was represented on the one hand by US imperialism and on the other by the so-called ‘workers’ states’ (they weren’t really, I know) - degenerated, bureaucratic or whatever the designation, but still on the scale of things forced to represent the interests of the workers of the world, even despite and against their sectional bureaucratic positions. There were inter-imperialist rivalries and hostilities, but none which would distract US imperialism from its prime objective - confronting and defeating the world workers’ and oppressed movement.

For the national liberation struggles, we deemed they had only one way to go: their path as emerging capitalist states was extremely limited. They could never now get to the big table of the world and could only at best be very junior partners of major world capitalist powers. To strike such an accommodation with the global forces which had supported their national domination and subjugation would be a contradiction to their aspirations of national freedom and independence.

The struggle to achieve national independence would force them into the ‘socialist’ camp and into objective and often military alliance with the workers’ states or the global forces of socialist revolution. Also, the only true independence they could achieve for the peoples of those countries was a socialist path, which freed people economically and socially from all forms of capitalism, native and imperialist. Many see Cuba as a classical example of this trajectory.

The pressure for imperialism to soak up and control the world’s resources made it very reluctant to share any part of that with some upstart independent capitalist economy. This would leave the independence movement no choice but to swing toward socialism and the socialist camp.

Were we naive? Nothing at that time would have suggested this was anything other than a principled and accurate analysis of the balance of forces and how we should play it - not just as a cynical exercise, but as a principle of isolating the major enemy of progress for the world’s peoples. Few of us had any illusions in the ruling castes and bureaucracies of those countries, although Che and Fidel did appear for a time to be of a different mettle than the men in grey overcoats.

As it turned out, and true to form, unless the revolution is kept under the direct control of the working class, through democratic committees and councils and assemblies, with recallable delegates and popular mass decision-making, ‘leaders’, charismatic or brutal, will assume power over the masses and derail the very point of the revolution. I’m sure we were aware of that maxim at the time, but we considered the whole world revolution a process which was still unfolding numerically and in depth and quality.

Incidentally the slogan here and across Europe was ‘Victory to the NLF’ (in Vietnam) and not simply ‘Stop the war’, but this slogan wasn’t adaptable to all wars of liberation - only to those which were directly (or so we believed) heading toward some form of socialist society. It must also be said that the people of Vietnam fought with the most incredible heroism for independence and socialism against the utter barbarism of US imperialism and its allies. They didn’t ask to become “marketised ‘communist’ sweat-shop operators”, nor did they deserve to. That they became so was our failure, the failure of the workers of the western world in particular, to carry through our revolutions and ensure they didn’t become isolated and strangled by the IMF and World Bank.

Sometimes strategies and perspectives fail because the other side outflanks us or outthinks us, or is more powerful than us. If Mike knows some foolproof strategy to adopt to the global struggle of humanity which will ensure we will not be defeated, I’d like to know what it is.

Unless we’re going to get the one about ‘building the centralised Marxist-Leninist party’. We know that one hasn’t worked, and I think fairly well we know why.

Foolproof
Foolproof