Letters

Up yours

For the record, I am not in the SWP and haven’t been for six months (‘Lies and confusion’, October 25).

Yes, that’s right, dears, other people outside the SWP agree with what they say on many, many things. Maybe that’s why they are out there building a party and a movement while you’re running around with your heads up your arses.

Up yours
Up yours

Jesus Christ

It was great to see Jesus on the front cover of the Weekly Worker (December 20). The only thing I’m wondering is, did issue 702 sell more copies to christians or communists? It would be interesting to know.

I wonder which group had the biggest meetings in December?

Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ

Shit-stirrers

The proposition that the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s position on Iraq is an abandonment of class politics is, of course, the precise opposite of the truth: it is your fetishisation with the slogan of ‘Troops out now’ that is a betrayal of the Iraqi working class, as all reputable Iraqi trade unionists will confirm (‘Abandoning class politics’, December 20).

However, your pursuit of this matter has nothing to do with the Iraqi working class, but everything to do with the AWL. Fortunately, no-one in the AWL wants anything to do with a bunch of ex-Stalinist petty bourgeois dilettantes, who have no contact with, or knowledge of, the working class.

Good try, comrades! Unfortunately for you, no-one in the AWL will take this latest attempt to stir the shit seriously. Especially as you use the term ‘deracinated’. Now I’m charitable, but I’m sure your Mr ‘Ken Crisp’ didn’t really know what he was writing when he used that term, eh?

Shit-stirrers
Shit-stirrers

No beer halls?

I am pleased to learn that Terry Liddle agrees that he and I could “get on well if we met over refreshments” (Weekly Worker December 13). I hope that he would allow me to imbibe a glass of wine or beer, as I would certainly have no objection to his preference for tea or fruit juice on such an occasion.

I am sure that Terry is sincere when he concedes that there was a lot wrong with the past, and that he does not want to idolise it. I am familiar with parts of London which have become dilapidated - as has Terry’s home estate. In contrast the street in Willesden where I grew up, with its rough, three-storey tenements, has been transformed: the Victorian houses having been professionally converted to neat, desirable, self-contained flats.

Terry wonders what I consider a minority, informing us that 23,000 people per year are admitted to hospital for alcohol-related reasons and that 50,000 people are claiming incapacity benefit on the grounds of alcoholism. Considering that a majority of the adult population (say 40 million people) use alcohol, albeit in radically varying quantities, this represents minorities of 0.06% and 0.13% respectively! I think that we could all consider these to be infinitesimal minorities.

This does not mean that socialists should ignore the problem of alcohol abuse. Terry’ gives part of the solution in his letter: “These people [with addictions] get little help and support [from] social workers and community psychiatric nurses. Sadly the tenants’ association has little power to do anything effective.” It is this lack of help and support which socialists would surely address - not the prohibition which Terry advocates.

Terry then goes on - by implication at least - to group the entire adult population together as “tosspots” and “binge drinkers”, excluding anyone who chooses to partake of alcohol from a “disciplined revolutionary movement” whose inspiration would be the “Red Guards of the October Revolution, the pre-war German RFKB and the Liberation Front of Vietnam”. I do not believe that any of these organisations were part of the temperance movement. Indeed John Bridge’s article, ‘Past, present and future’, reminds us that the pre-World War I German SDP operated in “every town, every workplace, in the beer halls, in the cycling, boating or chess clubs, in the youth groups, women’s organisations, in the co-ops, in the universities, in the army ...” (my emphasis Weekly Worker December 20).

A different world is indeed possible, Terry. It will never be achieved by Marxists unless we engage with the world as it is - with all its potential problems - in order to change it.

No beer halls?
No beer halls?

Outstanding man

As Paul Whetton’s daughter, I am very proud to call him my dad and am pleased to know it was not just his wife and children who thought he was an outstanding man (‘Intransigently brave’, April 6 2006).

It makes me burst with pride to read what you have written and gives me great joy to know that his grandchildren will one day also be able to read about their granddad.

Outstanding man
Outstanding man

Cargo cults

I believe comrade Ticktin is mistaken in compartmentalising the tasks of developing a programme and intervening in the working class (‘What next for Campaign for a Marxist Party?’, December 20). The CMP is still at stage one: ie, he believes it should dedicate itself to the programmatic task solely. He implies that, once we begin to intervene in struggles, we will have the future hoped-for party. I suggest instead that the programmatic task is never finished because it requires the continual import from practice, which is what the dialectic is all about.

Moreover, a revolutionary party is not only a programme that intervenes in the class struggle, but is an actual alternative to the class. Too many propaganda groups call themselves parties when they are closer to cargo cults.

The process of building a revolutionary party may not follow the guidelines of parliamentary procedure, because it is about the creation of consciousness rather than a new organisational structure.

Cargo cults
Cargo cults

Bedside manner

I am pleased that Lawrence Parker has clarified what he was saying about Ewan MacColl in relation to the British road to socialism, the parliamentary road and revolution (Letters, December 20). I clearly misunderstood that particular piece of his review in my letter (December 13).

I don’t think I’m so dozy, though, as to misunderstand the rest of that review or its central theme of discrediting MacColl and totally misrepresenting his role as a revolutionary socialist and working class artist. Readers of the paper and everyone who knew Ewan can judge that for themselves from the review, against what they know of MacColl’s contribution.

By the way, your bedside manner could do with some working on, Lawrence.

Bedside manner
Bedside manner

Spot on

Lawrence Parker’s criticism of David Douglass is spot on. I am a great admirer of Ewan MacColl’s work both in theatre and folk music. However, Ewan remained a bit of a Stalinist both in his politics and the way he ran his life.

I am grateful to Dave, though, as without his letter and Lawrence’s response I would have missed the book (Class act: the cultural and political life of Ewan MacColl by Ben Harker). I have just ordered it and will let you know when I have read it what I think about it.

Spot on
Spot on

Extremists

The politics of revenge, terror and extremism have claimed another victim and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto is to be condemned. One can have many differences with her politics but there is no justification whatsoever for dealing with political opponents in such a manner. By committing this act, terrorists wanted to send a clear message that they will not tolerate secular and moderate forces.

There will be many theories about who carried out this attack, from Al Qa’eda to Taliban cells operating in Pakistan. But we cannot deny that this is the direct result of imperialist policies carried out by Pakistani armed forces and secret services over the last three decades in Afghanistan and at home.

I still remember the day when Soviet troops left Kabul. Islami Jameet-e-Tulba (who proclaimed themselves ‘soldiers of Allah’) fired thousands of rounds with automatic weapons at Punjab University to celebrate this victory. Dozens of Afghan intellectuals belonging to the People’s Democratic Party, Khalq, Parcham, Sholaye Javid and others who took refuge in Pakistan were assassinated in Peshawar and elsewhere with American-supplied bullets.

Jamat e Islami were given a free hand to occupy educational institutions by the establishment. These institutions were declared fortresses of islam, and progressive-minded students and teachers were banned from entering. There was no room for dialogue or democracy. Thousands of foreign-funded madrassas were in full swing, producing fanatics who wanted to impose their monstrous ideology upon the whole country and were prepared to kill whoever got in their way.

Extremists
Extremists

Nostalgic

John Bridge’s bout of nostalgia could give the reader the impression that Stalinism was just a case of a certain pernicious faction gaining the upper hand (‘Past, present and future’, December 20). It should be stressed that Stalinism had real social roots in the Soviet bureaucracy, and as a body of doctrine reflected the interests of a social layer increasingly alien to the working class. It rapidly turned into a counterrevolutionary force dressed up in Marxist clothing.

The CPGB followed every twist and turn of Stalin’s policies, even as countless struggles were sacrificed to the needs of Soviet diplomacy.

When the Second International collapsed under the weight of opportunism and rallied to the conflicting national flags, this was a world-historic event that called for the construction of a new international. Equally, the degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist bureaucracy meant that the Third International was dead for revolution and a new beginning had to be made. This did not happen in a single event but in a whole series of betrayals. As a result Trotsky called for the Fourth International. This was founded in the same year that the last of the old Bolsheviks were facing death in the Moscow trials.

When the Third International was founded, affiliation was denied to those who had voted for war in 1914. Likewise, a new workers’ movement must be based on unambiguous rejection of Stalinism as a bureaucratic formation and as a political legacy that sows confusion among socialists to this day. There can be no question of formulating a ‘post-Moscow trials Marxism’ that has any hesitation on this, or can view the gulf between Stalinism and Trotskyism as of mainly historical interest. The idea that a movement can acquire the name and heritage of the CPGB without spreading confusion or worse on this very issue is absurd.

Stalinism did not merely crush all opposition ruthlessly and pervert the revolution to serve its own ends. It gave birth to political heirs who in time demolished the Soviet Union itself - the very crime for which oppositionists had been falsely condemned. It did all this in the name of Marxism. Once the ultra-left period had passed, it turned to the popular front strategy, opening the door to a whole range of national adaptations to reformist, nationalist or other formations opposed to the working class. The CPGB’s own mass base was largely inherited from its wartime role as an ally of British imperialism and continued through alliances with the peace movements and the trade union and Labour lefts.

The habit lingers on in the refounded CPGB, a serial regrouper, looking for forces to merge with among the remnants of Stalinism or left radicalism (Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Respect). Actually, the style reminds me of many erstwhile Trotskyists. In the post-World War II period Trotskyists were faced with immensely strengthened Stalinist and reformist forces and many opted to merge into the mass movements (Pablo), or to look for left-moving forces among reformist or nationalist movements (Mandel/USFI). This invariably meant an orientation away from the working class, and usually that the new initiative carried the seeds of its own destruction.

All that is left today, apart from the radical left swamp, are the relatively small forces that remain around the International Committee of the Fourth International. They have the merit of having assessed their own history and experience in order to redefine the independent interests of the working class. This is the essential first step in constructing a new workers’ movement, rather than comforting thoughts about how many members were in the old CPGB.

Nostalgic
Nostalgic

Marxist art

I agree with James Turley’s response to Hillel Ticktin’s first article on Marxist method (‘A load of old Balzac’, November 15).

Most fundamentally, Marxism asserts that the world is knowable and controllable. If this perspective is applied to the production of cultural artefacts, an artistic practice is created that emphasises transparency of production and rationality of construction. This process redefines both the role and nature of cultural producers (or artists) and the role of art itself: the mystical or quasi-religious function of art is eradicated in favour of a materialist and concrete aesthetic that is open and transparent.

Though history offers some examples of such practice, it is always compromised or mediated by a mismatch between form and content. It is only in the 20th century that the contradiction is resolved by collapsing this distinction. Within visual art, the work of the constructionist artists Katarzyna Kobro, Anthony Hill, Richard Paul Lohse et al is seminal in this regard, as is the work of the Systems Group established by Jeffrey Steele in 1969. Here the transparency of geometry and math replaces the opacity of ideology-saturated inspiration, intuition, and Ticktin’s idealist notions of “genius” and the “profound” (‘For realism, for humanity’, November 8).

Perhaps the question Hillel Ticktin meant to pose was: should Marxist method be applied to aesthetic production and appreciation? Perhaps Ticktin prefers artists to be left to live in their own private and supposedly neutral worlds, offering us a distraction from reality? But he is able to assert that aesthetic behaviour is more or less free from determination by the economic base by questioning the meaning and analytical effectiveness of the phrase ‘in the last instance’. In addition, because relationships between superstructural phenomena are extremely “complex”, he appears to assert that it is foolhardy to attempt to isolate their underlying causes and interconnections.

In constructing the base-superstructure model, both Marx and Engels were aware of the dangers of an overly mechanistic perspective. Though Engels revised the model to include interactivity between components in the superstructure and between the base and the superstructure, he nevertheless stressed that economic determinants were always present and ultimately decisive.

Thus, our perception of the extent to which a superstructural component is autonomous is in large measure dependent on the breadth and depth of analysis employed or, as Ticktin seems to intimate, the level of abstraction applied. A shallow or localised analytical perspective will inevitably emphasise the autonomy of the phenomena under investigation, but, the deeper such analyses penetrate, the less autonomous and free from economic determination such phenomena will be seen to be. Contrary to what Ticktin appears to assert, such an analysis offers opportunities to isolate the way in which creative artists reproduce - knowingly or not - those relations of production and power that are at the foundation of capitalist society. And, once generalised, such an analytical perspective has implications for revolutionary strategy. For this reason alone, I think Ticktin is mistaken not to embrace an analytical perspective and focus of this kind.

He is almost correct to assert that there is no such thing as a capitalist violinist or, by inference, inherently capitalist material. But his analysis fails to see the symbolic uses such materials are appropriated to fulfil. As I attempted to outline in my article, ‘Art and commodification’ (July 26), cultural producers can either affirm existing distributions of power by producing cultural artefacts tailored for the market, or they can negate existing power relations by producing cultural artefacts that attempt to resist processes of marketisation and commodification.

It is in this way that the behaviour of creative artists is, in the last instance, determined by the economic base. And it is in this way that Marxist method is applicable to the analysis of art.

Marxist art
Marxist art

Sophistry

Liam O Ruairc follows Althusser in thinking that Marx’s ideas were incoherent and in need of “reconstruction” (Letters, December 6). As a result, concepts crucial to understanding Marx’s political economy, such as contradiction, abstraction, essence, abstract labour and surplus product, are air-brushed from his account of Althusser’s “continued relevance” to politics.

Instead, Liam recommends students to start using sociological jargon like ‘interpellation’ and ‘habitus’. As such, he is successful in proving that Althusser continues to be relevant to the social democratic politics informing the writings of sociologists such as Therborn and Bourdieu.

Althusser is useful to those who wish to abolish Marx’s distinction between false and true consciousness and argue that ideology is an all-pervasive excrescence of social structures such as schools and the family. Althusser’s ‘reconstruction’ enables sociologists to teach Marx without reference to commodity fetishism, a category essential to understanding the ideology of bourgeois society. It justifies teaching a sociology - purporting to be Marxian - that makes little or no reference to Marx’s political economy.

Liam points out that Althusser denounced structuralism as ideology. In order to gain academic credibility, Althusser distorted Marx according to linguistic criteria borrowed from structuralism. This inconsistency is an example of the man’s dishonesty. What Stalinism attempted to do in reality - the reduction of individuals’ consciousness to atoms subject to impersonal, overwhelming bureaucratic forces, Althusser - appealing to the authority of Marx - attempted to do in thought.

In effect, Althusser’s method was a form of subjectivism. It permitted readers to project whatever they imagined to be the case onto a particular text. This was popular with lazy students with well honed literary skills seeking approval and employment within bureaucratic institutions. It enabled Althusser to pretend to be an expert on Marx when, in reality, he was a fraud. In his memoir A future lasts forever (1995), he admitted he knew almost nothing about the philosophy of history or about Marx.

Liam forgets to mention that the nature of Althusser’s project was to deny that there was any continuity between the thought of the early Marx of the Economic and philosophical manuscripts and the later Marx of Capital. In particular, he held that the concept of alienation was absent from Marx’s later work.

A superficial linguistic approach confirms such a reading. Marx does not use the term ‘alienation’ in Capital. However, the concept is self-evident in Marx’s theories of exploitation and class. Liam must prove Marx’s incoherence in this respect if he is to give the “full defence of Althusser’s project” he promises.

This project - separating a ‘humanist’ early Marx from an ‘anti-humanist’ later Marx - was motivated by the needs of a Stalinism under attack from the left as a result of the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968.

Students with access to the Manuscripts (and later the Grundrisse) were challenging Soviet dogmas of diamat and histmat. Moreover, following the work of Erich Fromm and others, they were using Marx’s concept of alienation to develop critiques of the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and China.

Althusser loyally upheld the doctrine of socialism in one country. The fact he was sympathetic to Mao’s China - a regime responsible for the deaths of possibly 70 million of its citizens - does not contradict this fact. Moreover, like some other Stalinists, he never broke intellectually or emotionally with a Roman catholic upbringing, seeking an audience with pope John Paul II in 1979.

A necessary condition for explaining Althusser’s unhappy consciousness is that he was a victim of the mental health system of oppression. He suffered depression, therapy and electro-shock treatment throughout his life. He had 15 mental breakdowns from 1945 to 1980. In 1980 he murdered his wife and was incarcerated in a mental hospital.

This is, of course, in no way sufficient. A complete explanation needs to account for how it was that his ideas had such a huge appeal during the 1960s and 70s. This was a period during the cold war when Stalinism was successful in defeating revolutionary movements in France, Czechoslovakia and Portugal. At the same time, the Soviet Union and China were supporting national liberation movements in Africa, Asia and South America.

It is therefore understandable that Althusser was able to masquerade as an academic authority on Marx for so long. He was able to capture the imagination of activists and intellectuals caught up on the fashionable radicalism of the period, many of whom were reluctant to study Marx in depth. Most of these people had illusions in the progressive nature of nationalism and leftwing social democracy - policies supported by communist parties throughout the world. As a result, they gained little or no knowledge of Marx.

At a time when there is the potential for a revival of revolutionary socialist ideas amongst students, I find it disturbing that, instead of calling for a revival of the study of Marx and Hegel, authors such as Liam O Ruairc and James Turley should uncritically acclaim the discredited anti-Marxist sophistry of Louis Althusser.

Sophistry
Sophistry

Utterly foul

Your use of so-called anti-war tactics in a proxy sectarian war against the Socialist Workers Party is utterly foul. Another country has been threatened with genocide. Reports of up to four million in Afghanistan and over a million in Iraq instantly refute the thrust of the Hopi campaign.

The Iranian regime has to be defended not from its people but from US-UK threats. The idea that the Hopi position is principled is bloody. If millions of Iranians are to die through nuclear attack, if I did not say I had done everything I could to stop this I would feel party to that genocide.

Utterly foul
Utterly foul

Bananarama

Paul Bennett’s claim to speak as a Marxist (Letters, December 13) is severely limited by his politics of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, a party which holds that socialism needs to be established through a general election returning a majority of SPGB MPs to the House of Commons, and then parliament bringing in socialism through legislation, presumably crowned with the royal assent. If this is Marxism, then I am a banana.

Technological progress has not removed the distinction between a lower and higher phase of communism. His own journal editor’s reply to a letter of mine explicitly stated that it would take time for abundant and free access to be established (Socialist Standard June 2006), implicitly acknowledging the higher stage of communism is not an immediate practicality.

The Marxist theory of socialist revolution and the transition to communism is quite clear. The dictatorship of the proletariat, established after the working class has overthrown the capitalist state, will require time to fully establish the new proletarian state and time to convert the existing democracy for the few into a democracy for the many - ie to fully establish the institutions and mechanisms for the majority rule of the working class and genuine control over the means of production - to move into the first phase of communism.

It will then take time during the lower phase of communism to convert the taken over means of production and distribution into socially useful and ecologically sustainable production and distribution. It will take time to fully determine what socially and democratically determined needs and priorities should be. It will then take time to expand the level of socially useful production to a point of abundance, to when free access can be realised.

The reason all these take time is because none of the above can be progressed during capitalism and can only be commenced following the overthrow of the capitalist state and elimination of the capitalist class as a class and the influence of their supporters.

There are two other fundamental requirements for the higher phase of communism. First, a cultural revolution to get rid of centuries of habit and behaviour inculcated from class-divided society and to develop the new man and woman. Second, to completely eliminate elements still hostile to socialism and prepared to use undemocratic and possibly terrorist methods to undermine and disrupt the new order.

The economic tasks outlined earlier will probably take a number of years, perhaps some decades. The latter two requirements will probably only be fully achievable over generations. Once accomplished, however, we will have moved into the higher phase of communism.

Bennett’s recipe for a parliamentary instant socialism is in fact a recipe for staying exactly where we are, since it shows no grasp whatsoever of the political, economic and practical tasks required to get from capitalism to socialism.

Bananarama
Bananarama

Nuclear option

I appreciate that attempting to follow and adequately summarise the whole debate at the Hands Off the People of Iran launch conference cannot have been an easy task, but I would like to clarify some of the points I made on nuclear arms (‘Sanctions: a form of “soft” war and preparation for massive bombing’, December 13).

As I said, I had belonged to the political tradition which was characterised by its opponents as believing in the ‘workers’ bomb’ and, insofar as that was really an argument about the nature of the Soviet Union, I stood by it, but never thought I would be asked to associate with support for the ‘mullahs’ bomb’. It might be that Soviet possession of nuclear weapons deterred imperialist aggression at times, but the Soviet regime’s reliance on nuclear strategy contributed in the long run to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

War is politics by other means, and you cannot separate the means used from the ends you are pursuing. Technology is not socially neutral.

Iraq had weapons such as Saddam Hussein used against the Kurds, but, when it came to defending Iraq from imperialism, more damage was done to the US fleet by a few Yemenis in a small boat. I said you could not liberate Palestine with nuclear weapons, because the Palestinian people want to return to their homeland, not to a radioactive ruin. Enough damage has already been done to the environment by the existing Israeli nuclear project.

The call to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone would clearly apply to Israeli nuclear weapons and to British and US bases. I told the conference there was already a movement in Israel calling for a nuclear-free Middle East, and this slogan had been raised by Mordechai Vanunu. In my view we have to link up with the existing movements in the world rather than strike macho postures about the ‘right’ to possess nuclear weapons.

Nuclear option
Nuclear option