Letters

Skewed

Anyone reading Enso White’s somewhat skewed conclusions on my opinions regarding the American revolutionary war of independence would assume I thought the events that took place within the 13 states between 1775 and 1783 were reactionary (Letters, February 26). Let me explain why that isn’t the case.

Writing during the mid-19th century, Marx did sometimes refer to America as the “most progressive nation”; and quite right too. However, criticising the 1788 constitutional settlement does not undervalue the significance of the American political revolution. Whilst that settlement represented a democracy that was something very much ‘in progress’, it also provides a basis from which to judge and evaluate the level of struggle existing within and between the main social classes in the country at that time. That is my point.

From this perspective, it is clear that the constitution represented a compromise or, to use an alternative label, a sop. That compromise was double-layered. Firstly, fearful of the revolutionary fervour still existing in society from below (consider the Shays rebellion in Massachusetts, 1786), the constitution was not simply the work of wise and progressive men of the time trying to establish a decent and orderly society (as is often portrayed by the American establishment), but the work of elites trying to maintain their privileges against ‘excessive’ democracy, whilst giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.

Secondly, in order to aid the unity of the 13 states into one market for commerce, the constitution also represented a compromise between the moneyed interests of the north of the country and the slaveholding interests of the south. Indeed, that slavery was not outlawed at the time led Nimtz to describe the constitution as being based upon the most “retrograde” feature of the American social formation - the slave-owners - and Marx to describe it as the “most progressive nation” until the civil war in the 1860s; he also described it as the “defiled republic”.

Skewed
Skewed

Rejigged Zionism

That the CPGB has decided to review its 22 theses on the Palestine question, as adopted in 2002, is a good thing (‘Two nations and the Arab revolution’, March 5). But there is no point in so doing if all it does is result in a rejigging of the existing positions.

The problem with the debate is best exemplified by the front page headline: ‘Does Palestinian self-determination and the Arab revolution mean that Israeli Jews must be denied national rights?’ This is a strange way to pose events in the wake of the massacre of some 1,300-plus civilians in Gaza, including over 400 children. Israeli Jews are being denied nothing. The problem is their denial of the most basic human and civil, let alone national, rights of the Palestinians.

There is no disagreement with the idea that only some form of pan-Arab revolution can possibly lead to the demise of Zionism. This is so for a number of reasons, not least of which is the rough demographic parity between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. But also because, if Israel is sponsored and supported by the west due to its ability to defeat and terrorise any popular Arab national and social movements, then its failure to do so will also lead to a questioning of that support.

What is wrong, though, is to put the question in such a way that it seems as if the national rights of the oppressor are at stake when clearly they are not. People are getting hung up on the question of ‘national self-determination’. Supposing that the Israeli Jews or Hebrews are a separate nation, which I doubt, then the question is, what type of nation? It is clear that Israeli Jews, just like the white South Africans and Afrikaners before them, are above all oppressors of another group of people or nation. That is their identity; that is what makes them a nation. They didn’t come into existence in a vacuum.

Language and territory certainly are prerequisites for the existence of a nation, but the reverse doesn’t hold. Just because a separate group speaks the same language and occupies shared territory, it doesn’t therefore mean that they form a nation or, more accurately, an oppressed nation. An oppressor nation has no rights in respect of their right to oppress another and that is the key point. The question of national self-determination for Israeli Jews simply does not arise. On the contrary, Israeli Jews are self-determining another people, hence the problem.

Hence why Peter Manson is wrong when he says that Israeli Jews “just will not accept” a shared state and that separate states are “a precondition” for ending anti-Arab chauvinism. That is simply not true. Did separate states end anti-Catholic and republican bigotry in the north of Ireland? As South Africa demonstrates, the precondition for ending anti-black racism was a unitary state. That doesn’t mean it will take place overnight, or that it’s not linked to questions of economics and class, but there is the possibility of an end to such chauvinism. Within two states there is no such possibility.

The reason for this is quite simple. Racism and chauvinism do not spring up out of thin air. They have material roots vis-à-vis the existence of a settler colonial people whose very formation depended on transfer and subjugation of the existing population. That is the basis of the peculiar formation of the Israeli state and the building of that state by the Jewish working class. I recommend the article I have just written about this on the Electronic Intifada website: electronicintifada.net/v2/article10379.shtml.

It is therefore a mistake to transplant the notion of labour aristocracy from the British or European context to Israel. Israeli Jewish workers aren’t simply labour aristocrats, occupying a position somewhat above the rest of the working class. On the contrary, they have been deeply involved in all the worst aspects of the oppression of the Palestinians. It would be more accurate to use such a term with regard to the relationship between Ashkenazi and oriental/Mizrahi Jews.

The key point to keep in mind in all these debates is that Israel is the last active settler-colonial state. To pose solutions that have no bearing in reality, which defy what is actually happening, is to make communists completely irrelevant. If the CPGB clings to two-statism, however it dresses it up, then it is in practice accepting the starting point of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s original position, which was that there was an irreconcilable difference between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.

I understand Moshé Machover’s position, which is one of not taking a position, on one or two states. However, he is wrong. The question is whether or not a solution to the Palestinian question can be achieved under capitalism - a bourgeois national solution in a region where there was no bourgeois revolution and that which was attempted was aborted (Nasserism, etc). I have no doubt that such a solution is possible, although in the fight to achieve such a solution, then the toppling of the existing set of class relations in the region is clearly posed, since it will by definition be an anti-imperialist struggle that challenges the ownership of oil wealth by a tiny minority.

But in a bourgeois national solution, there can be no doubt that a state that is ‘Jewish’, however defined (and religion is used as the national identifier), whilst at the same time being in a process of change, cannot be other than a state that will be Zionist or have strong Zionist tendencies with all that that involves. A single state for both Israeli Jews and Palestinians is a sine qua non of any solution that socialists can support.

Rejigged Zionism
Rejigged Zionism

Trotsky faith

The outcome of the debate in the CPGB looks likely to be that it will abandon its reactionary two-state line and other aspects of its 2002 position, but adopt an ‘Arab revolution’ solution. This is a two-stage theory - first the democratic, then the socialist at some later, undefined time - that we must oppose. However, the CPGB, in line with their adaptation to the ‘Arab revolution’, now also propose that the majority of Israeli Jews are labour aristocrats - ie, similar to the Lindsey oil refinery ‘British jobs for British workers’ strikers or the north of Ireland unionist workers. But the reality is far more complex than that.

Our differences centre on this: what force is capable of overthrowing Zionism? We would contend that this is not like the north of Ireland, South Africa, Algeria, the Malvinas and so on. The settler population is far more diverse than any of these. As professor Khazzoom points out, “how ‘Israelis’ feel about Israel’s Jewishness depends heavily on whether they have citizenship or not, live in Israel or not, identify as Arab, Palestinian, Druze, Bedouin, Mizrahi (or perhaps even Iraqi Jewish or Moroccan Jewish), Ashkenazi, Filipino, Romanian (Jewish or not), Russian (Jewish or not), Muslim, Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, are immigrants or Israeli-born”.

Moreover, the Israeli Zionist ruling class (mainly the white Ashkenazi settlers) possess such horrendous weapons of mass destruction, both conventional and nuclear, that the chance of defeat by a (largely mythical) ‘Arab nation’, even if united by an ‘Arab revolution’, is out of the question (though, as the Socialist Fight statement on Israel/Palestine says, we are for such a defeat). Socialist revolution in one or all of the surrounding countries would not alter that military imbalance substantially, and the US would immediately come to Israel’s assistance if such a possibility emerged.

Nor does the heroism of the Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon in 2006, or the Hamas and other resistance fighters in Gaza recently, mean that the Israeli war machine came close to defeat or can possibly be beaten by these methods. Not even the combined Arab armies are a match for this machine. And the socialist revolution is necessary not just to militarily defeat the oppressors but to begin the process of cleansing the oppressed of the “muck of ages”, as Marx observes in The German ideology.

No, our faith in the Arab working class is complemented by our faith in the Israeli working class, just as we do not reject the US, British, German or Japanese working class because of the powerful influence of great-nation chauvinism in their ranks. Surely, it is in anticipation of the powerful political effect on the heterogeneous Israeli society of a socialist revolution in a proximate country that we propose our solution of a binational workers’ state, only viable in the context of a socialist federation of the Middle East.

It is the prime concern of the Zionists to maintain their cross-class alliance, and US economic and military support is central to this. However, if this assistance was disrupted for any prolonged period by a catastrophic finance collapse or a war that went disastrously wrong for the US, or indeed the eruption of major class struggle in the US that threatened revolution, then the balance of forces on the ground would change radically.

Then there is the question of whether the Jews or the Israeli Jews constitute a nation. We say no to the former because it entails the right of all Jews to immigrate as citizens to Israel, but denies the right of return to the Palestinian diaspora from 1948 on. But we also say: yes, the Israeli Jews do constitute a nation since approximately the 1967 war. Many ‘left Trotskyist’ groups internationally agree that we should oppose a two-nation solution, not because we deny the right of the Palestinians to self-determination in their own separate state, but because we can see that this position supports, right now, the continued oppression of the Palestinians. If it is a nation, does it have the right to self-determination? We do not recognise any principle that oppressor nations (imperialist or otherwise) do not have a right to self-determination.

However, our binational workers’ state slogan is a programme for a future workers’ state; it is what we envisage after the socialist revolution. But it is also based on the reality of the here and now. The prospects for its realisation under Zionist capitalism in any just way, such as occurred with the separation of Norway and Sweden in 1905, does not exist. And we say that Israel has a right to self-determination in the context of the post-socialist revolution settlement; without being for the destruction of the Zionist state, it turns into its opposite - championing the supremacist right to discriminate of the whole Zionist project.

We believe the Israeli Jews should have not just religious, ethnic or cultural rights in the future workers’ state, but full national rights. Only this prospect will win the best Jewish socialist and militant workers to the banner of the revolution. And there will be ‘room’ for all the Palestinian refugees and proper compensation on their return (or even if they chose not to).

Of course, all things will be possible in terms of the arrangements that national groups and minorities can make to live together in the future socialist society, but getting there is a transitional phase during which we must reject, and fight against in a revolutionary way, the injustices of the here and now. Also, as Trotskyists, we are agreed that the working class is the force that can lead to the liberation of Palestine by utilising whatever united fronts of the oppressed are necessary to lead that struggle.

We concur with the proposition that the forces of the Palestinians alone will be inadequate to defeat Israeli Zionism and it will take the intervention of a revolution in one of more of the major countries in the region (eg, Egypt or Turkey) to overcome the imbalance. However, we do not spread illusions in the ‘Arab revolution’ - a two-stage Stalinist programme that ascribes progressive functions to the Arab bourgeoisie and to which many post-World War II Trotskyists, notably Pablo and Mandel, capitulated.

No, we put our faith in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and the Arab working class to overthrow their rulers and to inspire the Palestinian and most oppressed of the Jewish working class to overthrow and smash the Zionist state and institute a binational workers’ state in Israel/Palestine as part of the socialist federation of the Middle East.

Trotsky faith
Trotsky faith

Further study

Jack Conrad is right to target those trade union and political activists who deny or diminish the inhumanity of Stalinism (‘Dead Russians’, March 12). His polemic is consummate and his grasp of 20th century history is sound.

He is also correct to notice that Trotsky’s characterisation of the former USSR as a degenerate workers’ state was influenced by “his refusal to admit defeat”. It is now clear that the potential for proletarian rule in Russia and worldwide was extinguished at birth by civil war and the nationalism inherent to Stalinism and social democracy. This was not evident to Trotsky in the 1930s.

On the other hand, Jack Conrad’s thinking about the nature of the Soviet Union is in danger of reproducing the “dogmatic stupidity” of the sects he so abhors. He attacks Trotsky’s “hopelessly anachronistic formula” at the same time as suggesting that his own description of the USSR as “bureaucratic socialism” is superior.

He states that socialism is the first phase of a communist society. It begins once the working class takes power and establishes its rule over society. This is contestable and requires further discussion. Nonetheless, if it is true, it follows that Trotsky’s belief that a workers’ state based on nationalised property relations could cohabit with non-existent proletarian rule either in Russia or elsewhere is incoherent. Moreover, it follows that Jack Conrad’s belief that bureaucratic socialism existed in a regime that exterminated and exploited peasants and workers, isolated from movement by workers to form a class capable of expropriating capital globally, is also false.

Comrade Conrad notes accurately that both Lenin and Trotsky used the term ‘socialism’ to describe the transitional potential of the October Revolution. However, he forgets to place this in context. The socialist potential of the revolution was savagely extinguished. For 70 years or more, the historic possibility of an emergent dictatorship of the proletariat as the basis for a planned society worldwide was removed by Stalinism and social democracy.

If he has an argument for ‘bureaucratic socialism’, it is the following: Marx used ‘socialism’ to refer to a political trend fashionable within a section of an authoritarian bureaucracy in 1840s Germany. It follows that all authoritarian, bureaucratic regimes that have nationalised property relations, including the former USSR, are socialist. This is neither valid nor sound. It also ignores theoretical and empirical investigations into the nature of such regimes.

It is good that Jack is studying and interested in debating the political economy of the former Soviet Union. I guess this will move him even further away from the residual Stalinism that influences his thinking presently.

He is already beginning to apply Marx’s categories of surplus extraction, contradiction, atomisation and alienation to his understanding of the failed social formation that arose out of a defeated revolution. Hopefully, further discussion and study will quicken this movement.

Further study
Further study

Hyperbole

James Turley is assuring of us of two things - capitalism’s recovery and that quantitative easing on its own will not produce hyperinflation, at least initially or without other factors coming into play (‘Crisis cannot be offloaded’, March 12).

Firstly, while recognising the “US’s accelerating decline as the world hegemon state”, he does not bring in as a factor the disintegration of the imperialist economies, including the UK. These financial centres are getting their come-uppance for the neoliberal running down of industrial production. The bottom line is that Anglo-American capitalism cannot recover until investment in production is the bedrock of the financial system. A financial system that is paying back its debts to the rest of the world more than it is borrowing. The major imperialist states do not have the industrial capacity for that yet. In other words, the crisis is likely to be long-term. A generation of wealth has been lost.

While it is true that China is suffering from the loss of exports to the US, it has the option of developing its internal markets much more immediately than the US and the UK. With US/UK foreclosures, unemployment and retailing conditions steadily worsening and each having a negative effect on one another, the answer has been to stimulate credit or to reflate the bubble. In the UK, personal debt is three times the gross domestic product, while corruption and fraud are endemic.

While the initial burst of the financial crisis has had a global impact, those countries that have not followed the US/UK financial model are ultimately stronger and are largely creditor nations (creditor nations tightening their belts). The rates of recovery will be as different as the balance of power.

As to quantitative easing, historically it has led to hyperinflation and inflation even in Japan. Japan practised quantitative easing during the bubble’s inflation - not as the Bank of England is doing it now, as the bubble has burst.

The dollar is artificially high and is being used in the carry trade to pay off debts. Something that most experts agree won’t last due to the fundamentals. Everything points to the devaluing of currencies, particularly the pound and the dollar. The central banks cannot control this consequence of pumping money into the economy. The bubble cannot be reflated by financial trickery. Another downward spiral has begun.

It seems to me that James Turley’s analysis kowtows to official optimism about hyperinflation, though I suspect that is not his intention. He writes: “    This is most likely misplaced - in the first instance, it is by no means certain that this money will do much of anything. It is certainly not the first multi-billion-pound package to be thrown at the banks, and it would not be the first to fail to stimulate lending.”

There is an Americanism that expresses the effect quite well. In hyperinflation, prices get hit by a ‘triple whammy’ due to the increase in the money supply, the increase in the velocity of money and the decrease in production. Comrade Turley’s hesitation is on the velocity of money, presumably assuming the banks just sit on it. This may be true in the first instance, but there is only one strategy - throw money at the banks until money starts circulating. If it is hoarded indefinitely, this will encourage generalised money hoarding as such and then the risk is deflation, which is another route during a crisis to hyperinflation.

Paul Anderson
Glasgow

Hyperbole
Hyperbole

Clean coal

David Walters (Letters, March 5) seeks to correct errors in my previous letter (February 26). Let me return the favour.

Firstly the Bituminous Coal Association of the USA did not invent the concept of ‘clean coal technology’. We were using it at the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s in relation to the ‘clean coal technology of experimental plane’ at Grimethorpe. This was a joint Scandinavian-British venture to combat the effects of acid rain, which was damaging the forests of Scandinavia. The plant was working on the fluid bed combustion chamber idea and was well down the road when Heath pulled the plug and Callaghan didn’t continue it.

So this isn’t some fad for us in the National Union of Mineworkers and has been our demand since that time. The miners want clean coal because it’s burned where we live and we suffer the effects of dirty coal more than most. Miners’ wives have double the excess mortality rate from chronic bronchitis as the general population. We also see the effect on the environment worldwide - the world we and our children live in. So, yes, we support clean-coal technologies - and not as a sop to the green lobby, or just in defence of our jobs.

Dave is wrong: coal is not the biggest source of global warming - man-made global warming anyway. Destruction of the world’s forests is the major direct source, and the burning of forests as a method of clearance is a bigger source. This is linked to cattle production on unsustainable, deforested land, which in turn leads to desertification. The cattle themselves then add massively to the production of greenhouse gases.

So if we could do one thing right now to stop global warming it would be the preservation of the forests, followed by reforestation and a reduction in cattle farming in deforested areas. The bonus would come in terms of the protection of rare environments, animals, peoples and plants.

World transport - planes, cars etc - is the next greatest source of greenhouse gas and global warming.

So with this in mind one wonders why ‘the greens’ have made coal public enemy number one, when actually it should be number three. The truth is, many of the middle class greens don’t care for the miners or the proletariat in general and, while they mask this with concern for ‘the environment’ and pollution, there are deep, hidden class antagonisms too.

Dave is wrong too about the effects of fluidisal bed combustion, unless he is using a similar term for a different process. The fluid bed uses tiny amounts of coal fired into a bed of hot lime stones, which produces massively more heat from minute amounts of coal and consequently much lower emissions of CO_2.

That, however, is not the best system - the Hatfield system will be much more efficient when it comes on stream.

I would just say finally - coal has got to go? And steel? Does Dave propose we go back to wood? Perhaps a return to cottage industry, with the whole family knitting wicker baskets? A solid base for support from the greens and the primitives, but hardly the source of creation of an abundance of wealth, required to constitute a communist society.

By the way, hundreds of thousands do die in China as a result of their coal industry. Not because they are mining coal, but because there is no workers’ control of health and safety and no right to stop production or impose sanctions in dangerous underground environments.

Before Thatcher we had the capacity in Britain to produce 200 million tonnes of coal in the safest deep mines in the world. They were 100% unionised mines, well paid, in the most technologically developed coal industry in the world. They closed these mines and transferred production to unregulated, non-union, low paid, unsafe slaughter pits in China, India and other third world countries. This is a feature of the global ebbs and flows of the class war. It is nothing to do with the simple fact we mine coal: rather that coal was and is a strategic source for capitalism. Control of its production has to do with the degree of union/workers’ control of the process - or lack of it.

That is why Major closed down 60 mines producing 60 million tonnes of coal here, followed by importing 60 million tonnes of unsafe and more expensive coal from abroad.

Over 150 years ago Davie invented a miners’ oil lamp which warned of the presence of explosive gases. Miners won the right to carry it and close down production without reference to authority from anyone else. If we had that lamp and that right in China, hundreds of thousands of lives would be spared. Do you think the Chinese state doesn’t know about the Davie lamp? They do, but they also know of the degree of workers’ power and workers’ control which goes with it. That is why so many die in Chinese mines - nothing else.

Clean coal
Clean coal

Sloppy rubbish

John Corcoran’s reply (Letters, March 5) to my obituary of Edward Upward (‘Principled political artist’, February 26) is evasive, to say the least. He writes: “Lawrence Parker makes the assertion … that what I had written in my blog was ‘a significant misreading’ when I suggested that much of the criticism levelled at Upward’s writing was politically motivated.”

No, I’m afraid that wasn’t the problem I was getting at. I have no doubt whatsoever that most of the criticism levelled at Upward was anti-communist in inspiration. No, my real issue was Upward being painted as a socialist realist.

Corcoran says: “I did not suggest that Upward’s writing was exclusively in the socialist realist style.” In fact, this is exactly what was suggested. I am glad to know that the comrade does not have a particular brief to defend socialist realism and that he enjoys Upward’s later output. However, the only reference to Upward’s writing style is here: “I also believe that much of the negative criticism of his literature was in fact a literary and critical form of political opposition to his chosen form of creativity, and of course a dismissal - and a contemptuous dismissal at that - of any attempt to employ the socialist realist or written documentary form.”

Of course, it is misleading to suggest Upward had one “chosen form”, as Corcoran says, the reality being that the author struggled through a number of different forms throughout his career. As Corcoran doesn’t see fit to talk about these changes, the only conclusion any sane reader would draw from this obituary is that Upward was overwhelmingly concerned with socialist realism (or “written documentary”, whatever that might be). Where is the Upward of The railway accident, for example, in all this?

I’m trying to work out whether Corcoran believes his readers are just plain stupid, if he was just trying to pull a fast one, or whether this is the usual sloppy rubbish that leftwing writers serve up when writing on cultural issues. My money’s on the latter.

Sloppy rubbish
Sloppy rubbish