Letters

El Alamein

As capitalism loses some of its legitimacy, what should those who want to get rid of capitalism be doing?

After the battle of El Alamein, Churchill famously said “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”.

In some ways, the socialist position on the latest slump should be similar (minus, of course, the celebration of mass slaughter).

Capitalism has lost its veneer of invincibility, which is much of its strength. Pundits who a couple of years ago would have referred to ‘the economic system’ - as if there was no other - have started to refer to capitalism.

And as the possibility of pensions fades out of view, job security becomes a memory (to those who ever had it) and people lose their houses, their savings, we can expect a similar reaction amongst those members of our class who had previously had no cause to question their life’s trajectory within capitalism.

It is therefore imperative to use this opportunity, as capitalism’s feet of clay are broken, to build afresh rather than patch up the past. And we are building from a weak base.

Across the entire spectrum of political opinion membership numbers in parties are down - the working class has been demobilised politically, and often only ageing cadres remain, preserving political traditions rather than engaging in productive activity, recruitment and debate.

The first, most important battle is to continue the destruction of capitalism’s legitimacy in the minds of our fellow class members. That is, to drive the development of our class as a class-for-itself, mindful of the fact that capitalism is a thing that can be destroyed and a thing that should be destroyed.

As it rapidly crumbles from a high peak to a lower base, most workers “shouldn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”, as the song has it.

The second is to develop an effective medium of engagement between workers and politics. A great deal of energy has been expended on this topic in the past, mainly because all political parties which lose membership will, understandably, see this as an institutional failing. This is frankly hubris.

For an organisation to think that it is capable of single-handedly failing the working class is to reject the materialist approach, that our ideas come from our life circumstances and not from an all-knowing vanguard.

This medium of engagement has to take account of society’s development; open-air meetings at Hyde Park, for example, may be superseded by Second Life. The only way to establish this is to explore all avenues and reinforce those that work, while remaining confident in the class’s revolutionary potential.

The third is to ensure that the right ideas for the working class win out, and constitute the basis for the overall class struggle. Historically this battle of ideas has been waged both in the mind - in debates, lectures and social events - and on the streets.

We, of course, favour the first approach, and do all we can to keep activity there. This is not just a matter of aesthetics. All of capitalism’s power, including its coercive power, is in the hands of the working class; fighting can only firstly divide us and secondly weaken us.

While socialists have few resources, capitalism’s own failings have far more reach and power to convince our class of the folly of capitalism than we possess - the largest organisations claiming to be revolutionary may just about win a couple of column inches with a large demonstration, as opposed to daily front page news of corruption, failure and despair from the mainstream press.

Capitalism will provide its own gravediggers. Existing organisations can at best address points two and three above - re-establish a mass political culture amongst our class, whilst engaging in debate between the various political traditions and throwing the matter open to our class, that the best ideas win in terms of membership.

This also determines the level of cooperation between these traditions. All, presumably, want a climate in which working class ideas can flourish. Though some may be powerful enough to have their own mass papers, in practice preaching is only to the converted.

Authoritarian parties are hostile at the second level: rather than defending their own ideas, they create their own political ghettoes, such as the old communist parties, which denigrated and suppressed their opposition so as not to compete (and fail) at the level of demonstrating the relative values of their ideas. This is where street fighting plays its role: physically removing opposition that one cannot overcome in a battle of hearts and minds, whilst destroying the climate in which the working class can find its way. The revolution is aborted in the process, not defended. This is another reason why a socialist revolution must be peaceful, at least as far as our class is concerned.

By contrast, a genuine revolutionary party in capitalism is, by definition, a party of the working class. A depoliticised working class cannot make a socialist revolution. It must be a party that operates at the level of discussion between workers, not so as to fetishise a particular political form, but because a successful socialist revolution is made by the working class coming to revolutionary ideas.

This brings us to defending our own political tradition. We are a party of the third part, so to speak: we focus on debate between traditions, engaging workers in the process, whilst maintaining the medium (finding out how people engage in politics, making the process a positive one). Even if we had the power to affect the news, we would have no need to engage in ‘propaganda’ in its pejorative sense; the simple facts damn capitalism amply enough, and it is enough to shout these facts from the rooftops along with our call to action.

We focus our differences at the level of ideas. Front organisations are only organisations that suppress debate and engage in conflict at a lower level.

Classic cases are the recent Socialist Alliance and Respect - coalitions which have been the means for various left traditions to draw working class support together, all to then vie with each other to recruit for members within this pool.

Only in such an environment could one use the word ‘comrade’ to refer to an organisational enemy. The Weekly Worker often carries records of physical ejections from meetings, even beatings, amongst these supposed comrades.

The working class is profoundly deterred by these antics; perhaps more importantly, the idea that workers can never attain more than ‘trade union consciousness’ is made self-fulfilling by denying debate.

The coming months and years will see many organisations, calling themselves working class, trying to establish or re-establish themselves.

Calls will be made to support this or that country, this or that leader, this or that party. There is a simple way to negotiate this maze: those that do all they can to make space for the working class themselves to become revolutionary, are revolutionary: all others are impostors.

The object must be nothing short of a society that has the liberation of our class from capitalism as its precondition: the abolition of wage-slavery. We have the power to do this if we are confident and not distracted. We as a class must be trusted with our own decisions, and credited with the ability to know our own interests.

And there should be no preaching of violence within the class; we fail when our energies turn against each other. In effect, this means that the revolution should be as peaceful as possible; all those who now bear arms are workers like ourselves, and history has shown how unwilling workers can be to fire on each other unless backed into a corner. But we should be hostile to all those who try to sow defeatism amongst our class, doubt our revolutionary ability or ability to organise ourselves, who attempt to turn our energies to their own ends.

We have, of course, more to say than this. Lessons from history that have been learned, the writings of past revolutionaries, and more. But these things are a touchstone to avoid the errors of the past: the revolution should be for the class and by the class, together as comrades.

We may not, this time, end capitalism. But we can sense the beginning of the end; and get going a political party with socialism as its objective: not small reforms, but the overthrow of capitalism - that is the end of the beginning.

SJW

El Alamein
El Alamein

No longer vacillating

It has been a long time since we last issued a communiqué on the situation in Zimbabwe and the position of the International Socialist Organisation. The long silence has been attributed to frustrating internal squabbles that had bedevilled the organisation over the last three to four months, coupled with the overwhelming vacillating attitude of the entire civic society, particularly over how to respond to the agreement between Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change to form a new inclusive government.

Our position is that we will not accept any form of collaboration with the Mugabe regime, which was defeated in the 2008 March elections, but continues to rule with an iron fist.

Families have lost members butchered by Mugabe’s thugs, who tortured innocent people from the townships - many still have the wounds to prove it. Many find it extremely hard to come to terms with a regime whose hands are red with human blood.

This is the situation, but most civic leaders are strategically positioning themselves closer to the MDC, which has sold out in exchange for positions in the new government, ditching previously agreed positions. We in the ISO have remained resolute that we do not support the new government as long as Mugabe is still the president and as long as it does not offer anything ideologically different from Mugabe’s economic policies of neoliberalism.

Now the government has embarked on its neoliberal Short Term Economic Recovery Programme under MDC secretary general and new minister of finance, Tendai Biti. It calls for complete privatisation of all government parastatals, education, electricity and almost all the social delivery system. There is to be no more support for small-scale farmers, who are now urged to seek financial support from private banks.

At the same time the country has dropped its own currency in favour of the US dollar and the South African rand, currencies which are scarce in the country. Effectively the entire economy has been put in the hands of casino gamblers offering even less than Mugabe did. It’s all-out neoliberalism and only the fittest will survive.

However, real struggles are beginning. And now they are ideological - unlike before, when it was anti-Mugabe slogans that dominated. We are now to fight neoliberalism being pushed by both MDC and Zanu-PF as parties for the bosses.

The second government priority is to initiate a constitutional reform process, whereby MPs will work hand in hand with a selected number of people from the civic society to form a constitutional committee, in which we will seek to participate.

Our main purpose will be to make sure that the issues people have been fighting for over the past decade are included in a social and economic bill of rights. We also want the set of demands that was included in the People’s Charter drafted last year incorporated in the constitution.

It is our intention to push for an anti-neoliberal constitution, as movements in Latin America have done. We will seek to build a united front to achieve this.

It is in this regard that we seek regional and international solidarity in our fight against sanctions and neoliberalism - for both are forms of war being waged by western imperialist nations on us in Zimbabwe, just as they destroyed Gaza and Afghanistan. Our continued existence depends on the generous support of those who appreciate the indispensable role we play.

Our situation was made worse when our offices were broken into and all our equipment, including computers, was stolen by a group of renegade comrades, who are working with reactionary civic society organisations trying to liquidate the ISO Zimbabwe.

So besides moral solidarity with our struggles we are also appealing for donations to enable us to operate and intervene.

No longer vacillating
No longer vacillating

Burnt by bureaucratic centralism

David Landau’s obituary of Steve Cohen was a moving tribute to a fighter for the oppressed (‘Defiance, not compliance’, March 26). However, although comrade Cohen’s 64 years were filled with small achievements in the cause of working class struggle, in a very real sense his was a life unfulfilled.

To say that is not to dismiss his decades of dedication to progressive causes. Far from it. But what strikes me about his work is that virtually all of it was undertaken as an individual or as part of a small group of comrades fighting around single issues. There was no overall line of march, because none of the separate causes were brought together under the programmatic direction of a working class party.

Like many, including comrade Landau himself, Steve was burnt by his experiences as a member of a revolutionary organisation - even though the one he belonged to for a few years in his 20s, the International Marxist Group, was among the better organisations in terms of democratic culture. And the conclusions he drew - about democratic centralism, the nature of working class organisation, the need for party - were in large part negative.

According to comrade Landau, “Steve questioned Trotskyist and Leninist ideas about democratic centralism, dictatorship of the proletariat and so forth, believing that we have to learn from other traditions such as anarchism and Bundism.”

It depends what you mean by “learn from”. We must study all political trends, including those of our enemies. But what comrade Cohen seems to have taken on from anarchism - at least in terms of his practice - is that a working class party is at best unnecessary, at worst undesirable.

As for democratic centralism, it is again unclear what it was that Steve “questioned”. Was it the bureaucratic centralist impostor adopted by virtually the entire left, whose roots can perhaps be traced back to the Bolshevik ban on factions in 1921? Or did he come to believe that the principle itself - unity in action plus freedom to criticise - should be junked?

In truth, so many of the former members of the various left sects - what the CPGB has called the flotsam and jetsam - have drawn the conclusion from their unpleasant experiences within them that not only democratic centralism, but a disciplined revolutionary party of the class, must be abandoned.

In parallel with comrade Cohen’s rejection of partyism there would appear from David Landau’s obituary to be another tendency - the identification not of class oppression, but of sexual, minority and in particular racial oppression, as the main antagonistic manifestation of capitalist rule.

So Steve’s support for Irish liberation was linked to “the struggle against racism in general”; he dismissed any two-state solution for Israel-Palestine as “inherently racist”‘ and he rejected “the idea that there can be some kind of fair and non-racist [immigration] control”.

The notion that capitalism is, and always will be, racist to the core is a mistake shared by much of the left. In reality, while the bourgeoisie repeatedly needs to seek out scapegoats and exacerbate divisions amongst our class, capital itself is “inherently” ‘colour-blind’: the ethnicity of the workers it exploits is in itself totally irrelevant.

Take border controls. It is a common fallacy of the left that bourgeois states adopt them primarily for racist reasons. While undoubtedly their employment is usually justified in a national-ideological way, their main purpose is to allow capital to adjust the flow of labour according to numbers and skills required, not ethnicity. Indeed, individual workers of any ‘race’ or ethnicity can be deemed either legal or illegal, either legitimate or ‘outsider’.

Communists oppose all border controls not because they are by their nature racist - they are not. We oppose them because they strengthen capital and weaken the international proletariat.

On the one hand, capital is easily transferred between states, while labour is restricted. On the other, the creation of the category of ‘illegal worker’ enables wages and conditions to be undercut and political organisation to be impaired.

It has to be said that many of Steve Cohen’s misapprehensions are widely shared across the left, whether organised or not. Which goes to show that the problem is not just the absence of a single party, but the absence of a single democratic party based on Marxism.

Burnt by bureaucratic centralism
Burnt by bureaucratic centralism

Obnoxious anti-Euro platform

For years the left has been agitating for a trade union challenge to New Labour. We have a government that is ‘Labour’ in the way the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was ‘socialist’ or the USSR was ‘soviet’- ie, not at all. It’s a vestigial label. It seems simple enough that what we need is a party of labour, a party that represents, as the Campaign for New Workers’ Party puts it, the millions, not the millionaires.

This is particularly crucial in the forthcoming European elections. The British National Party needs only a small percentage swing in some regions to gain its first MEP. This would be disastrous not just as a morale-booster for a vile party of hate, but practically too, since the Euro gravy train offers, in expenses and salaries, a huge boost to the coffers of any party that gets elected.

We are faced with the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. We have deflation for the first time in decades and the International Monetary Fund predicts that the UK economy will be the worst hit of all the developed nations.

In a crisis people look for scapegoats. People who lose their jobs, workers whose pay and conditions are cut and pensioners whose meagre pensions shrivel want somebody to blame.

It’s a sad fact that, spontaneously, the people who are blamed in this dog-eat-dog society are your neighbours, fellow workers, the poorest of the poor. A crisis is the breeding ground for racism, xenophobia and hatred.

In this situation, it is crucial for socialists to offer a clear explanation for the crisis and point the way to a solution based on solidarity, not division. Sadly, the ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’ campaign, launched with the backing of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers to contest the Euro elections, does the opposite.

The title, which is already registered and not negotiable, is fundamentally miseducating. It points to the European Union as the cause of the problems faced by workers. This is patently not the case. We are in a global financial crisis, which is affecting the United States and China, France and Brazil. It is a crisis of capitalism. With even bourgeois commentators quoting Marx’s Capital, it is laughable to focus on the EU.

Or rather it would be laughable were it not for the tragic consequence of fuelling xenophobia - the very danger that has already reared its head in the Lindsey strikes. ‘British jobs for British workers’ was raised as a slogan in the early days of the strike - and gleefully seized on by the rightwing press.

Socialists involved in the strike, particularly from the Socialist Party, did a good job in clarifying its aims and moving it away from xenophobia, but that was clearly there as a spontaneous element in the first wave of independent working class action we’ve seen since the recession.

The Socialist Party have been brought on board the No2EU initiative, largely because of the involvement in the Lindsey dispute, and credit for any class-conscious demands in the platform, such as ‘Yes to international solidarity of working people’, is due to them. But it is a doomed enterprise to turn something that is at base a nationalist mess into anything that can be supported by socialists.

To quote No2EU’s platform, “Nation-states with the right to self-determination and their governments are the only institutions that can control the movement of big capital and clip the wings of the transnational corporations and banks.”

This is pure nationalism, and has nothing to do with international workers’ solidarity. It is nonsense to think the two can be combined. When you have two ideologies pulling in opposite directions, which one will prevail?

In an election, the title and headline will be all most people will read of a campaign. Much has been made of the way the rightwing press seized on the ‘British jobs for British workers’ slogan.

What is to stop them doing the same with the anti-EU message of this campaign? No2EU will be presented as much the same as the UK Independence Party and other reactionary nutters.

The most worrying aspect of the campaign is the attitude to migrant workers: “The social dumping of exploited foreign workers in Britain is being carried out under EU rules demanding the ‘free movement of capital, goods, services and labour’ within the EU.

Successive EU directives and European Court of Justice decisions have been used to attack trade union collective bargaining, the right to strike and workers’ pay and conditions. The single European market ... creates a pool of working people to be exploited and treated no better than a commodity like a tin of beans.”

The single European market didn’t create that pool of exploited workers; capitalism did, several hundred years earlier. And, from its inception, capitalism has set worker against worker: English against Irish, Irish against Chinese, European against Asian, Asian against African, South African against Zimbabwean, and so on.

The answer is not to attack the free movement of labour or migrant workers, but to organise all workers on the job, and impose trade union wages and conditions.

Neil Cafferky of the Socialist Party explained at a meeting of the Left Unity liaison committee that the ‘social dumping’ clause arose from the RMT’s problems in the shipping industry, where Chinese workers were employed at a 10th of the wages of British seafarers.

Clearly, this is disgraceful exploitation, but equally clearly the answer is for trade union action to raise the wages of the Chinese seafarers. The idea that these superexploited workers should be blamed and described by the term ‘social dumping’, as if they were some form of toxic waste, is obnoxious.

Obnoxious anti-Euro platform
Obnoxious anti-Euro platform

Trade mercy

Regarding Mike Macnair’s article, I have a few points of agreement and disagreement on the question of protectionism (‘Revolutionary charades and musical chairs’, March 26).

On the one hand, nation-based protectionism is a non-starter, unless perhaps it’s the United States, and even then should exclude protectionism for small farmers against third world products.

On the other hand, continents do need to have at least a minimum level of self-sufficiency, and the third world does need some form of ‘protectionism’ (not to mention debt forgiveness) in order to develop properly.

I propose that any sort of demand for ‘fair trade’ - necessarily at the transnational level - should merely follow up on the ‘reverse globalisation’ resulting from the oil spike before the economic meltdown, restarting industrial production in the developed world, while leaving small farmers there at the proletarianising mercy of third world produce.

As for ‘nationalisations’, there should be a demand for the European Union equivalent.

Trade mercy
Trade mercy

Liverpool calling

Revolution, Workers Power’s youth group, say they “believe that the [national student coordination] meeting on April 18 is an excellent opportunity to gather together activists radicalised by recent events, particularly around the university occupations, and unite in action around common goals” (Letters, March 26).

Not such an excellent opportunity, I’d suggest, given that it clashes with the Palestine trade union solidarity conference being held in Liverpool on the same date, and called by Liverpool Friends of Palestine and Merseyside Association of Trades Union Councils.

Marxism may be a guide to action. But it’s no excuse for not checking the calendar. Not that the Weekly Worker is any better, as it doesn’t include this event in its action update either.

Liverpool calling
Liverpool calling