Letters

Joker

I’d have been grateful if Louis Proyect (Letters, January 21) had been more specific about what he found funny in my article on Avatar and dialectics (‘Delusions, distractions, dialectic’, January 14).

Was it the discussion of the current context of capitalism, the Marxist approach to knowledge or the importance of internal party debate?

Joker
Joker

No cuts

One to two hundred students and lecturers turned out for a short protest march from King’s College London Strand campus to parliament on January 26. The goal was to protest cuts at King’s, as well as at other universities. King’s is facing a 10% budget slash, having already lost its engineering department completely, and a spirited campaign orchestrated for the most part by the Socialist Workers Party has sprung up in opposition to these plans.

The organised left presence was hefty, with Communist Students, the Socialist Party, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Socialist Action and Socialist Appeal sending several people (for the most part through their various fronts, needless to say). The biggest contingent was from the SWP (or, according to their placards, Another Education is Possible), and it was they who dominated the political character of the protest.
The story of the day, perhaps, is the story of a chant. After police first started redirecting us (wholly incompetently, incidentally), one apparent SWP member started a chant: “This is what democracy looks like!” It did not pick up very quickly - probably because 200 people being escorted to a building where they will be ignored in the company of hordes of police, many on horseback, is not anyone’s postcard-picture of democracy.

At some point, even this token act of defiance got reversed - the chant had turned to “This isn’t what democracy looks like!” Quite so, comrades. How about tackling democracy properly instead of warming over economist clichés?

No cuts
No cuts

River to sea

I agree with the main points made by Tony Greenstein in his article dealing with the obstacles faced by the pro-Gaza mobilisation, which are essentially the same obstacles faced by the Palestinian resistance (‘Know your enemy’, January 14). The enemies of the Palestinian anti-imperialist struggle include not only the Israeli and other imperialist states, but also the Arab ruling classes and the Palestinian Authority, which collaborate with Israel and serve the imperialist order against the masses.

As for Hamas, while revolutionaries favour its victory in a military conflict with imperialism and its agents, this defence should never be extended to political support, as the Hamas leadership is seeking a place for itself in the imperialist order and the reason it does not act like the PA today is that so far Israel has not agreed to the 30-year ceasefire Hamas has offered. Hamas’s willingness to police the masses in Gaza was exposed not only by the way they treated the pro-Palestinians activists, but also in the last demonstration against the Egyptian army, when young people in Gaza threw stones at Egyptian soldiers and Hamas dispersed them by shooting in the air.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution explains very well what is behind the behaviour of the Arab ruling classes, the PA and even Hamas. In this epoch of the decline of capitalism, the bourgeoisie in the countries that have not gone through the bourgeois democratic revolution are too afraid of losing control over the masses and prefer to collaborate with the imperialists rather than stand at the head of a democratic revolution. The tasks of the democratic revolution therefore fall on the shoulders of the working class, which must lead the masses in a socialist revolution.

While the imperialists and their servants oppress the Palestinians, the international working class, from South Africa to Greece and Australia, shows its solidarity, not only in resolutions, but in actions, like hot cargo of Israeli ships carrying goods, and in particular military goods. While the ruling classes in the Arab countries collaborate with Israel against the Palestinians, the working class in Egypt, Iran and many other countries shows its solidarity with the Palestinians in spite of the repression.

I also agree with comrade Greenstein that the situation of the Palestinians today brings to mind the situation of the Jewish mass in Europe during the horrible persecution by the Nazis and their servants. The Nazis are not the only ones responsible for the holocaust. Also responsible are the ‘democratic’ imperialists who supported the Nazis until 1938 as a brutal force against the working class revolutions that were possible in the 1920s and 30s. When it came to the Jews, they closed the gates in the west to the Jewish refugees. This is the fault not only of the imperialists, but also of the Zionist organisations that welcomed the Nazi rise to power and collaborated with them - for example, in the Haavara agreement.

The Nazis were assisted by Jewish policemen and by the Jewish councils controlled by the Nazis. The Israeli state has never made any effort to bring to trial those Zionists who collaborated with the Nazis, for fear that the responsibility of the Zionist leaders for this collaboration would be exposed.

The solution for the Palestinians will come only through independent working class actions, which will culminate in workers’ revolutions to form a Palestinian workers’ state from the river to the sea as part of a socialist federation of the Middle East. This will be realised when the working class  constitutes itself into a revolutionary working class party fighting for world socialist revolution.

River to sea
River to sea

Eco-reaction

I agree that we would do well to properly appreciate how “Marx and Engels fought tooth and nail” against incorrect ideas on humanity and nature (‘Ecology and economism’, January 21).

But that would mean having to fight tooth and nail against modern environmentalism, since the ideas upheld by Marx and Engels are antithetical to those of the green movement (but not, I think, primarily in the way that Ben Lewis’s article describes).

Whereas environmentalists criticise capitalism for increasing human interference in nature, for Marx and Engels this increased human activity was precisely the key progressive aspect of the capitalist epoch. Marx praised capitalism for challenging the “deification of nature” and insisted that its “civilising influence” is the fact that “Nature becomes for the first time simply an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be recognised as a power in its own right; and the theoretical knowledge of its independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements, whether as the object of consumption or as the means of production.”

‘Eco-socialists’ like to highlight Marx’s remarks regarding soil erosion in their attempts to reconcile Marxism with green ideology. But, in reality, Marx had no time at all for the environmentalists of his day.
Responding to Daumer, he wrote: “modern natural science ... with modern industry, has revolutionised the whole of nature and put an end to man’s childish attitude towards nature ... For the rest, it would be desirable that Bavaria’s sluggish peasant economy ... should at last be ploughed up by modern cultivation and modern machines.”

Marx and Engels argued that increasing human mastery and dominion over nature is central to human progress. This was the crux of their revolutionism, since they believed that capitalism stood in the way of such progress and that social transformation was required to bring about a consciously planned society that would unleash humanity’s productive potential and thus step up its control over its natural surroundings.

Greens argue that capitalism brings about too much industrial development. Marx and Engels argued that it does not bring about enough. Greens argue that there is too much mass consumption, and they look forward to a world where there are less people gobbling up the Earth’s resources. Marx and Engels argued that people’s consumption is criminally restrained by their poverty and they called overpopulation arguments a “libel against the human race”. Greens are in the vanguard of movements against scientific and technological breakthroughs, however limited, in agriculture and industry.

Marx and Engels enthusiastically celebrated the discoveries of modern society as “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals”, and they condemned capitalism for holding back further advancement.

Hence the entirely conservative nature of environmentalism: by arguing that capitalism already gives way to too much economic development and consumption, environmentalism essentially provides very convenient apologism for the current system, especially as the latter enters into recession. If capitalism is already generating too much development, why get rid of it?

All we would need to do is call for (completely utopian) policies against its further growth. There is no need for social transformation. After all, is not the central Marxist argument for revolutionary change that capitalism restrains the development of the productive forces of society?

We do indeed need to provide an alternative to capitalism’s mismanagement of our material surroundings. But that ought not to mean capitulating to middle class, Malthusian eco-reaction. It needs to mean emphasising greater human control, mass prosperity and radical economic and social development as the surest way of enabling scores of billions of human beings to flourish on this planet.

Eco-reaction
Eco-reaction

Oil-track mind

Ted Hankin is right to point out that such matters as resource depletion, peak oil and environmental degradation did not exist for classical Marxism (Letters, December 17). They still do not exist for most Marxists at the time of writing. We are faced with problems to which there are no ready-made solutions, in a situation where most Marxists seem to live in the past. It is not going too far to say that any form of Marxism which does not engage with the energy issue is irrelevant to society.

The most important of these problems, represented by the theory of peak oil production, which is about the coming oil shortages soon to assail industrial civilisation, raises entirely new questions for the left and society as a whole. For instance, how will the bourgeois state and the various classes in society react to the deepening energy crisis following the global peak in oil production? What will be the ideological and political repercussions of the energy crisis?

How will the neoliberal world order, which the US has sought to impose on the world, respond to the decline in energy supplies following peak oil? Is this the decline of capitalism and does this have any significance for left strategy? How will the Labour Party react to capitalism in irreversible decline? In addition, what about the trade unions?

How do we view immigration controls in the light of peak oil? Would a country like Britain be better off with more workers to replace the loss of energy from oil decline, or less? Indeed, should immigration controls have anything to do with the energy crisis?

These are some of the questions which Marxists must begin to address.

There are, of course, no nationalist solutions to the energy crisis, but this has not prevented fascist organisations like the British National Party from seeking to profit from it. At a Glasgow conference on peak oil in 2005, some BNP leaders were in the audience.

So what should be the Marxist response to the threat posed to industrial society? No-one should underestimate the power of peak oil. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, not long after its own regional oil production peaked in 1987, as was predicted by the US intelligence services. Knowing Soviet oil production was about to peak, the US increased the pressure on the regime to help facilitate its collapse.

Oil-track mind
Oil-track mind

Not thinking

The purpose of serious polemical exchange and the open airing of differences that this paper looks to promote is to deepen theoretical understanding, sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of political disagreements, and achieve the political clarity required for our class to re-articulate its project, its vision for communism, following the defeats of the 20th century and the stifling stranglehold of Stalinism and social democracy. This has been the cornerstone of this tendency’s approach since The Leninist, which also had an open letters page.

However, merely because we provide a framework for discussion and education does not mean that all of our readers actually learn anything at all. John Robinson is a good example.

Comrade Robinson charges Mike Macnair with not being a Leninist. To this I can only charge comrade Robinson with not thinking. He has forgotten nothing learnt from his steeling in Gerry Healy’s ‘dialectics’. But he has not learnt anything. His dogmatic, ossified ‘Marxism’ is reflective of a modern Trotskyism in utter programmatic and strategic disarray. Might I suggest that comrade Robinson actually reads and engages with the arguments presented here and elsewhere by comrades like Mike Macnair and James Turley? That way, by the time his next letter arrives, he might have something new, engaging and thought-provoking to say beyond repeating soundbites and help actually develop the argument for all of our readers to take part in and learn from. I will not hold my breath ...

Not thinking
Not thinking

Acting up

Given all our understandings of human abuse of Earth and resultant ‘anomalies’ caused by it - degrees of floods, calibre of hurricanes, etc, the Haiti earthquake is nevertheless a natural occurrence (‘Quake: no act of god’, January 21).

The degree of its effects because of impoverishment and counterrevolutionary processes on the people in Haiti is apparent. Nevertheless, it is that abominable misnomer - an act of god.

Acting up
Acting up

Split ends

John Robinson writes: “Comrade Macnair takes the view (fully set out in his book Revolutionary strategy) that communist parties should not attempt to lead a revolution until they had won the support of the majority of voters. This attitude is, of course, precisely the same as that of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which today has about the same number of members as it had when it was first founded about 100 years ago” (Letters, January 21).

How a sympathiser of a split from a split from a split from a split from a split (have I got the number correct?) from the Fourth International to become a Fifth International challenge the SPGB on membership numbers is beyond me. The SPGB are not proud that they have remained such a small political party, but our membership strength does nothing to diminish the validity of our socialist analysis.

Socialism can only be achieved by a politically conscious working class. It is the experience of workers under capitalism which drives them to understand the need for socialism and this process is enhanced by the degree of democracy which they have won for themselves. Dictatorial power wielded by a vanguard minority, no matter how sincere its intentions, can never act as a substitute. That way, the workers remain a subject class and the dictators, having acquired a taste for power, consolidate their own rule.

Working class emancipation necessarily excludes the role of political leadership. Even if we could conceive of a leader-ridden working class displacing the capitalist class from power, such an immature class would be helpless to undertake the responsibilities of a democratic socialist society.

Having seized power as a minority in a country where socialism was not possible for all sorts of reasons (economic backwardness, isolation from the rest of the world and, of course, the lack of a majority understanding for socialism), the Bolsheviks had no alternative but to do the only thing that was possible: to continue to develop capitalism. Lenin found himself in the position of having to preside over - and, in fact, to organise - the accumulation of capital.

But, as capital is accumulated out of surplus value and surplus value is obtained by exploiting wage-labour, this inevitably brought them into conflict with the workers who, equally inevitably, sought to limit their exploitation.

Split ends
Split ends

Renegade

I must say that the now-renegade Kautsky was weak on economic questions in even a Kautskyan minimum programme (for ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution and not the full-blown anti-feudal revolution, let alone the dictatorship of the proletariat)  (K Kautsky, ‘Prospects of the Russian Revolution’ Weekly Worker supplement, January 14).

Historically, other political figures have understood economic republicanism better than Kautsky - figures such as China’s Sun Yat-sen and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. The leftwing elements of their respective movements may have even understood their respective ideologies to mean economically republican development without even the ‘nationalist’ bourgeoisie cherished by Chairman Mao, conceding the role of ‘industrialist’ and ‘entrepreneur’ entirely to the small-business petty bourgeoisie and to cooperative movements.

Renegade
Renegade

For dummies

I’ve been in contact with the ideas of the Weekly Worker and its forerunner, The Leninist, for about a year now and it arranged many of my uncomfortable ‘gut feelings’ into a coherent picture. For this service alone I would like to thank the comrades of the CPGB for their (often disregarded) work.

But there is a problem too. As the CPGB falls ‘out of tone’ with so many of the far left, many people simply don’t understand what it is that its ideas entail - mostly because these people have only been exposed to their organisations’ version of The Truth. Questioning a whole system of ideas is quite a high learning curve for many and therefore it isn’t at all surprising that the Weekly Worker often gets dismissed as a “gossip rag” and what not. For this reason also the CPGB is only really popular with those who either love to do some leftist train-spotting or hold an ungrateful position as ‘loyal oppositionist’ within their own organisation and try to stir up the battle of ideas.

So to lower this learning curve and introduce other members of the far left (and indeed the working class in general) to the (real) ideas of Marxism, wouldn’t it be a good idea if some literature was written with this public in mind, a sort of ‘Marxism for dummies’, so to speak?

For dummies
For dummies

Straw man sex

While I refrained from replying to previous responses - because they were thoughtful or too boilerplate - the response from Clark in Toronto (Letters, January 21) has prompted me to respond with one more letter.
Let me begin by saying that, for someone who claims the mantle of historical materialism, he obviously has a contempt for careful study and science that stands in antithesis to his proclamation of fidelity to such a method. I must also say that, if I had all the straw from all the straw men leftists like to build in their debates, I could build a bonfire that would burn off all the oxygen on planet Earth. Clark is a prime example of the incisive lack of listening capacity, lack of study and lazy ideological approach. So basically Clark fails, in his unintended hilarious missive, to actually address anything of value in my previous contributions (Letters, September 17 and October 1).

Clark says that I didn’t address sexual relationships between capitalists and proletarians. This is false. I specifically referred to this. In fact, I expressed much more concern about the implicit power issues in teacher-pupil relationship than about age. I also brought up laws that protect workers from workplace harassment as a good example of legislation that could be used as models around issues of age of consent. That Clark ignored these prominent features of my letters means that either he didn’t read them thoroughly or he has an unhealthy preoccupation with issues of age of consent per se rather than the issues of power and (gender/sexual) oppression that motivate me.

I do not advocate “anti-sex feminism”. I have no idea from where Clark pulls this formulation or attempts to prove it. It stands against the historical materialist method to pull things out of one’s own arse - more straw for my apocalyptic bonfire.

Clark says: “The idea that sexuality might have relative autonomy from other modes of cultural and economic domination is dismissed.” And rightly so. Sexuality - as ample research from many different sources too long to list here demonstrates - is a result of a complex combination of evolutionary and social dynamics. We cannot do anything about the evolutionary/genetic aspects of it. But the social relations that inform sexuality are certainly within the purview of a historical materialist approach that Clark claims to champion but utterly fails to apply when protesting the “dismissal” of the “relative autonomy of sexuality”. Everything not determined by our genes is a social relation, interconnected and most certainly not autonomous. This is basic, orthodox, unreconstructed 19th century Marxism, or perhaps more specifically Engelianism, not “anti-sex feminism”.

How we fuck is a social relation, as is who we fuck. We certainly lack the determinism of yesterday, but we will not abandon scientific theory for political expediency as easily as Clark would had us do - even if he is correct that science itself is not devoid of ideological pressures.

Clark does correctly identify the key issue: we must “recognise that young people are sexual beings with sexual desires, while also recognising that they are relatively disempowered both economically and politically. How to reconcile these facts is a tricky and urgent problem.” However, he utterly fails to see that he is a grown man who purports to speak on behalf of the young people - and fails to acknowledge that I have also addressed this point.

Ultimately his position is one of substitution, of ultra-leftism at best and of exercising privilege at worse, of claiming to speak on behalf of the young people - whereas if one listens to young people one actually gets a different song. I have already addressed this in my previous letters.

Likewise, he is correct that “It requires attention to, among other things, the power dynamics of age, professional relationship and class, each of which differs on a case-by-case basis. But it also requires that we abandon the age-of-consent laws as a failed, authoritarian model for understanding and regulating sexual behaviour.” But stating what should be non-controversial views among Marxists doesn’t ‘wear off’ into his other platitudes. As addressed in my previous letters (and above), issues of power are regulated by law within capitalist society because they were won by collective struggles. Clark’s position seem to vacillate between a clear understanding of the material basis of age and sexual oppression and an idealist view of sex as divorced from social relations - a classic example of claiming materialist rigour while actually spewing ideological bullshit.

In my letters I attempted to provoke a debate on policy and ideology from perspectives I have not often seen. Some of the replies were interesting if predictable, others were truly thought-provoking. Clark’s is really a lazy attempt to give Marxist language to an ideological position that lacks any political or theoretical rigour. I would have expected a better response, not a trite exercise that actually fails to respond to anything.
Ultimately, my position is that we need to address societal concerns with rational policies rather than infantile demands, while at the same time raising consciousness. It would serve self-described historical materialists like Clark to closely follow the Maoist dictum of ‘No study, no right to speak’. Just because something seems emancipatory, that doesn’t mean it is.

And lastly, from the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ on down, Marxists have never been afraid to be authoritarian here and there. The atrocious excesses of actually existing socialism cannot result in an opposing advocacy of a libertarian free-for-all - not because of morality, but because of overlapping liberties: liberty can also mean the liberty to oppress, and against that liberty I stand a solid authoritarian, with no excuses for it.

And, as rape and workplace sexual harassment demonstrate, all too often sex is a tool of oppression and violence rather than a beautiful thing among consenting people.

Straw man sex
Straw man sex