Letters

Big brain

Comrade Bob Potter in his article ‘Dawkins and Dennett defended’ has grasped the wrong end of the stick so firmly that I think it best to start at the beginning in explaining the significance of brain size for the origin of Homo sapiens (Weekly Worker January 28).

The key biological difference between ourselves and chimpanzees is that hominoid females do their best to hide the fact that they are fertile (presumably because this ensures them more attention from males and thus improves their reproductive success), while female chimps display their fertility. Originally our ancestors’ brain size appears to be similar to that of chimps, but during the next period the smaller-brained hominids disappear from the fossil record and brain size doubles. These big-brained young need more food and mature to independence more slowly. This appears to have happened because post-menstrual females assisted their daughters in raising the young. What was in it for the females in taking on such a formidable task?

In the final stage of our development into Homo sapiens with another doubling in brain size the picture becomes clear. The females, in alliance with the beta males, overthrew the alpha males and won a social order that was egalitarian. This state of affairs survives for about 100,000 years until the extinction of the plentiful large animals that had ensured a state of abundance for ancient Homo sapiens. In Chris Knight’s view Homo sapiens are an evolved species with a genetic structure that is stable and capable of expressing our species’ essence. Communism is the only social form that can fulfil our genetic and intellectual needs.

It is worth mentioning that the overthrow of the alpha males did not involve the use of exterminating violence, nor were they driven out. They were incorporated into society as valuable, but not all-powerful, figures. The longer maturational process had created closer bonds with their mothers. This process must also have affected the alpha males and helped make them more cooperative with the new order. So the growth in brain size  is most closely related to a long-standing struggle by females to take control of their sexuality.

A side effect, however, was the very strong sense of solidarity that made organising on a scale by which we could successfully hunt animals that even the lions could not touch and made us Africa’s top predator.

Our brain is, relative to our size, much larger than that of any other mammal, but for an animal that hunts we do not have exceptional sight or hearing or sense of smell, as you might expect. But we are better at planning and in a most peculiar way. We see everything through symbols. Everything is firstly changed into something it is not and only through abstraction can we reach a sense of reality. Our brain allowed us to do that.

Big brain
Big brain

Sex hypocrisy

If SKS had read a little more carefully my letter (January 21) in response to his initial contribution, he might be a little less prone to construct straw men of his own in his response (Letters, January 28).

He claims that I accused him of “not addressing sexual relationships between proletarians and capitalists”. In reality, my claim was that advocates of the age of consent rarely, if ever, consistently apply their rationale that power disparities necessarily negate sexual consent. If they did, sexual relationships across other social divisions would almost certainly face the same authoritarian restrictions we impose on young people.

The reason that young people are uniquely singled out has less to do with a desire to protect them, and more to do with adults anxiously trying to control their sexuality or, more specifically, parents attempting to assert chattel property rights over their offspring. There is no other reasonable explanation for why young people are so often punished for having sex with other young people.

SKS also asserts that he does not advocate “anti-sex feminism”. Since SKS finds this label insulting, it is odd that there is no discussion of what he thinks anti-sex feminism is or how he thinks his views contradict it. He provides only a dogmatic declaration that once again ignores what I actually wrote. I never claimed SKS identified as an anti-sex feminist: only that he was recycling anti-sex feminists’ views of sexuality.

According to anti-sex feminists, sexuality is nothing more than a tool for men as a class to oppress women and young people as a class. As Catherine MacKinnon famously claimed, “sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism”. This understanding of sexuality, as I mentioned in my previous letter, reduces sexuality to a single axis of social power and sees that power relationship as completely dominated by men. It does not attempt to theorise how men and women relate differently to sexuality on the basis of orientation, class, race or age.

Neither does it consider whether sexuality can be a means of resisting social domination, whether legally proscribing young people’s desired sexual activity only further dehumanises and disempowers them, or whether a physically pleasurable sexual activity might raise a different set of questions than physical abuse or forced domestic labour.

It is, in other words, reductionist. SKS might innocently claim to disavow the anti-sex feminists’ reductionism, but his analogising age-of-consent legislation to child labour laws leaves little doubt where he stands.

“How we fuck” is certainly a social relationship. Where SKS goes astray is in failing to realise that it is an analytically distinct kind of social relationship. It should not be conflated with how we work, how we organise politically, or any other kind of social relationship. Sexuality involves a unique constellation of biological and psychological capacities and tendencies. A notable tendency is for human beings to find sex physically pleasurable and therefore to seek it out. This certainly does not mean that all sex is consensual or pleasurable, but it does mean that we should be very careful when we hear equivalencies being drawn between age-based laws regulating wage-slavery and age-based laws regulating sexual conduct.

To pretend that they are the same because they involve the same categories of people is to perform a violent (and unMarxist) abstraction. It is to ignore the uniqueness of the activity being regulated, and instead to pretend that all social relations involve the same needs, desires, capacities and therefore power relationships. Marx condemned capitalism as exploitive because it was, and continues to be, a system of forced labour operating under the guise of consent. Without the “silent compulsion of hunger”, most proletarians would find waged surplus labour so unpleasant, or its political consequences so unacceptable, that they would not perform it.

Does this model of power translate seamlessly into the world of young people’s sexuality, as SKS’s analogy suggests? Are we to believe that young people, like starving proletarians, have no reasonable alternative but to say ‘yes’ when sexually propositioned by adults? Maybe this is the case in parent-child relationships, where capitalist society continues to grant the parent virtual ownership of the young person, or in cases where a young person is hustling for subsistence money. But can we honestly say to ourselves as Marxist-socialists that ‘have sex or starve’ accurately reflects all young people’s sexual agency? Is sex really so unpleasant that we must assume non-consensual criminality when we learn that a young person has had a sexual relationship with somebody in a different age category? Is consensual genital stimulation the equivalent of being locked in a soot-filled factory for 14 hours? Maybe SKS maintains a highly negative view of sex, but I do not.

The most disturbing aspect of SKS’s post is not his reductionism or failure to think clearly about his ideas on consent and power. It is his unwillingness to come to terms with the hypocrisy of his own views. He accuses me of “speaking for young people”, of substituting my judgment for theirs, as if to imply I am arguing that all young people should be having sex.

I am on the side that wants the young people to decide for themselves, especially where that decision is an emphatic ‘no’. It is SKS who wants to substitute his judgment for the judgment of young people on this matter. It is SKS who wants intrusive developmental tests to take precedence over young people’s own opinions. Our comrades can decide for themselves which view is the authoritarian one.

Sex hypocrisy
Sex hypocrisy

Paper round

I would like to make a few points about two articles in last week’s paper.

Mark Fischer is correct when he writes, “The reality of unemploy[ment] is now largely experienced as a personal tragedy rather than a social phenomenon. This atomised and impotent state for masses of people is the fault of the leaders of the workers’ movement” (‘Lessons of the NUWM and UWC’, January 28).

According to information gathered via the Office for National Statistics’ quarterly labour force survey, unemployment in the UK is around 2.5 million. In addition, there are 2.7 million people claiming disability benefits (in the form of incapacity benefit, or income support with the disability premium). There are also 1.3 million people on single parent benefits. Then there are the 1.5 million housewives, carers and ‘discouraged’ workers, bringing the total number of economically inactive adults of working age in the UK to around eight million.

Recently, Yvette Cooper, secretary of state for work and pensions, asked the statisticians in her department to investigate why official unemployment had not increased as much as had been predicted. The answer to this conundrum was shown in a recent Channel 4 programme Middle class and jobless, which explained that there are 750,000 unemployed middle class people who are not claiming benefits because their capital or partners’ income is too large or they are too ashamed to do so.

So a new Unemployed Workers Charter, which I strongly urge the CPGB to launch, will have to target the diverse range of people that go to make up the eight million economically inactive in the UK. Organising the unemployed is, at the best of times, very difficult. Once an unemployed person gets a job, he or she wants to forget about the time they were unemployed. However, communists must endeavour to do what they can. The new UWC should, in my opinion, target two groups of the economically inactive. One is the million young people aged 16 to 25 who are ‘NEETs’ (not in education, employment or training). The other is the 2.7 million people on disability benefits, who will all have to undergo medicals over the next three years as part of their personal capability assessment.

Fortunately, there is an excellent web-based, membership-funded organisation called Benefits and Work (www.benefitsandwork.co.uk), which all communists interested in claimants’ rights should join.

In the same issue, Laurie McCauley reports on whether the CPGB should downgrade the printing of the Weekly Worker in favour of an increased web presence (‘Communists meet to debate perspectives’, January 28).

Whilst I read the paper each Thursday as soon as it is online, I continue to receive a hard copy. Once read, I pass it on to a friend, who reads it on Sunday mornings. A hard copy, as the Socialist Party in England and Wales and the Socialist Workers Party have learnt with their weekly papers, is an essential ‘calling card’. People put more value on something they pay for, in contrast to a leaflet handed out at a demo or university.

If the CPGB did not have a hard copy of the Weekly Worker, it would have the same problem that the virtual International Committee of the Fourth International/Socialist Equality Party has with its World Socialist Web Site, which is reduced to handing out leaflets that are soon discarded.

Paper round
Paper round

No religion

Jeff Leese seems to imply that issues raised by what can be loosely termed ‘environmentalists’ are a priori grounded on reactionary principles (Letters, January 28). He is, of course, quite right when he points out that, for Marx and Engels, “… 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”.

But are not human beings also in the midst of and part of nature? Moreover, in this sense, surely a centrally important aspect of a planned society is control over population numbers, not least of all because, whatever we may like to believe, the earth’s resources are finite. Whether we like it or not, there will be a decline in oil production. Given that the global food supply is heavily reliant on oil and, crucially, water, is it really feasible that - even under socialism, which will produce for need and not profit - “scores of billions of human beings” will be able to live a sustainable and fulfilled life on Earth?

As both Tony Clark (Letters, January 28) and Ted Hankin (December 17) pointed out, classical Marxism was not faced with such issues. As far as I understood it - and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong - Marxism is a tool, a methodology for analysing, and drawing conclusions about, the reality of the material world; and, from that, about how we can proceed to change social relations in that world. It is not a religion, where we refer back to the holy texts for the correct line. What was a correct analysis in Marx and Engels’ time, with a global population of about 1.5 billion, may no longer be appropriate in contemporary conditions.

No religion
No religion

Good guy

James Turley is lukewarm about the news that “around $114 million [is] promised by Barack Obama’s government” (‘Quake: no act of god’, January 21). It is easy to be cynical about Obama’s motives, especially from an organisation who branded him “world’s No1 terrorist” before he had actually moved into the White House.

James mentions the “lurid tales of looting and sundry barbarism among the local population”. It’s not surprising that such things take place from a desperately poor and dispossessed population, and that is precisely why troops need to go in. I’m a bit of an anarchist myself, but the sort of anarchy where criminal gangs run riot is not something I’m in favour of. If you’re distributing millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in aid, you need to make sure it gets to the people who need it.

Isn’t it brilliant that US troops are doing something very good in contrast to the role of the US military in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq? Barack Obama has good intentions, talking of the need to “unite Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and non-believers” in his inauguration speech. So different from the divide-and-rule agenda of Bush, Cheney and the rest of the Project for a New American Century that spoke of the need for “a new Pearl Harbor” - ie, 9/11.

The SWP is stuck in the past and would oppose United Nations peacekeepers too, believing the UN is always a tool of US imperialism - the same logic that led to them opposing troops in Bosnia, Kosova and East Timor.

Good guy
Good guy

Kit off

In mid-January I met with some friends at Kelly’s Cellar, Belfast. I wore a jacket with the zipper wide open. Underneath I had a Celtic jersey. It was Sunday just hours after a soccer match on TV.

After a few minutes, the barman came to me and asked me to close the zipper. I asked him why and he answered: “Celtic jerseys are not allowed here”. I complained and left immediately.

Kelly’s Cellar is one of the oldest pubs in Belfast and it was used by the Society of United Irishmen to hold their secret meetings. The United Irishmen writing still looms from the wall, accompanied with portraits of republican leader Henry Joy McCracken and Theobald Wolfe Tone. A plaque near the front doors commemorates the meetings of the United Irishmen.

The ideals of the United Irishmen mean nothing to the owners of such a historical pub. They shouldn’t adorn themselves with borrowed plumes. Cherishing all the children of the nation equally, but not with Celtic jerseys?

Kit off
Kit off

Smear

Shame on you for publishing such a smear piece (‘Know your enemy’, January 14).

Obviously, you did not read our articles (nor did Tony Greenstein understand them), but rushed into accusing us of being an anti-Semitic site.

Proof, please? Go visit it and find us the anti-Semitic posts. If you fail to do so, we demand an online apology.

Smear
Smear