Letters
War and peace
With reference to section 1.3 of the CPGB’s Draft programme on ‘The danger of war’, I think we very much need to retain the words ‘war’ and ‘peace’ in our vocabulary. The mere absence of war does not imply that a society remains at peace. We need to retain too the memories of bygone wars, just as the memory of the holocaust is supposed to make us determined that such a thing should never happen again.
Also, while we can be pretty sure what ‘war’ means, what exactly does or should the word ‘peace’ signify? Does it mean the absence of conflict of all kinds? If that’s the case, then that would be a very bland and meaningless kind of peace. One hopes that disagreement and conflict of opinions will exist and that dissenting voices will be heard and attended to.
Otherwise I agree!
War and peace
War and peace
No crime
In 2010, nearly half a century after buggery was decriminalised in this country, you would think it impossible that any person should be registered as a sex offender for having consensual sex. Regrettably, truth is sadder than fiction.
After applying for a position as a volunteer at Wormwood Scrubs prison, John Crawford from London discovered that his criminal record check showed him to be a sexual offender because of two counts of buggery dating back to 1959. Fifty-one years later, when applying to work with vulnerable people, Crawford remains legally bound to disclose a conviction received when he was just 19 and extracted after weeks of beatings in a police cell. If he failed to mention his buggery conviction, he could be prosecuted under the Sexual Offences Act 1956.
In John’s case, after much pressure, Hampshire police finally agreed to delete his conviction from central records. However, there are many other people in a similar position, who were convicted under a pernicious and discriminatory law, whose convictions remain on their records.
John has taken his grievance to court and in doing so launched a landmark legal battle to overturn his 1959 conviction for buggery. In an interview with The Guardian, Crawford explained: “What I want to do is apply for voluntary work and, when it comes to the box on the application form that says ‘Do you have a criminal record?’, I want to be able to say no.”
His struggle highlights a contradiction and double standard in the law with regards to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Exception Order 1974. Even though John’s conviction has been deleted, he is still required to disclose it to a potential employer. Requiring people to disclose themselves as a sex offender for the ‘offence’ of being gay criminalises people’s sexuality and condones the original conviction.
As the old slogan goes, an injury to one is an injury to all, and as such we should all show our support for John Crawford’s case and others like him. You can sign a general petition to abolish convictions for buggery at petitions.number10.gov.uk/GayEquality. There is also a Facebook group in support of his case.
No crime
No crime
Language myths
Chris Knight’s ‘psycho-analytical study of Noam Chomsky’ hardly justifies four full pages (‘Extraordinary double-act of Noam Chomsky’, March 11). A sobering thought is that his several articles on this theme, would have found ready acceptance by the Stalinist press a few years ago; worryingly, they are presented as a ‘Marxist answer’ to Chomsky.
This latest contribution begins with 10 lengthy paragraphs documenting (as ‘damning evidence’ against Chomsky) the substantial funding his research has received from the US army, navy and air force. We need remind our comrade of recent history. Basic transformations of the 16th and 17th centuries were the birth of experimental science and the development of the capitalist methods of production. By the 20th century political power was dominated by the rapidly expanded combines, trusts and cartels. Technical innovations and mass production raised the capital necessary on a scale large enough to be profitable to a level only monopoly firms could reach. By the end of World War II, 80% of industrial science was carried out by the research departments of the monopoly firms. And, as any rudimentary socialist understands, the most profitable form of production is the arms industry. Guns, aeroplanes, poison gas, atom bombs, bacterial sprays - all increasingly attracting investment. Military (scientific) research expenditure vastly overshadowed not only that of pure science, but also industrial research.
In the USA (and increasingly in Britain), the virtual taking over of the finance of universities, under pressure of defence research contracts, completely changed the status of research. We often forget how much of today’s world is an offshoot of war economy production. Almost from the outset, the aeroplane had a primary military function, from which civil aviation eventually took enormous pickings. War and war preparation are to be thanked for the multiple refinements of electronics and atomic energy. Less conspicuous, the pervasive chemical industry, producing everything from fertilisers to detergents, nylon to antibiotic drugs, ready to turn out explosives and poisons.
Today’s capitalist society is a total, global system - Chris Knight may well have a clean conscience for not ‘taking money from the military’. In today’s educational structure, he’s a lucky fellow. In the total society of today’s capitalism, the overwhelming majority of workers are in some sense ‘working for the system’. Interestingly, he makes no mention of the other beneficiaries - BF Skinner, for example, (whose ‘learning theory’, incidentally, was not based on ‘reward and punishment’), also pocketed thousands from the US military.
Chris persists in dismissing Chomsky’s ‘notion of science’ as essentially mythological. That’s not quite the way Chomsky would present himself ... and readers should not be beguiled by Chris Knight’s ridiculing of Chomsky’s ‘fables’; if they do, they should be aware they are distancing themselves from most of history’s creative scientists. Let Einstein make the point: “I regard it as trivial that one cannot, in the range of atomic magnitudes, make predictions with any degree of precision, and I think that theory cannot be fabricated out of the results of observation, but that it can only be invented.” Science is concerned with testing hypotheses.
Let another of today’s scientists, Stephen Hawking, develop the argument further:
“I don’t know of any major theory that has been advanced just on the basis of experiment. The theory always came first ... the theory then makes predictions, which can then be tested by observation.”
As an individual who has been associated with (and at times involved) in the revolutionary movement, I am saddened that the Weekly Worker, which to my mind stands head and shoulders above any other current publication on the left, and which differs from its competitors by its preparedness to open its columns to all anti-capitalist opinions, seems reluctant to allow proper discussion of the ideological roots of ‘Marxism’. Over several years I have contributed articles to the paper, most of which have been printed, following (often) a substantial ‘edit’. Looked at individually, I have generally felt that my contributions have been enhanced by the editors ... but when considered overall, it is a matter of concern that frequent references to and quotations from Dietzgen, Mach, Pearson and most recently, Vygotsky (discussing ‘language as a tool’ making possible intellectual development), were removed (edited) from my text.
It would require much more space than would be considered justified to deal in detail with the misrepresentation of Chomsky (and indeed cognitive psychology) in Chris Knight’s article. Many of his errors are simply carelessness, as his allegation about the remarks made by Dan Dennett regarding the ‘jumbo jet’ (actually made by Jerry Fodor) or his claim that he ignored “the fruitful insights developed by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget”. In my view, his greatest crime on this occasion is his failure to refer to the work of his colleague, Leslie Aiello, and her suggested explanation of how the upright posture adopted by our ancestors may have determined the origin of the human ‘voice box’; this hypothesis fits well with Chomsky’s fables.
Re-reading Karl Pearson’s The grammar of science, written more than a hundred years ago, is a virtual introduction to today’s ‘cognitive’ approach to making sense of the material world. I can imagine myself as part of a group, including Marx, Dietzgen, Pearson and Vygotsky, reading through Chris Knight’s latest study of Chomsky - and agreeing among ourselves, ‘We are definitely not Marxists!’
Language myths
Language myths
Chomsky nonsense
It is fine that the Weekly Worker is free from one of the besetting sins of the radical left - namely sectarianism - and in the name of pluralism publishes a wide variety of viewpoints, even up to scandalous ones.
Still, I think it’s a bit too much to give space so generously (two long articles) to Chris Knight for his strange attacks against Noam Chomsky (February 4, March 11). Knight seems to really believe in the existence of a huge military-corporate conspiracy, where Chomsky tried, by nothing less than his political activities against the Vietnam war and other leftwing credentials, to explain away Pentagon’s funding of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s linguistics programme back in the 1950s and 1960s.
To refute Knight’s scurrilous diatribes in detail would be like shooting sparrows with heavy artillery. So, just to put matters straight for readers, the modern study of generative grammar, which started at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics in the 1950s, had neither then, nor has had ever since, any practical applicability, military or civilian. It is pure, basic research, where the object of inquiry is the human language faculty. That was Chomsky’s own view right from the beginning, although some of his colleagues at RLE were initially interested in machine translation.
The institutional reason for the Pentagon’s funding of linguistics at MIT up until about the middle of the 1960s was that the predecessor of the RLE had been the famous Radiation Laboratory, where, for example, radar was developed during World War II. One component of the whole complex was RLE’s Acoustics Laboratory, where Morris Halle, the organiser of the future linguistics programme, had been working since the early 1950s. It was Halle who arranged for Chomsky to be hired.
The best way to refute Chris Knight’s conspiracy fantasies once and for all would be for the Weekly Worker to publish a popularised but informed article by a professional linguist on the real research programme of generative grammar. It would be even better if the writer had a progressive viewpoint, so that readers could see what is politically relevant in science and what is not.
Presenting the contrast between culturally oriented anthropological linguistics and generative grammar with its biological view on human language in terms of a power struggle between left and right, as Knight does, is grotesque nonsense.
Chomsky nonsense
Chomsky nonsense
Dogmatism
I was amused to read Ray Rising’s letter lecturing Weekly Worker readers on where to go to learn Trotskyism, but his defence of the latter is based on pure dogmatism, although he manages to expose Hillel Ticktin to some degree. (March 4).
Rising shows that Trotsky defended the socialised property relations of the Soviet Union unconditionally, and defended Stalin insofar as the latter defended these relations of production, while calling for anti-bureaucratic reforms, but changed tack after the 1933 debacle in Germany, when he started calling for political revolution to overthrow the Soviet, or ‘Stalinist’, bureaucracy.
Two points need to be made here. First, after the disaster in Germany, a result of rightwing social democratic betrayal and communist ultra-leftism, Stalin continued to defend the property relations of the Soviet state. So why did Trotsky change his position on Stalin? The second point relates to Trotsky’s call for political revolution to remove bureaucracy. The idea that bureaucracy can be defeated by political revolution issues from the anarchist kennel, not Marxism, and Lenin correctly argued against it, regarding the struggle against bureaucracy as a more long-term process, in which communists had to fight bureaucracy while using it at the same time.
Dogmatism
Dogmatism
GI paper
Further to your article about resistance inside the armed forces (‘Joe Glenton and the demand for a popular militia’, March 11), are you Brits aware of the very active GI paper Military Resistance? It was previously called GI Special.
Further information is available by emailing thomasfbarton@earthlink.net.
GI paper
GI paper
Maverick alone
A quick reply to your statement that Socialist Resistance’s single candidate for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Dave Hill, “is actually more of a lone maverick than a disciplined member of a left organisation” (‘Vetoes and three-minute decision-making’, March 11).
Well, this particular maverick has the full support of Socialist Resistance nationally, has been supported as a candidate by Respect and has the full involvement of all (only six) members of SR’s Brighton and Hove branch in leafleting, canvassing, funding and media work. All five who are in the country, for example, attended the March 9 launch of Tusc’s Brighton Kemptown campaign at which Bob Crow, Hannah Sell and I spoke, together with a PCS striker and a student representative of the magnificent Stop the Cuts/Reinstate the Sussex Six campaign.
All were also present in supporting the 700-strong rally and march for jobs and public services in Brighton on March 6. Videos of my speeches and pictures of the demonstration and the Brighton launch meeting are available at www.brightontusc.blogspot.com.
At first, yes, I was a bit of a maverick within SR over No2EU and now Tusc, being in a minority in urging full support for those developments. Actually, with SR’s welcoming of internal debate and internal party pluralism, it was precisely that minority position that led comrades to put me on SR’s national council. Birmingham and London SR branch comrades are organising group visits to Brighton to support the Tusc campaign in leafleting and canvassing, as well as with donations and media assistance.
As it happens, I support the requests of both SR and the CPGB that they should be represented on Tusc’s national steering committee and that in any future post-election developments there be transparency, organisation and pluralism. Having said that, it is a very major achievement that Tusc, supported by regional and local (if not yet national) trade union organisations, is now working with a wide range of socialist and Marxist groups and parties - including local groups of independent socialists - and with trade unionists and workers in struggle.
Maverick alone
Maverick alone
Excuses
Peter Manson bemoans the reluctance of Dave Nellist and other Socialist Party members to debate their views on a workers’ militia during election campaigns (‘Vetoes and three-minute decision-making’, March 11).
Anyone who has read Michael Crick’s book Militant (pp176-77) will appreciate why there is such a reluctance. Pat Wall, in a public debate with the Socialist Workers Party, clearly outlined the Militant/SP position on the state and the right of the workers’ movement to defend itself with arms at the time of revolutionary transformation. The media subsequently seized on this to try and prevent him being elected MP for Bradford North.
The CPGB seems to wish to elevate this point of principle to a dogma which bears no relationship to the concrete circumstances. Or are you saying that the coming election will be a pre-revolutionary situation?
To answer this question reveals the real motive of the CPGB, which is to excuse itself from playing a part in the most significant united socialist election challenge to New Labour. Why could the CPGB not name the candidates you wish to stand? Do you not have any prominent trade union or community campaigning comrades?
Excuses
Excuses
Optimist
Ben Lewis reports that Mark Fischer predicted that the vote for Tusc would be absolutely terrible, given the nature of this election, with many leftists simply holding their noses and voting Labour (‘Reactionary realignments and a left in crisis’, March 11).
I think such pessimism is unjustified in the case of Socialist Party councillor Dave Nellist at least, as he is standing in a safe Labour seat against warmonger and defence secretary Bob Ainsworth.
Tusc candidates and other leftwingers need to argue skilfully against cuts, pointing out where the money will come from - closing tax loopholes and havens, plus nationalising all the banks, only compensating pension schemes, and run them (and already nationalised banks) democratically from below with some (if not most) control in the hands of borrowers and savers - and pointing out the similarity of the mainstream parties policies’ and preparing for a minority in parliament supporting a mass movement opposing the cuts.
Optimist
Optimist
Way forward
I can report, in response to Steve Freeman’s mention of Lewisham, that Lewisham People before Profit have taken a decision to actively consider standing a parliamentary candidate in Lewisham East. This candidate will stand alongside our candidate for borough mayor, John Hamilton (see www.johnhamiliton.org.uk).
We have taken a view not to contest West Lewisham and Penge, but give critical support to the left Green candidate, Rhomayne Phoenix. We are also giving full support to Ian Page, who we understand will appear on the ballot paper as ‘Socialist Alternative’ rather than Tusc.
We are seeking to stand and endorse as many progressive community candidates as possible in the local borough elections. We are targeting two seats in Deptford: New Cross and Evelyn wards.
Our coalition of progressive, trade unionist and socialist activists is mirrored across the country with similar broad, anti-cuts and progressive coalitions taking shape. More than a dozen local political parties are now registered with the electoral commission. This is the way forward for the left - seeking to link with those breaking from Labour and working to build broad-based community coalitions, where socialists have a powerful voice.
Way forward
Way forward
Labelling
National organiser Mark Fischer responded to calls for the CPGB to stand an “exemplary” candidate in the forthcoming general election by arguing: “We could not even stand under our own name, since the electoral commission has ruled that only the Morning Star’s CPB is allowed to use the description ‘Communist Party’ on the ballot paper - and it would not impact on the left either” (‘Reactionary realignments and a left in crisis’, March 11).
I must bring up my older suggestions to get around this crap. I know that the Campaign for a Marxist Party, which included the Socialist Alliance, ended up as a flop, but so has the Call for a New Anti-Capitalist Party.
I think the CPGB should take the initiative to forge a Left Party, something even many left-Guardianistas are clamouring for. Yes, that specific label is quite appropriate, since it has been, how shall I say, ‘cashing in’ on the other side of the English Channel.
Of course, the programme would have to be different from the politically incoherent ‘third’ Draft programme (in fact, the second draft, plus two new sections), and the demands listed would need to have a methodology justifying their inclusion, as opposed to the lack of such methodology in the CPGB’s draft programmes thus far.
Labelling
Labelling
Deluded
The name of one of your regular letter writers, Jacob Richter, has worried me for some time. Did I used to know him? Was he once an actor in The bill TV series?
I finally came across his name in a review in The Times Literary Supplement. Jacob Richter was the pseudonym Lenin used on his reader’s card at the British Library.
There are other modern people of the same name - a musician and a businessman, according to Google - so I can’t assume your regular writer Richter is a pseudonym. But if it is a false name, is our Jacob showing delusions of grandeur? Or is this the second coming of the messiah?
Deluded
Deluded
Q and A
In response to Ben Lewis’s piece, ‘Taking Labour seriously’ (January 21), I have contacted the general election candidates in my constituency, Hackney North and Stoke Newington.
They include Diane Abbot, who is recommended on the Labour Representation Committee list (however erroneously) and is currently standing as the incumbent MP, and Matt Sellwood, who is the Green Party candidate in the same constituency. Matt is a Hands Off the People of Iran supporter, a trade union activist and Unite member, a self-described ‘eco-socialist’, and has been known to campaign for tenants’ and squatters’ rights in the area.
Ben Lewis recommended we should confront LRC candidates with two specific questions that the CPGB considered to be suitably revealing. I have added a third question in order to draw a sharper line between candidates who merely oppose the most evidently obscene manifestations of capitalism, such as war, and those who, on the other hand, clearly advocate working class politics.
Just a quick point before I leave you to the hopefully entertaining ‘compare and contrast’ exercise of reading through Diane’s and Matt’s answers. At the most recent CPGB aggregate, comrade Nick Rogers suggested that we should consider a tactical vote for Green left candidates as well as Labour left ones, which was countered by claims that the Greens are fundamentally a petty bourgeois party and have until recently officially held ‘anti-human’, let alone anti-working class, politics.
While this roughly corresponds with my own impressions of the party and the green movement more broadly, I have yet to read a systematic analysis of ‘eco-socialism’ and related green left currents in the pages of the Weekly Worker. One is often left with the impression that ‘eco-socialism’ and ‘green socialism’ are mysterious, confusing ideologies that the Marxist left would rather not touch and that are therefore best brushed off with a few quick catchphrases. Hard facts and a serious, thorough analysis of the ‘eco-socialists’, their ideology, history and relationship with the working class may help to clear things up.
My first question to each candidate was: “With the proposed massive ‘slash and burn’ cuts that will be imposed upon us by either the Tories or Labour, will you oppose all cuts in services if you get elected into parliament?”
Diane Abbott responded: “There is no question that because of the money spent bailing out the banks there will have to be cuts to public services whoever wins the next election. But, as in the past, I will be voting to protect public services. My constituency is particularly vulnerable to cuts, not only because people use public services, but because the public sector is the largest provider of jobs in the constituency. Big cuts in public services represent a ‘double whammy’ for the people of Hackney. They will lose their services, but they will also risk losing their jobs. It is worth noting that more money has been spent in Hackney under a Labour government than under any other government. I have always pushed for more investment in Hackney and I will continue to do so if I am re-elected.”
Matt Sellwood responded: “I share the common Green Party view that cuts in services and investment during this time of recession make no economic sense, and would hit the vulnerable hardest. We are, instead, calling for a massive programme of investment in a Green New Deal - which would include improvements to public housing, renationalisation and improvement of the rail system, investment in renewable energy and the training of a new skill base in infrastructure design, development and maintenance. I can’t pledge to oppose all cuts in service because that is a bit of a hostage to fortune unless it is more tightly defined. For example, I would vote to end subsidies for nuclear power, the Trident nuclear submarine system, and so on, which, to some people, would be seen as cuts in service. They would lead to job cuts, although the impact of our programme as a whole would lead to new jobs, in sectors which are healthier for both society and the planet.”
My second question was: “Will you call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan as well as oppose any further imperialist ventures?”
Diane Abbott replied: “I voted against the Iraq war and against the war in Afghanistan. My parents were born and brought up in a British colony so I have no difficulty in identifying with imperialist ventures. Last year I visited the British army in Helmand province. On the one hand, I was very impressed by the bravery of our soldiers but, on the other hand, it confirmed my view that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won and, the quicker troops withdraw from there, the better.”
Matt Sellwood replied: “Yes. I am a long-standing anti-war activist, with a record of protest and direct action against both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am implacably opposed to them.”
My third and final question was: “Would you call yourself a Marxist? And to what extent will class politics be on your agenda if you are re-elected to parliament?”
Diane Abbott wrote: “Class politics has always been on my agenda and my voting record proves it. For the record, I do not claim a second home, I live in Dalston and wholly support the prosecution of MPs who have taken advantage of the system. What concerns me is that many voters don’t realise that, if David Cameron gets elected, he will be the first old Etonian prime minister since 1964. Electing David Cameron would be taking this country back 40 years. We have come a long way since the 60s and have seen far more diverse people from different backgrounds, like myself, become party members.”
Matt Sellwood wrote: “Now there is a question with a long and complicated answer! My politics are informed by Marxism, although I am not an orthodox Marxist. I self-describe as an eco-socialist, and am a member of Green Left, the eco-socialist grouping within the Green Party. My politics are probably closest to those of Murray Bookchin and the social ecology school of thought, although I take influences from a variety of different sources, mostly around left-libertarian theory. I am significantly influenced by left Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg.”
Q and A
Q and A