Letters
Full-throated
It is barely necessary to respond to Henry Mitchell, whose full-throated defence of Zionist barbarism and colonialism speaks for itself. Just a couple of points, however.
As anyone who has accessed my blog will know, I am extremely critical of Hamas, which is a reactionary group politically. However, it is a fact that unlike Fatah it has stood up to Zionist colonialism, even while it wished to reach an accord with it. So, just like Trotsky’s attitude to Haile Selassie and Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, I support resistance to Israel by Hamas, but give Hamas no support against its own people.
Mitchell has some chutzpah though. The left is accused of being akin to fascists and their ‘boycotts’ of Jewish shops in the 1930s. Of course, this is all very predictable, knockabout stuff. But it was only last week that opponents of Israel’s murder of human rights activists were confronted by a counter-demonstration outside the Israeli embassy by the Zionist Organisation and the English Defence League: ie, fascists!
The boycott of Israel is now taking off in a bigger way than any of us imagined. Settler colonialists are not only willing murderers, but they are stupid as well. The attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a mistake, even by their own standards.
The boycott is comparable not to the Nazi armed siege of Jewish shops, but to the boycott of slave-grown sugar and the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany - which the Zionists destroyed via their trade agreement (ha’avara) with the Nazis! (Yes, they don’t tell you about that one).
Rachel Wiseman criticises the academic boycott because “The resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict will not come from shutting down liaison and cooperation between Israeli and British colleges. Only closed-minded bigots would deny the exchange of ideas, scientific innovation, the arts and humanities, and staff/student exchanges, which are the oxygen of democracies around the world.”
Indeed, the exchange of ideas is important, but Israeli universities are not for the free flow of information. They are themselves integral to the military-apartheid structure of Israel. They do the military research, they draw up the diplomatic strategies and options via their think tanks, they have seminars on how to deal with the ‘demographic threat’ of Arab Israelis. Universities are not islands of socialism amidst capitalism. It is precisely their role in the oppression of Palestinians and in furthering the aims of Zionism that makes Israel’s leaders so proud of them and which ensures they react so vehemently to a threat to them.
In the Palestine solidarity movement we have always encouraged links with Israeli academics and we work closely with a number of those who support the oppressed. Indeed the boycott isn’t even about individuals, but institutions. But, yes, I am indeed in favour of delegitimising the Israel state as a Jewish state. States based on racial supremacy have no right to continue in existence. But I talk of the state - literally a body of armed men in Marx’s definition - not the people living in that state. Israel is an ethnocracy, not a democracy: even in the bourgeois sense and it has no legitimacy. It is precisely this that results in its existentialism, because underneath Zionism’s leaders are fully aware that it is not even a ‘normal’ bourgeois state.
We are seeing a witch-hunt being conducted against Haneen Zoabi, the Arab Israeli member of the knesset who was on board the Mavi Marmara. She has been accused of being a terrorist and physically attacked by her fellow parliamentarians, who are proposing to strip her of her parliamentary privileges and effectively leave her open to assassination. This is a fundamental attack on the remaining democratic rights of Israel’s Arab population.
Israel is vulnerable over this because one of its few remaining claims to fame is being the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. And for this they point to the right of Israeli Arabs to vote and stand for the knesset. The hypocrisy and cant of Wiseman and Mitchell is such that they have nothing to say about an attack on a secular leftist Arab woman who is being vilified for her political stance. It is extremely important that socialists take up the cudgels for Haneen Zoabi and Balad, her political party.
Full-throated
Full-throated
Praise sandwich
Farzad Houshyar’s article on the commodification of higher education begins with an account of a 1990s departmental meeting when lecturers were exhorted to abandon “snob research” and actively seek funding from industrial collaboration. Houshyar eloquently identifies the event as emblematic in the rise of market-place higher education, with its emphasis on customers, client surveys and the demands of the business model - a picture that those of us in both the further and higher education sectors recognise only too well.
And yet ... does this tell us the whole story? Let’s rewind to a university tutorial in the late 1970s, when academic freedom was so firmly established that undermining it wouldn’t even have been a twinkle in Keith Joseph’s eye. As an undergraduate in a department with the highest working class intake in the country and an excellent research record, I was delighted to learn that my tutor had an impeccable series of publications. I’d even read a couple of them. He was radical, he was erudite, he was politically sound: uncompromised by the demands of the marketplace, he was innovative, edgy and definitely cool. Sadly, his approach to teaching was less than inspirational: suffice it to say that his most avant-garde learning aid was an alarm clock which was set to go off at the end of the designated tutorial hour, thus ensuring that no time was wasted on students which could have been better spent on cutting-edge Marxist literary criticism. Publishable, of course.
My point is that Houshyar’s article too narrowly identifies academic value with innovative research, equating the erosion of theoretical research opportunities with the overall “deterioration of the purpose for which universities came into existence”. Commercial and industrial funding certainly undermines academic freedom, but independent research and development has for too long been prioritised as higher education’s primary concern - at the cost of learning, teaching and the overall undergraduate experience, which is already under siege from funding cuts, insane assessment regimes and targets dreamt up during one of Kafka’s worse nightmares.
Having said that, I was highly entertained by the author’s revealing account of “educational policy new speak”, having acquired a gruesome fascination with the pointless linguistic paraphernalia of the business model, as applied to all aspects of public and voluntary sector organisation over the last 20 years. The notion of having a ‘chief information officer’ in a university? Priceless.
(By the way, this letter is an example of what is called a ‘praise sandwich’. Positive comment - constructive criticism - positive comment. It’s what teachers do, I’m told.)
Praise sandwich
Praise sandwich
Hysterical
Henry Mitchell in his attack on Tony Greenstein’s states: “The knee-jerk response to the tragic, violent confrontation between one ship of Turkish Islamists against the Israeli Defence Force (whilst the other ‘aid for Gaza’ ships peacefully sailed to port) is typical of the hysterical and inflammatory language of the voices baying for the blood of Israel” (Letters, June 10).
Thus a reader of his letter may think that it was not the Israeli commandos who launched an attack in international waters on a flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to an under-siege Gaza, but that somehow innocent Israelis were ambushed. This is a page from the Israeli propaganda manual. In reality it was an act of piracy. Can anyone seriously claim that passengers who try to prevent the seizure of their boat by pirates are to be blame for attacking the pirates, while the pirates acted in self-defence?
Under international law, to be sure, this act of the Israeli armed forces is not characterised as piracy, but as a crime against peace. However, this is a legalist argument, because if it had been carried out by armed forces other than of a state it would be defined as piracy.
Mitchell goes on to attack the courageous journalist, Robert Fisk of The Independent, saying that he is not a neutral observer. What exactly is a neutral observer? If a journalist during the massacres of the Jews by the Nazis was neutral and not on the side of the suffering Jews, he would not be neutral, but pro-Nazi. Similarly when someone is indifferent to the suffering of the people in Gaza, he is not neutral, but a racist.
Mitchell parrots the Israeli propaganda machine that equates criticism of the crimes of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism. Another Zionist, Mitchell G Bard, wrote a book Will Israel survive? that is a passionate defence of Israel and everything it has done. He said: “The distinction between legitimate criticism, however, and anti-Semitism is usually quite clear and can be determined by what Natan Sharansky calls the 3-D test - committing any one ‘D’ is usually indicative of anti-Semitism.
“The first D is the test for demonising: Are Israel and its leaders being demonised and are their actions blown out of proportion? Equating Israel with Nazi Germany is one example of demonisation.
“The second D is the double standard test - as when Israel is singled out for condemnation at the United Nations for perceived human rights abuses, while nations that violate human rights on a massive scale, such as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, are not even mentioned.
“The third D is the test of delegitimisation: questioning Israel’s right to exist is always anti-Semitic. Unlike genuine critics, anti-Semites are not interested in improving Israeli society; their goal is to delegitimise the state in the short run and to destroy it in the long run. There is nothing Israel can do to satisfy these critics.”
In his “neutral” attack on Tony Greenstein based on this 3-D test, Henry Mitchell justifies the inhuman siege and the starvation of 1.5 million people in Gaza that began after the Palestinians elected Hamas as their government.
Finally, the appalling accusation of anti-Semitism against Tony Greenstein - “‘If the Jews hadn’t done in Jesus’, ‘If the Bolsheviks hadn’t been controlled by the Jews’, and didn’t you know, ‘If the Jews hadn’t upset the fascists, then World War II would have been cancelled’” - is based on the denial of the part the Zionist leadership played during the Jewish holocaust. The Zionists collaborated with the Nazis in Germany until 1938. They did not lift a finger to save the Jews during the genocide.
Leaders like Weitzman and Weiss helped close the gates against Jewish refugees in the west to ensure the Zionist project in Palestine. Most members of Jewish councils established by the Nazis were Zionists. In Hungary the collaboration of the Zionists with the Nazis cost the lives of half a million ordinary Jews. To organise the ghetto uprising against the Nazis the Jewish underground had to eliminate Zionist collaborators. Most Zionists opposed the uprising and most of them deserted the Jewish masses to save their skins. The same Zionist leaders later became prominent in Israeli politics like Begin.
The real history is not recognised by the Zionists and their friends. However, that does not mean history does not recognise them.
Hysterical
Hysterical
Battle plan
I note Tina Becker’s reference to Trotsky’s Transitional programme in her article on the new Die Linke programme (‘Danger of honest opportunism’, June 3).
Becker claims: “At the time of writing his Transitional programme Trotsky thought capitalism was on the point of final and complete collapse. He mistakenly believed that all that was necessary was to defend existing wages, conditions and rights. A spontaneous movement to do so would lead to the clash of class against class and pose point blank the question of state power.”
While this may accurately describe the reformist perspectives of many of those who claim to stand in Trotsky’s tradition, it is a gross distortion to claim that this has anything to do with the revolutionary perspective of the Transitional programme itself. I am left wondering if Becker has even read the document. If she had done so she would have perhaps noticed that Trotsky clearly explains that its method is based on transcending the crass economism she ascribes to him:
“It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat ...
“The Fourth International does not discard the programme of the old ‘minimal’ demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual - that is, revolutionary - perspective. Insofar as the old, partial ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism - and this occurs at each step - the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal programme’ is superseded by the transitional programme, the task of which lies in systematic mobilisation of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”
Trotsky’s document does not simply defend the “existing wages, conditions and rights” that workers have won under capitalism, but advances a battle plan for the proletariat - made conscious of its historic tasks with the assistance of a revolutionary party - to reconstruct society along fundamentally different (ie, socialist) lines. In the face of mass unemployment and declining income, for instance, Trotsky did not advocate a mere defensive posture, but put forward the perspective of full employment and a sliding scale of hours and wages. It is not defence of the status quo. but struggle on the basis of a transitional programme that by necessity poses the question of power:
“If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands, inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. ‘Realisability’ or ‘unrealisability’ are in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.”
For a serious treatment of the real political basis of the Transitional programme, see the IBT’s edition of this important work at www.bolshevik.org/tp - particularly the introduction.
Battle plan
Battle plan
Crap
Eddie Ford writes: “For communists - unlike BP, Shell and the rest - oil, like all other natural resources, is not some free gift to be frittered away as if we were greedy children out to conquer and dominate nature. Rather, it is to be treated as a precious resource to be cherished and husbanded” (‘Burning up planet Earth’, June 10).
Personally, I think this article is crap - romanticism at its very worst. There is nothing wrong with romanticism, of course, but practicalities are more important.
Oil is there to be discovered, to be utilised, not “cherished”, “husbanded” or deemed precious. If it were husbanded or cherished, then it would be expensive and rarely used! Oil and the products derived from it are very useful, including computers and the internet. It has its hazards, but it has its good points ... What are you suggesting? That we leave it under the sea and forget about it? What alternatives do you have in mind in the meantime? A bit of nuclear power perhaps ... a few nuclear accidents in Russia to be ignored!
I have been studying environmental sciences since the 1960s and I remember the time when the congress arrangements committee of the CPGB. tried to ignore an environmental policy which I and one or two others were advocating at the time. We held up the whole congress from ending early ... and got it through! Nice to know that the environment has now become a priority in communist thinking ... it has taken a long time.
Perhaps, instead of anti-capitalist dogma, you should start using your brain to work out what methods should be used in developing and conserving the future prospects and lifestyles of the people on the planet. I suppose that you have also swallowed the ‘green’ arguments about carbon usage and the warming of the planet ... without doing any proper research.
Crap
Crap
Mastery
How does Eddie Ford come to the conclusion that a socialist world would “consume far less electricity”, considering that around a quarter of humanity today has no access to electricity at all and many more do not have enough? Surely a socialist world - a highly developed and modern world focused on creating conditions of material abundance for all - would require far greater supplies of electricity than our current society, in which the bulk of humanity enjoys backwardness and poverty?
Instead of adopting the reactionary petty bourgeois ideas of environmentalism, I think that Marxists should be pointing out that the problem with capitalism is not that it creates too much consumption and production, but that, on the contrary, it holds back industrial development and creates vast underconsumption.
Much to the disdain of the eco-worriers, a socialist society would aim to unleash humanity’s productive potential by increasing human mastery and conscious command of nature.
Mastery
Mastery
New boom
According to David Harvey, “Since the 1970s, capital has been encountering difficulties as a result [of reduced possibilities for profitable investment]. It has actually been investing not in making real things that people need, but in asset, property or stock markets” (‘Rethinking revolution’, June 3).
The second part of his comment above about investing in assets like property and stocks is true, but is the first part of that assertion? In 1970, only a small minority of people in Britain owned cars, for instance. Today I look around even deprived council estates and see two, three or more cars parked outside each house. Probably the majority of households seem to think that it’s automatic that their children will have driving lessons and a car as soon as they reach the appropriate age. Someone is investing in very real production that produces all those cars that previously were not being made and sold!
In 1970, China was a very impoverished country. The majority of its population are still extremely poor, but since 1970 millions of peasants have become industrial workers. Not only is someone making very real investments in the factories that those workers are now employed in, but those workers are themselves buying things like cars themselves. In fact, China has now surpassed the US as the world’s largest car market. Again someone has invested very real capital in industrial production to satisfy that demand.
In 1970, the most advanced calculating device (outside the huge mainframe computers that occupied entire rooms) was the slide rule. In 1976 when I was first studying economics, the small, expensive calculator I bought was quite a novelty. Few people had them, which is why they were so expensive. Today, not only do calculators have the same processing power as those mainframe computers, but there have been so many calculators produced that their unit cost has fallen to the extent that they have become dispensable, throwaway items! Again someone was investing quite massive sums of real capital in the industrial processes that produced and developed those calculators that effectively didn’t even exist in 1970.
They were the first examples of the use of printed circuit boards, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that the microchip began to be introduced, and then only on a relatively small scale. Yet, from the 1990s onwards, the personal computer began to be introduced, and is again now so pervasive that it has become a consumable item. Someone was not only investing real capital in their production, but was also finding a huge market for them.
In fact, I could list literally hundreds of products that are now mass-produced and consumed around the globe, which did not even exist in 1970. I could speak about the massive increase in production of commodities that did exist in 1970, but the consumption of which - like cars - is now massively greater than in 1970.
It is, of course, true that from the mid-70s onwards the onset of the new long-wave decline did make it harder for capital to find markets for its goods, and under the conditions of the downturn capital tends to be more reluctant to move into new areas of production. Yet it managed this expansion of the range of industrial production and investment despite that. Of course, a lot of the expansion has taken place in new types of product from around the time that the long-wave decline ended in the late 90s. It’s since then that we have seen the mushrooming of investment in new products based on the microprocessor, and mobile technology such as the mobile phone, digital cameras and so on.
In truth, far from finding difficulty in developing new areas for such production, the opportunities look almost endless. No sooner have we got used to the idea of HD TVs than we are being encouraged to buy 3D TVs. The use of the microprocessor in computing power to decode the human genome has now led to the development of synthetic life, which opens up the possibility of hundreds of applications from organisms to simply eat up pollution, so ending concerns over greenhouse gases, but also producing by the same means synthetic fuels and medical cures.
The fusion of many formerly compartmentalised areas of science in this way is opening up even more possibilities. The development of nanotechnology is at a very early stage, and yet even now we are able to create carbon nano-tubes that are the strongest material ever produced, and which could make travel into earth orbit very cheap through the development of a ‘space elevator’.
Hobsbawm in his Industry and empire rightly comments that, had it not been for the development of other industries in the early 19th century such as coal, steel and so on, the industrial revolution, which was essentially a revolution in the textile industry up to that point, would have stalled, for the simple reason that each industry requires the existence of other industries, so that a market is created for its output. By the same token the end of a long-wave boom tends to be characterised not just by the fact that every existing industry has reached capacity restraints for what it can profitably sell, but that there is an insufficient number of new potential industries that can create demand for its products, or which can act as an outlet for the surplus capital. Similarly, the commencement of a new long-wave boom is characterised by the opposite: a mushrooming of new potential products and industries, such that there is a rich field of opportunity into which capital can expand, and each creating new markets for the other.
That is the situation we see today, and we are only at an early stage of that process. The main constraints upon it, and the reason that the process has been more vigorous in Asia than it is in the west, is the fact that in order to avoid economic collapse during the downturn western governments kept things going with excess liquidity, and also because, partly based upon that, old monopolies were able to keep going, where otherwise they would have been closed or restructured and the capital diverted to more profitable outlets. The financial crisis was a result of that process, and probably constitutes its closure.
New boom
New boom
Appalled
I am utterly appalled that Heather Downs should unquestioningly accept that sexual games between children should now be subject to rape legislation (Letters, June 10).
In the case in point, all three children were voluntarily engaged in no more than normal and perfectly natural games of sexual discovery and daring. That this activity is now deemed ‘rape’ simply by the fact that the two boys are 10 (just) and not because they forced the girl to do anything against her will is accepted by Heather, as though this was the most natural conclusion in the world rather than its direct opposite. I will remind Heather that because of the madness of ‘king’ Gordon Brown, he introduced changes to the Sexual Offences Act which would render any sexual activity, anything at all, between children ‘rape’ if at least one of the kids was 10 or older, even if no sexual intercourse took place, or even physical contact. Regardless, moreover, of whether the games were mutually voluntary or not. This, it seems, to Heather is quite acceptable, while to most of us it is utterly repugnant, obscene and dehumanised.
The game of undressing which took place between the three kids in question is deemed by Heather ‘sexual violence’ and that the female pal in the game was “bewildered”. By what, one wonders? The courts certainly, the hoo-hah and the panic must have bewildered all three kids, as the state went into manic overdrive, following its own mad agenda. That she was “bewildered” by the turn events took after confessing to her mam that she’d been “a bit naughty” and blamed the boys for actions she later admitted voluntarily joining in is certainly true. However, this is not what Heather is suggesting.
She is right though - those of us who (joyfully) remember sexual encounters at eight, nine or 10 will not recall accusing our partners of rape. That’s because such games and encounters weren’t called rape then, and weren’t a crime, unless visited by force and violence. It is the police and department of public prosecutions who have called this rape, not the little girl. No wonder she is bewildered.
In days gone by all three might have been grounded, or stopped from playing together; a little earlier the boys might have earned a slap. Today, the moral backlash and paranoia is such that harmless kids, all three of them, have had their lives ruined by the stupid action of the law, reinventing criminal terms, so they become catch-alls of suppression of childhood and normal human relationships.
That Heather seeks to defend and promote such distortion is deeply depressing, but all too typical of this reactionary, repressive wing of middle class feminism.
Appalled
Appalled