Letters

Ultras

Although the vast majority of James Turley’s article provides a refreshingly interesting analysis on the World Cup and football in its wider social context, I am disappointed that he unwittingly repeats the common cliché of directly linking ultras with football violence (‘Reclaim the game’, June 24).

His comment, that “Football violence, on the continent in particular, often has an underlying political charge - the St Pauli ultras are militantly anti-fascist, in drastic contrast to some of their opponents”, appears to suggest that Ultra St Pauli are roughly the equivalent of Millwall’s Bushwackers, Portsmouth’s 6:57 Crew or Cardiff’s Soul Crew, only with anti-fascist politics. This is clearly not the case.

Although members of Ultra St Pauli are occasionally involved in direct confrontations before and after matches, often for justifiable reasons, it is far too great a step to link them with football violence. Far more important to the group is the support given to the team and peaceful political activities, such as the policy of inviting asylum-seekers to attend games with the group as a show of solidarity.

Ultras
Ultras

Pissing in wind

As always, I was interested to read Peter Manson’s report of the recent CPGB aggregate (‘Labour Party and communist strategy’, June 24). I was pleased to read that the CPGB has thrown in the towel and now sees the Labour Party as the only game in town.

The dreadful results for Tusc, the Socialist Labour Party, Respect, the Scottish Socialist Party and other left parties in the general election clearly show that nothing can be achieved outside Labour.

As someone who made the serious error of resigning from the Labour Party when Tony Blair became leader in 1994, I now see the error of my ways. I feel that I have wasted the last 16 years by - excuse my French - pissing in the wind. The late Ted Grant has been shown to have been correct all along. Peter Taaffe and the Socialist Party in England and Wales clearly have a lot to answer for in my decision to resign from Labour (and I am not alone). As a result, I now have an uphill struggle with my constituency Labour Party in regard of my application to rejoin.

One interesting thing about all political parties, ranging from the Socialist Workers Party to the Tories, is that 95% of their members are either aged under 25 or over 45. This is due to three factors: the Thatcher counterrevolution; the defeat of the miners’ strike; and the economic boom of the 20 years up to 2008.

Finally, I call on Mark Fischer to stop wasting his time by reporting on sect-like groups such as Tusc and the Socialist Party in England and Wales. His time would have been better spent reporting on the recent Compass conference, including the meeting held by the Labour Representation Committee.

Pissing in wind
Pissing in wind

Swiss model

Just a comment on your article, ‘Silence of the left’ (Weekly Worker June 10). The thing with American-style gun laws is that they don’t arm the working class: they arm the middle class. Like everything else, the ability to own a gun - especially guns with which you could feasibly take on the state if need be, what with body armour and all - is based largely on money.

I agree that the best model would be something based on the Swiss model, in which everyone over a certain age is issued with a gun, trained to use it and encouraged to take part in a militia system (although I think only the training should be compulsory - actual participation in the militia should be voluntary).

Ultimately it comes down to the balance of power - the only thing that makes it necessary to arm the working class is the fact that the state is armed, so we should only call for general gun ownership as a second preference to the destruction of all purpose-built weapons and the prohibition of their manufacture.

Swiss model
Swiss model

United action

As the stall we ran on Saturday June 26 was our first in Leeds, I did not really think we would attract many people. However, the result turned out to be totally the opposite. We sold out of Weekly Workers - including some previous issues - and a number of political badges we displayed were also bought.

A good number who were passing by stopped and asked about our ideas and views in general. Also some wanted to know about Marxism and how the CPGB differs from other organisations.

I had long conversations with two people. First was a sociology student, who approached us with his friends and started asking about Marx and Marxism. It was obvious he was repeating what he had learnt on his college course. The discussion with him was about how Marx interpreted globalisation and we also exchanged ideas about Francis Fukuyama’s idealist interpretations that the current global political reality itself has answered it all: ie, the banking crisis and also the coming to power of reformist, semi-socialist governments such as in Venezuela, Bolivia and other places, and the international rallying of the masses toward this ideology.

Then the discussion went on to capitalism as a system and how it cannot organise society economically and how it inevitably needs to invade and dominate other countries in order to expand and to get more resources only to increase the profit that as a system it seeks, no matter how costly that domination would be for the people - for example, the invasion of Iraq, which has cost the lives of nearly two million innocent people so far. The student seemed to be interested and I will be contacting him to see if he wants to join us in further discussions on socialism.

The other discussion I had was with a member of the Socialist Party, which I used to be a member of. I had met this comrade at a Committee for a Workers’ International summer school in Belgium. I was arguing that the left needs a united Communist Party, in which we can all democratically express our views and propose our strategy for common action against the common enemy. But the comrade did not agree on that and thought that we were fundamentally different from each other. Therefore we cannot work under one umbrella.

We also talked about the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and how they did not accept the CPGB. I pointed out that if the letters on this had not been published in the Weekly Worker then no-one on the left would have known about it. By the way, when Tusc refused the CPGB, that was the main thing which led me to leave the Socialist Party.

Overall, I think the stall was a great step forward for our ideas. We are thinking of displaying other leftwing organisations’ meeting leaflets and newspapers over the coming weekends, to show how on the left we need united, democratic action in one Communist Party.

United action
United action

Cuts war

The Liberal-Tories are always at war with the working class, alongside the bosses and their state (‘War on the working class’, June 24). But an intelligent strategy by the working class and its political representatives will recognise that these three forces are not the same and will attempt to utilise divisions within them.

In fact, I’ve written many times that, despite all the brouhaha over cuts, I do not believe that such a programme is in the interests of capital itself. It risks creating an unnecessary deep recession, which will harm the interests of capital during a period when it is coming out of recession. That is clearly the message being sent directly by US capital via Obama at the G8/G20 meeting. A number of other ideological representatives of capital, from Nouriel Roubini to George Soros, are making similar points about the lunacy of cutting before the recovery has gained traction. The other night, Newsnight featured economist Richard Koo, who related how such a policy in Japan in 1997 had been disastrous, killing the recovery for no benefit and delaying it for another 10 years.

I view the macho cuts policies being put forward by various rightwing politicians as rather like the war of words that they sometimes get into for public consumption to prove their credentials, but which then take on a life of their own, rather as happened with the Falklands war. The proposals in the budget for 25% cuts are clearly nonsense and unachievable. Even Norman Lamont was reduced to describing them as “an ambition”. Cuts that are unachievable and not in the interests of capital are unlikely to happen. The actual representatives of capital - the permanent state bureaucracy - will see to it that they are choked at birth or shortly afterwards, not only to protect the interests of capital, but also to protect its own immediate bureaucratic interests.

We shouldn’t count on that. Still less should we see that state as being in some way on our side in this any more than in anything else. But we should utilise the division of interests. In so far as the state bureaucracy resists the cuts, we should support that, but not simply to defend the status quo. We should utilise the current situation to put forward a socialist vision of society - socialist solutions as alternatives for implementation here and now. To the extent that the Tories’ proposals on cooperatives open a door to put forward such solutions based on workers’ ownership and control, all the better.

Again the Liberal-Tories have said they want to enable us to say how the cuts should be made. We should take them at their word. If we organised labour movement conferences in each area and meetings in each workplace, on each street and in each neighbourhood to discuss the cuts, we could build up a powerful movement to present the government with an alternative programme to deal with the crisis, which, having asked for that, it would find difficult to reject.

I’ve put forward several ideas on my blog about how this could be done, and one simple suggestion on how the deficit could be paid for tomorrow. Given there is far more than £1 trillion of shares listed on the stock exchange, if every limited company was required to create new shares equal to 10% of its issued share capital and hand them over to the government, this would mean the government taking in over £100 billion in shares. It could sell these at the best times through the arms-length company it set up to deal with the similarly created bank shares. By taking this payment in new shares rather than cash, it does not impact on the profitability or cash flow of any company. It therefore does not alter its ability to pay wages or suppliers or to make investments. In so doing, it takes no money out of the economy, thereby maintaining economic growth.

If all the shares were sold at the same time, this would depress values by approximately 10%. But not all shares have to be sold at the same time. Additionally, share prices frequently move up or down by 10% over a relatively short period without any reason other than the feelings of investors. In fact, by protecting economic growth, it would be more likely that profitability and capital accumulation would rise, leading to rising rather than falling share prices.

But the Liberal-Tories will not pursue such a policy because, although it is economically rational and meets their supposed criterion of fairness, it represents - unlike all previous taxes on income or wealth - a direct attack on capital itself. It means essentially a direct transfer from capital to labour. But as a single, simple demand to raise, it has very great attractions for the labour movement to put forward.

Cuts war
Cuts war

Crazy agenda

Heather Downs claims that her defence of the arrest, prosecution and forced detention of two little boys are “arguments specifically in the interests of working class women” (Letters, June 24). Actually, it is not in the interests of anyone of any class. To try to link the progressive struggle of the suffragettes to the sexual repression of children just doesn’t wash. ‘Votes for women, jail for children’ wasn’t the demand, as I recall.

Let’s return to the facts of the argument in hand and stop trying to throw handfuls of non-applicable historic sand in our eyes, can we? Heather describes the thoroughly inhuman designation of voluntary child sexual exploration as ‘rape’. It’s not rape. This is a silly designation invented by the Blair-Brown government as part of their moral panic against youth sexuality.

The boys were not guilty of doing anything criminal or anti-social at all. Neither, of course, was the girl, who did no more or less than they did. The fact that they were found guilty by the court is unimportant. It is a repressive and nonsensical charge, being found guilty of which doesn’t add any legitimacy to it or guilt to them. Nor does it mean you’ve actually done anything wrong in the normal, accepted sense of what ‘wrong’ is. They were undressing, for god’s sake - that’s all. All three of them were voluntarily engaged in it. Nobody was forcing anyone to do anything. Simply because the boys had just turned 10 and she was eight, the law and the courts call it rape.

Heather chooses not to condemn such repressive nonsense, but to defend the arrest, the charge and the punishment. She cites George Lansbury’s support of the suffragettes as equating to her support for the process of arresting and jailing the kids, and my opposition to this as equating to Quelch and Bax of the Social Democratic Federation opposing votes for women! But you can’t shoehorn such dank, reactionary penal and social policy into some form of progressive historic tradition. It just won’t fit.

What is gut-wrenching in Heather’s last contribution is the assertion that these two little boys were engaged in “predatory sexual behaviour”. Undressing? You show me yours and I’ll show you mine? How is that predatory sexual behaviour? Unless one believes all sexual activity engaged in by the male species of any age with anyone is ipso facto “predatory”, just by virtue of being advanced by a male. This viewpoint permeates some wings of middle class feminism and represents heterophobia or misandry.

The little girl engaged in a normal sexual game with two of her playmates. Then she felt guilty and thought her mam might find out, so she owned up but alleged the game was the boys’ idea. That’s all that happened here, or should have been. Sadly, the police were called and when the girl was interviewed she retold the story, adding that it was a joint and mutual game. The police then acted on the law as it stands, despite what was clearly a minute and harmless incident, and charged the two boys with ‘rape’. The director of public prosecutions then went ahead with the whole circus of a trial and the trauma of national sensation and publicity and the impending jailing of the two boys. Is this really in the tradition of the suffragettes or any progressive movement or current?

Heather persists in calling the above non-events “sexual violence” and condemns those of us who are appalled by this whole dehumanising and crazy agenda as “sexist”. Those who call for children to be accused, charged, prosecuted, jailed and have their lives ruined for perfectly natural childhood behaviour are actually defending progress and equality, it seems.

I don’t know what your vision of a just world would be, Heather, but I for one, sure as hell, don’t want to live in it.

Crazy agenda
Crazy agenda

Long time ago

In the first of a two-part reply to my review of his book Mike Macnair devotes most of his attention to but one of my criticisms - the lack of a theory of socialism in the book (‘Socialism is a form of class struggle’ June 24). I assume that discussions of the question of parliament and of democracy will be in the follow-on article.

Mike makes the perfectly reasonable point that one wants to avoid the old sectarian practice of making a particular view of Russian history de rigueur for membership of a political party. It would plainly be foolish for a serious political party to make one’s views on Lincoln or Napoleon a criterion for membership, and the same logic applies to one’s views on slightly more recent Russian history. What I was mainly concerned with is where the theory of socialism, or a lack of it, impinges on contemporary policies.

Mike cites the precedent of Marx back in 1880 commenting approvingly on the fact that the programme of the French Workers Party contained only demands which had been spontaneously thrown up by the labour movement. But that was 130 years ago! A lot of water has gone under the bridge since 1880. Mass working class parties have grown up, come to power and, with varying degrees of success, tried to transform economies in a socialist direction. More relevantly still, these attempts have in many countries fallen back, with a revival of capitalist economics.

Mike would do better to focus on the 1980s and 1990s, the point at which the labour movement worldwide suffered an enormous ideological setback. It was a setback which, as it was occurring, seemed to me to have had no precedent since the defeat of Napoleon. In that setback the very idea of socialism as a distinct way of organising the economy was apparently discredited, and in consequence many erstwhile socialist parties abandoned socialism as a goal. They repositioned themselves as a ‘democratic left’ instead of a socialist left. My worry was that Mike’s book was part of this broader trend - intellectually more sophisticated no doubt, but shading off into a purely democratic radicalism.

In a movement with a long history, changes in orientation can often be convincingly justified by appeal to precedent. If one wants to emphasise a purely democratic republican turn, then one focuses on what Lenin wrote at the very start of the 20th century when he was polemicising against the autocracy of the tsar. If one wants to downplay the need for socialism, one cites documents from the very birth of European social democracy. Lenin was not content with repeating demands which had arisen spontaneously from the labour movement: he advocated that social democrats explicitly introduce political demands which went beyond that.

Mike too is quite willing to be explicit when it comes to political objectives: a republic, proportional representation, etc. He is presumably going to reply to my earlier objection that these objectives were an outdated early 20th century view of democracy. But the point is that he is willing to introduce objectives that go beyond the spontaneous demands of the movement when he has the theory that lets him do so.

He is reticent about putting forward socialist economic objectives because he has no theory of socialist political economy. But without a working class political economy there can be no political workers’ movement. Without its own political economy, the working class can never be more than a resisting and oppositional voice: fight the cuts, fight anti-union laws - all the slogans of a failing oppositionism, with which the left is so familiar. Without its own political economy labour cannot advance policies to change the way the economy operates.

It is well known that Marx devoted a great part of his intellectual life to developing a critique of the then existing political economy of capital. In the process he provided an explanation and justification for contemporary struggles by the labour movement to limit the working day.

As the labour movement became more powerful, it began, from the 1920s on under Marxian and other socialist influence, to challenge the economic dominance of capital. In the process it needed a political economy that went beyond Marx’s description and critique of Victorian capitalism.

People like Neurath, Feldman, Kalecki, Lange and Dickinson provided a body of ideas that could both guide socialist economic policy and provide a refutation of the ideologies put forward by early 20th century bourgeois economists. This ideological foundation allowed the movement to advance confidently to challenge the institutions of capitalist economy. It gave socialism an intellectual credibility that meant even orthodox economics textbooks treated it as a viable alternative system.

But by the 1980s the social democratic movements both in the east and the west were running into increasing difficulties with their attempts to run two rather different variants of socialist economic policy. In the political crises that ensued, both variants of socialism emerged without intellectual or political credibility. Party intellectuals and political leaders west and east gave up on the idea of socialism and concluded that there really was no alternative to the market. Given the late 20th century intellectual crisis of socialism, a crisis from which we are only gradually beginning to emerge, it is quite unrealistic of Mike to suggest that a revolutionary strategy is possible without an economic programme, or that you will leave it to the working class itself to come up with an economic programme.

To reconstitute a socialist movement capable of winning not just core working class support, but the support of a majority of the population, that movement is going to need very clear and convincing economic policies. It will need policies that are intellectually coherent, consistent and which appeal to the immediate interests of broad sections of the population. Without such policies there can be no credible socialist movement. And it does no good to focus primarily on constitutional issues. Unless people believe that there are other ways in which the economy could be run, they will not fight for purely constitutional objectives. Behind a bitter struggle for political liberty there is the desperation for a better material life.

There is much in Mike’s article that is unexceptional. The distinction between pure modes of production and real social formations in which a variety of production relations coexists is uncontroversial. And, as I have said in earlier contributions to this paper, his identification of socialism with the dictatorship of the proletariat, with a period during which classes and class struggle continue, is pretty much the pure milk of Maoism. On the other hand, his vision of socialism as an economy in which a large class of independent producers and mittelstand capitalist entrepreneurs will coexist with a socialised sector is more Dengist or Scandinavian in flavour. He also touches on something that was a great concern of the Maoists in the 60s and 70s - the power that educated experts have in a relatively ill-educated society. But I remain unconvinced by his rather forced attempt to equate skilled labour with a petty bourgeois status.

He refers to intellectual property, but this is not really relevant to the issues he is addressing. The USSR and until recently, China, did not recognise intellectual property rights (IPR) or patents. And even in the west, IPR is largely a concern for large companies and institutions rather than members of the middle class. The costs of patenting inventions and defending patents are generally beyond the reach of the self-employed. So it seems that his identification of what the Soviets called the intelligentsia with the classical petty proprietor is actually based on a concept borrowed from orthodox economics: ‘human capital’. In orthodox economics this idea is meant to indicate that even wage workers are capital owners - they own their own ‘human capital’ in the form of skills.

As I see it, there are a number of problems with this approach. It is true that skilled workers are typically paid more than unskilled ones. But, though a skilled worker may earn more, that does not make them independent producers. They are still reliant on selling their labour-power to an employer. And unlike the peasant proprietor skilled workers or the intelligentsia were, in the USSR, products of the socialist economy itself. Its vast expansion of educational institutes turned out a highly educated workforce.

Taken at its face value, Mike is implying that the more scientifically and technically advanced a socialist economy becomes, the stronger will grow the petty bourgeoisie, and thus the more premature and futile will be the attempt to establish socialism. This is where his argument leads, but I suspect that he will not want to pursue it to this logical conclusion.

Long time ago
Long time ago