Letters
Class act
While I agree with much of Anne Mc Shane’s article on the Irish elections and the United Left Alternative (‘Now the left has TDs’, March 24), her critique of the ULA misses one rather essential point: the ULA is a partitionist organisation that fails to take up the national question. When Ireland remains divided by imperialism, with part of the country still annexed by Britain and with some thousands of British troops there, just what kind of ‘left alternative’ is it that manages not to mention this?
Surely, for revolutionaries, it is not possible to separate the economic issues in the south from the political issue of imperialist-imposed partition. This, it seems to me, is actually more relevant now than ever - most particularly since the economic woes in both the six- and 26-county states are similar, as are the attacks on the working class. What more auspicious time could there be for promoting a real left alternative - namely, a vision of a 32-county workers’ republic, as opposed to two clapped-out, anti-working class pseudo-states?
While the ULA TDs can play a useful role in helping build protests against the Fine Gael and Labour attacks on the class in the south, it’s not the unity of the economistic left that is needed; it’s the unity of the socialist republicans, since they are the only ones who are prepared to use words like ‘occupation’, ‘partition’ and ‘socialism’ - ie, they combine the national and class questions.
Class act
Class act
Pick and mix
Maciej Zurowski not only has a sense of humour failure in his letter about sexual freedom, but is seriously mistaken in his belief that D’Emilio’s understanding of the development of gay identity “complements” Foucault’s account (March 24).
On the contrary, D’Emilio flips it on its head. Foucault argues that modern sexualities were developed in the second half of the 19th century by early sexologists, whereas, in Capitalism and gay identity, D’Emilio argues that these “theories did not represent scientific breakthroughs, elucidations of precisely undiscovered areas of knowledge; rather they were an ideological response to a new way of organising one’s personal life.” So, while there may well be interplay, gay identities were developed by gay people prior to the intervention of science.
Zurowski is making a classical mistake of collapsing gay history into the history of sexual prejudice and conflating gay identity with development of heteronormalism as an ideology. The logical extent of this position is to see the demise of one as somehow linked to the passing of the other. If you implied this logic to the class struggle, you would come to the post-Marxist conclusion that class-consciousness perpetuates rather than undermines capitalism.
Zurowski somewhat disingenuously misses my point when he calls me a workerist in my comprehension of sexual prejudice in the working class. I am not claiming that workers are somehow immune from sexual prejudice, or that it has not been used or amplified by the powerful. Rather I am saying that sexual prejudice in the working class is more complex and cannot simply be turned on and off by the ruling class; or evaded by gay workers hiding their identity. On the contrary, sexual prejudice can only be thwarted by the conscious acceptance of all forms of diversity. Moreover, it needs to be recognised that sexual prejudice is reproduced in the working class by perceived experiences that make non-heterosexual relationships seem abnormal - particularly the structure of institutions under capitalism from schools, housings services to the organisation of supermarkets which are designed to support the nuclear family.
Given the root-and-branch restructuring required to achieve sexual liberation, imagine my disappointment when I come to study the ‘Sexual freedom’ section of the CPGB’s Draft programme. To use a rather hackneyed phrase, they are okay as far as they go. Sexual freedom or liberation is more than legal parity for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people. Rather, as Oscar Wilde observed in The soul of man under socialism, “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.”
Part of this is about transforming social institutions, so that all forms of consensual sexual and non-sexual relationships are respected and validated. What this would mean in a comprehensive list of demands I will not venture off the top of my head. Perhaps some pick and mix of rights and responsibilities or perhaps a more comprehensive support for the individual through things like the individualisation of tax and benefits, so that relationships are only ever maintained for their own sake.
Pick and mix
Pick and mix
China
Reading Ben Lewis’ article about the overtly capitalist nature of today’s China, and taking into consideration the fate of both Maoist China and the Soviet Union, perhaps it is worth attempting to place the Soviet-style socio-economic formation in the broader historical context of the development of capitalism on a world scale (‘Capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ March 17).
If one strips the Soviet socio-economic formation, as established during the initial five-year plans in the 1930s, of its ideological facade, and considers it as what it really was - a programme of intense national economic and social development in a country in which a state apparatus under a forceful leadership takes the place of a failed bourgeoisie - rather than an experiment in building socialism, then some interesting factors come to light.
The Soviet Union and China were the last significant countries to undergo a profound process of modernisation. Both were huge countries containing vast amounts of natural and human resources. Both had at their helm a national leadership that was determined to push aside internal resistance and external opposition in order to carry out its programme. And under this leadership, and with these essential resources, these countries were indeed transformed into modern industrial societies. The process was often haphazard, wasteful and inhuman, but, all in all, the basis for such a modern industrial society was indeed laid down.
This begs the question: where else was this process carried out? There have been examples of all-round modernisation, such as the British dominions and South Korea, but the process here was encouraged by imperialist states and carried out under their aegis. In most of the non-imperialist world, modernisation has been patchy and lopsided, and modern industry, where it exists, sits incongruously alongside primitive agriculture and vast, barely productive shanty-towns. The national leadership in India has proved unable to root out pre-bourgeois social forces; the current industrial development of Brazil is largely dependent upon investments from the big powers.
Well over a century ago, Marx and Engels wrote how capitalism was forced to distort its own laws of motion in order to advance. The experience of the Soviet socio-economic formation takes their observations to a new level. Under Stalin’s five-year plans and the equivalent in Mao’s China, far-reaching modernisation necessitated the destruction of the law of value. The modernisation that took place under Stalin and Mao could not have occurred if the ruling criterion in their societies had been profitability.
As so often, the dialectic exerts its revenge, and the irony of the Soviet socio-economic formation is that, whilst it can forcibly modernise a big, backward country, there is a limit to its ability to maintain the process of modernisation. As the Soviet economy matured under Stalin’s successors, its growth rates declined, and during the mid-1960s the Soviet elite considered introducing market measures to reverse this process. But, as it saw the continuation of quantitative growth and looked fearfully at the risks involved, the Soviet elite backed away from embarking on any serious reforms. The result was stagnation and ultimate collapse: the transition under Gorbachev and his post-Soviet successors was not to a modern capitalist society, but to Russia becoming more akin to a third-world supplier of primary products. The institution of a serious process of market reforms in the 1960s would have enabled the Soviet elite to embark upon a far more successful transition to the market.
The Chinese elite, however, keenly watching the stagnation to their north, realised that, if they were to survive, let alone thrive, they needed carefully to guide the Chinese economy back to the market. This they have done with considerable success. Ben states that China is still a long way from enjoying the normal conditions of bourgeois rule. That is true, but it could also be mooted that, if China maintains its economic rise, things that the imperialist bourgeoisies have taken for granted over the last half-century - constitutionalism, separation of powers, private property protection and so on - may be seen as an encumbrance to their ability to compete with China.
Who would have thought, back in the glory days when we were told by advocates of Stalinism that ‘actually existing socialism’ was being built in the Soviet Union or China, that what we actually had there was a temporary process of non-capitalist national modernisation that would enable the Soviet and Chinese elites to build up their societies so that they could at some point rejoin the capitalist world? Quite a few of us never believed in their tales of a happy land far, far away; and today’s wreckage in Russia and the thrusting capitalists in China are proof that Stalinism had nothing to do with communism.
China
China
Genuine
While I enjoy Eddie Ford’s writing generally, and agree with the anti-imperialist principle in his most recent article, I feel he does not consider some important specifics of the situations at hand (‘Imperialism out, down with the Gaddafi regime’, March 24).
He writes: “... such hyperbolic language is being deployed in an attempt to fool us into believing that Libya - unlike other, pro-western, Middle East dictatorships - is a special case and that this ‘humanitarian’ or liberal imperialism will somehow be beneficial to the long-term interests of the Libyan masses. In reply, communists argue that the Libyan intervention will no more bring liberation or democracy to its people than the imperialist overthrow of Saddam Hussein - a former client regime of the west - relieved the suffering of the Iraqi masses. Instead, the brutal imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq just brought about new horrors and suffering - leaving the country traumatised and dismembered.”
While I can’t see into the future, I think one can say there will be no occupation force in Libya. Politicians of the coalition have universally ruled out this possibility. So effectively that makes the coalition merely an air force for the rebels to use against Gaddafi’s forces. Through this they seem to get the best of both worlds: the help of western military power, yet no occupying force to control the country after the dictator has been overthrown.
I cannot but disagree strongly with Eddie’s statement that some on the left have “totally misguidedly” come out in support of ‘no-fly zones’. Without the air strikes, there’s a high chance that right now Gaddafi’s forces would have retaken Benghazi. At best, that means the pro-democracy uprising is over. At worst, it results in a massacre of the rebels. As much as I hate US foreign policy, I think we should look at each action specifically. This could actually be a genuine western intervention for democracy.
I think the situation in Libya is key. If Gaddafi wins, the other Arab governments will realise they can just suppress the democratic movement violently. If the rebels win their struggle for democracy, regardless of how they needed western intervention to do so, it would give a massive boost to the regional movement.
Genuine
Genuine
Conspiracy
Much self-flagellation is currently taking place amongst the western ‘left’, or at least it should be, given their atrocious reading of the Libyan ‘revolution’.
Right from the very beginning, something just didn’t smell right. From the outset, this was no peaceful, civilian insurrection such as those taking place elsewhere in the region. In other words, it started life as a civil war - heavily disguised, with western help, as a ‘people’s revolution’, but one armed and dangerous.
All the while many on the western ‘left’ were joining the imperial chorus calling for western military intervention on ‘humanitarian’ grounds and all the while the empire was plotting to get rid of another ‘troublesome’ puppet, partition Libya right down the middle, with the east (where most of the oil is located) led by the ‘revolutionaries’, mostly ex-Gaddafi hacks and CIA ‘assets’.
It’s outrageous that allegedly civilised people can agree to rain death and destruction down on the Libyan people based on nothing more than an opinion. It’s based simply on the fact that the rebels faced defeat in Benghazi and the assumption that Gaddafi’s forces would then go on the rampage raping and slaughtering the inhabitants of Benghazi. So, instead of Gaddafi doing this, it’s being done by the combined forces of the most powerful military machine on the planet.
Isn’t it about time the western ‘left’ stopped passing judgment on the workings of other countries with words that essentially reflect the imperial mindset? The ‘we know best’ attitude is something I have come across all too often in my travels around the planet and is heavily imbued with racism, albeit of the patronising kind.
As with everything else about the Libyan ‘revolution’, nothing is what it appears. The chance for the Libyan people to really take charge of their own future has been aborted by the empire.
Conspiracy
Conspiracy
Marxist tripe
“The imperialist air and sea attacks on Libya since Friday can only be welcomed by readers of this paper,” says Dave Gannet (Letters, March 24). Well, not this reader. How a Marxist can come out with such tripe is beyond me.
We have to face it, revolutions do fail, some disastrously and bloodily. I am certain that the Libyan uprising was premature, doomed from the start. The conditions for successful regime change by Libyans in Libya did not exist as they existed in Tunisia and Egypt. We have to accept that. In those latter countries the overthrow of the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes are not in any sense complete revolutions. It remains to be seen whether those insurrections will eventually become successful revolutions. Any involvement of imperialist agencies or military forces will inevitably ensure they will not.
DG continues: “The democratic hope in Libya requires the defeat of the Gaddafi regime.” He then goes on to say: “Of course, it would be better if Libyans did it all themselves.” No. It would be absolutely crucial that they do it without the involvement of imperialist forces. Marxists and anti-capitalists should never welcome or applaud imperialist intervention in a popular uprising. Revolutionary movements will not gain mass support if they are perceived as being in league with imperialist powers. For whom are the imperialists ‘saving the day’? In whose interests are they operating? Certainly not those of the Libyan people - I think we can be assured of that.
The waves of Arab revolts seriously unsettled and alarmed the imperialists. But now the Libyan situation has given them the opportunity get a handle on things and the chance to thwart the flowering of anti-imperialist, democratic regimes. But now that the revolutionary wave has been compromised by imperialist intervention, the US/UK-backed dictators in central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa can now sleep easy and be assured of stability in their fiefdoms.
The idea of Marxists being even temporarily in step with such ‘progressives’ as Hillary Clinton, Sarkozy and William Hague quite frankly sickens me.
Marxist tripe
Marxist tripe
Incompatible
I don’t really understand why Peter Manson thinks I distorted his argument (Letters, March 24). If it is because I paraphrased Peter as saying that “only in a factory or office do workers have sufficient ‘common interest’” for the election of their own individual representatives, while Peter actually said this is often the case and that in geographic districts it is rarely appropriate, that’s a fairly fine semantic distinction. Readers of Peter’s original article (‘Socialism means winning the majority’, March 10) and his response to my letter (March 17) will come away with the impression that he gives a pretty emphatic thumbs-down to the concept of electors in wards and constituencies directly electing and recalling representatives.
I agree with the main thrust of Peter’s article, which backed a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum on the alternative vote and criticised the support by the Labour Representation Committee for first-past-the-post. It is the section discussing the differences between proportional representation and district representation with which I have strong differences.
Again in his letter, Peter calls for “a system of genuine PR, where recallability is exercised by parties and voters can give their verdict on the performance of those parties through annual elections”. In his previous article “genuine PR” is defined as the list system in which voters put a cross against one party. My view is that such an electoral system is incompatible with the CPGB’s advocacy of “extreme democracy”.
If democracy is to mean anything it should surely involve as direct participation as possible by electors in the political system - whether in workplaces, trade union branches, political parties or elections for national and local assemblies. Now, there is no question that party list systems provide highly proportional results. But the problem, as I see it, is that (a) representation is at the remotest possible level with no element of local control whatsoever (the clear advantage of district representation), which means that (b) electors effectively subcontract all political decision-making to political parties. In between elections, there is no way for electors to lobby a representative to try and get them to vote a particular way on a specific issue - let alone to subject them to a recall election.
The single transferable vote in multi-seat constituencies does not share these problems and actually successfully combines district representation with a large degree of proportionality. It is not compatible with the right of recall, but in the election itself allows electors a high level of flexibility in how they cast their votes. For some elections I think it can be appropriate. My preference, however, is for an electoral system that gives electors the right to intervene at any time in the electoral system by recalling representatives.
The CPGB’s proposal that parties do the recalling of representatives under the party list system makes matters even worse from the perspective of the elector. It is presumably representatives who flout the party line (perhaps under electoral pressure) who will be recalled and replaced with a loyalist. No more John McDonnells and Jeremy Corbyns then.
More to the point, there would hardly be a need for individual representatives. Most political business could be conducted just as well, if not better, between party negotiating teams, each wielding a block vote weighted according to the party’s national vote. Formally democratic but with genuine democratic content hollowed out.
An individual party can be highly democratic and we would expect a mass Communist Party to develop mechanisms that empowered members and catered for a close relationship with the working class as a whole. In these circumstances, a party would have the right to discipline its representatives. They could remove them as candidates for the next election or expel them from the party.
The flaw in the CPGB’s proposal is to suggest that the electoral system itself should directly incorporate party discipline. The CPGB’s advocacy of extreme democracy should rather aim to accentuate the direct disciplinary rights of electors. The argument raised at the CPGB conference in January on the Draft programme that giving electors the right to recall representatives would allow the Murdoch press to run riot reveals a surprising lack of confidence in the ability of communists to connect with the working class and a conception of democracy that is anything but ‘extreme’.
No electoral system is going to guarantee communist representation. That depends on the support we establish within the working class. The reason that the argument for democracy should be at the centre of our programme is that democracy provides us with both a road to power and the only way of building a communist society. If building communism is the task of the working class itself, then we need to facilitate independent action by the working class. That is why the kind of democracy we advocate now is a crucial question.
Peter’s point about “the difficulty of any individual ever being able to truly ‘represent’ all the electors in a current council ward or parliamentary constituency, with ‘all their disparate, often antagonistic interests and views’” is certainly more substantial than the Murdoch press argument. He thinks I haven’t answered it. But my citing of the Paris Commune was intended precisely to point to a real historical example of district representation that allowed the working class to express its interests and take power.
As Marx explains in The civil war in France, “The Commune was formed of municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms.” Yes, each representative on the Commune would have gained the support of only a portion of the electors, but elections to all sorts of bodies tend to involve majorities and minorities.
Yes, a variety of classes representing “antagonistic interests and views” participated in the election. Marx observes that “the party of Order was again allowed to try its strength at the ballot box”. It was the act of holding an election that allowed the working class to demonstrate its hegemony over other social forces - even if it delayed the decisive action that Marx thought might have saved the situation.
It is because the working class is a majority class that I see no reason why majoritarian electoral systems should pose any particular challenge of principle or practice to partisans of the working class.
Incompatible
Incompatible
Reject Labour
I write as a working class, trade union militant and non-party socialist who has attended many demonstrations over decades. I also write as a long-standing Public and Commercial Services union branch secretary who managed to encourage 17 other PCS members of the branch to come along to the March 26 TUC demonstration - some also took friends or partners along as well. The majority had never attended a demonstration before in their lives.
The official estimate seems to be 250,000 but it felt nearer 500,000. Thousands of people, like us, didn’t bother with Hyde Park, as the march took so long and moved so slowly we had to give up at Trafalgar Square and head back to our trains/coaches. It was huge and it was good-natured. There was such a friendly, carnival atmosphere that it was hard getting any anti-cuts chants going. Proof again that the vast majority had never been on a march in their lives before.
I was outraged that Ed Miliband was invited to address the crowds in Hyde Park and hope he was heckled for ‘being brave enough’ to mention that “some cuts are necessary”. This invitation shows we face a fight on two fronts. The obvious fight is the cuts. The less obvious but bigger battle is where the Trades Union Congress and Labour-affiliated unions are carefully pledging only to fight the coalition government’s cuts, leaving the way open once again to push workers to vote Labour and to accept their cuts.
The question of supporting the Labour Party and what that entails is the question facing the anti-cuts movement, although it would be better if more accepted the big question is really forming a revolutionary Marxist party, as the Weekly Worker constantly stresses.
We will clearly not get unity across public sector unions unless it is on the stifling basis of all agreeing to help elect another Labour government. That sort of unity will mean few strikes, even fewer cross-union ones and any further mass demonstrations being a vehicle for the Labour Party’s re-election. I don’t want the false choice of having an executioner who will be more gentle with the noose and give me a little longer to live, which is what voting Labour instead of the Tories or Lib Dems amounts to.
Every opportunity I get to discuss this question sees a handful of Labour Party supporters sneering, but everyone else well up for their union and communities standing anti-cuts candidates. The ‘only show in town is the Labour Party’ trade unions have no mandate to continue giving millions of pounds of members’ subscriptions over to a party which in government started the attacks and cuts now being pursued by the coalition government. They have no mandate to urge their members to vote Labour when such unions will not allow their annual conferences to debate motions calling for disaffiliation (or at least a substantial reduction in donations) by ruling all such motions out of order.
I am surprised to see the Weekly Worker, which so regularly campaigns for maximum democracy in left organisations, look the other way, as those trade unions refuse to allow their members to have any debate about what relationship they should have with the Labour Party. The Weekly Worker and trade union barons are united in saying, ‘No halfway houses’ then!
All these decades (whether Tory or New Labour) of propaganda putting individualism and selfish consumerism first have had a massive setback. We will not allow our public services to be privatised without a fight. For all the welcome community groups and ‘local issue’ protestors present, for all the voluntary groups, pensioners, unemployed, even the anarchists, the fact remains - the trade union movement called this huge protest and delivered it. No-one else could have pulled this off. If the trade union movement were not divided by those unions affiliated to the Labour Party putting electoral considerations above fighting the cuts, we could see ever more massive protests organised and more strikes. The battle is within the unions, not the LRC or Labour Party.
I’m proud of PCS and its constant calls for public sector unity and proud that we are not affiliated to the Labour Party and stifled (stupefied?) as a result. I hope the PCS conference in May adopts my proposed selection process for choosing independent anti-cuts candidates (and my other motion arguing we should back anti-cuts and only anti-cuts Labour MPs, such as John McDonnell).
Reclaim the Labour Party? No thanks. Reclaim our unions from Labourism? Yes!
Reject Labour
Reject Labour