Letters

Crack regiment

I read Harley Filben’s review of Owen Jones’s Chavs: the demonisation of the working class very carefully and get the clear impression from him that the demand to restructure British industrial capacity is somehow reactionary (‘Chav-baiting and class politics’, June 23).

The demands that you hear everywhere among the workers of the northern, Scottish and Welsh former centres of traditional industry are to rebuild and restructure coal, steel, engineering, shipyards and maritime marine, with as much direct workers’ control as can be achieved.

Now, while those of us in the abandoned industrial heartlands see this as a programme to get our families and communities off the scrapheap into well-paid, unionised employment, Harley says ‘no’ and instructs us that such a strategy is based upon fundamentally nationalist strategies: “To turn Britain back into an industrial powerhouse ... means going into competition with Germany, China, India and the rest for a limited supply of industrial capital and working hours.”

So our contribution to the vital need of spreading internationalism and world class-consciousness is to rot on the unemployment queues, see our communities devastated with hopelessness, poverty, low life expectancy, high infantile mortality, high ill health rates, low educational achievements and social goals, benefit dependency, anti-social crime, drug addiction and poor housing, content in the knowledge that our fellow workers in Germany, China and India are working. We are doomed to acceptance of impoverishment and disempowerment as a social class here because we can only change things internationally and can’t make demands for this piece of land mass where we live, as that would be seen as ‘nationalism’.

Leave aside the history as to how we actually arrived at this situation and that the defeat of the traditional proletariat here led to the superexploitation of workers in the third world who, tonne for tonne, are killed and maimed a thousand times more than we were and paid a pittance for equivalent labour-power; that our labour was unionised and posed political challenges, while the export of exploitation abroad actually took conditions back through time to those we had left behind centuries before. The export of jobs from Britain and Europe represented a massive defeat for standards of labour and qualities of life worldwide - it wasn’t an act of internationalism by global capitalism.

Leave aside also the fact that basic production of coal and steel is actually rising around the world, as is demand, which will soon outstrip it. Rising energy prices (caused by the relative scarcity of fuel) are damning masses of British families to fuel poverty and premature death and will soon inflict widespread power cuts across the country. Sky-high energy prices are directly linked to closed pits, which caused natural gas exhaustion, North Sea oil depletion, vastly more expensive and dangerous nuclear expansion and futile plagues of inefficient, non-productive wind turbine estates.

We have apparently to put up with all that because the demand to exploit reserves here with labour here and restart basic manufacturing production is nationalistic.

If we can’t achieve world socialism, we’ll sit on our hands and let the whole damn place collapse around our ears because there are no short-term solutions. Let’s instead work on some abstract rebuilding of the labour movement, unions without work or workers (doing what, I wonder?), because anything less than simultaneous worldwide socialist revolution with a global strategy for work and production will be nothing but “fruitless guerrilla war against the bourgeoisie”.

I’d like to see a communist programme for the struggle we’re actually in, for the places where we live, and the people we live among, with the problems they’ve actually got. No, not instead of a world socialist struggle, or counterposed to it, but part of it. Because frankly, comrades, if you don’t have answers in the here and now as to how to meet the problems which confront our class, you will remain desperately irrelevant and useless as a fighting unit of the working class.

Crack regiment
Crack regiment

Lumpen

Your review of Owen Jones’s Chavs: the demonisation of the working class has provoked an interesting forum debate at www.forteantimes.com.

Perhaps the most interesting comment was: “Next time some chavs throw stones at me and shout homophobic crap, I will shake my fist at them and inform them that they cannot harm me, as they are just a middle class construct. Or maybe I will just scarper.”

Even Marx believed in the existence of a lumpenproletariat. The members of the lumpenproletariat - this “social scum”, said Marx - are not only disinclined to participate in revolutionary activities with their “rightful brethren”, the proletariat, but also tend to act as the “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.”

They haven’t gone away, you know.

Lumpen
Lumpen

Some right

I’m not surprised to find the same liberal agenda used in your article on assisted suicide as we find in the mainstream media (‘Dignity in life and death’, June 23). Socialism has no developed tradition of tackling systemic oppression and has a regrettable tendency to subsume such issues in a reductionist class analysis.

Obviously, Eddie Ford is absolutely correct to argue that we should all have the facilities to end our lives at the time of our choosing. But taking this issue in isolation as a purely ethical and legal matter is wholly mistaken. There would only be a purely legal remedy to a problem with a purely legal cause.

It has long been argued that in order to find the true cause of the oppression of various groups there is no better method than to give them equal rights. When the situation remains unchanged, the cause will be discovered. The emphasis on recourse to law is the hallmark of liberalism. In fact, an ‘equal’ right to assisted suicide would merely amplify the existing inequality. Equal numbers of print books don’t give blind children an equal opportunity to read.

One frequent objection to assisted suicide is that people will be pressurised into ending their lives by mercenary relatives; counterposed is the argument that the absence of facilities in Britain causes people to go abroad to die sooner than they wish. Therefore, the debate degenerates into one of humane relief of suffering and legal safeguards. The underlying political analysis of the reasons why campaigners such as Debbie Purdy and Terry Pratchett are so much more palatable than Liz Carr (opponent of assisted suicide) remains unanswered.

We are left with no means to establish why it might be that disabled people are to be given no other rights - only the right to assisted suicide. The BBC have not had three-hour-long documentaries about why it will be impossible to go to the paralympics in a wheelchair on the tube, no coverage of the lack of lifts and ramps in the average High Street bookshop, no-one famous interviewed on the inaccessible venues chosen for socialist meetings and conferences. Still less, why effective treatment for many conditions is unavailable on the NHS. So all we’re left with is that disabled people want to top ourselves because we’re disabled: the political problem has been shifted onto the individual physical body.

Our oppression is therefore naturalised. But it is no more natural than having separate (or no) drinking fountains for black people and then saying they can’t come in because there is no separate fountain. A recent event by disabled arts activists showed that a woman in a wheelchair asking for donations to help her ‘fly to die’ collected a lot of money with no questions asked. Under the current circumstances, the ‘right’ to die will be the only right we get.

Campaigning for the ‘right to die’ in isolation will leave the rest of society untouched except for brief periods of heart-warming self-congratulation for resistance to reactionary moralism. Disabled people will be admired for our courageous acceptance of an inevitable fate, and the rest of the world can continue unaffected by the inconvenience of changing to accommodate us. Since when did socialists promote acceptance of social and political inequality?

Some right
Some right

Property right

In Mike Macnair’s book, Revolutionary strategy, the following demand was listed: “Abolition of constitutional guarantees of the rights of private property and freedom of trade.” I would like to see this demand fleshed out more.

For example, the civil courts can be prohibited from enforcing the collection of the interest portion of debt payments or impose severe criminal penalties on those who use threats of harm to extort interest. Society can also directly establish ‘maximum allowable personal wealth’, a populist limit on non-possessive property ownership, and then adjust it by mass democratic means.

Right now, I’m a witness to the Canada Post labour dispute. What started as a rotating strike was escalated into an employer lock-out and now discussions on back-to-work legislation, plus media spin in favour of the government side regarding this ‘essential service’. How about prohibiting lock-outs for those employers in ‘essential services’ (such as in response to rotating strikes or ‘free service’ strike situations, like bus drivers not collecting fares)?

Property right
Property right

Facebook ban

The internet platform Facebook has banned Republican Sinn Féin Germany/Austria, without warning after less than six months in existence.

The group had been set up to use modern media to spread the message of Irish republicanism in times of economic crises, bailout and sectarian attacks. The group’s wall was used to publish statements, press releases and events of the political organisation, Sinn Féin Poblachtach.

An email to the administrator, dated June 13 2011, said that the group promotes ideas of “hatred, menace or obscenity”. Furthermore, it is forbidden to “attack individuals and groups”. While sexist, racist and sectarian material is allowed on Facebook and similar websites, democratic voices are systematically attacked.

Facebook ban
Facebook ban

Tax slaves

James Walsh seems to think that Egyptian tax collectors still extort taxes from workers and peasants with instruments of torture, as they did in Roman times, and therefore they should be shunned by the left (Letters, June 23). No, things have moved on.

The fact of the matter is that we are dealing with a 41,000-strong organisation, its full title being the Real Estate Tax Authority Union, one of the 620 unions affiliated to the 20 million-strong Public Services International. These brave men and women established their own, independent, union in 2008, after a three-month-long strike under the conditions of the Mubarak dictatorship. They won a 325% increase in wages.

The RETAU president, Kamal Abou Arta, has been imprisoned 22 times under Sadat and Mubarak. As to the job that his members perform, it is hardly the moral equivalent of “kiddie fiddling” or working as a gas chamber operative - as comrade Walsh suggested. And under present circumstances ending the collection of real estate taxes might just benefit the rich rather than the poor.

But comrade Walsh seems to be implying that it is wrong to struggle for trade unions amongst those tainted by working in arms factories, prisons, police and armed forces, etc, because all such people are somehow beyond the pale and can never be won to our side. I do not agree.

The first concern of a trade union is to defend the interests of its members and RETAU has certainly done that. But that has not led to a narrow, sectional, attitude. No, far from the tax collectors’ union being conservative in outlook, it fought for the overthrow of the Mubarak regime and today extends its solidarity to the PCS strikers in Britain. In the context of Egypt the first independent trade union since 1957 is surely to be wholeheartedly welcomed. Its birth marked the beginning of the end of the old regime and indicated the strength and breadth of what was going to come. Needless to say, RETAU contingents took part in the Tahrir Square protests.

Workers under capitalism are the slaves of capitalism. They often hate every minute of the work they do and hate those they work for. Their work is alienated. They work for wages in order to live, not because their work fulfils their human potential. For instance, the work of coalminers and steelworkers undoubtedly helped the imperialists in both World War I and World War II. But it no good turning our back on them. The point is to end capitalism. Not blame its slaves.

Tax slaves
Tax slaves

Star rant

It is not James Walsh who has ‘lost his marbles’, as the headline you gave his letter implies: it is the British left. Anyone with half a mind can see that the British left, including the CPGB, is only going round in ever decreasing circles. The left will continue to do so while it is built on such failed methods and ideologies. Anyone thinking otherwise must be mad or bad.

The Weekly Worker/CPGB has become a sad parody of the old Eurocommunist CPGB. At least they were prepared to recognise that things weren’t working. You lot have become about the triumph of the will. Even your theories on anthropology are about putting thoughts above material conditions.

Pretty much the first rule of scientific ethics is ‘cause no harm’. The so-called organised British left keeps active for the sake of being active. Are you worried that people might reflect and try and think about the deep-rooted problems if they cease running around like headless chickens? The British left has no concern about leading workers to certain defeat or encouraging a mad man to live on the streets so as to send himself to an early grave. The British left is built on the principle that it is better to encourage woolly thinking if that gives them the answer they want for today.

The only moderate defence I’ve heard for the invitation of the Socialist Workers Party to the Egyptian tax collectors’ union is that at least they are moving away from the Islamists. That flirtation has caused massive amounts of harm, but not so much to the SWP. The SWP still builds on the faulty logic that anyone who is slightly against the capitalist states should be embraced as a friend. Faulty logic underpins a rush to the lowest common denominator - or, in this case, the lowest not very common denominator - of only serving the interests of those who have moderately privileged jobs in the state sector.

We don’t have scientific socialism in this country; we have neurotic, insane socialism that is only interested in serving the interests of sectional movements and their buddies. You, ‘comrades’, are the true sectarians. You and those who you support are the backward proletariat; the advanced proletariat recognise we have no movement worthy of the name.

The ruling class think you’re a joke, the working class think you’re a joke and I think you’re a very old, sad joke, but you take yourselves way too seriously. The ruling class even took the insanity of Stalinism seriously.

Star rant
Star rant

Selfish

According to the Wall Street Journal, two oil companies, Toreador Resources and the Hess corporation, are “prepared to seek oil and gas under the Eiffel Tower” (June 22). This is called by some people ‘progress’ and the ‘free market’.

Disappointed tourists visiting Paris may soon discover that the Eiffel Tower has become an oil derrick. The oil pipeline, of course, will be concealed beneath the Louvre museum. Now all that is lacking is for the oil companies to find oil under the Statue of Liberty ...

The indigenous tribes in the Peruvian Amazon have been fighting against oil drilling in their lands. They were denounced by the outgoing president of Peru, Alan Garcia, as “selfish”. No doubt those who are socialists who wish to defend the Eiffel Tower will be called the same.

Selfish
Selfish

Self-defence

I’m curious about the official Communist Party stance on the individual ownership of arms, particularly firearms for self-defence.

The history of firearms control in Britain clearly has its roots in class relationships, particularly the desire of the ruling classes to disarm and suppress peasants and workers. The 1920 Firearms Act was in fact introduced due to growing fears of working class uprising following World War I, as was seen in Russia and, closer to home, Ireland.

Self-defence
Self-defence