Letters

Useful Platypus

I am writing to respond to Mike Macnair’s critique (‘Divided by a common language’, June 30) of my article on ‘The philosophy of history’ (June 9).

JP Nettl’s biography of Rosa Luxemburg can be plausibly considered his life work and not ancillary to his primary intellectual concerns because it was the product of almost 20 years of thinking, not the three years of intensive writing that produced his book. Nettl’s preface clearly indicates this. Immediately after World War II, his imagination was captured by the history of pre-World War I Marxism in the German Social Democratic Party and Luxemburg in particular, but the controversial nature of the subject made him ruminate long on it and forego available sources of support for his study of it, before publishing his 1,000-page book in 1966. Let’s be clear: Nettl was not a Marxist. But that should not anathematise any insights he may have had.

On ‘imperialism’ and ‘authoritarianism’, I was concerned to show their interrelated character, which I sketched only in very broad outline: the general historical trend of post-1848 Bonapartism, all the way up to the present. As Marx and Engels put it, Bonapartism expressed a situation in which the capitalists could no longer and the workers could not yet rule society (see Engels’ 1891 introduction to Marx’s The civil war in France). I agree with Mike Macnair that, for example, Bukharin’s explanation of imperialism’s effect on the socialist workers’ movement, the political compromise of the metropolitan workers with respect to their national states, is better than the idea that they were economically ‘bought off’ (I disagree, however, that the latter was Lenin’s and Trotsky’s essential perspective). I agree as well that the virtue of such an emphatically political explanation is that it can account for similar phenomena in the periphery.

But this raises the issue of what I have called ‘authoritarianism’ or willing support for the status quo and hostility to alternatives, and the subjectivity for doing so, again. Why are the workers more often conservative, even virulently and self-destructively so, than not? The explanation of (some) workers’ support for fascism by reference to their peripheral character (ie, the unemployed or ‘lumpenised’) is what indeed ‘dodges the issue’. While the SPD and KPD’s refusals to fight a civil war against fascism in Germany in 1918-21 and circa 1933 may have been of decisive, conjunctural importance, this itself is what requires explanation (it also leaves aside the Italian case). It cannot be laid simply on bad leadership - on the parties’ bad decisions - without reference to the workers’ fear, or lack of support for better action, which was broken, however briefly, in Germany in 1918-19, but precisely as a civil war among the workers. The contrast of 1918-19 with 1933 could not be clearer: as Adorno put it, 1919 already decided what came later (see Those twenties Columbia 1998).

The issue of Hegelianism is a difficult one: how to include the ‘subjective factor in history’. I think this turns on how one understands Marx’s critique of Hegel. I don’t think that Marx’s reference to the ‘real’ is in an empiricist sense, but rather in Hegel’s sense of the actuality of the rational in the real. The issue turns on the relation of essence and appearance, or, with what necessity things appear as they do. What is essential is what is practical, and what is practical is subjective as well as objective. Theoretical reflection on the subjective must use metaphysical categories that are not merely handy, but actually constitutive of social practices in which one is a subject. The commodity form is not a generalisation from experience.

All of this, however, is largely beside the point regarding Platypus. For the conversation we seek to host is not between ourselves and others, but much more widely on the avowed left, and among those with far greater experience than what is available among our own members. We serve only to facilitate, even if we have to elbow our way in, provocatively, to make the space for such conversation, otherwise foreclosed. We consider the need for such conversation to be more ideological than practical at present.

I am glad that comrade Macnair recognises that Platypus may “serve a useful anti-sectarian purpose in near-future politics. It is also possible that it serves a useful political purpose by hammering home the bankruptcy of both the ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ left.” This is precisely what we intend, though I think it is potentially much more. If Platypus does successfully what Macnair thinks it might, I for one will be happy to allow the “guide to history” through which we understand our own efforts to be considered a ‘useful myth’.

Useful Platypus
Useful Platypus

Abstract slogan

One has to wonder what the point is of theses such as ‘The Arab awakening and Israel-Palestine’ (June 30). On even the most basic level, it asserts that which it attempts to prove, underlying which is a paucity of analysis, made up only by half-digested generalisations.

The whole question of an Arab nation is problematic. Arab unity died with the Abassid caliphate nearly 800 years ago and arguably long before. So there is very little tradition of political unity. There is a common language, of sorts, but there is no common economy. What there is, of course, is a feeling that the region as a whole has been subject to the depredations of western imperialism, albeit in different ways.

Although the recent uprisings were sparked off in Tunisia, they spread almost entirely to the Arab east. Although the people of the region, including non-Arab minorities, felt a common desire for freedom from their US-imposed dictators, these demands were unsurprisingly focused on the local rulers. Although there is a consciousness of being part of an overall Arab people, the immediate struggles were of necessity local. To raise the demand of Arab unity is to raise an abstract slogan that has no immediate relevance to the most pressing needs of the Arab peoples at this particular juncture. That is not to say that the removal of imperialism from the region as a whole is not an important demand in the future.

However, the failure of the United Arab Republic tells us little. It was a consequence of its own irrelevance to the pressing needs of the day. The theses say: “Evidently, Arab reunification remains a burning but unfulfilled task.” Would that it were so.

Yes, the Israeli Jewish ‘nation’ is historically constituted, but so what? Wasn’t the tiniest principality historically constituted? You can tick all Stalin’s boxes on territorial contiguity and language, but this does not a nation make. Israeli Jewish identity is versus the other, the Palestinians and Arabs. Even within the Israeli Jewish ‘nation’, there are deep ethnic divisions, over such fundamental issues as ‘who is a Jew’. As to their common culture, thousands of nationalist Israeli Jews marching through Arab Jerusalem on Jerusalem day chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’ is one manifestation of this national culture.

It is no more reactionary to deny the existence of an Israel Jewish nation than to deny similar colonial phenomena. But, whereas in the United States and Australia the indigenous people were defeated, if not wiped out, in Israel the colonists have only been partially successful. Israel lives in permanent tension with the Arabs, including its own Arab citizens. That this is precisely the role that imperialism intended for this Jewish Sparta seems to have escaped the attention of some of the most astute Marxist observers and also those who seek explanations in the ‘Jewish’ or Zionist lobby.

Nor is it “half-baked or perverted” to suggest that self-determination, which you accept as being a question of national equality, does not apply to a settler nation. Self-determination simply means the right to be free from national oppression, not that nations have the “right to determine their own fate”, which is a blank cheque for Zionist expansion (as if under capitalism anyone has such a choice). It is therefore meaningless to talk of the right of self-determination of a warrior state, an armed satrap of the west, in such terms. It is a capitulation to social and national chauvinism.

Israel is an artificial entity. It was always intended thus. The fact that it has created a civil society should not blind us to this. The inability of its working class to create its own labour party or even a genuine trade union - and the statist Israeli Labour Party has all but collapsed - is a symptom of this. It is the most rightwing ‘nation’ in the west and also the most racist. Its most atavistic religious elements are increasingly to the fore in national politics and openly argue for the removal and murder, on religious grounds, of the Palestinians. This is the real Zionist national identity coming to the fore. And it finds its expression in the Zionist belief, which is part of Israel law, that there is no Israeli nation - only a Jewish nation. In other words, Israel is not even a state of its own citizens, but a state of Jewish people worldwide.

Yes, the French state is entitled to self-determination, should it be attacked, as in 1940, and its independence threatened. But this is a state that was historically constituted, which underwent a bourgeois revolution and the battle of the Third Republic between democratic republicanism and the clerical-military-royalist castes, imbued with anti-Semitism. It was a fight that was symbolised above all by the trials and tribulations of the Dreyfusards. Pray tell me the name of Israel’s Dreyfus? There is no democratic or republican conflict within the Israeli Jewish people. Alone in the world, there are no anti-imperialist currents. The majority support ‘transfer’ even of Israeli Arab citizens. By a large majority, Jews don’t wish to be neighbours or friends of Arabs. This is the ‘culture’ of a settler people or nation, if you will. But self-determination?

How are Israeli Jews oppressed other than in their dreams? When you use the term ‘genocide’, it is noticeable that it is not applied to those who have suffered from it, the Arab peoples, but instead Jewish Israel. The holocaust was in Europe, not Palestine! It is not the hard-nosed Israeli generals and the rabbi Dov Liors, for whom Jewish blood is superior to that of Arabs, who are in any danger of genocide, but their victims. Even the most common and garden settler racist in Israel has a better understanding of these things than the CPGB aggregate. ‘Gas the Arabs’ is a popular form of settler graffiti. It is no coincidence that a section of the settlers identify their own role with that of Hitler.

The idea of two states is simply not credible because it does not deal with the root of the problem - Zionism. It’s like a solution in Ireland that ignores partition. In fact, British socialists have long since done just this - eg, the Socialist Party. And, in any event, apart from political objections, the settlers have long since ensured that there can be no Palestinian state worthy of the name.

But socialists cannot just counterpose an abstract socialist federation of Arab states to the conflict in the here and now. We have to pose national solutions that are in fact only attainable as a consequence of the overthrow of the Arab order. This means that the solution of a democratic, secular state in Palestine is the only solution in the socialist book. Two democratic, secular states is a nonsense. If they are secular, why have two states?

Moshé Machover asks mischievously, why ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’? I would have thought the answer was obvious: a democratic state can also become a religious tyranny. It is a fundamental precondition that a democratic state should also be a secular state, precisely in order that there is no subjugation of religious minorities.

Abstract slogan
Abstract slogan

Here and now

We can all sympathise with David Douglass in his plea for action now (Letters, June 30). But is it logical to argue that world socialism may be the answer, but we’ll have to wait a long time for it? It is just that attitude that delays socialism and the chance to make a real change. There is nothing “now” to be done that will solve the problem. (He is also overlooking that there is an endless stream of issues under capitalism and a myriad of organisations involved in them all.)

Socialists are not immune to the human tragedies which occur daily. Socialists suffer those tragedies as severely as anyone else. If social activism had solved all the workers’ problems, or were even to be able to say that things were steadily improving, that would argue in favour of the approach that Dave advances. But that is not the case. The reality is that the reforms which the social activists promote do not work. The social activists are not gaining much and the same problems continue to appear. It is so often one step forward, several steps back. One can pick any problem and sometimes find an improvement has taken place but most likely only after a very long period of agitation. Rarely, if ever, has the problem disappeared, and usually other related problems have cropped up to fill the vacuum of suffering left by the ‘solution’.

Socialist activists have claimed impressive ‘successes’ and ‘victories’ in every field except one. History has proven beyond any shadow of doubt that they have not remotely convinced the workers of the need for socialism. The efforts of social activists have been geared to an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable contradictions of capitalism.

There are two kinds of reformism. One has no intention of bringing about revolutionary change; the other being the one Dave appears to favour that cherishes the belief that successful reforms will somehow prepare the ground for revolution. He is seeking the best of both worlds by both supporting reforms and advocating revolution. Reformists always claim how much better everything would be if only they were in power: the NHS, the environment, the economy, education. And how is all this to be achieved? Dave prudently exercises silence, but we do know the typical left solution: taxing the rich and nationalisation - ie, state capitalism.

Dave also risks believing class struggle militancy can be used as a lever to push the workers along a political road, towards their emancipation. But how is this possible if the workers do not understand the political road and are only engaging in the economic immediate struggles? It can only be concluded that the answer lies in ‘leaders in the know’ who will direct the workers. For revolutionaries to attract support on the basis of reformist policies - on the basis of saying one thing, while really wanting something quite different - would be quite dishonest. And then to maintain non-socialist support, revolutionaries will be forced to drop all talk of socialism and become even more openly reformist.

Dave’s argument (I stand to be corrected) is that the working class is only reformist-minded and winning reformist battles will give the working class confidence. Thus the working class will learn from its struggles and will eventually come to realise that assuming power is the only way to meet its ends, that the working class will realise, through the failure of reforms to meet its needs, the futility of reformism and will overthrow capitalism. Yet, regardless of why or how the reforms are advocated, the result is the same: confusion in the minds of the working class instead of growth of socialist consciousness. Dave desires that revolutionaries should change their ideas to be with the masses rather than trying to convince the masses to change their minds and be with them.

There is little wrong with people campaigning to bring improvements to enhance the quality of their lives and some reforms can indeed make a difference. Our objections to reformism is that our continued existence as propertyless wage-slaves undermines whatever attempts we make to control and better our lives through reforms, that it throws blood, sweat and tears into battles that will be inevitably undermined by the workings of the wages system. All that effort, skill and energy could be better turned against class society.

It is only when people leave reformism behind altogether that socialism will begin to appear to them not as a vague, distant prospect, but as a clear, immediate alternative which they themselves can achieve.

Here and now
Here and now

Straight talking

Wow! Four great letters in the Weekly Worker (June 30).

David Douglass is pretty much as right as someone can be. The left has become all about the fetishes of metropolitan talking heads and chattering professionals. Dave thinks socialists should be talking to and responding truthfully to the working class concerns. What a revolutionary practice that would be.

Pat Corcoran is dead on the target as well. It’s a shame that the lumpenproletariat hasn’t gone away - but most Marxist thought about seeing the real world as it is, rather than how we would wish it to be, has. I’ve always thought the best way to deal with scum is have the threat of a jolly good kick in the knackers, not a promise of a hug from a social worker.

Heather Downs is also right. You lot (the Weekly Worker/CPGB) remind me of the character, Jack, in Fight club. He takes solace from those in pain and gives solace by saying he understands and feels their pain. In the meantime, he does nothing to stop more such desperate cases coming along the production line of society. Now I know that you claim to believe in a socialist-communist society, but, as Dave said, it’s about the here and now.

What a compliment it is for a comrade to be called a ranter. Ranting is a fine English revolutionary tradition that has been lost to a shameful degree. We are in an internet and telly age, where communication is more about the verbal than ever, but the verbal is still clearly despised by the British left, even though it is the most democratic and natural form of communication.

Many class relationships haven’t changed as much as we would like and many pretend since Roman times. The ruling class still maintains instruments of torture and the big stick to maintain their rule and their taxes. I think that is the Marxist position. Not the position of Phil Kent, who wants to pretend that it isn’t normal people who maintain social relationships, but instead a tiny handful of mega-capitalists. So what if someone is against Mubarak? So was the British ruling class.

I liked the bit about how Platypus should speak in plain English, I do wish that the Weekly Worker would talk about politics of concern to ordinary people in the language of ordinary people.

Straight talking
Straight talking

Save Dale Farm

Some 90 families at Dale Farm, the UK’s largest traveller community, have been hand-delivered a final notice of eviction, giving families until midnight on August 31 to abandon their homes, or face their entire community being bulldozed. The central government and Basildon council have set aside over £18 million for the eviction battle that could last three weeks. It will be the biggest clearance of its kind, involving the ploughing up of 54 separate plots created on a former scrapyard purchased by the travellers 10 years ago.

Dale Farm is only a 30-minute train ride from London, and hundreds of people have pledged to join residents in non-violent resistance. The residents have encouraged their supporters to establish a base at Dale Farm - Camp Constant - to resist this eviction and house human rights monitors.

Join us on Saturday August 27 and beyond, starting with a weekend of traveller history and celebration, together with practical eviction resistance training. There will also be training for legal observers and human rights monitors. Sleeping space is available in caravans or you can bring a tent. The eviction could go ahead right after midnight on August 31, so we will be staying at Dale Farm before then in preparation.

On July 9 and beyond, we will be building defences to resist the eviction. We will also hold a meeting every Saturday at 1 pm.

Save Dale Farm
Save Dale Farm

Harare trial

The International Socialist Organisation Zimbabwe wishes to update all progressive cadres, socialists, revolutionaries and democrats who have been in solidarity with us since the unjust February 19 arrest, detention and torture of ISO comrades, student leaders and human rights activists.

The case against them for “subverting a constitutional government” goes to court on July 18 in Harare. Our national coordinating committee comrades, Munyaradzi Gwisai, Tafadzwa Choto and Tatenda Mombeyarara, will be standing trial, together with trade unionist Edison Chakuma, debt rights activist and ex-ISO comrade Hopewell Gumbo, and student leader Welcome Zimuto.

Your solidarity messages condemning our arrests were important in increasing the political cost on Zanu-PF for keeping us detained. You indeed fought for our freedom. They can beat us, kill us and detain us. But they will not survive the revulsion against the intrinsic contradictions of capitalism that we are exposing. Workers will always stand up and revolt. We won’t stand by, while rampant corruption and crass materialism disable both government and private sector. We will shout at the top of our voices when we detect the abuse of power and political intolerance.

Egypt and Tunisia are lessons for the poor and an opener to another Russia 1917. The workers and the oppressed masses of the present world, if united, can easily make capitalism history. As revolutionary socialists we remain convinced that there is only one solution to capitalism. That solution is a revolution.

Please send messages of solidarity.

Harare trial
Harare trial