Letters

Left joke

In his defence of the closure of British industry as some sort of progressive efficiency drive which capitalism is undertaking for the benefit of humankind globally, nowhere is Arthur Bough more dramatically wrong than in the case of coal mining (Letters, August 11).

He talks of “those things which can now be produced more efficiently elsewhere ... in Asia, Latin America and increasingly in Africa.” Does Arthur have any idea of the hell holes that coal mines are in precisely those places? The death and injury rates in Africa and China, for example? That he thinks Chinese coal mines, which slaughter our comrades in their tens of thousands, are “more efficient” than British mines is sheer madness. In Latin America the death and injury rate can only be described as carnage. Their coal mines are infamous for explosions, rock falls and inundations, with scant, if any, regard for safety and massive death, injury and disease rates.

Prior to the end of apartheid, South Africa saw 500 miners a year die in coal mines alone and they called it ‘cheap coal’. It was in fact the dearest coal in the world outside of China in terms of deaths and injury. Sadly, the death and injury rate has not fallen appreciably since the end of apartheid.

Much of the coal coming into Britain comes from the ex-Soviet republics, whose coalfields are regularly wracked with explosions of methane gas - the control of which is a very basic science of coal mining. By far the most safety-efficient coal mines in the world were British and, yes, primarily as a result of nationalisation and a powerful trade union, which ensured safety levels rose steadily throughout its life.

It was also due to large inroads of workers’ control and miners’ independent safety rights, which were heavily protected by an armoury of legal statutes and acts hard fought for over the centuries. The right to carry a flame safety lamp gives workers the ability to detect gas in their own working areas and shut off all production and power then and there, without reference to anyone else - a right which, were it to exist in China or Russia, would save many thousands of lives each year.

When it comes to the assertion that the reason for the closure of British production in favour of overseas manufacture is that “the firms in those other countries have been able to produce those goods more cheaply than can British capitalists”, Arthur is again utterly wrong, certainly when it comes to coal.

Britain was producing the cheapest deep-mined coal in Europe and among the cheapest in the world. This it did, as I said, while engaging in the safest coal production anywhere in the world. In 1979 European Economic Community figures showed that the National Coal Board had the lowest production cost in Europe at £29 per tonne, compared to £45 in France and £41 in West Germany. On top of this government subsidies averaged at £1.62 per tonne in the UK, compared to £17.96 in France and £7.41 in West Germany (EEC documents quoted in The miners and the battle for Britain). The only coal which was and is cheaper to produce is Australian open cast, but it too receives a subsidy of more than double anything British coal ever received. So you’re wrong, Arthur, and badly wrong.

It wasn’t me advancing the cause of nationalisation of Bombardier; that was Peter Manson. But Arthur is wrong about nationalisation of the mines and its impact. I am a fourth-generation coal miner and nobody can tell us nationalisation didn’t bring a massive improvement in terms and conditions and health and safety, although it was a long way short of what we had demanded. The privatised coal industry today in Britain may be more productive than the old NCB, but at the cost of safety, hours of work, job control and union rights. Nonetheless, because of the continued, though weakened, presence of the National Union of Mineworkers and the fallback of strict legislation, private British coal remains the safest by far in the world.

I should add, by the way, that nowhere in these figures have I included the social costs of the closures and the switch from coal produced here. Were we to do that, we would be talking in ten of billions of pounds.

So finally we come to Arthur’s question as to why, if British coal was so efficient, did British capitalism wipe it out. No, it wasn’t “for the hell of it”, but if Arthur thinks capitalism’s sole motivation is profit, then he is rather naive. Control and power are of primary importance to the capitalists and we have witnessed many times in wars, strikes, etc the suspension of profit-making in order to retain their dominance of society. In this case, the trade union movement, represented in its best traditions by the NUM and the mining communities, was too strong. We represented a different vision of society, and a massive strategic economic and political clout (84% of all power generation).

The rolling back of the organised working class, shifting strategic production abroad and relying on finance and banking alone could not be done without defeating the miners and, by the time John Major came along, that meant wiping out the whole coal industry. Traditional British industry had the highest density of union membership and the highest gross membership, represented in mass, militant, class-conscious unions. Strike figures and combativity demonstrated over decades it was these workers and their industries which posed the biggest potential challenge to governments and ultimately the system.

Listening to Arthur, one could believe that the actions of capitalism in Britain were the best of all possible worlds and, hey, it spreads the work around and gives workers in the third world a chance to join us, so we should stop complaining. Best bet is to do nothing at all then: just put up with it, or set up a cooperative making “socially useful products”. But not railway carriages or coal or ships or steel; clothes pegs might be an idea or perhaps some back-to-subsistence agricultural commune, while the workers on this island mark time and wait until the flush of revolution sweeps Asia, Africa and Latin America and we can be rescued.

Is it any wonder the British working class sees the ‘left’ as a joke?

Left joke
Left joke

String 'em up

Henry Mitchell excoriates the participants in the recent riots and disturbances, a great outburst of “irrational” criminality from a thoroughly “subproletarian” layer of society (Letters, September 1). “It is not politics, but psychoanalysis, that is relevant to the understanding of rebel psychology,” he tells us - we are spared, thankfully, any disquisitions on the authoritarian personality.

In fact, no level of opprobrium seems quite harsh enough for comrade Mitchell: surely, he advises us, the Bolsheviks, had they been in power last month, would have “decisively crushed” these rapscallions, who have “excluded themselves from civilisation”. The picture is grim - a social stratum irredeemably lost to vulgar consumerism and casual criminality, from whom we can expect literally nothing better.

Grim, and grimly familiar: all comrade Mitchell has done is reproduced the jeremiads of the rightwing gutter press (Owen Jones’s Chavs compiles many of the variations) and give them a quasi-left tilt. What sings out, both from the pages of the Daily Mail and from Mitchell’s missive, is a compulsive hatred for the perpetrators, which pre-empts any chance at useful suggestions of what to do about the evidently enormous weight of atomisation in what amount to the poorest communities in Britain.

Mitchell demands the workers’ movement dissociate itself completely from these lumpen scum, though exactly why it would be a bad idea for us to win them for something useful, as opposed to petty criminality, is left unexamined.

String 'em up
String 'em up

Rage

Henry Mitchell is critical of those who argue that the recent riots were political. Mitchell claims that the rioters were just “narcissistic groups, consumeristic and selfish, that put crime before the needs of the community”.

Naomi Klein argues the contrary and I would have to agree with her (The Guardian August 18). She recalls the looting in Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion, which emptied libraries and museums, while workers stripped factories. At the time, she points out, the looting was thought to be highly political, reflecting the fact that the regime had no legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

Klein goes on to cite Argentina circa 2001. The economy was in free fall and thousands of people in the rough neighbourhoods looted foreign-owned superstores. The looting had been preceded by the elite selling off the country’s assets, stashing their money offshore and then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Once again the ruling elite lacked the respect of the people.

Similarly, here in Britain, we have seen the establishment exposed for its corruption. The MPs’ expenses scandal showed how our ruling elite were prepared to grab as much as they could from the public purse. Then the banking crisis exposed the greed of the bankers, who played Russian roulette with the economy and pocketed huge bonuses. The Murdoch scandal showed that sections of our justice system could be bought and sold.

Cleary Mitchell is wrong to try and argue that the riots were not political. The rage that we saw on the streets is an expression against an unjust system. Whilst, however, the riots shook up the system, conscious, collective action is needed for any lasting change.

Rage
Rage

Distortions

Why does the Weekly Worker constantly rely on distortion as a tool in its sectarian and often childish reporting of other groups? Is it, as I concluded after reading Eddie Ford’s article on the recent riots, that you have nothing to offer the movement in face of events such as these riots (‘Aftermath of August', September 1)?

As far as I can see, you are placing the failure to provide answers for the class during the riots on other lefts. In so doing you resort to distorting, in particular, the views of the Socialist Party in England and Wales by taking out of context 19 words from an article of 2,000-plus words. You claim the Socialist Party “complained that the police did not act effectively to defend people’s homes and small businesses”. What the SP article stated was not its view of the police, but that of local people.

Eddie then compounds this distortion by writing: “We take it then that SPEW’s ‘answer’ to the riots, and to declining capitalism in general, is to demand more policing.” I do not usually adopt the following sort of comment as a method of debate within the movement (although it does appear to be yours), but what a load of crap. Are you really saying that the contributor to The Socialist should not reflect the views of people caught up in an event?

It was quite clear that the views were those of local people and Eddie and the CPGB can assume, invent, whatever they like. But please try to retain at least a small degree of reality when it comes to important issues facing the working class. Reality in this case is that the views of the SP were outlined throughout the article and, in particular, within the list of programmatic aims and demands in the article’s concluding paragraphs. Of course, you do not quote any of these.

You, the CPGB, the SP and I have expectations of the police and the other forces of the state. But an average person being firebombed or having her windows smashed may have other expectations. That person may think, ‘I’m a taxpayer and aren’t the police supposed to stop this rather than stand at the end of the street watching?’

In a socialist party of a mass, or neo-mass, nature I would start to consider putting forward ideas such as workers’ defence forces. These can exist even now, but in limited form. Defence of meetings under attack from reactionaries or, as in the early days of Trotskyism, against the Stalinists. Also in the case of specific activities by reaction, as with the English Defence League at Tower Hamlets. But we are not yet at that stage of development where defence could be organised on the scale required.

The task before us is the building of a mass workers’ party, which will involve argument, debate and polemical disputes. For this process to be of any use, we should be honest about our ideas and the ideas of others.

Distortions
Distortions

Jarrow myth

My old comrade Dave Douglass reminds us that the wellspring of the Jarrow crusade of 1936 was “the massive levels of unemployment (more than 80% for males) in Jarrow and surrounding areas ... real, hard social deprivation”, not the cynical machinations of either the workers’ movement bureaucracy or the ruling class (Letters, September 1). If he had left it there, this would have introduced a useful element of balance into our assessment of the event. However, his wider attempt to colour Jarrow red is deeply unconvincing.

First, the comrade makes great play of the fact that “‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, the town’s leftwing MP and former founder member of the CPGB”, was “instrumental” in the march’s organisation. Frankly, I don’t really see the point being made here - Wilkinson was already well on the political path that would see her take a ministerial portfolio in the 1945 Labour government. After the 1929 general election, she had been appointed by prime minister Ramsay MacDonald as parliamentary secretary to the minister of health. This is not to deny she was on the left of the Labour Party, but then we actually have to be clear about the nature of the Labour left, don’t we? Its relationship to the party’s right has - thus far - been a symbiotic one, not one of irreconcilable conflict. Thus Wilkinson accepted the political paradigm of the pro-capitalist wing of the party and - although that wing certainly didn’t support the Jarrow initiative - even its absence did not prevent it imposing strict political limits on its character. The left acted as its proxy.

For example, at the 1936 Labour conference one Lucy Middleton, parliamentary candidate and wife of the party’s national secretary, criticised Wilkinson for “sending hungry and ill-clad men on a march to London”. In her moving book on Jarrow - The town that was murdered - Wilkinson characterised this as symptomatic of “an attitude of official disapproval” - ie, the hostility of the labour bureaucracy to organised actions by the unemployed in general. Her response? “Wilkinson registered her surprise”, given that Jarrow had been “100% respectable” (M Perry The Jarrow crusade: protest and legend Sunderland 2005, pp41-42).

Making the march “respectable” for the right wing of the movement necessarily entailed disassociation from communists and the genuinely mass National Unemployed Workers Movement that these disreputable elements led - as Perry also notes, the prominence of leading communists in the NUWM was a “recurrent excuse for refusing to work with [it] or mobilise a mass campaign against unemployment” (p41). It is this, not the supposed radicalism of the Jarrow action, that accounts for the hostility of the Labour and trade union leaderships.

By the way, Dave misunderstood my comment that Jarrow was “official lauded”: I was referring to how it is regarded today. I am well aware that the TUC and Labour leaderships opposed it at the time - obviously, as the Matt Perry quote above succinctly puts it, they would oppose any initiative to organise the unemployed, even in the supine, begging-bowl manner of Jarrow. Why? Because given the mass impact, success and deep implantation of the NUWM, an initiative in this field implied either an association or a direct competition with the communists - a link that the Labour Party apparatus, quite correctly, felt would only make it look pretty bad.

Comrade Douglass then wonders from where I get the strange notion that communists and NUWMers were barred from the march: “A number of local communists and well-known revolutionary socialists were on it the whole way,” he tells us. If they were, they kept their heads down on pain of expulsion. Take the comments of Dave Riley, the Jarrow chief marshal, in the aftermath of an incident in which communists from South Normanton (a pit village near Chesterfield) publicly announce that they had collected £20 for the marchers.

A local Conservative Party official complained. Riley assured him - and the Chesterfield Tories who actually hosted the marchers in the town - that “This is the fourth time the communists have tried to gatecrash ... We are determined at all costs to preserve the non-political character of this crusade ... If necessary we shall call the authorities to assist us” (ibid p85).

Jarrow was framed as an apolitical alternative to the militant, communist-led mass movement that was the NUWM and an atmosphere of anti-communist witch-hunt prevailed on and around it.

Lastly, it is worthwhile pondering this. In the mid-noughties, British embassies around the world featured chronologies of the history of the British people - in other words, coagulated reactionary myths designed to bolster national chauvinist sentiments. On these sites, the 1930s featured just two entries: World War II and ... the Jarrow crusade.

Why, I wonder? Perhaps comrade Douglass will ponder that too.

Jarrow myth
Jarrow myth

Neofolk

I just wanted to congratulate Maciej Zurowski for his article about the neofolk scene (‘Aiming at wrong target’, September 1). This is by far the most honest and accurate account I have read on the matter, but, more importantly, it advances a thesis that is both original and coherent.

I am not a communist myself and would have certainly held a prejudiced opinion of your publication before reading this article. Thanks.

Neofolk
Neofolk

Eminently sane

I couldn't let this pass - 'Aiming at wrong target' is a truly great piece of writing and research. Eminently sane and also hilarious. More from this writer, please.

Eminently sane
Eminently sane

Wonderful

Just wanted to say I thought Maciej Zurowski’s article was wonderful. For too long I have been exasperated by mindless anti-fascists winning (or losing) small battles, when the real danger is not in such fringe phenomena in music sub-sub-sub-scenes. Neither, however, is merely shrugging and denying any sort of thought on the part of the artist - whether right or wrong - a sensible answer, for one ultimately gets the most out of music as art through symbols in exciting thought, not inhibiting it.

Anyway, I thought I should tell you I find this the only well-balanced article I’ve read yet, whether from a left, right or neutral stance.

Wonderful
Wonderful

Sex strike

I was interested to see that some CPGB members have expressed misgivings about Chris Knight’s book Blood relations and his ‘sex-strike’ theory (‘Debate, controversy and comradeship’, September 1). In my opinion, this work is among the most reactionary pieces of biological determinism ever promoted by the left.

Considered to be progressive, if only by readers unfamiliar with anthropology, it is, sadly, nothing of the kind. The theory relies on sociobiology - the idea that society and culture derive purely from a biological base. Chris disguises this with a lot of talk about female solidarity, gender-bending picket lines and defeat of alpha-male dominance, but the underlying principles remain regressive. To see this clearly, consider a theory based on the idea that men would voluntarily undertake sexual abstinence for two weeks every month to manipulate women into gathering vitamin-rich berries. Would such a theory be taken seriously?

Is it credible that women (able-bodied, not pregnant or breastfeeding) couldn’t get their own meat? Even with the help of their brothers? The brothers, remember, have a direct interest in their sisters’ genes being passed on, no matter who the father is. What makes Chris think men prefer sex to meat, while women (who are, after all, the same species) only want the meat? Those manipulative, frigid women, tricking the idiotic men! Since the exchange of sex for meat is identified as the origin of the ‘human revolution’, it appears that women only become fully human by simultaneously becoming prostitutes.

According to comrade Knight, women go to all this trouble to get meat to feed their children. Why don’t men, allegedly so keen to ensure the paternity of babies, show an automatic interest in keeping them alive once they’re born and voluntarily give their children meat?

Then there are lots of problems with empirical facts - eg, research has shown that women do not synchronise their menstrual cycles and nobody has presented a credible mechanism by which this could be achieved. Even in our society, where girls generally get good enough healthcare and nutrition to have their first period as young as eight, it often takes a few years to establish a regular cycle. Add to this Chris’s expectation of almost immediate pregnancy (if possible) and subsequent breastfeeding, which would result in no menstruation for years at a time, and it starts to look increasingly unlikely that cycles could be synchronised.

Evidence of human female polygamy (multiple partners) is shown by male and female being of similar size - like bonobos, but unlike gorillas. Gorillas are polygynous (each alpha male mates exclusively with several females). Males have small genitals because their sperm don’t need to compete inside the female. Bonobo males’ genitals are large to provide enough sperm deposited far enough inside the female to compete with all the other males’ sperm. The genitals of male humans are somewhere in between, indicating female humans were originally predisposed to be less ‘promiscuous’ than bonobos, but not as monogamous as gorillas, which doesn’t support the idea of original alpha-male exclusive dominance overcome by menstrual synchronisation, because visible menstruation developed in response to multiple male partners and because of large foetal brains supported by eating meat.

There seems to be some confusion around the idea of human behaviour having a material basis; just because we’re looking at sexual and reproductive behaviour, it doesn’t mean that sex is the only place we look for material causes of that behaviour. This was the great insight of Engels in his Origin of the family, private property and the state. If our examination of influences on human behaviour is as limited as comrade Knight’s, we inevitably end up with biological determinism.

This has been particularly unhelpful in discussion of gender and sexuality, because it leads to a belief in the inevitability of women’s oppression. The sex strike theory of human evolution holds no progressive potential.

Sex strike
Sex strike

Perplexed

I am somewhat perplexed by Moshé Machover’s remark in his otherwise excellent article, ‘Israel rocked by protests’ (September 1), that I am “unable to see the difference” between expressing satisfaction that Israelis are at last learning lessons from the Arab spring and the comments of a journalist that “At long last we have learnt something from the Arabs!”

By itself the remark can clearly be construed as implying that up till now Israelis have had nothing to learn from Arabs and that Arabs have had nothing to teach them. This is a viewpoint common to settler-colonial peoples and it was not so much a question of ‘reviling’ the comment as using it to illustrate that the July 14 protest movement in Israel is still held back by the politics of Zionism. But I disagree that it is “a typically appreciative remark”.

I can fully understand and sympathise with Moshé’s enthusiasm for what is happening in the Israeli protest movement and I share that enthusiasm, but to a more limited degree. The question is whether the movement can achieve even a limited victory without Israeli Arabs and Palestinians living under occupation paying the price.

The proof of the pudding will be in whether the protest movement can transform itself into or help crystallise a political party that will encompass the demands of Israel’s Jewish poor and the Arabs living in Israel. Historically, the omens are not good and the question will be whether the protest movements in the Arab world and Syria in particular will continue to finish what they started or whether they will disintegrate, as in Libya.

Perplexed
Perplexed

Lake campaign

Thousands of protestors came onto the streets of Orumieh, a city in north-west Iran, in the last week of August to voice their concerns about Orumieh Lake. They were chanting in Turkish, “Give life to Orumieh, let the river flow, cure its heart”. This demonstration was organised after the parliament (majles) declined to take this up as an emergency matter.

Orumieh is drying up and dying. The third biggest salt lake in the world has lost a large amount of water and area since 1998. This lake used to cover about 5,200 square kilometres, was 140 kilometres long and 55 kilometres wide. Now 60% of it has become salt desert, and the maximum depth of the lake has decreased from 16 to five metres. The drying up of Orumieh Lake will not only affect the tourist industry, but the combination of dry salt and the wind will also be catastrophic for agricultural land in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan.

Islamic Republic officials try to blame natural causes for this tragedy. They talk about drought and global warming, but a little research indicates that the regime in general and the Revolutionary Guards in particular are responsible for what local people call a ‘salt tsunami’. Ecologists in Iran believe that the building of 35 dams on rivers supplying water to the lake is the main reason for the drying up. Revolutionary Guard generals (sardars) now form a new capitalist class. These sardars built dams across the rivers for irrigation to produce different kinds of fruit and other agricultural products.

The people of Orumieh are very concerned about the future of the lake. If it dies, salt storms will change the ecology of the region. But the secret police and anti-riot units have suppressed peaceful demonstrations. Like anything else in the Islamic Republic, the decisions are made at the top. They always serve the profits of the ruling class.

Lake campaign
Lake campaign

Stop eviction

The date for the £18 million pound eviction of Dale Farm, a former scrapyard which is now home to 90 families, has been revealed to be Monday September 19.

Residents are calling on supporters to come to help them stop the eviction. They are also calling for legal observers and human rights monitors to come down to act as witnesses. Dale Farm is only a half-hour by train from London Liverpool Street station. The council has threatened to close roads in advance, so it is recommended that people come as many days before the eviction as possible. Sleeping space in homes is available, but please bring a tent if you can.

On September 19 Basildon council and the coalition government, who are financing this, will face a moral challenge to explain to thousands of people and the world’s assembled media why they are choosing to make over 100 children homeless and remove them from their schools.

Stop eviction
Stop eviction