Letters

Left rut

I don’t want a discussion of what was initially about the question of how to defend workers’ jobs, such as those at Bombardier, simply to become a discussion about the history of the miners’ strike. I will, therefore, keep my responses to Dave Douglass in that regard to a minimum (Letters, September 29).

Dave begins by telling us the basis of the National Union of Mineworkers’ argument in 1984. But this is irrelevant. What I explained was the basis on which the National Coal Board, and behind them the government, had set out to close pits. That basis was surplus capacity, and if capacity was to be reduced it made sense to begin by closing the most marginal pits. Dave repeats the statement that British coal was, and remains, the cheapest deep-mined coal, but, as I pointed out previously, that overall figure hid the fact that some pits’ production was far more expensive than this average.

Kathy O’Donnell, in an article in Capital and Class (‘Brought to account: the NCB and the case for coal’, summer 1985), does a good job of uncovering the economic arguments put by the government and NCB, and by the NUM and Andrew Glyn, in the context of making a case for British coal. As she points out, in 1981-82, 141 out of 198 collieries made a financial loss, but 90% of the NCB’s losses were accounted for by just 30 pits. And, from the time of nationalisation, despite the successive ‘plans for coal’, it was the continuing reduction in demand that had been decisive. The 1950 target of 230-250 metric tonnes for the mid-1960s had fallen to 200-215mt by 1959, actual production in 1965 being 187mt. Demand continued to fall during the 1960s and after 1979 coal consumption fell by 15mt a year.

After nationalisation, there was a massive closure of pits and a reduction in jobs. Between 1960 and 1969, 420 pits were closed with 50% of the workforce (322,000 miners) losing their jobs. So, as I pointed out, it was the overcapacity of coal compared with demand that was the issue, as it always had been, and, under those conditions, the NCB would always seek to close the highest-cost pits.

I am not a miner, but I grew up in a mining village. Both my grandfathers and many of my friends were miners. I was secretary of my miners’ support committee, and on a picket line each and every day of the dispute. But I remember also writing an article for Socialist Organiser at the time setting out why I thought it was wrong to make the economic argument. This was the closest thing to an all-out class struggle there had been in decades. Whether the economic argument stacked up or not was, in reality, irrelevant. The real basis of the dispute was a political struggle of our class against theirs. On that basis, in the short run, it was necessary to defend the jobs, whatever the economic argument.

I think Dave’s argument that the NUM was still strong after 1985, and that this left the government with only the option of closing down the industry, simply will not wash. He knows as well as I do that, on return to work, militants were being disciplined and persecuted left, right and centre, as management got its own back. There were no doubt many disputes during that period, but the NUM won virtually none of them. By this time, there was no need for the NCB to close the industry if the only aim was to discipline the miners.

Dave refers to the loss of demand for coal coming from the downturn in steel and elsewhere, but surely he isn’t arguing that Thatcher closed these industries down solely to discipline their workers. It seems a very strange argument to suggest that capital seeks to make profits by more effective disciplining of the workers, and disciplines the workers by closing itself down!

Dave’s arguments about workers’ control actually do spell out only the kinds of arrangements that were introduced with ‘mutuality’ and, perhaps, more closely with the kinds of post-Fordist arrangements that managements have introduced with workgroup systems, designed to increase productivity. They in no way represent any kind of dual power, and the reality of that was exposed with the closure programme. No-one doubts that safety and conditions improved under nationalisation. But this was just another example of the shift towards Fordist production.

The closure of hundreds of small, expensive collieries after nationalisation, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, was also the cost of introducing the investment in new machinery, which in turn required the introduction of new safety regimes. The bosses would not want to lose millions of pounds of equipment in a cave-in, would they? It was not nationalisation per se that led to these improvements, but the shift to a modern mining industry which was responsible. The same has been seen in many other industries that were not nationalised.

I was not suggesting that cooperative mines could have worked in every case. My point is that it is wrong to simply say that co-ops could not work, and the answer to economies of scale is to link the co-ops together - not just in mining, but across the economy - as the basis for a real workers’ plan for coal, and energy in general, in a way that can never be done under state-capitalist control of any industry.

This brings me to the main point in relation to defending jobs such as those at Bombardier. The real issue here was about the insecurity of all jobs within the context of a capitalist economy. The starting point is to oppose the job losses, full stop, in the short run, whatever the economic arguments. I am obviously for defending workers’ jobs at Bombardier, but I am opposed to defending them by calling for other workers to lose their jobs or by suggesting that this group of workers has a right to jobs above the rights of some other group of workers. That is the road to class division, not unity.

However, I do not go along with the Fabian/Lassallean arguments put forward by most of the left in such cases, arguing for nationalisation, let alone the ridiculous calls for nationalisation under workers’ control, for the reason I have already set out. Nor do I believe that, in anything other than the short run, is it simply possible to oppose such job losses on principle, without putting forward an alternative. In a case like Bombardier, what is really required is for the workers to have their own plans for how they could run the firm themselves and produce goods and services that could have been sold in order to keep the firm going under their ownership. The more we build such a worker-owned sector of the economy, as is happening with the Mondragon co-ops, the more demand is created within this sector and the more production can be planned rather than left to the vagaries of the market.

In that respect, I’d ask Dave what his attitude is to the job losses at BAe? Is he, as with the NUM position in 1984 and his position now in respect of Bombardier, in favour of adopting a purely trade unionist position of defending existing jobs on the basis of defending the status quo? What that really means is defending the production of means of destruction - effective killing machines sold to every tinpot dictator and tyrant around the globe with which they will suppress their workers. Surely, no socialist can defend that, but it does not mean we cannot argue for defence of those jobs. We can defend them on the basis of arguing for direct workers’ ownership of the business as a co-op and for the establishment by those workers of an alternative plan of useful production.

The left really has to get out of the Lasallean/Fabian rut of thinking within the existing system, confining itself to a trade union consciousness, and begin thinking like socialists who are actively - here, today - trying to transform the means of production and social relations and to construct socialism within the existing capitalism.

Left rut
Left rut

Greenwash

Again, David Douglass avoids the issue and misrepresents my point of view. I wrote that “coal kills, and kills more than any other form of energy ever known to have been developed by humans” (Letters, September 22). Miners’ deaths are a small percentage of the numbers. I wasn’t saying, or even implying, that the killing of people was the issue of coal mine/pit safety (albeit it is one, obviously).

Secondly, uranium miners, what few there are, generally work in safer, open pit mines than underground coal miners. Additionally, a lot of uranium is ‘mined’ as a secondary by-product of other metal mining, such as copper. We can look forward to a day when advanced breeder reactors completely eliminate the need for any mining whatsoever with regard to uranium. On this, uranium is not a ‘fossil fuel’, as Dave wrote, as it wasn’t created by dead animals and vegetation like coal and petroleum.

Thirdly, ‘clean coal’ (a term invented by the US coal industry in 1987 as a marketing sleight of hand, and a scientific oxymoron if there ever was one) is still an expensive pipe dream. I actually endorse the application of CO₂ mitigation where possible, but clearly, after the failure of several experiments in this regard, coal remains quite dirty, quite the killer. The Chinese are the most serious about this and have some real programmes to see if it can be done, given their massive use of coal. But despite those like NUM president Arthur Scargill, who goes to ‘green conferences’ trying to greenwash coal, it’s made zero headway in the environmental movement.

Fourthly, we know that coal kills tens of thousands of people every year in the US alone, the existence of technology to mitigate this notwithstanding (dubious at best anyway). Coal is increasingly being mined with ever fewer miners but with deadly environmental mountain-top removal or open pits in the US. There exist no plans at all to retrofit generating plants to make them any cleaner than they are now. Coal is the largest single source of heavy metal contamination in the US with dangerous, chemically toxic material like mercury, uranium, thorium and other material unregulated and literally spewing from every smoke stack where the substance is burned.

While there is a huge debate over nuclear energy, there is almost no debate over the continued use of coal. I agree, it will be burned for some time. But long-term planning means planning to end it, completely, and some countries are attempting to do this or at least mitigate it with nuclear and renewable energy (the latter, of course, can’t replace coal’s density or on-demand loading of power plants).

Lastly, on nationalisation, I raise this because, while Dave is correct that this doesn’t mean a nuclear future, it does open the debate for society to say ‘How do we want to go?’ It’s a basic working class right that something as important as energy be taken out of the hands of the profiteers and speculators. The struggle for a socialist society will require a lot more energy than we use now, even to get off fossil fuels, like coal. Socialism means the expansion of the productive forces, not its restriction, and for this we need vast amounts of cleaner, cheaper and usable energy. If this means more coal, it’s dead in the water. As Lenin stated, “Communism equals soviet power and electrification.” He couldn’t have been more correct.

Greenwash
Greenwash

Energy primary

It is an amazing fact that most Marxists continue to ignore the present unfolding energy crisis related to the peaking of global oil production - otherwise known as ‘Hubbert’s peak’, or simply ‘peak oil’ - when trying to explain the predicament in which capitalism now finds itself.

This attitude however, is not entirely new. When the Opec embargo led to the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973, which triggered the deepest post-war recession up to that time, Marxists explained the recession in terms of the falling rate of profit, or overproduction and underconsumption theories. These same explanations are being rolled out once again to explain the current crisis. In other words, most Marxist and bourgeois economists are completely unaware that the content of the present crisis is the peaking of global production, leading to the end of economic growth for capitalism.

There is a warning which needs to be issued to those who are new to the peak oil debate, or who are not familiar with its intricacies. There are two sides to it, with those who oppose the peak oil thesis being referred to as cornucopians. This side believes that the peaking of oil output is years away and that there is plenty of oil left, and when oil does peak, technology will be able to solve the problem effortlessly. The cornucopians are led by free-market academic economists who are in the pay of the oil companies. Their job is to mislead those who are aware of the importance of the energy issues for as long as possible in order to protect oil company shares.

Those who defend the peak oil thesis do not claim oil is running out and therefore we are all doomed. We say that cheap, easily accessible and best-quality oil, referred to as conventional oil, will soon be in decline. Only if we fail to make a transition to a steady state society will we face social disintegration. One of the problems we face is that the collapsing world economy will bring oil prices down by cutting demand. This leads to the illusion that there is no oil crisis, and these lower prices also discourage investment in alternatives. Alternatives though can only mitigate the problems posed by oil depletion. At the present time renewable energy can only produce a tiny fraction of what we get from fossil fuels. What is needed is a complete reorganisation of society on the basis of production for need, not to increase profits to service a debt-based economy, which requires ever increasing supplies of energy.

While Hillel Ticktin is right to point out, for instance, that the falling rate of profit or underconsumption do not explain the present crisis (neither does overproduction), he makes the mistake of seeking Lenin’s authority to explain this crisis in terms of the existence of surplus capital lacking investment opportunities, which then leads to a financial bubble that must eventually burst (Weekly Worker September 8). Indeed, both Marxist and bourgeois economists have failed to locate the real sources of the present crisis, which is leading to a depression from which capitalism will not recover.

Why is it that Marxists like Ticktin, and most bourgeois economists, fail to identify the true cause of the present economic downturn? In my view, it is no accident that both Marxism and bourgeois political economy have got it wrong about the true nature of the present, unfolding depression. Both were formulated at a time when political economy had no need to pay any special attention to the question of energy and the role it plays in society. Consequently, it is not surprising that Marxist theories about capitalist decline or disintegration have nothing to say about the role of energy in the process, although everyone knows that no economic activity can proceed without energy. In the 19th century depletion was not an issue for economists, as far as I know.

While most people on the left will agree with the idea that Marxism remains useful in its critique of capital, what is generally not understood is that it is actually inadequate to explain the present unfolding depression. The reason why Marxists are explaining this crisis in terms of the falling rate of profit, overproduction or underconsumption - and in Ticktin’s case the existence of surplus capital - is because Marxism’s origins as a critique of classical bourgeois political economy lead to viewing all crises as emanating from the circulation of capital. By not realising that energy is primary, bourgeois and orthodox Marxist economic theory misleads people about the real causes.

To understand why this crisis is the first of its kind in the history of capitalism, it is necessary to realise that what we call the industrial revolution, which led to the birth of bourgeois political economy, was a qualitative break from all previous human civilisations, in that this transition to modernity was in essence an energy revolution. In their economic activities, humans began to replace renewable energy with non-renewable power. In other words, we have built a civilisation which is almost completely dependent on non-renewable, fossilised energy.

The energy transition which we call the industrial revolution also led to the idea of economic growth - or at least made it central to bourgeois economic thinking. Growth was and remains the number one mantra of the advocates of capitalism, which unlike previous societies cannot exist for long without constant expansion. While Marxism helps us to understand the laws of motion of capitalist society, this process of capital accumulation or economic growth requires abundant supplies of cheap energy, which capitalism first found in coal, followed by oil, gas and nuclear fuel.

The problem is, without increasing supplies of cheap energy economic growth becomes increasingly problematic or even unattainable. This is the stage we have reached now. The whole of bourgeois economics is based on the notion of promoting economic growth, and the political competition in bourgeois political discourse is mostly about which party can best secure it. Traditional political economy, particularly in its neoliberal guise, does not recognise any limits to growth and it would seem too that through Marxism the socialist left has taken this idea on board. When Stalin, in his Economic problems of socialism in the USSR, wrote that the basic law of socialism was “the securing of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole of society through the continuous expansion and perfection of socialist production on the basis of higher technique”, he was simply repeating the views of Marxism, which presumably saw no limits to growth.

Energy primary
Energy primary

Refreshing

Mike Macnair’s article, ‘Mapping the alternative’ (September 29), which calls for the workers’ movement to start acting on a European scale, is the kind or polemic that decided me to apply for membership of the CPGB - one lives in hope of a ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ in due course.

Mouthing easy slogans like ‘Tax the rich’ will not get us anywhere; what is needed is unity between the various leftist splinter groups - not just in Britain, but throughout the European Union. We must first build a Europe-wide communist party and, I would add, a Europe-wide united front of leftist parties.

Also in comrade Macnair’s article was mention of the importance of rebuilding the strength of the trade unions, cooperatives and mutuals and defeating the bureaucracy within them. Without strong, Europe-wide proletarian and people’s organisations of this kind, we are indeed just ‘confessional sects’ arguing among ourselves about who are the purest Marxists with the most revolutionary-sounding slogans.

The phrase ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ is perhaps particularly appropriate in this context. The Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community and later developed into the EU, was capitalist in nature, but in so far as the EU has many of the attributes of an embryo superstate, it does require EU-wide working class organisations to fight for socialist and communist alternatives. The fact that many countries within the EU had mass communist, socialist and workers’ parties in the past can only add to the case for EU-wide proletarian solidarity and organisation.

These states include France and Italy from the former western camp, but also many former socialist states whose experiences will be invaluable in avoiding the pitfalls of the Stalinist bureaucracies, whilst reviving the ideas which worked well. The latter includes the workers’ and consumer cooperatives and small-scale, publicly owned enterprises which competed in the friendly socialist marketplace of comrade Tito’s Yugoslavia. Several former Yugoslav states are now in the EU, as is the most successful of the Soviet-style states, the area formerly known as the German Democratic Republic. Not forgetting the Republic of Cyprus, the only communist-led administration within the EU.

We need the expertise and experience of our comrades in these countries, and we badly need to build the EU-wide party organisation to fight the EU bureaucracy and set forth Europe-wide alternative Marxist policies. This is why I find the CPGB/Weekly Worker approach so refreshing and enjoy reading the open debates in the letters page. Only by debating can we build the united party and united front here, and throughout the EU, that is so badly needed, as capitalism teeters from one crisis to another.

Refreshing
Refreshing

De jure

Mike Macnair’s recent article raises good points, but criticisms need to be made with respect to public policy.

First, a Europe-wide anti-austerity struggle is a start, but not as good for the UK situation as the establishment of an affiliate of the European United Left-Nordic Green Left in the UK, preferably by Chartist-inspired British Die Linke-ists and other leftists outside the nationalist Communist Party of Britain.

Second, Macnair is criticising the ‘close the havens and tax the rich’ schemes from the wrong angle in saying that, “in reality, to actually implement either policy would involve an overthrow of the current international state system”. It sounds a bit too much like Marx’s premature judgment in the Communist manifesto about the ‘transitional’ character of some measures, like land value taxation, progressive income taxation and free education. What is needed is a platform for structural, radical, pro-labour reform beyond these cheap schemes. It is better to err on the side of caution (reforms deemed achievable even if they may not be) than to scream ‘transitional’ till the cows come home.

Third, such a platform is missing from the CPGB Draft programme. In my November 11 2010 letter, I listed five planks this side of revolution. I’ll add a few more:

1. The redistribution as cooperative property of not some but all productive property where the related business has contract or formally hired labour, and where such property would otherwise be immediately inherited through legal will or through gifting and other loopholes;

2. The encouragement of, and unconditional economic assistance for, pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing enterprises and enterprise operations, as even an alternative to (Die Linke-style) non-insolvency restrictions like legally binding workplace closure vetoes and coupling prohibitions on mass sackings or mass layoffs with socially secure transfers to more sustainable workplaces;

3. The heavy appropriation of economic rent in the broadcast spectrum, unconditional economic assistance for independent mass media cooperative start-ups, especially at more local levels, for purposes of media decentralisation and anti-inheritance transformation of all the relevant mass media properties under private ownership into cooperative property; and ...

4. The protection of workers’ cooperatives from degenerating into mere business partnerships by means of prohibiting all subcontracting of labour.

Finally, given the increase in the ranks of precarious workers and the lack of programmatic discussion on mundane issues like wage theft, the CPGB Draft programme considers fully socialising the labour market, again this side of revolution, as the sole de jure employer of all workers in society, contracting out all labour services to the private sector on the basis of comprehensive worker protections.

De jure
De jure

Jarrow fatigue

I’ll not bother responding to Mark Fischer in any detail again (‘They obeyed the rules’, September 29). He simply ignores the contrary facts I put to him, quoting wholesale from Matt Perry but with added cynicism, giving even less credit to the march and its motives than Perry does. Readers might, aside from my own comments in the previous papers, wish to read Jarrow march by Tom Pickard (London 1982), which gives a thoroughly more sympathetic and balanced view of the event.

In concluding my side of this correspondence on this subject, let me say I had the privilege of marching with the Youth Fight for Jobs and their Jarrow March 2011, as they set off from Jarrow on Saturday. It was a very moving affair. One couldn’t fail to be struck by the enthusiasm of the ranks of young folk at the head of the march, demanding real jobs, work and education. The march was accompanied by Easington Colliery band belting out its martial tunes and followed by PCS and RMT union banners, as well as those of North East Shop Stewards Network and Socialist Party branches. There were also a few well known rank-and-filers from Unite and strikers from AEI Birtley, who are currently in the middle of a bitter fight for jobs.

The route took the march through the crowded town centre and was everywhere cheered by shoppers and drinkers from the bars who came out to cheer and clap. But it was the reaction of the old folk which most moved me. A number were in tears, not simply at the memory of what happened 75 years ago, but the miserable fact that our young people have to do it all again. This is not to say, and the speakers all made this point, that the conditions endured by this generation are anything remotely as bad as those of our grandparents and great grandparents. The march moved through numerous small streets and communities and most people came out of their houses to clap and donate money into the collection buckets. A small army of little kids joined from the streets to march triumphantly with the parade and be proudly photographed by their parents.

That this march struck a chord here is beyond question, whatever Mark and current debunkers of our history want to make of the crusaders of 1936 - the purpose of that march and its place in working class history in this region is firm and secure anyway. I salute the Socialist Party and YFJ for this initiative. It certainly stirred the pot of discussion and debate on the current social system and its failures, and the need for a radical shift in priorities and social agendas - and that must surely be supported and welcomed.

An added bonus was the fact that Labour-run South Tyneside council tried to ban the march by demanding a £2,500 fee to ‘close roads’ and, in the process, hit the headlines of press and TV across the region, attracting the universal condemnation of local people and ensuring many of them turned up with their kids to demonstrate their support for the march and for democracy. These bans on parades, festivals and marches of all sorts driven by ‘health and safety’ paranoia and compensation phobia are becoming extremely commonplace across the country. It is a worrying trend that we need to be firm about resisting and defying.

Jarrow fatigue
Jarrow fatigue

Petty stuff

It seems that those on the left who engage in sectarianism justify it by claiming other groups’ proposals are flawed. The irony here couldn’t be more apparent. Sectarianism is a very flawed way of trying to achieve Marxism, as it narrows the base of popular resistance to capitalism and popular understanding of Marxism.

Of course, it is fair to exclude some groups on the ‘left’ who are Stalinists or call for a state-capitalist dictatorship, as they evidently aren’t Marxists. But to exclude groups based on a different hypothetical approach to Libya or other petty stuff isn’t doing the left any favours.

The CPGB isn’t as guilty of this as other groups. But I sigh when articles have the obligatory attacks on other left groups. Why can’t we have more relevant Marxist analysis of the interesting issues at hand instead? Even if only by a small measure, that would help achieving Marxism more than sectarianism does.

Petty stuff
Petty stuff