Letters

Sepia

My comrade Dave Douglass should learn to quit when he’s behind (Letters, October 20). Indeed, I’m a little at a loss as to why he is still squabbling, since he appears actually to agree with me on the central point about the politics of the Jarrow march. To quote the comrade himself, these politics defined it as “a popular front-style protest” - that is, an action that subordinated independent working class interests to curry favour and foster a possible alliance with trends of bourgeois political opinion.

Having conceded this, the rest of the copy the comrade churns out in his characteristically Stakhanovite quantities is, like its Soviet variant, more or less non-functional - when it is not factually incorrect, of course. Yes, I am happy to accept as good coin the left political credentials of some Jarrow marchers, the bloodcurdling revolutionary speeches made before and after the action itself, the opposition to it from the establishment and the leaders of the official workers’ movement (to reiterate, Dave, when I talk of Jarrow 1936 being “officially lauded”, I am speaking of our contemporary mainstream politics, not the establishment’s reaction at the time - as I made abundantly clear in a previous letter (September 8).

So what? The original article I penned was about the political template of the Jarrow event and the efficacy of - as you precisely define it, Dave - “popular front-style protest” for the battles our class, including its unemployed components, will face in the coming years. It is in that sense we must reject the lessons taught by Jarrow and critically engage with the militant history - warts ’n all - of the National Unemployed Workers Movement.

Instead, Dave’s allergic reaction to drawing a sharp political line like this inclines him dangerously close to a type of mawkish proletarian sentimentality. So it seems one of his key objections to my criticism of Jarrow is that, “whatever [my] motive”, the effect is to “[diminish] class identity at a time of growing hopelessness among the class”. It is hard to follow Dave’s logic here. I contend that the 1936 march was precisely an exercise in diminishing and diluting class-consciousness - something we should reject in favour of the genuinely mass traditions of militant unemployed organisation we have in our common heritage and that should be culturally integral to any healthy workers’ movement.

You’ve got it arse-backwards, comrade. Our class shouldn’t buy into sepia-tinged, establishment-endorsed myths about its own history. When we do, it acts to cripple, divert and dilute our struggles in the here and now.

Sepia
Sepia

Nuclear vs coal

In response to Dave Douglass’ strident defence of the continued use of coal (Letters, October 20), I want to correct him where he is clearly wrong.

On ‘coal versus nuclear’ and issues of safety, coal is, factually, the highest source of heavy metal content in the world today. This is not a new finding. It is one of the leading causes of particulate death in the United States - up to 30,000 a year.

Yes, coal is way more dangerous than nuclear. Nuclear energy hasn’t killed anyone in the US. Coal kills. Not from 2,000 years ago as a cumulative number, but right now, today. Dave cheers the fact that coal mines are “popping up like daisies”. But every consumer of coal - be it for home heating in China or coal plants in the US - means death. There is not a significant number of plants going up using carbon capture and storage (CCS) or particulate mitigation. Thus, every new plant that burns dirty coal is just that - a burner of dirty coal - and it will kill people. Every plant, bar the half dozen with some CCS, means going a step closer to climate change.

I actually support CCS. There are only a few plants in the world that have it because it is very expensive to implement. The Chinese are indeed spending vast sums rolling out pilots to test the ability of their thousand coal plants to adapt the technology. I think it would be a good thing if it could be rolled out because, like Dave, I have no green fantasies that we won’t be burning coal decades from now.

But every coal plant can be replaced with a clean, zero-carbon nuclear plant (the eventual goal of the Chinese, in fact). The Scots just announced the closure of their pilot CCS plant in Longannet. It seems a pity to interrupt, but it’s now official that the UK’s CCS demonstration project has bitten the dust. Costs had risen to the point that it was going to add about £2 billion to add post-combustion CCS to just one of the eight 300MW units at the Longannet coal-fired station (and even then it’d have captured only 90% of the CO₂ produced. HMG was going to put £1 billion into the scheme, but private investors would commit only £500 million, so it failed.

On that basis, CCS coal is going to come in at about £7.5 billion per GW (let’s be generous and say £5 billion for economies of scale and improved design over the next decade), or about £8 billion adjusted for availability to average output. New-build nuclear here is on course to cost £3.3 billion-£5 billion on that same basis. This, of course, is nation-dependent: ie, where both coal and nuclear are built. But coal dust and CO₂ are going to continue and there is simply no momentum towards planetary CCS.

Secondly, the coal tailings around which Dave claims to have had frolicking days camping and sleeping around are notorious for their pollution of ground water, dam collapse and so on. Like him, I’d be for totally transforming the vast areas surrounding the coal mines and collieries of both our countries to true greenfield status. But this dirt is polluting a lot more than it’s not, and it’s getting worse here in the US, in the UK and in India and China, where it represents a huge environmental disaster. That coal continues to expand is dooming the planet and no manner of spin is going to make coal ‘clean’.

As for uranium, this produces the decay product, radon, which is ubiquitous in the Earth’s crust. It has a short biological half-life, meaning it’s usually gone in about three days. However, miners, especially those in deep shaft mines with little or no ventilation, stand a good chance of getting ill and dying. But, with proper ventilation and union-enforced safety rules, uranium becomes much less dangerous - probably safer than coal mining. But there are so few uranium miners that it becomes less of a concern, generally. As with coal mining, danger can be mitigated by proper safety and engineering procedures and enforcement.

The future will be to eliminate all uranium mining for the reactors now coming on line - be they fast reactors, which use nuclear waste as fuel, or thorium, something the Chinese are pouring money into now.

As for nuclear energy and military weapons, this is on old green canard raised by Dave. Nuclear energy rests only on its own civilian infrastructure. It doesn’t need a military connection and, in fact, almost all nuclear weapons use enriched uranium and plutonium produced from specialised nuclear WMD reactors. The connection between nuclear energy and weapons is akin to that of the aerospace industry that derived every single passenger jet liner from the B-52 and other weapons programmes.

Commercial nuclear energy is wholly independent of the military wing outside the ‘theoretical physics’ that is fission. This is why most nations with nuclear energy do not have weapons programmes. It’s cheaper to just build the weapons from these specialised reactors. Above all, nuclear weapons are a political decision, one of policy for pro-war governments. Having or not having a civilian energy programme is wholly irrelevant. We need to attack nuclear weapons and campaign politically for nuclear disarmament.

Only nuclear energy can truly get rid of nuclear weapons by down-blending highly enriched U235 into usable fuel to be burned up in nuclear plants. We should demand the expansion of these programmes to include the Chinese, British, French and American nuclear stockpiles.

So we have three major on-demand fuel sources being developed, despite any protestations from greens or the left: coal, nuclear and - the big one - natural gas, sneaking in under the cover of ‘green energy’ and promoted wholesale by wings of the green movement. And it will be this way for decades, as the need for more and more energy shows no abatement.

Nuclear vs coal
Nuclear vs coal

Swinging

I was once a supporter of Kondratiev’s long-wave economic theory, which is what Arthur Bough is supporting today, with a great deal of insistence, it would seem (Letters, October 13). Unlike Bough, I realise that that the long-wave theory no longer applies. So why does Bough not recognise this?

Once again, I need to remind readers of the Weekly Worker that traditional political economy, left or right, Marxist or capitalist, was formulated at a time when economic processes were not related to energy availability. This tradition continues both in Marxist and bourgeois circles. According to the long-wave theory, revolution and wars tend to occur during the upward phase of the cycle. This no doubt is one of the reasons why Bough is adhering to Kondratiev.

Stalin rejected the theory and had Kondratiev arrested, no doubt because he interpreted it as removing revolution from the agenda, or removing conscious control from the party. Trotsky, as Bough points out, played it down because the theory did not take account of exogenous factors. Bough is making the type of mistake which Trotsky surely would have recognised. In other words, to uphold Kondratiev’s theory today in the light of new economic conditions, when the peaking of global oil production, a geologically imposed exogenous factor, is now serving to sabotage the normal working of the upward phase of the long-wave cycle, would be mindless dogmatism. The crisis from 2007-08 signalled the end of Kondratiev theory, meaning that, generally speaking, from now on there will be no more upswings for capitalism, but continual decline, as oil production continues to stagnate before starting its long-term decline.

Today it is not the up-waves of capitalism which will trigger wars and revolutions, but capitalism’s permanent crisis and decline. It is necessary to be charitable to Arthur Bough, though. He may not be familiar with peak oil theory, or the notion of an energy crisis bringing capitalism to its knees, and so he is not in a position to think about its social and political consequences and how socialism will have to get around this problem.

Swinging
Swinging

Hypocritical

I found the article ‘Black Bloc allowed to wreck protest’ (October 20) highly controversial in light of the violence amongst demonstrators soon afterwards in Greece.

The ‘No stewards’ caption under the photo of the protests suggests that you advocate stewards fighting young anarchists. To promote the importance of parties having “a degree of internal cohesion, group loyalty and discipline” is in marked contrast to your very recent articles about the actually existing Moonie-like parties over the past decades. However, I do appreciate that the CPGB would complain about the actual, ongoing reality of what you would wish for in your imagination. I feel past exchanges of letters in your paper illustrate that the Bolsheviks could be defined as ‘substitutionist’ (party in power rather than the working class in power).

You complain that “the behaviour of the Black Bloc was completely counterproductive in terms of the demonstration’s original organisers, who sought to build the broadest possible mass movement”. You are being hypocritical here, as you have constantly criticised attempts to build the widest possible popular fronts, such as Stop the War Coalition - the difference being that you failed to be “counterproductive” to this ineffective strategy.

You (rightly) didn’t criticise the 1984 miners’ strike for giving the government “the wonderful excuse” to respond with authoritarian measures. Some in your paper have advocated ‘class war’, which would inevitably bring warlike measures from the government and result in “intensifying repression”. You never ‘owned up’ that strikes you supported brought in anti-union laws. Your article suggests the Rifondazione Comunista leader was somehow brilliant because he simply didn’t support banning strikes and marches! You are being hypocritical if, in the future, any working class activity you advocate brings in the “wonderful excuse” of “state repression” and then you fail to be self-critical and condemn your own programme.

You mention how anarchist behaviour towards other demonstrators is “absolutely inexcusable”, but the article suggests you are advocating stewards dishing out violence against young anarchists - though again I expect you would complain about the actual reality of this police-steward united front in practice rather than what you imagined. Indeed could it be that the bureaucracy of a trade union arranging to physically sort out anarchists ends up being “counterproductive” and brings on more violence and increases anarchy?

We should be serious and careful about these events rather than simply advocating some Stalinist or David Icke-like conspiracy theories about the police and Black Bloc working together based on ‘suggestions’ from “some” and the feeling they were acting “suspiciously”.

Hypocritical
Hypocritical

Whole point

James Turley writes of the Occupy movement: “Sniffy comments [from parts of the left] … about … their left-liberal campaignist political character rather miss the point” (‘A global act of refusal’, October 20).

Did I miss something? I thought this was the whole basis of the article - and justified, in my opinion.

Whole point
Whole point

Implicit threat

The murder of Gaddafi is a victory for imperialism. While Gaddafi was no more a revolutionary than Saddam Hussein, neither military figures were the puppets that imperialism expects from bourgeois politicians. It is no coincidence that both countries have huge oil resources.

Gaddafi was apparently killed or injured by Nato bombing. While imperialism faces world economic crisis, the imperialist military still has a privileged status, which functions without the cuts faced by social services throughout the world. Imperialism always attempts to use military technology to suppress its economic contradictions.

The killing of Gaddafi is an implicit threat to genuine revolutionaries who did not share Gaddafi’s petty bourgeois politics, but will surely face the same imperialist intervention in a future genuine socialist revolution.

Implicit threat
Implicit threat

What are you doing?

Marx famously said that “philosophers have long interpreted the world - the point is to change it”.

In that context, while I see the importance of engaging in critique of what other professed revolutionary socialist organisations are doing, I would ask what members of the CPGB are doing on the ground themselves to push forward the workers’ movement, besides making interventions at events like Marxism (SWP), Socialism (SPEW) and Anti-capitalism (Workers Power), where they call for a new communist party and for the left to face a massive regroupment.

I look forward to a reply in the following issue of Weekly Worker and engaging in this debate about how communists relate to the wider working class.

What are you doing?
What are you doing?

Crisis and cuts

On Saturday October 23 comrades gathered in Manchester for the first Northern Communist Forum. The meeting was on ‘Can we beat the cuts?’ and was opened by the chair of the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee, John Bridge.

Comrade Bridge outlined how the economic crisis had arisen, placing it within the framework of capitalist decline. He noted that what is “remarkable” is that the bourgeoisie is virtually in a state of panic. It does not have a plan to overcome the crisis and is reduced to reacting frantically to events as they occur. But the bourgeoisie has learned from the mistakes it made in the 1930s, when it refused to intervene and watched the crisis morph into the great depression and eventually World War II. Following the 2007 financial crisis there was a pragmatic, ‘road to Damascus’ conversion of the majority of the bourgeoisie, who broke with the neoliberal paradigm and began pumping trillions of dollars into the economy.

He also contended that Keynesianism, a civilised version of capitalist decline, actually causes the system to further malfunction. Nevertheless Keynesianism and organised capitalism can be seen as a negative anticipation of socialism, as discussed by Engels in Anti-Dühring. However, even when the ruling class abandoned Keynesianism in the 1980s it was unable to go back to classical capitalism. What we have with financialisation and globalisation is “pseudo-markets”, which, of course, themselves malfunction, and are further evidence of systemic decline. We should reject superficial references to the GDP and so on, which demonstrated continued expansion of the system before the present downturn. Instead Marxists look deeper - eg, at the historical undermining of the law of value - in order to understand where the system is going.

Comrade Bridge went on to criticise the revolutionary left for failing to step up and meet the challenges. Instead of uniting on a principled, Marxist basis as the attacks increase, many groups have seen the economic crisis as an opportunity for their own sect. This is, of course, most eloquently demonstrated by a Socialist Workers Party pre-conference bulletin last year, which set the aim of recruiting a paltry 1,000 members in 2011.

Comrade Bridge went to say that what we need is “a radical break” with sectarianism and bureaucratic centralism. We must build a revolutionary party that is as democratic as it is dynamic - a party that the whole left can make its own. If we want to stop the slide into barbarism, with which the present situation is pregnant, we need to organise for the working class to come to power at the very least on a regional basis. In Europe, the strategic task of communists is to unite the movement, fight for European unions and a Communist Party of the European Union.

The debate that followed centred around the failure of the left to move forward and lead the resistance against the cuts in a principled manner. Several contributors noted the complete stupidity of competing socialist groups setting up rival ‘united’ campaigns against the cuts. Many comrades agreed that the Keynesian approach pushed by large sections of the self-styled revolutionary left is an utter dead end. We also discussed whether the relative decline of the United States would lead to a multi-polar world in which China would usurp the USA as the imperialist hegemon, just as the USA supplanted the British empire. Most comrades thought not.

The Northern Communist Forums are a CPGB-sponsored series of meetings in Manchester. We are looking to work and hear from a variety of comrades and tendencies over the next few months. We have also organised a reading group, which will be studying Victor Serge’s From Lenin to Stalin. The next forum, on November 20, will be on ‘Women’s liberation and the Russian Revolution’ at the Friends Meeting House at 3pm.

Crisis and cuts
Crisis and cuts

Sustainable

It is true that Chris Knight’s thesis on the self-creation of the human species is enhanced if it can be shown that women are able to synchronise their menstrual periods.

But his theory also argues that the females collectively conspire to prevent any male having sex with any female except on their terms. This was the cutting edge of their fight for human equality. Sex is the central relationship in the survival of all animals. All apes are sexually manipulative. It is a mistake to equate sexual manipulation in the name of the survival of the species with human prostitution. A view so common on the left that Frederick Engels invented a phrase for it: viewing the world through   ‘brothel-tinted’ glasses.

Comrade Knight’s argument also explains why the females can rely on the support of the beta males. The females are in fact acting in the majority interest, not just their own. They are making truly democratic demands.

No alpha male would confuse red ochre for real blood, but they did, and still do amongst the few remaining matriachal tribes, relate to the symbolism of the ceremonies positively. The singing, dancing and development of tradition drew the alpha males into the larger community. They are not destroyed: rather they are socialised. Also the ceremonies create a relationship of partnership with the world around, rather than one of simple animal exploitation.

The males do get sex after they bring home the hunt. This changes them into fathers and providers. Unlike other male apes that just follow the females around waiting for sexual opportunities, but are otherwise of little use. So it is not just a question of manipulating male sexuality, as Heather Downs asserts (Letters, October 20). Rather it is a question of a sustainable mode of production, in which work and culture are united.

Sustainable
Sustainable