Letters

Enough said

I’m concluding this recent spate of correspondence mainly because I’ve said all I need to say. Also because the gutter-level, slanderous insult offered by Arthur Bough in his last contribution tells me it’s time to wrap up (Letters, October 20).

I want to clarify that I am in fact a revolutionary communist, of the anarcho-syndicalist variety. I wish to see the working class gain power worldwide, I wish to see the state smashed and I wish to see direct workers’ control of industry and society. However, I am not so foolish as to think movement towards these goals march at an equal pace, or that the frontiers of our challenge and control do not shift back and forth. Gains short, and sometimes far short, of our total objective can be made and have been made. I do not see the defence of these gains, or these short, incremental successes as reformist, or counterproductive. In the real world, the struggle to survive to make ends meet, to stay alive at work, to feed the kids, to keep a roof over our heads, to live in some kind of dignity in old age is the daily battle front of the class war.

It is with that knowledge that I challenged Mark Fischer on his snooty dismissal and vulgar designation of the Jarrow march. As he says, we do not have a disagreement on the politics of that march, its shortfalls, its misleadership and its failed strategy (Letters, October 27). But there was more to the march than those things. The contradictory elements, the background from which these arose, the quality of the men on the march, the appalling social conditions in which they and their families were living, the decade of defeats and betrayals from which it sprang, the role of the CPGB, TUC and Labour leaderships and the rotten compromises they offered all played their part. A spark of communist humanity in Mark’s assessment and designation, a more rounded analysis and I wouldn’t have felt the need to demonstrate the other side of the picture.

When it comes to Dave Walters and his promotion of ‘left’ nuclear power, I think we have actually reached a kind of reluctant consensus: yes, coal is being and will be burned, that there is a need to minimise the harmful effects of the industry and promote carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and other clean forms of coal consumption. I recognise that nuclear will be developed despite those of us who object to it, and for that reason would probably call for an integrated energy programme under workers’ and consumers’ control, whilst I would still argue within that integration for the smallest possible role for nuclear and look to its phasing out.

I do not recognise or accept Dave’s nightmare figures on effects of ‘heavy metals’ in coal and assume by “tailings” he is talking of something different from pit tips I was describing (Letters, October 27). These are totally inert heaps of colliery spoil, on which all sorts of vegetation has grown over decades and no danger has ever arisen. I have never encountered problems with heavy metal, and I suspect this feature must be linked to the rapacious and largely unsupervised US strip and opencast industry.

Dave is wrong (I hope) about CCS in Britain. Although the government has pulled the plug on Longannet, and this follows 40 years of similar indifference to developing clean-coal technologies, a major project is going ahead at Hatfield Colliery (the pit where I served as a union rep for decades) and is due to be online in 2015. That scheme takes out 100% CO₂ and has many other ‘green’ benefits, which I described earlier.

The point is, this is the most efficient coal burning system in the world, and stops CO₂ ever being released. This could be the plimsoll line for all coal-powered plants worldwide - it only requires a political and social boot up the arse to make this happen. As Dave says though, with profit the sole driver, steering energy production to a more costly but socially responsible direction will be hard.

This brings me to Arthur Bough. During my long decades in the coal industry I was involved in every major national, area and regional struggle since 1969, and a thousand local strikes and rag-ups. I was in the forefront of every major picket operation, planned a number of them, faced long imprisonment for conspiracy and much else. I fought with armed scabs and cops.

Despite all this Arthur Bough says I am an “apologist for state capitalism”. This is a highly provocative and offensive slander - nothing more. I will resist the temptation to get into the gutter with him by responding in kind.

Bough has an eccentric, one-dimensional, mechanistic way of analysing pricing, value and economic policy, which renders him incapable of seeing that ‘profit’ and ‘surplus’ are not fixed and static, but tools bent to the particular requirement of the state and capitalism in any particular period. He accepts that British coal was produced more cheaply than any of its competitors, but he argues we had a surplus of coal and this is why the pits were closed. If that were the case, why do they now import 70 million tons of coal from abroad, which is more expensive to produce?

The Thatcher plan was to defeat the National Union of Mineworkers, break up the nationalised coal industry and sell it off to her friends. In order to do this successfully unit costs and marginal cost pricing would replace the way ‘profit and loss’ were previously assessed, making it important to close down those collieries which could not individually be shown to be ‘profitable’. This was determined not by the global price of competitors, but the internal average cost. So ‘unprofitable’ pits were actually just less profitable.

The whole coal industry would only be sellable if the NUM was shown to be broken and the workforce cowed and compliant. By 1992-93 it was clear this couldn’t be served up, as militancy, resistance and strong trade unionism continued and as such the industry would be abandoned wholesale.

Arthur Bough just doesn’t understand the process. British coal was the cheapest in the world until the political decision was made to smash the NUM and sell off the industry. Huge new mining developments had been planned in North Yorkshire, Doncaster, Wales, Staffs and Cleveland. Thorne Colliery in East Yorkshire had been projected to produce 150 million tons in its first five years. In every case the new coalfields were spiked, with the National Coal Board blaming ongoing NUM combativity, while Selby - the richest coalfield in the world, which had the lowest unit production costs anywhere and numerous untapped coal seams - was unceremoniously shut. This wasn’t the placidly deunionised industry the prospective new coal owners had been counting on, so they walked away, and Major closed down the industry.

I have spent 10 years writing a huge book on this whole process from the rise of Thatcher to the Major closures and the miners’ last stand. It seems a bit pointless to have to pull facts and analysis out piecemeal and out of the total context in the way that Bough’s cynicism has demanded. Since I won’t be engaging in further debate with him, readers may wish to read this analysis and history of the period in its entirety in Ghost dancers, available from djdouglass@hotmail.co.uk or from Housmans, Freedom Bookshop and Waterstones.

Enough said
Enough said

Mind and matter

Assuming that the Labour Party continues to exist during the present irreversible crisis and decline of the capitalist system, I am convinced that the right wing will lose their influence and control at a certain stage. What I am not convinced about is the argument that “Labour needs Marxism”, pure and simple (Weekly Worker October 13). Firstly, with the many different versions of Marxism on offer, it is not clear which one Labour needs.

Also, on what level does Labour need Marxism? For instance, it’s possible to argue that the need is on the political level: that is, the recognition that the class struggle of the working class is the struggle for socialism - although, of course, Marxism did not invent this idea. This, however, doesn’t necessarily mean the Labour Party or the working class needs Marxism, particularly in a dogmatic form, on the level of philosophy, economics or theory of history, in the one-sided way it is usually presented. On these latter levels Marxism is only partially true.

Like previous schools of thought, Marxism to a large extent has been turned into a dogma which is unable to recognise the essence of what is really going on. Hence the present crisis was attributed, for instance, to overproduction by some Marxists, although we now know that the inability to restart meaningful growth as a result of stagnating oil energy resources is at its heart.

This is only one example where Marxism is shown to be one-sided. Another is the philosophical question regarding the relationship between being and consciousness. Quantum physicists claim that consciousness can influence reality at a quantum level. Where does this leave Marx’s 19th century view on the relationship between mind and matter?

Marxism has both strengths and weaknesses, and most of its strength relates more to the past than the future; that is why the argument that Labour needs Marxism is very problematical. What Labour does need, however, is to be won over to the idea of a sustainable, democratic, socialist society. We need to get as many people on board as possible in regard to this view.

Mind and matter
Mind and matter

Britain's road

A couple of weeks ago I got the chance to interrogate Rob Griffiths of the Communist Party of Britain when he came to Cambridge as part of his speaking tour promoting Britain’s road to socialism.

Oddly, the CPB accepts the African Union, but not the European Union, which it wants to see broken up. Griffiths explained to me that the AU was different because it is a counterweight to the US and helps facilitate Chinese investment in Africa (he seems to overlook the fact that this has been dubbed ‘neo-colonialism’ in Africa).

Rob Griffiths also ignores the fact that workers’ rights will be no better off at the hands of the British state. We all know what Cameron means by renegotiation of our membership of the EU: withdrawal from the social chapter, etc. When I said that we should aim for a communist united Europe, he quoted Lenin, to the effect that a United States of Europe would be either reactionary or impossible. Before reading your article I had been unfamiliar with this (‘Vile class-collaboration on display at Westminster Hall’, October 27). Obviously, in his mind, the short-cut, reformist route to ‘socialism in Britain’ is much easier to achieve than aiming higher - for a revolutionary Europe.

Before the discussion started, I asked a comrade with sympathies with the Greek Communist Party (KKE) why she thought Greece should get out of the euro (and return to the drachma and the subsequent high inflation?). She told me that the sacrifice and subsequent suffering were necessary for the greater good, which I thought was just needless masochism.

Overall, the discussion was very lacklustre - hardly anybody questioned the CPB general secretary except me, and, apart from his lead-off and summing-up, Griffiths did most of the talking in between too.

Britain's road
Britain's road

I object

I object to Edith Bartelmus-Scholich’s characterisation of the informal meetings of representatives of the four main political platforms in Die Linke as undemocratic, apart from transparency issues (‘A better version of social democracy’, October 27). This is similar to what should be occurring within any party’s media. Quota sampling should be used for cooperation between tendencies, platforms and currents in an editorial organ. This would go a long way towards ensuring that key political positions are not censored from the party press.

Another statement that raised my eyebrows was: “This carefully arranged Personaltableau reflected the different fractions in the party. That’s how mainstream political parties choose their leadership. A left party should do better.” It’s rather rich when considering that the writer’s own organisation probably uses the highly problematic slate system, which, according to one Pat Byrne, is supposed to “recommend a list that consciously includes a good balance of talents and personalities, [but] in practice has allowed leaders to secure their continuous re-election, along with a body of like-minded and loyal followers”.

Ideally Die Linke should employ probability-proportional-to-size sampling in order to measure the relative strength of the tendencies, platforms and currents.

I object
I object

Print death

The news that Tribune has ceased publication in its 75th year comes as no surprise - it only sold around a thousand copies a week. An annual subscription price of £75 did not help and, as Royal Mail continues to increase its postage rates, this model can only get worse.

I agree with Towards a New International Tendency (Tanit) that the days of print editions of leftwing weekly newspapers are numbered. Like many disillusioned Marxists I refuse to donate a large portion of my meagre income to keep them in print.

The demise of Tribune has many lessons for the organised left, including the CPGB and its Weekly Worker, which only sells around 500 hard copies each week. Producing weekly papers such as The Socialist, Socialist Worker, Solidarity and the Weekly Worker is just pouring money into black holes. In 2011, people aged under 30, including the most radical anti-capitalists, do not buy newspapers, but rely on the internet and the i-phone.

It is time that the Weekly Worker jettisons its weekly hard copy and transfers to a web-only publication. The long-delayed update of the website says a lot. The money saved by shutting down the weekly hard-copy production should then be used to finance a professional web design and update the CPGB website.

Print death
Print death