WeeklyWorker

Letters

No dogma

Tony Clark is right that Labour needs to be won over to the idea of a “sustainable, democratic, socialist society” (Letters, November 3). But I am sure he would agree that socialism cannot be simply legislated from above by the ‘next Labour government’. Unless Labour overcomes its belief that “predatory capitalism” can be made sweet, an Ed Miliband government pursuing a ‘less deep, less quick’ austerity programme in the ‘national interests’ of British capitalism, accompanied by traditional Labour hand-wringing and heart-searching, will undermine the working class, not strengthen it.

That is why Labour Party Marxists’ motion to the Labour Representation Committee’s annual conference at ULU on November 19 opposes the Labour Party forming a government to run capitalism. So long as the working class is not strong enough to challenge the system, Labour should back the development of the workers’ movement as a principled opposition.

Socialism can only be delivered by a confident working class majority which has been won to the necessity of superseding the capitalist system, replacing minority capitalist class rule (capitalism) with majority working class rule (socialism), leading to classless communism. Working class rule is only sustainable, of course, on a continental scale and, ultimately, on a world scale. That perspective is the kind of Marxism that the working class - and the Labour Party - needs.

But comrade Clark is “not convinced” that the Labour Party needs Marxism, or which of “the many different versions of Marxism on offer” it needs. He is, of course, knocking Marxism as a whole on the spurious grounds that dogmatic, one-sided versions exist.

However, criticising “some Marxists” for reducing Marx’s understanding of capitalist crisis to a single factor - overproduction - he offers us instead his own one-sided technological dogma. Marxism is supposedly outdated because of the growing shortage of cheap oil production. As if technological change and the revolutionising of productive technique were not always part and parcel of capitalism.

Saying that Marxism did not invent class struggle, comrade Clark is clouding what Engels and then Marx discovered about class struggle - that capitalism creates the working class, its own gravediggers; that only the working class can end capitalism; and that a working class semi-state is needed during the socialist transition from capitalism to communism. Marxist socialism is working class socialism.

Who can disagree with comrade Clark’s proposition that we don’t need, for example, Marxist economics in a “dogmatic form” or in the “one-sided way it is usually presented”. But we do need it in its authentic, rounded, scientific form. It was Marx who broke through the limits of the classical political economy of Adam Smith, Ricardo et al with his theory of surplus value, showing how exploitation works under capitalism, a society of nominally free and equal individuals.

Lastly, I would ask comrade Clark not to fall for the idea that Marxist philosophical materialism is somehow undermined by what may be perfectly legitimate claims by “quantum physicists” that “consciousness can influence reality”. It was pre-Marxist mechanical materialism which downplayed the active role of consciousness in shaping development.

Marxist materialism is dialectical: although matter is primary, mind and matter interact. Of course consciousness influences reality.

No dogma
No dogma

Dangerous

Tony Clark asserts: “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?”

It leaves Marx’s view exactly where it was, comrade Clark. The clue is in the phrase “quantum level”. Effects can occur at quantum level that, apparently, do not occur anywhere else. The major anomaly in physics today is that theories which describe the quantum world and the world of the ‘big’ are radically incompatible with each other. No doubt a Nobel prize awaits the first physicist who comes up with a ‘grand unified theory’ which can overcome this embarrassment.

Clark is also incorrect to assume that Marxism is comparable to a ‘hard science’ such as physics. In his Minds, brains and science, John Searle points out that there are three major types of science:

The philosophical world outlook of Marxism has been abused by those who believe, or at least pretend to believe, that the doctrine is akin to a set of Newtonian laws for social science. Such abuse ranges from the Communist International to, more recently, followers of the ‘WRP tradition’, where regular ‘predictions’ of capitalist collapse were systemic to the party ideology. Paradoxically, it is when we understand the limitations of Marxism as akin to a social science that its potential power as an agent of liberation rather than a statement of quasi-religious dogma is revealed.

Tony Clark’s letter indicates not so much the inadequacy of that 19th century theory, Marxism, but rather the continued efficacy of that 18th century epigram, ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’.

Dangerous
Dangerous

Rapturist

Tony Clark says that I am probably not aware of the peak oil thesis (Letters, October 27). On the contrary, I have been very familiar with it, and the work of MK Hubbert, for more than a decade. Not only that, but I agree broadly with Hubbert’s findings. The problem is that I do not see what Tony thinks this has to do with the long wave. What Tony puts forward is not Marxism, but Malthusianism.

Unfortunately, I am old enough to have seen and heard these kinds of ‘catastrophist’ notions put forward a number of times - whether it be the forewarning of impending economic catastrophe of the kind that you can read most weeks in the Weekly Worker and most other left papers, or environmental catastrophe, or simply the ravings of the ‘end-timers’, who have forecast the end of the world at least three times during the last year. And, to be honest, I have no more time for the catastrophists of the first two kinds than for the latter. It seems to me that they all spend too much time waiting for their own version of The rapture, which will save them, and not enough time actually focussing on the foundation of Marxism - an optimistic belief in the power of humanity to continually bring about improvements in its condition. We should be focussing on that, and how we can mobilise it, to bring about the changes we desire, rather than waiting for some exogenous event to come along and do the job for us.

Malthus and Ricardo had their own version of peak oil, contrary to what Tony says. For them, it was ‘peak land’. They were writing at a time when land was still the most important input; and, like oil, no more of it was being produced, and what existed was being used up. On that basis, Malthus in particular forecast doom and starvation. Also on that basis, Ricardo built his model of the law of the falling rate of profit and the concept of diminishing returns. They were both wrong, as Marx and subsequent history showed.

The same is true with oil. In the 1970s, I remember the Malthusians of the environmental movement telling us that the environment was screwed (it wasn’t) and that oil was about to run out (it didn’t).

In 1973, a quadrupling in oil prices was the spark that set off a global recession. But what has happened since? I remember petrol hitting £1 a gallon back then. Had it risen in line with wages, today it would be £20 a gallon, as opposed to the £5 it actually costs. Moreover, there have been several spikes in oil prices bigger than that of 1973, but they failed to spark recessions in the same way.

The reason for this is simple, as Marx set out. Scientific development has intervened, just as it did with peak land. Today, higher prices mean more oil is worth recovering, so economic reserves increase. Secondly, scientific development means more can be recovered economically. Most importantly, science has reduced dependence on oil, so that the income elasticity of demand has risen - ie, a given percentage rise in GDP does not bring about the same percentage rise in oil demand as it once did.

In fact, just as previous conjunctures of the long wave were associated with the introduction of new and improved technologies - including, for example, the switch from coal-powered energy in the 19th century to electric, gas and oil in the 20th - so some of the new technologies fulfilling that role today are in the form of alternative energy production. This, along with new technologies based around the microchip, as well as biotechnology and nanotechnology, have produced the new industries around which the new long-wave boom is developing, and has enabled the expansion of exchange-value relations even wider. And, of course, those very technologies also provide the basis for massively reducing energy requirements even further (LED lighting and screens, for example).

Far from peak oil being an impediment to the new boom, it is a fundamental aspect of it, because it provides a useful stimulus for developing these new industries and new technologies. If you doubt that, look at China, whose oil consumption has seen the largest increase of any economy, at a time when the price has been rising sharply. It is China which has seen by far the largest increases in its GDP, and in the standard of living of its citizens. But it is also China that is spending more money than anyone else in order to reduce its dependence on oil by developing new alternative forms of energy, and the industries that go with it.

Simply look at the facts, as I said in my article (‘The crisis is financial, it is not economic’, October 13). Contrary to Tony’s assertion, the global capitalist economy continues to grow - the US achieved growth of 2.5% in the third quarter, for instance - and the potential for extremely rapid growth on the basis of all these new technologies, and the facilitation of world trade that they provide, means that, rather than continual decline, this boom is likely to be bigger than any seen previously in history.

I see that as a great thing and a marvellous opportunity for the working class, just like the long-wave boom after 1890, and the postwar long-wave boom. By contrast, the previous long-wave declines of the 1860s-90s, of the 1920s-30s and of the 1970s-2000 were all associated with hard times for the workers and with reaction, sometimes of the most brutal kind. That is why those on the fascist right who hope for that kind of crisis are at least more rational than are the left, even if they are no more rational in the arguments they put forward to justify their constant expectation of its arrival.

Marxists should leave the sandwichboard variety of analysis to the nutters on Hyde Park Corner. I’ll stick with Marx, and an analysis of the facts.

Rapturist
Rapturist

Not loopy

James Turley’s ‘Waking the dead’ (November 3) makes the typical leftist mistake of dismissing as ‘loopy’ all things described as paranormal.

That UFOs exist is a well-known, documented fact. Not only did the Soviets and western governments investigate them and found this to be so, as documented in the late Donald E Keyhoe’s books - he was a USAF major. Now Nasa scientist and former astronaut Dr Ed Mitchell has also admitted that an alien craft did indeed crash at Roswell in the 1940s, and that there has been ongoing contact. Admissions by such an eminent person, in writing and on UK radio, cannot be easily dismissed. The denials and secrecy are easy to explain - governments do not like to admit that alien craft from wherever they come are invading their airspace with impunity.

As to other aspects of the so-called paranormal, such as contact with entities in other dimensions via mediums/channelers and other means, of course there are frauds and tricksters in all fields. There are also many genuine ones, and there is overwhelming evidence of survival of death which is now convincing an ever increasing number of agnostics, atheists and rationalists who believe it has a scientific basis.

Ronald Pearson is a scientist with an engineering background who dares to think ‘outside the box’ and he has come up with the ‘big breed theory of the universe’, which accounts for all paranormal activity, including survival of consciousness. His scientific theory is accessible on the internet and has been published in scientific journals in Russia.

In the UK, however, he has been refused publication in such journals because his theory conflicts with some of Einstein’s. Research grants and facilities depend on following the orthodox scientific line, but new ideas and theories upsetting the old ones are always treated as heretical at first. It took many years before Galileo’s view of the solar system was accepted.

Quantum physics also gives us a very strange concept of reality, with sub-atomic particles which can be in more than one place at once and interact simultaneously at enormous distances, and sub-atomic particles which revert to wave function when there is no conscious observer. All this is scientific evidence that matter cannot even exist without a conscious observer, that the speed of light can be exceeded and the possibility of other dimensions interpenetrating our own.

Soviet scientists also discovered that all living things have a primary energy or ‘bio plasma’ body. Illnesses show up here before manifested in the physical body, and under certain circumstances the bio plasma body can be shown to survive damage to the physical body.

Another area of evidence for survival is near-death and out-of-the-body experiences - also remote viewing activities, as carried out by intelligence agencies like the CIA and others around the world. These cannot be dismissed as mere hallucination, as there is now a huge volume of evidence, backed up by professional witnesses, that things can be seen and heard accurately at long distance, and also when the person seeing and hearing them is unconscious. This proves that our five senses and the organs facilitating them are not the only means of gathering such information.

Of course, people who bury their heads in the sand and refuse to examine the evidence will know nothing of all this. They will continue to say that all mediums and psychics are cold reading or using tricks. I can vouch that I got a very accurate message from Colin Fry at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon some years ago which could not possibly have been cold reading, guesswork or available by research beforehand. It gave, among other things, an accurate description of renovations to my mother’s kitchen, how and exactly where I’d damaged the working surface - all coming from my maternal grandmother. He gave her name and how she died.

I’ve been criticised by one of your comrades for referring to ‘mysticism’ in some of my emails, but this time it is comrade Turley who has brought the subject up and I feel it deserves an answer from someone who has studied such things and knows what they are talking about.

Not loopy
Not loopy

Consensus

Yes, there is a sort of consensus between David Douglass and me on the fact that the future generation will include, among many other things, coal and nuclear, at least going out to 2050 and beyond. No doubt we think the continuation of the others’ ‘favourite’ forms of generation is unfortunate, but that’s where the debate is.

I think it’s unfortunate that carbon capture sequestration seems to be going away. I say this because, if coal is going to be with us, they should try to employ CCS and particulate mitigation as much as possible until, in my opinion, it can be phased out in favour of generation four nuclear energy. This is many decades away from happening.

I should clarify a point: the issue is the overall particulate effluent, not heavy metal content per se. Most radioactive ‘contamination’ in the environment (thorium, uranium) in the United States that I know of does, in fact, come from coal burning, but it’s not particularly relevant statistically outside the chemical toxicity of both particulate and fly ash. Particulate as a foreign matter in the lungs leads to cancers and heart disease. Tens of thousands of deaths a year are attributed to this in the US.

Consensus
Consensus

SPEW theatre

Last weekend saw the Socialist Party in England and Wales’s annual school, imaginatively entitled Socialism (perhaps not as imaginative as the SWP’s insistence on calling theirs Marxism, in spite of everything).

CPGB comrades were on hand to sell the Weekly Worker and spice up discussions a little; it should be noted that, in flattering contrast to much of the rest of the left, the Socialist Party is rather more welcoming to speakers from other tendencies, and also a little better at responding intelligently to criticism from the floor. Alas, their comrades are no less sniffy when they meet the assorted ‘sectarians’ on the steps of University of London Union, selling their wares. Both we and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty had a tough time of it - but I suppose one cannot expect miracles.

I attended a meeting on the fallout from the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal and the appropriate socialist response - both the opening from comrade Philip Stott (of SPEW’s Scottish sister organisation) and the subsequent discussion was wide-ranging, taking in the accelerated concentration of media conglomerates and the decline of quality and investigative journalism in the face of inexorable economic pressures.

I argued against comrade Stott’s suggestion that wholesale nationalisation of the means of media production is conducive to the greatest possible freedom of the press (a position he interpreted as a de facto vote for the status quo) - but in contrast to the material put out by SPEW in the immediate wake of the affair, he did at least place great emphasis on the desirability of press freedom (except, somewhat ambiguously, for ‘fascists’), as well as the importance of the development of the workers’ movement’s own press (indeed, his main example here - revolutionary German Social Democracy - could have been cribbed from any number of Weekly Worker articles).

Elsewhere, SPEW’s head honcho, Peter Taaffe, grappled with the problems of democracy under socialism. Again, his vision was a little more expansive than the rather mundane image of his organisation might lead one to expect, covering under-represented matters such as the arts, sciences, social interactions and all the other little things that capitalism only cares about inasmuch as there is a buck to be turned out of them.

There was, of course, a major gap in his presentation - the importance of fighting for democracy now, as an integral part of the struggle for socialism. Challenged on this by CPGB comrade Sarah McDonald, he declared agreement with her demands for annual parliaments, the abolition of the monarchy and the Lords and so forth. Very good - but these matters very seldom make it into SPEW’s propaganda, let alone the agitational material in which it places so much stock - restricted as it is almost entirely to ‘bread and butter’ economic issues. Even the democratic demand upon which SPEW places so much stress and in which it takes so much pride - the principle of a workers’ representative on a worker’s wage - gets quietly shelved when it comes to closely allied union bureaucrats.

Saturday’s evening rally was attended by around 400-450 people (perhaps a few hundred more attended at some point over the weekend), and kicked off with the focus squarely on the SPEW front, Youth Fight for Jobs, and its Jarrow march, which finally arrived in London on the Saturday afternoon. After a short film covering their trek, the young marchers trooped in to an extended standing ovation, and led the crowd in chanting. It was a well executed piece of political theatre, the SPEW/Militant tradition not being noted for its dramatic flair.

Notable by their absence were the usual array of left union tops who have bogged down Socialism rallies year after year (only SPEW’s own Janice Godrich, PCS president, spoke on Saturday, although the Sunday rally featured further speakers from the PCS and the Prison officers). This made for a better rally, but may perhaps bode ill for the group’s attempts at favour-currying among these individuals. Time will tell.

SPEW theatre
SPEW theatre

Sexgate

Phil Kent seems to think that the socialisation of men is dependent on women acting as sexual gatekeepers (Letters, October 27). The quotation from Engels about “brothel-tinted glasses” relates to his view that conventional Victorian sexual morality could not account for women having multiple male sexual partners in any context other than prostitution. Therefore, practices such as, for example, group marriage were quite misunderstood.

My contention is that Chris Knight and Phil fall into a similar trap; they think it is quite obvious that women would trade reproductive sex (which they don’t want for its own sake) for meat (which they are unable to get themselves). Meanwhile, men are prepared to make considerable material sacrifice for sex with women who don’t really like it. Simultaneously, these men are uninterested in the survival of their own children. Women, in typical self-sacrificing maternal devotion, lie back and think, if not of England, at least of the palaeolithic Rift Valley. They don’t want the sex and they don’t even want the meat for themselves, only for their children. The attempt to put a radical gloss on this as female collective action, that transforms human evolution by controlling male sexuality, actually makes the theory even more reactionary.

The only other arena where these sorts of ideas are current is in radical (as opposed to socialist) feminism. This relies on the oppression of women by men being the inevitable result of male biology, consequent innate aggression and predatory sexual behaviour. It is quite remarkable, given the hostility usually expressed on the left to that body of work, that the two should have so much in common.

I do not accept that men are naturally sexual predators with no interest in the welfare of children, or that it is the inevitable responsibility of women to control men’s sexual behaviour for the greater good of society. The continued commitment to these reactionary ideas is most unhelpful.

Sexgate
Sexgate

Bureaucrat

Comrade Mike Macnair’s recent Weekly Worker article on principled opposition made lots of key, solid points, but part of me feels that his usage of the word ‘bureaucracy’ is still part of that left tradition that treats it as a swear word.

One Eddy U wrote that: “If there is an analytical lesson to be learned from the demise of Soviet-type societies, it is not about capitalism’s future as much as it is about the socialist alternative itself. Specifically, it is about the role of modern bureaucracy during the transition to socialism. The place of such administration is quite unclear in Marx’s and Engels’s famous but terse exposition of the transition to socialism ... But socialism, like capitalism, is a system of division of labour. Its longterm feasibility has to be based on members of the workforce consenting to their assignments and subordination within the workplace ... Theories of possible future socialisms thus need to address not only the role of modern bureaucracy, but also its political implications during and after the transition to socialism” (books.google.ca/books?id=bciQpfRc87IC).

In my view, bureaucracy is a process, not mere proceduralism, specialised knowledge, division of labour, or hierarchy. What is the realistic alternative other than to establish, on a very permanent basis, an in-house bureaucracy as a means of preparatory organisation?

Bureaucrat
Bureaucrat

Be astute

I have read all the letters you have printed and been deeply impressed at the perspicacity of your correspondents. But, I humbly suggest something new has happened and the Communist Party must now react to it - not just with theory and dogma, but with political astuteness.

What has happened is that capitalism has finally died. Its appearance of life is due only to the heart-lung machine of the media, but it is dead. Even better, people all over the world are starting to realise this fact in spite of the rightwing propaganda of the media.

How should the CPGB react to this new situation? I believe it should offer a simple, easy to understand manifesto that would appeal to 90% of the people, a salient point of which should be to nationalise the petrochemical industry, the power and nuclear industry, all public transport, major supermarket chains, the water industry and the banks. This would bring in hundreds of billions of pounds. For example, our petrol supplies are controlled by private companies who are showing joint profits of over £70 billion every year. Petrol is thus £1.40 a litre. In Venezuela, where the communist government controls the industry, petrol is 7p a litre!

By controlling all the main industries, we would halve the cost of living. People will thus have more in their pockets to spend, which would cause the shops to have to order more, and the factories to take on more and more operatives to fulfil the orders. The unemployment rate would gradually fall to almost zero.

Lastly, I believe it necessary to remind the people that Britain is a one-party country with an immovable head of state, because all three parties espouse the exact same political agenda and we, the people, have not the power to remove our royals, who cost us £202 million a year. Only a communist government will change this utterly undemocratic state of affairs.

Communism is no longer a political preference: it is now a political necessity.

Be astute
Be astute

Shelf life

For some time now, Dave Cope, of the secondhand book trader, Left on the Shelf, and I have been compiling information on the history of radical bookshops of the past. You can find where we are up to at www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk, where there is as full a listing as we have managed so far, together with a bibliography covering mentions of radical bookshops in fiction and nonfiction.

We would appreciate help in filling in the gaps. Today, for example, we received a very comprehensive survey of Marxist-Leninist shops of the past, which will work its way onto the listings soon. I’m also planning a booklet on radical bookshops, which will be less list-based, and would be pleased to hear from any former workers or customers about their experiences.

Shelf life
Shelf life