Letters

Miner insult

Dave Douglass accuses me of a “gutter-level, slanderous insult” in my last reply to him. I think that’s a bit of an over-reaction. Nevertheless, if Dave took personal offence at what I said, rather than accepting it as political criticism, I apologise, because it was not intended as such.

I take it that what he was objecting to was my statement that, in defending and promoting the idea of nationalisation by the capitalist state, he was acting as an apologist for state capitalism. I have difficulty in apologising for that, however, because I don’t know how else to describe the promotion of state capitalism as a solution for workers’ problems - as opposed to the solution, proposed by Marx and Engels, of a revolutionary transformation of property relations via workers’ ownership of the means of production. Still less can I think of a different way of expressing that, when the person making the argument in favour of nationalisation by the capitalist state continues to do so on the basis of arguing that such nationalisation has in some way been done to benefit workers rather than capital, despite the evidence they themselves have presented, which contradicts that assertion.

Dave had gone to some length to elaborate the profit-and-loss basis upon which the National Coal Board conducted its activities, and upon which it made decisions concerning pit closures. Yet, having provided that evidence quite clearly, he then still went on to claim that the nationalisation of the coal industry had meant “the lowering of the individual profit motive”! I’m afraid that nothing Dave has said resolves this basic contradiction, including his own unsubstantiated insult that I have an “eccentric, one-dimensional, mechanistic way of analysing pricing, value and economic policy, which renders [me] 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”. In fact, the last part of this sentence surely undermines further his own claims about the benefits of nationalisation for workers, and his statement that it lowers the individual profit motive.

Nor does anything he says in this regard resolve the contradiction in his argument in favour of nationalising other firms, such as Bombardier and BAe. If, as he claims, the state closed down the coal industry for no other reason than it was the only way of defeating a militant workforce, he still has to explain why on earth that same state, with a Cameron-led government, would nationalise these other industries, given that they would have to have a far more militant, far more revolutionary and class-conscious workforce than were the miners, if these industries were to be able to force that state to concede any kind of meaningful “workers’ control” to them, as Dave insists upon.

Let me be clear. In saying that Dave’s arguments amount to apologism for state capitalism, I am not in any sense impugning his revolutionary credentials or inclinations. I have no doubt that he wants to rip the head off capitalism, but that does not change the fact that, objectively, the arguments he raises lead in the opposite direction. People can simply be wrong without having in any way become traitors to their class. In demolishing the arguments of one of his Narodnik opponents, Lenin described them as “reactionary”. But, in a note to the article, Lenin pointed out that, in doing so, it did not in any way change the fact that his opponent had proved himself over the years as a dedicated revolutionary.

As Dave says he does not intend to respond further, I will not pick up on the further contradictions in his argument relating to pit closures, as the arguments I have already put forward previously adequately do that.

It is one thing to oppose a reactionary return of state-owned property to private capital; it is another to advocate such state-capitalist solutions rather than a revolutionary transformation of property relations, by the establishment of worker-owned property.

Miner insult
Miner insult

Republican?

I have been puzzling over exactly how the CPGB plans to reform the Labour Party. I take it as given that the CPGB is not trying openly or secretly to reform it into a revolutionary Marxist Party. The only thing that makes any sense to me is a plan to reform the Labour Party into a republican socialist party. On the surface this seems like a damn good plan (I won’t bore readers with the negatives).

Then up pops a new group called ‘Labour Party Marxists’, which Mike Macnair tells us is “politically close to the CPGB” (‘Principled opposition, not constitutional cretinism’, November 3). It has put forward the following motion to the AGM of the Labour Representation Committee:

“The Labour Representation Committee does not aim for a Labour government for its own sake. Bad Labour governments do not lead to good Labour governments. They lead to Tory governments. History shows that Labour governments committed to managing the capitalist system and loyal to the existing constitutional order create disillusionment in the working class.

“The aim must be that the Labour Party should only consider forming a government when it has the active support of a clear majority of the population and has a realistic prospect of implementing a full socialist programme.”

This is obviously inspired by our great republican socialist traditions. It is hinting at republicanism combined with the aim of a full socialist programme. If this was passed by the LRC it would be a step towards a republican socialist party. No wonder Stuart King is gnashing his teeth because he fears and loathes republicanism.

But I can also understand his frustration. Why are Labour Party Marxists only hinting at or flirting with republicanism. There is a picture of the queen above the article, so we all get the message. Stuart recognises what these Marxists are up to and says it is bonkers.

Come on, Labour Party Marxists, have the courage of your convictions and use the ‘R’ word. Tell the Labour Party it must become republican socialist, not royalist capitalist.

Republican?
Republican?

Expediency

Peter Manson reviewed the Socialist Workers Party’s latest pre-conference Internal Bulletin (No2) in last week’s paper (‘No ambition, no vision’, November 10).

In the bulletin the SWP central committee say, “The revolutionary left can seem tiny, irrelevant and marginalised”, and, yes, it is tiny. However, the SWP cannot be criticised for trying to build the party, as Peter Manson suggests, when he says, “How about trying to develop a winning strategy for our class, not one that aims to make the SWP marginally less tiny?”

Who is to say which of the numerous left parties has the winning strategy? This is the type of attitude that is certainly not going to win any friends, if ever there were discussions to build the mass party of millions that the left needs. What sort of time frame does Peter Manson suggest it will take to build that party? I am sure other left groups would be quite pleased to recruit 100 members in one day. Once members are recruited, what happens to them after they have signed the membership form is another question. Of course, Peter Manson adds the caveat that he does not want to be mistaken about recruiting people to the left.

Expediency
Expediency

Sexgate

Heather Downs starts her critique of Chris Knight in the wrong place (Letters, November 10). Unlike comrade Knight, who first demonstrates a material chain of events that relates our ape ancestors to modern humans, she begins with how people ought to behave. Yes, our female ancestors did have an interest in controlling the bullying of alpha males, but the alpha male does not provision his sexual partners nor their offspring.

Over time, with bigger brains, first grandmothers, then aunts and sisters were recruited into the care and provisioning of offspring. But it took the human revolution to turn males from being the leisured class into a productive class. Only when the female-led coalition took control over female sexual availability and began the system of group marriage did long-distance big-game hunting become possible. This was done by men. But what they killed did not belong to them. There was a taboo against them eating their own kill. The meat belonged to wives and their kin.

The point is that the human revolution created a much more complex pattern of relationships, including the identification of the male as a father with emotional interests in his offspring. Humans made the leap from biology to culture and with that came greater trust between individuals, - and not forgetting language, art and ritual.

The social reality that came into being with the human revolution represents our creation as humans and was for the first hundred thousand years or so militantly egalitarian: practically everything was shared.

The ritual of sexual gatekeeping that offends comrade Downs was the common culture of both sexes. It was part of the mode of production - part of the tempo and meaning of life equally for both sexes; part of a shared power. It maximised human freedom within the bounds of the nature-given necessities that ruled their existence. And who knows what people did in the periods when they were not having heterosexual sex. Perhaps it wasn’t all about forced sexual abstinence.

They had all the faults that you find in humans today, including jealous outbursts, aggression and other forms of unacceptable behaviour. It was their success in dealing with these issues without recourse to laws, police or prisons that made them so civilised.

Sexgate
Sexgate

Stalin erred

The issue raised by Jack Conrad’s article, ‘Lenin and the United States of Europe’, for or against, is a dividing line amongst sections of the left (November 3). Yet the left need not be divided on this issue if it is approached in the right way.

For Lenin, writing in 1915, the ‘United Europe’ slogan was subordinated to the slogan for the ‘United States of the World’. However, at the time he considered this latter slogan premature because “first, it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others” (VI Lenin CW Vol 21, pp339-43).

Lenin regarded the world revolutionary process in a dialectical way. In this view, it is unnecessary to choose between socialism in one country and the world revolution, although comrade Conrad disagrees and charges Lenin with sloppiness around the issue of socialism in one country. Unlike Lenin, our old friend Trotsky demanded that communists choose between the two: “Either permanent revolution or socialism in one country” (The permanent revolution London 1962, p11). In practice, for Trotsky everything was either-or and he went on to found his Fourth International on this anti-dialectical basis.

No honest person can doubt that Stalin, whether you like him or not, defended Lenin’s strategic line to the letter, but, of course, this did not stop him from making tactical errors and committing crimes which sullied his reputation in the eyes of the more sensitive folk, although politics rarely attracts sensitive souls. However, there is a lesson for the left to learn from these old differences.

Not many things in life are either-or. We must learn to distinguish those which are and those which are not. The question of European unity is not an either-or issue. There are positive sides to it and negative sides. On the plus side, it promotes European integration and, on the other, it may strengthen the power of capitalism - that is, in the normal course of things. But with capitalism reaching the end of growth, we are no longer living in the normal course of things.

Stalin erred
Stalin erred

Fees and cuts

One year after breaking into the lobby of Tory HQ at Millbank, on November 9 students marched through London again, the central themes being tuition fees, soaring youth unemployment and the restructuring of higher education.

Attendance was around 8,000-10,000 (though police estimates put it at much less), significantly lower than last year. This should be expected with the National Union of Students’ lack of any real mobilisation for the demonstration and the left’s lack of strategy. Most of the building and careful planning for the day had been on the part of the police, who mustered horses, dogs, at least three helicopters and thousands of officers - it seems that even in these times of austerity no expense is spared when it comes to putting on a show of intimidation.

The Met had spent the week before November 9 warning that baton rounds and rubber bullets had been authorised in an attempt to appear tough on public order (although this may have backfired in terms of the press coverage). Despite the provocative policing, however, there were relatively few disturbances on the day - there were a small number of arrests when a group broke off to set up camp in Trafalgar Square, which the police deemed illegal.

As the march proceeded along The Strand towards the City, morale was boosted by a display of solidarity from construction workers, who signalled their support from the scaffolding of a building site. There were cheers and applause, as the chant went up: “Students and workers, unite and fight!” There were more expressions of mutual solidarity, as the march passed by a group of electricians, engaged in a struggle against employers who want to drastically slash their wages. Some of them had been at the wrong end of a police kettle and vicious assault a few days earlier.

We then found themselves diverted away from St Pauls and onto an alternative route to the Moorgate campus of London Metropolitan University, one of the hardest hit by the cuts of any university in the country. As the end point was reached, the police, who had surrounded us from the start, closed in briefly before protestors filtered away either to join the Occupy squatters or make their way home.

The problem for the student left now is how to avoid a situation where in a year’s time, after the government has forced yet more marketisation down our throats and we are still just as divided, there are only 5,000 on the streets protesting. Waiting for objective conditions to create some sort of spontaneous uprising is absolutely no strategy at all. The battle against the hike in fees and scrapping of the education maintenance allowance was lost last year, but we still have to fight a rearguard battle against further attacks. But most of all we need to inspire students not just with a vision of a better education, but of a better future.

There is a vast discontent with the current order, sparked by a system that is patently failing. This has translated into a yearning for an alternative, including on campus. It is down to the revolutionary left to demonstrate that the Marxist alternative is the only viable one and to mobilise students around that. However, much of the left views the student movement as analogous to the trade union movement, and believes that their job is primarily to ensure that students unite around fees, rents and so on. The problem with this is that, unlike workers, students do not have a common class interest and in fact are not divided from their university and college administrations by antagonistic class interests. As a result student militancy tends to be episodic and inconsistent.

Higher education is driven by ideas and it is in this area that revolutionaries ought to concentrate. We need to win as many as possible from the individualistic path of merely purchasing the training necessary to pursue a career towards the hugely more ambitious aim of uniting in order to create a world fit to live in through the struggle for human emancipation - the logic of the class struggle against capitalism.

But how can this be done if the rival groups aim merely to recruit to their own particular sect? Unity is an absolute necessity and it means more than simply marching alongside each other for one afternoon. It means building an organisation together, fighting alongside each other, engaging in debate and working out a strategy and programme to bring down this wretched system.

The left often talks about how the cuts ‘must’ be fought, whilst the actions of the groups suggest that we lack any idea of the gravity of the situation. Without meaningful unity the capitalist class will succeed in making the majority pay for the economic crisis. If their attacks are successful (and in higher education many have already been implemented) they will set back our movement for generations to come. And they will ensure that education remains a commodity bought by the few in order to acquire greater earning power.

Fees and cuts
Fees and cuts