Letters
Left and EEC
Gerry Downing (Letters, December 15) has me at a disadvantage, in that he knows the “political trajectory” of VN Gelis, whose book I reviewed in the Weekly Worker (‘Defence of the nation-state’, December 8).
I have no such knowledge of comrade Gelis other than the book, which I presume Gerry has read since it made him “hopping mad”. The book has a passing reference to “illegal immigration”, which I clearly express my discomfort with. My point about not having a gloss on it is that he hasn’t written this book to win or retain friends on the British left, and the book was set to be challenging to Weekly Worker consensus views.
The trajectory of the book, which is what I was following, proves to be quite accurate in its view of the effects of Greek membership in the European Union and the single currency. This trajectory is still being played out with the uncertainty over continued membership of the euro and EU, and would seem to give the lie to the opinion of Arthur Bough that Gelis has the mood of the Greek masses all wrong (Letters, December 15); in this sense, the book is a useful backdrop, however events pan out.
I have no disagreement with Gerry’s conclusion that we must fight for trade union rights and organisation for all workers, migrants included. I did nothing else for the last four years of my working life, as an organiser for the TGWU and Unite. I hosted meetings across the religious, national and ethnic divide in ethnic community centres of all sorts and spent weeks and months trying to explain to local workers the vital necessity of winning one union for all workers.
Management will, as they did at Lindsey oil terminal, ship in workers directly from abroad to bring down rates and, more importantly, to break local and on-plant union identities. A few workers did ironically display ‘British jobs for British workers’ on their homemade placards, but the workforce was far from all ‘British’. Workers who struck and demanded proper contract agreements and a level playing field in manning included quite a few Polish and other workers of non-British origin who had settled in the area, joined the union and identified with the locally born workers. Here is not the place to replay the politics of that dispute, but it is still being misrepresented. Comrades, in their enthusiasm to be ‘internationalist’ and ‘anti-racialist’, need to take care they don’t end up supporting management’s ‘right to manage’ and some intrinsic right to hire and fire whom they like without the interference of the workers.
I’m a bit disappointed that Gerry should think he has some right to demand that I distance myself from the views which he attributes to Gelis. None are my views and nothing I have ever said implies they are. The struggle is international and internationalist, but it is fought where we actually are and meeting the terms of the challenge such as it actually is in the here and now. That means engaging in the struggles which the workers are actually involved in. It was in that capacity that I first raised criticisms of the CPGB delegates and other self-declared ‘leftists’ for abstaining in the vote at a Coalition of Resistance conference to support the fight for jobs at Bombardier, and offering no alternative resolution or practical tactical response to the mass job losses.
The effects on working people in Derby were devastating and demanded action. ‘Wait for the international, spontaneous, simultaneous working class revolution’ just wouldn’t cut it, but, had it been offered, it would at least have been better than abstaining. Arthur’s scolding that we shouldn’t be trying to take these jobs away from the German workers who now had them and, basically, that was the way capitalism worked, so get used to it, was even worse. In later correspondence, Peter Manson proposed a call for ‘nationalisation’ of the plant, which I then went on to debate. I say this because Arthur Bough has continually misrepresented my opinions on this whole subject, despite the actual exchanges being there in the archive for anyone to see.
He is wrong as to the position of most of the left regarding the prospect of the capitalist EEC.
The views of Chris Harman at the time were typical of the far left: “Revolutionaries ... must be adamant in their ideological opposition to those inside the working class movement who resort to chauvinistic arguments. But this cannot mean that we are neutral on the question of Common Market entry. There are a number of interrelated reasons which make it imperative for us to oppose entry” (International Socialism No49, autumn 1971).
Again, I refer Arthur simply to the articles and discussions on the period within the Labour Party Young Socialists and the Labour and revolutionary left in general. A lead article by Ted Grant in Militant read: “Capitalist Common Market - no! For a Socialist United States of Europe” (Militant special, May 1975).
I’m talking here of the actual experience of our socialist anti-EEC campaign platforms (as against the official ones, which we refused to work with and frequently attacked, given their popular frontist composition and sometimes odious rightwing politicians). Arthur seems to acknowledge that the ‘far left’ generally took up a position of opposition to the EEC. His interpretation of their positions doesn’t alter the fact that they opposed entry.
The CPGB was highly influential in the unions and labour movement at this time, and their opposition to the capitalist EEC project was widely reflected in the labour and trade union movement in general and in the revolutionary left generally. As I recall, only the Maoists campaigned for EEC membership for the reasons outlined in my review. This was not, by and large, because of ‘nationalism’, though there were some stomach-churning displays of toy-town patriotism on some platforms and demonstrations of the period.
I don’t agree that “Marxists always favour larger units bringing groups of workers together”. It depends what the composition of that unit is and what its political basis for bringing them together is. The reunification of Germany under Hitler wasn’t such a good idea. As I had said in my reflection on the period, most of us favoured the slogans for a United States of Soviet Socialist Europe or a European Socialist Republican Federation. We did not see foreign workers as our enemies, but our comrades and fellow workers; we did though see the capitalist EEC as utterly hostile to our common interests across the continent.
I have no doubt Arthur’s purer-than-pure splendid isolation made little contact with the raggy ranks of progressive opposition to the scheme and he, as usual, seeks to denigrate it by attributing the most vulgar of political positions which it never held. This simply means he was standing in a different place than I was, and still is. I have never supported calls for immigration and import controls, by the way - I and my branch always opposed the National Union of Mineworkers’ position on import controls and did this widely throughout the 1984-85 strike and the campaign in 1992-93, as the comrades of the CPGB would surely testify.
Left and EEC
Left and EEC
Play the ball
The Greek left always were anti-EEC on paper. One of the main slogans in the decade after the fall of the junta was ‘EEC and Nato are the same, US bases out’. Now one of the main slogans of the people - not the organised forces of the fake left - is ‘Bread, peace, freedom - the junta didn’t die in 1973’, which indicates a connection with the past and a hope for the future of a reborn left.
It appears that all nationalism is deemed evil, even though Trotsky argued: “In its day economic nationalism led mankind forward. Even now, it is still capable of playing a progressive role in the colonial countries of the east. But decadent fascist nationalism, preparing volcanic explosions and grandiose clashes in the world arena, bears nothing except ruin” (‘Nationalism and economic life’, 1934).
It’s no wonder that the British left have such a reactionary past when it comes to the struggle for the independence of Kenya or even Ireland, which is much closer to home, and they have a ‘plague on both your houses’ approach to issues that concern less economically developed nations such as Greece, who benefited not one iota from joining the EEC-EU, but instead became bankrupt as a result, thus confirming in retrospect why the slogans of the 1970s were correct.
Gerry goes a step further, arguing that all immigration is good (irrespective of whether we are in a boom or slump), even when it is bad for workers, as the world becomes a global village. But the country with the most immigrants, presumably the USA, hasn’t even created a national labour party. Britain had colonies and was a leading imperialist power. Greece had none in the modern era, so why are they lumped together? Greek workers have no obligation to accept, support or condone mass immigration into the country because the bosses have had no controls since 1990.
Gerry Downing adopts the Bolkenstein directive of the EU and assumes he isn’t part of the fake left. The expansion of the EU into eastern Europe proved a bonanza for the bosses for as long as the debt-induced bubble lasted. Now it is proving to be a burden, but Gerry wants to continue as before, arguing borders should be abolished the world over, so the bosses can have a permanent oversupply of labour. His jokes regarding border controls are indeed a joke. They haven’t existed for over a decade or more, and near enough anybody at any time can get in or out (even those provisionally expelled), using a variety of routes, such as fake student visas, fake names, fake nationality, etc.
Britain has, by all accounts, experienced the largest intake of newcomers in its post-war history. A majority of the British people have been consistently against the EU as a result of that. Should we ignore this and assert ‘British jobs to all and sundry’ in order to make Gerry happy?
Under the new world order, anything goes and those who argue against controls are essentially for a race to the bottom and against protectionism, but, above all, against workers’ control. I have never supported illegal labour or the rights of capitalism to march untrammelled into countries, nor do I condone transnational corporations outsourcing, offshoring or inshoring, as well as their extensive tax evasion.
Gerry wants to adopt capitalist policies for workers and give them the title of ‘internationalism’, as if the creation of multinational, polyglot, hybrid ‘nations’ is the task of imperialism, not socialism. The capitalist United States of Europe, as Lenin argued almost a century ago will be either unrealisable or reactionary. It resembles both. Greek workers should have no truck with it and, the sooner they dispose of the fake left, the better, as they will be able to take back control of their country, their economy and their culture.
I would like finally to say that it is difficult to respond to people who comment on books they have never read, but then that would assume the critics are actually interested in the politics and not character assassination. After all, if you can’t play the ball, you play the man.
Play the ball
Play the ball
Bad treaty
My, last week’s issue of the Weekly Worker was quite an issue on left nationalism all round - from across the European Union to Libya, to the Middle East, to the former Soviet space.
It is only about a week before the 20th anniversary of what Russian leader Vladimir Putin aptly called “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”, still felt by workers the world over even today. It is also about a week or two before the 89th anniversary of what could be considered one of the unsung geopolitical tragedies of the 20th century. The treaty on the creation of the USSR was a historical mistake.
In my opinion, the debates that led to this episode had Lenin in the wrong and his people’s commissar of nationalities mostly in the right. The promotion of miscellaneous national peculiarities and ‘positive discrimination’ in favour of non-Russians within what Terry Martin called the “affirmative action empire” may definitely have been more positive than, say, the later discrimination against non-Slavs becoming combat pilots in the Soviet air forces. The entire Soviet space in 1922 should have simply been an enlarged Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
Bad treaty
Bad treaty
Lesser evil
I seem to remember a letter from Dave Douglass a few years ago where he said that he supported the war against Nazi Germany (even under Churchill’s leadership) because the Nazis were such an evil regime that their defeat was absolutely essential. The ‘lesser evil’ had to be supported.
Surely, the same logic can be applied to Ian Bone’s view regarding Libya (‘In the footsteps of Kropotkin’, December 15). Namely, that the slaughter that Gaddafi’s forces were threatening to inflict on the rebel-held areas justified the need for Nato’s intervention. For the west to stand back would have been diabolical.
It so happens that I believe Dave Douglass was right in the case of World War II, as Ian Bone was in the case of Libya. Sometimes ‘liberal interventionism’ is the ‘lesser evil’ which has to be supported.
Lesser evil
Lesser evil
Dirty hands
Dave Douglass is, of course, free to argue what he wants, where he wants, and Ian Bone is a grown-up and able to fight his own battles without help from me.
However, I am perturbed that Dave decided to launch an attack upon another anarchist comrade in the pages of a newspaper committed to a politics which, if it were ever to gain power, would happily shoot all anarchists who presented an alternative opinion to their Leninist dictatorship.
Although, to be fair to the ‘comrades’ of the CPGB (PCC), they would be unlikely to get their hands dirty and more likely to be those intellectually justifying the butchery whilst others did the dirty work.
Dirty hands
Dirty hands
Go to war
Anne Mc Shane calls on the United Left Alliance to pull itself together (‘ULA must take itself seriously’, December 1). By this she means that it should adopt a party structure and observe democratic norms.
In my view, these are necessary, but not sufficient elements in the building of working class resistance in Ireland. Unity requires an object and the object of a party is its political programme. Any campaign to build a party must be spearheaded by the call for a socialist alternative to the austerity (I accept that Anne addressed some elements of policy in a later article).
Under the pressure of events, the ULA, at its formation, took a step towards such a programme with its demand for the repudiation of the sovereign debt. Recently, it took quite of number of steps backwards with a policy statement on the budget. There is no doubt that this was arrived at undemocratically. My organisation, Socialist Democracy, is an affiliated organisation. Members of the organisation are active in ULA branches. We first saw the policy statement after it was issued to the press.
More important than the issue of consultation is the change of policy. The statement limits itself to calling for cessation of interest payments on private bank debt. No longer is there any call to repudiate the sovereign debt. As a result, it is utterly reformist. The Irish government, utterly subservient to capital, should tax the rich and invest in jobs - the policy even calls for the workers’ pension funds to be used by the state instead of demanding that they be ring-fenced. It is, in fact, a left version of the ‘better, fairer way’ advanced by the trade union bureaucracy.
As Hillel Ticktin keeps asserting in the columns of the Weekly Worker, the capitalist class will not adopt a Keynesian strategy. The function of a ‘better, fairer way’ for the Irish trade union bureaucracy is to distract from their actual strategy, which is to support the bank bailout and to act alongside Irish capitalism, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank to implement the austerity. As I write, the Irish government is threatening their union partners, indicating that they must meet cuts targets that they themselves select and help implement.
The function of the budget statement by the ULA is to avoid a rupture with the ‘left’ bureaucracy. The results of such a strategy are, as Anne Mc Shane indicated, the Dublin march. ULA members, themselves politically silenced, marched behind the programme of the bureaucracy and alongside Sinn Féin - themselves implementing cuts in the north of Ireland.
Anne believes the composition of the march was the result of a last-minute deal. My understanding is that from the first meeting on September 10 the only issue was building an alliance around the march, with any politics a very distant second. It was called by the ULA, but aimed at a broader coalition that would inevitably not be mobilised around a repudiation of the debt.
The meeting she refers to happened more recently, on November 5, and was formally called by Mick O’Reilly, speaking for Dublin Trades Council. Mick announced a new campaign, the Campaign against Austerity, and opened the meeting by claiming that the Irish Congress of Trade Unions could support this campaign and the pre-budget march, as there was nothing in the Croke Park agreement to prevent them doing so. The SD member at the meeting was the only one to challenge Mick on this, saying that the trade union leadership had played the role of enablers for the offensive against the working class and that the troika had incorporated the agreement into the memorandum of understanding, around which the austerity was built. The condition for this popular front was that there be no repeat of the workers’ protests against the union leaderships that marked the November demonstrations last year.
Mick was unable to turn ICTU ‘support’ into a national mobilisation for the Dublin march because the union leadership, having implemented the last budget, had agreed through the consultation mechanisms of social partnership the main features of the upcoming budget. Later, in an interview on RTE news, Shay Coady, general secretary of the Impact union, clarified matters when he declared that it shouldn’t be forgotten that these measures would not have been possible without a good, solid agreement with the trade union movement, such as Croke Park.
The ULA leadership are unwilling to break with the left bureaucracy and are unable to present a credible alternative. As Anne Mc Shane says, they produce a budget statement that doesn’t mention the eye-wateringly low corporation tax. Another omission is blindness to a union bureaucracy openly implementing the austerity. The statement lists Greece and Italy as under occupation, but fails to question the legitimacy of the Irish government, itself under the direct supervision of the ECB and IMF.
If the workers are to oppose the bailout and austerity, then they must go to war, expropriating the resources and services that the capitalists want to destroy in the service of imperialism, close down the financial structures that are bleeding them dry, begin to construct a workers’ bank, link up with workers’ struggles across Europe.
I have written extensively about this because if the issue is simply one of democracy, then there is a fairly wide base of dissatisfied activists who can be mobilised. If the issue is one of programme, then convincing a majority of ULA members is a much harder task. The worry is that the momentum generated by the ULA’s formation is gradually slipping away without anyone confronting the political issues facing the working class.
Go to war
Go to war
Dumb legalism
While I admire Trotsky as a Marxist thinker in many ways, I am not a Trotskyist by any means. Paul Anderson’s decision to frame my views as ‘Trotskyist’ say more about his ideological leanings than mine (Letters, December 15).
Yes, Nato military aggression is a threat to many workers around the world, and is still the main military threat. However, for the workers of Zimbabwe, Chinese-made weapons used by the Zanu-PF party’s security forces and the army are currently a bigger threat to them than Nato is. Again I state the point that Mugabe is an opportunist willing to tolerate whoever wishes to invest capital in Zimbabwe so long as they respect his autocratic rule. The principled way to approach Zimbabwe is to have a Hands Off the People of Iran-like organisation that is anti-regime and anti-intervention.
The Chinese can talk about respect for sovereignty all they want, but sooner or later their investments in Africa are going to be challenged by African workers. They can then take the position that they are merely coming to the aid of a friendly government. Given that they didn’t even use this excuse when supporting Unita in Angola, Chinese capital will show its true colours when it is finally challenged by African workers.
I’ve never given tacit support to western intervention through foreign intelligence or Nato bombings. I loathed Gaddafi, but never for one minute supported what Nato did. Those who do are no better than the idiots at Harry’s Place and certainly not on the left. These leaders don’t deserve to somehow be put on a different level than Nato. They are dictators and bourgeois nationalists. When I call for Nato to get out of Libya, I do so with no illusions as to what Gaddafi is and was. There are, however, many Marxist-Leninists happy to fly the Gaddafi green flag of Libya and post sympathetic pictures of him, utterly ignoring the fact that he stood in the way of socialism in Libya and Africa.
National sovereignty and national self-determination are two different things. If we are going to fetishise national sovereignty, then I guess we should denounce Lenin as a social-imperialist for the Polish-Soviet war. I would argue that national self-determination was very much a tactic used by the Bolsheviks, given the situation in the Russian empire, that became a principle. If the UK were to have a socialist revolution today, but Wales decided to use its self-determination to opt out of a socialist federal republic and remain capitalist, do you really think that would be tolerated for long? I am not against national self-determination under socialism, but it becomes unworkable if large swathes of multinational states go socialist while smaller fragments do not.
Anderson’s obsession with national sovereignty is thoroughly bourgeois legalism, which was taken up by counterrevolutionary Stalinism. The real dumbing down of the left is the fact that there are still people who see Mugabe, Gaddafi and Assad as somehow worthy of support.
Dumb legalism
Dumb legalism
No socialist
According to Businessweek magazine (December 19), president Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is not exactly practising what he preaches:
“Dollar-denominated bonds issued by FertiNitro ... were trading at 68 cents on the dollar the day before Chávez nationalised the company in October 2010 … On November 22, the government offered to buy back the bonds for $1.05 on the dollar, or 54% more than they were trading for before nationalisation. ‘For all the noise associated with Chávez, he’s been very good to bondholders’, says Raymond Zucaro ... at SW Asset Management ...”.
Though it is clear the Venezuelan masses want genuine socialism, it would appear that Chávez is imposing a form of state capitalism. This confusion persists in Venezuela because Chávez makes ‘socialist’ speeches, while developing an economy similar to Argentina under Peron, who also carried out major reforms for Argentinian workers, while preventing change outside of state control.
No socialist
No socialist
Murder worship
I see that the ‘Dear Leader’ has passed away to whatever celestial Shangri-La that the DPRK potentates go to when their earthly form degenerates (probably from having to churn out a book every couple of days).
At this stage, I wonder if we are going to be treated to any comedy letters in your column from the DPRK Stalinist death, torture and starvation worshippers out there? No doubt we can choose between paranoid ramblings of conspiracy theorists going for some sort of Chinese/western-backed assassination, to weeping adoration from some middle class twerps idolising a non-existent ‘workers’ paradise’ that strangely they never risked defecting to, preferring to stay in the People’s Republic of Fucking North London with all its lousy wine bars and shit restaurants instead. If we’re really lucky, we might get some credulous fool wringing their hands about how the Americans - sorry, ‘imperialists’ - might use this opportunity to invade and somehow plunder a nation of undernourished skeletons with nothing much to offer at all, as if the US public and economy weren’t already exhausted by two drawn-out wars that its inept Congress has yet to actually pay for.
Hopefully, somewhere, some enlightened soul (not I) may eloquently discuss the fact that North Korea is such a basket case that South Korea dreads its collapse, knowing that even the 13th richest capitalist economy cannot hope to cope with the absorption of its impoverished and starving northern neighbour without Chinese and western assistance.
Personally, I hope that just one person out there who still hankers after the Orwellian dead end of totalitarian rule by ‘the left’ might find the time to read Barbara Demick’s wonderful Nothing to envy: real lives in North Korea and start to grasp that Marxists everywhere, even some who write in this paper, need to understand that the past is done, that many, many horrors were perpetrated in the name of ‘the left’ and that our purpose should be to move on and built a mass movement that embraces freedom, tolerance, equality and prosperity as the purpose of the making of a post-capitalist and, yes, a post-revolutionary human future.
Lenin said in April 1917: “it is time to cast off the soiled shirt and to put on clean linen.” We should all consider what we are doing here and what we want for humanity, so that perhaps then we might begin to understand, think and formulate what is to be done.
Murder worship
Murder worship
How much?
David Lee says that no-one should be allowed to earn more than £75,000 a year (Letters, December 15). Surely, no-one would need that much. Why not provide all citizens with a free supply of basic essentials - eg, bread, eggs, potatoes, etc? Foreign travel would need to be controlled to prevent the wealthy fleeing with their ill-gotten gains and to stop key workers moving abroad for higher pay.
Foreign governments may object to their banks, petro-chemical companies and power companies being seized, so we would need to develop arrangements with like-minded governments in North Korea, Cuba, etc.
How much?
How much?
Subtle
Harvey Filben observes that the left has approved various “outbursts of bloodthirsty rhetoric”, such as advocating the idea that “humanity will not be happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist” (‘Keep quiet and drive’, December 8).
He seems to share some amusement with this idea when he proposes that “21,000 carefully crafted death-threats” would be a creative response to Jeremy Clarkson’s rightwing opinions about strikers. Does he also find laughable the Stalinist/Maoist line that the physical liquidation of capitalists (and their allies amongst the intelligentsia, workers and the peasantry) is required to build a classless, communist society? Or is his irony too subtle for me?
Subtle
Subtle