Letters
Left cover
It seems that Red Scribe still doesn’t get it and insists on providing a ‘left’ cover for anti-Semitism in the Palestine solidarity movement (Letters, March 1).
I have no doubt that the cause of holocaust denial in the Palestine solidarity movement lies in the Zionist misuse of the holocaust to justify the oppression of the Palestinians. I was a friend of Frances Clarke Lowes, who was expelled from the national and the local Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. But, once he started on the road to questioning the holocaust, the first thing he did to justify his positions was to reach for neo-Nazi pamphlets and articles from the Institute of Historical Review. Frances came to adopt the whole baggage of anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews and that is when I broke from him personally and politically.
Very few Jewish anti-Zionists adopt the position of people like Paul Eisen. Eisen is a fully signed-up supporter of holocaust denial and an anti-Semite, both politically and personally. In a post on the PeacePalestine blog (January 13 2008), he explained how “The Ukrainian peasant listens about why the Jewish tavern keeper, tax farmer, landlord or whatever is doing what he’s doing ... But the time comes when he’s just had enough. He lifts his axe and splits the Jew’s head - it’s what they call a pogrom.” Writing in his pamphlet Holocaust wars, Eisen describes how neo-Nazi “Ernst Zundel was once involved in the publication of a book called The Hitler we loved and why, but Ernst Zundel was not the only German who loved Hitler and is probably not the only German who still loves Hitler.” Eisen is a full-fledged apologist for fascism. So what if he’s a proud Jew? So were the Zionists who collaborated with Hitler.
Clearly, if you are a Palestinian and someone comes and takes your land, expels and massacres your neighbours and family, all in the name of the Nazi holocaust and Jewish oppression, then you may react by denying the holocaust. That is an understandable, but politically backward reaction, and different from holocaust denial in Europe. But the birth of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in the mid-1960s and the development of anti-Zionist Palestinian resistance organisations broke from the tired anti-Semitic rhetoric of the collaborationist Arab regimes. Red Scribe, Atzmon and Eisen want to go back to that.
That is why opposing Zionism in the same way as the ANC opposed the anti-white racism of the ‘one settler, one bullet’ approach of the Pan-African Congress makes sense. Imperialism seeks to divide and rule, to sow the seeds of racist confusion. It is a pity that the misnamed Red Scribe goes along with this.
Red Scribe shows how alienated he is from the workers’ movement when he describes a clear differentiation between support for the Palestinians and holocaust denial as an “opportunist accommodation to soft Zionist sentiments”. The opposition of the labour movement to holocaust denial has nothing to do with Zionism and everything to do with Hitlerism’s butchery of the German workers’ movement and its bloody record. That Red Scribe dismisses this as soft Zionism demonstrates where he is coming from. Yes, much to the chagrin of the Zionists, British trade unions have begun breaking from Zionism and cutting their links with Zionist institutions. I am not in the business of trying to persuade them that they were wrong and playing the Zionist game!
Red Scribe also fails to understand my comparison with Marcus Garvey. I was describing the reaction to anti-Semitism of Jews in 1881 with the Odessa and other pogroms when some turned to Zionism. Clearly they were oppressed, but their reaction was a wrong one and mainly confined to the petty bourgeois Red Scribes of the day. It was a separatist reaction to anti-Semitism. If Zionism hadn’t achieved state power, it would have just been another historical curiosity, like Garvey. Red Scribe’s enthusiasm to exonerate the most reactionary elements of the Palestine solidarity movement overwhelms his power of analysis or comparison.
I don’t think it is for Red Scribe to question the democratic credentials of Omar Barghouti. Likewise, I’ve never accused Hamas of being anti-Semitic. The Zionists who helped create Hamas now point to the ‘anti-Semitism’ of the Frankenstein they helped bring about!
There is nothing red about someone who tries to excuse racism on the grounds that it impedes solidarity with the oppressed. That is an old labour movement tradition, symbolised by Henry Hyndman and the Social Democratic Federation. Support for the Palestinians will not be won on the basis of Gilad Atzmon’s and Paul Eisen’s holocaust denial sophistry and their rehabilitation of European fascism.
Left cover
Left cover
Wrong, wrong
Paul Smith is wrong, both theoretically and historically, on a number of points. The “chief source of state revenue used to finance state provision in the imperialist countries” was not “derived from the export of finance capital abroad and the extraction of surplus value from the labour-power of African, Asian and Latin American workers in the colonies or semi-colonies” (Letters, February 23).
The first country to develop such systems was Germany, which at the time did not have such colonies. When advanced economies did begin to export capital and extract surplus value, it was overwhelmingly not to the places that Paul mentions, but to other advanced economies. Fordism, which provided higher wages for workers, better conditions and a degree of welfare, did not obtain the resources to do so by the means Paul sets out, but merely as a result of being able to extract higher levels of relative surplus value. Welfarism is merely Fordism at a macroeconomic level.
Paul’s argument is refuted by his own evidence. He is right that “the high point of welfare expansion [was] in the 1950s and 1960s”. That is true, but that is precisely the time when European colonialism was being dismantled! Paul continues that this period involved “imposition of bureaucratic controls over workers’ activity”. But the very opposite was true. This was the period of the massive growth of the shop stewards’ movement, rank-and-file organisation and spontaneous strikes. In other words, at the very time when colonialism was being dismantled, and any potential revenue from it was drying up, workers were seeing both higher real wages and a higher social wage.
Paul argues: “Labour-power exchanged for state revenue is no longer productive of value or surplus value.” This is not true. As Engels puts it in Anti-Dühring, “The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head” (p360).
It is not true that “State revenue also subsidises the value of labour-power through free education and health”. Neither education nor health are free. They are paid for by collective payments from workers in the form of various taxes and national insurance payments, along with prescription charges and so on. In fact, given the bureaucratic and inefficient nature of that provision in Britain compared with, say, socialised systems in Europe, it is likely that workers are actually being overcharged for what they receive.
Paul continues: “Presently, the ruling class has abandoned the funding of state provision as a strategy for the survival of capitalism. It is attempting to restore the conditions that existed prior to the rise of imperialism in the 19th century.” That is clearly not true, as every developed economy has a state sector accounting for around 40%-50% of GDP. In most of these economies, spending on welfare provision, education, health, etc is continuing to rise. Labour trebled spending on the NHS, for example.
Finally, Paul says: “Some of the roles of these parties will be to counter propaganda that denies capitalism is in decline.” But it is not propaganda that capitalism is not in decline; it is an easily observable fact. I have provided the facts of the scale of the boom of the global capitalist economy previously. The simple fact is that this illustrates not just that capitalism is in a boom at the moment, but that it is the most powerful we have ever seen.
Wrong, wrong
Wrong, wrong
Not political?
Jim Moody (Letters, March 1) makes a number of criticisms of my latest article on the Murdoch scandal (‘Murdoch fights back’, February 23).
I feel that on many matters he has simply missed my point. His analogy with the spying of the secret state apparatuses implies that I throw my hands up and condemn criticisms of News International’s phone-hacking as so many Canutian admonitions against the inevitable order of things. My point is, in fact, stronger than that: it is good and proper for journalists, where the ends are justifiable, to resort to underhand methods, including the full range of Rebekah Brooks’s repertoire - voicemail hacking, suborning police officers and all the rest. (Borrowing the Met’s horses is less obviously useful to the pursuit of the truth, admittedly.)
The question is, rather, whether the ends are justified. Certainly, I do not endorse the antics of the ‘fake sheikh’ and his brave exposés of - shock! horror! - the cocaine use of the rich and famous; or paying police and ex-police to get the addresses (and perhaps murky pasts) of ephemeral celebrities. Yet it is necessary to challenge the predominant narrative of this case. First of all, it was Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire who had been Very Naughty Boys; now, the ‘corporate person’ of News International is a Very Naughty Boy itself, guilty of determinate actions which in their essence are crimes.
Yet it was not the means that violated ‘press ethics’, but the ends. The point of the free press - the very reason why anybody thought it would be a good idea in the first place - is that it would arm the masses with the knowledge needed to become citizens in the full sense of the word: ie, people afforded a degree of sovereign power as individuals and as a collectivity. It was, in the ironic but nonetheless apposite words of Finley Peter Dunne, to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”. Just as it deforms and abuses science, just as it turns ‘democratic representatives’ into pliant stooges, capitalism utterly debases the notional mission of the free press.
The political point here, in a sense, brings us back to the beginning. The state wishes, to use Jim’s words, to “embrace fully the public rage” over this issue to ‘bring the press to heel’. It will never miss an opportunity to do so - as the farrago over David Kelly showed many years ago. We, as democrats, want the opposite - we want a press with as much bite as possible, and every means of attack at its disposal, for the more awful of truths are hidden in some dark places. For communists, this is only possible by sweeping away the moguls and the cartels; and it precisely requires us, whatever the scale of public anger, to reorient the ‘ethical’ question away from phone-hacking and towards the abandonment of the free press’s democratic aim.
For Jim, it seems, the personal must always be private - even in the case, for example, of a rightwing politician explicitly standing for election as a family man upholding religious ‘moral values’, while covering up his own visits to prostitutes. Jim says that to counter this type of hypocrisy is to miss the point, since such behaviour “makes not an iota of difference politically”. Yet the hypocrisy concerns a political platform that the politician is advocating and perhaps attempting to force on others.
Comrade Moody recommends a 2008 Weekly Worker article, in which, he says, “there was nothing that suggested the private was political”. But I find that the article in question makes exactly the same point as I have made four years later:
“Scurrilous details of individuals’ private lives, in the absence of harm to others, are irrelevant to what they do in public and to the political positions that they may hold. If individuals wish to keep personal matters confidential, then, unless there is demonstrable harm to others or political hypocrisy in what they are doing privately, it must remain that way. However, should someone’s political positions jar hypocritically with their private life, then privacy cannot be sacrosanct (eg, publicly anti-gay, but privately cruising gay bars; publicly vaunting religiously sanctioned ‘family values’, but privately having affairs or using prostitutes)” (‘Max Mosley’s morals and ours’, July 17 2008).
Not political?
Not political?
Quick fix
It’s interesting that Hillel Ticktin’s robustly articulated article (‘The decline of money’, March 1) does not appear to have a specific solution for the quandary of mega-trillions stagnating in banks - aside from the implicit understanding that we may agree on: that the common and truly democratic ownership of banks would probably put an end to this.
The article is, of course, analysing the evolution of money and the growth of fictitious capital and does not propose a solution per se. Until the revolution though, we do need a quick fix, so perhaps a short-term one would be to withdraw money from banks en masse and for those who have spare cash to stash it at home or leave it with credit unions. This would be enough to unsettle the capitalist class and the resulting reaction might reveal a solution to the problem that was not evident before.
The sudden withdrawal of millions of people’s money from the banks might trigger a rash of unforeseen events. The problem of salaries and benefits being made directly into bank accounts could be resolved by the use of building societies - at least in the short term, if people’s banks could not be established quickly enough. To take this one step further we would then need to start to push for a money-free society, but one that had an inbuilt mechanism to prevent the establishment of a new layer of privilege and elitism that bedevilled the Soviet Union and still presumably the existent neo-Stalinist countries.
The removal of money from the neo-capitalists (as we could perhaps call these banks and institutions that ‘guard’ money), as well as the twin act of removing the ownership of the means of production from the old-fashioned capitalist ruling class, would be a good way to start building our communist future.
Quick fix
Quick fix
Disdainful
As my own thoughts have been revolutionised by comrade Hillel Ticktin over the years, with his idea of the USSR as a formless form, an historical anomaly - and perhaps this as a theoretical analysis is a key to working class unity within our world. I ask him and his comrades around the Weekly Worker and Critique to consider the idea that unipolar imperialism is 10 times more out of time than this single, isolated political counterrevolution that was barely a part of the world market at the time.
It is important to consider ‘full spectral dominance’ and how this is related to fictitious capital in the here and now. As a matter of open ideological struggle, I have mentioned ‘currency wars’ twice in my correspondence - now thrice. Do communists disdain to hide their views?
Disdainful
Disdainful
'Child' labour
I have to say I was grossly disappointed, though I shouldn’t really have been surprised, by Lindsey German’s contribution as apparent spokesperson for the left on the Vine programme, on Friday February 24, when the subject was the ‘child labour’ employed by western companies making sportswear and so on. The call was to ban ‘children’ from working.
Utterly predictably, given her political tendency’s inclination to tell people what to do and to know best what people really need, Lindsey was supporting the call. This she did regardless of what the actual workers themselves thought of it, or the impact such a move would have on income, poverty and health standards. These companies, she added, should not only not employ ‘children’, but also pay for their education. She was asked by Vine why would Nike or Nestlé, who wouldn’t be employing these young people, do that? She really thought they just should, and I wondered if she was suggesting they form governments in those countries and take over social and welfare care of the populations? The practical didn’t matter, of course; we were being self-righteous and cleansing middle class consciences here. I couldn’t get in on the discussion, but, had I done so, these are the points I would have made.
Firstly, this notion of ‘childhood’, which middle class moralists use as a major instrument of control, is now being extended to any young adult under the age of 18. Britain is to face in 2013 legislation which effectively makes anyone under 19 a ‘child’ and their freedom of work and lifestyle options will be massively controlled. You must stay at school or do a job which has a recognised apprenticeship. Leaving school and working in a hairdresser, café or wherever will no longer be allowed by law. Obviously, with manufacturing on death’s door, there are very few such apprenticeships, so you will stay at school and be regarded as a child.
‘Motherhood’, long despised on the left and never defended as a lifestyle choice, will be declared illegal in the sense that a young mother, even a young married mother, will not be able to stay home and bring up her children through the first years of their lives before they go into full-time nursery education. So young adult workers of 16 and 17 are now being called ‘children’, young married people will be strictly regulated as to their ability to work and bring in an income and to raise their families. Such draconian and authoritarian attacks on individual and collective civil liberties will be defended in exactly the way Lindsey did because someone else knows what’s best for you and you will do what we say.
Anyone who works in mainstream education today will tell you that, whereas masses and masses of young, non- academic pupils can’t wait to leave, and at one time would have joined the labour market and looked for jobs, skills and apprenticeships, seeking the independent life of a young adult, this forthcoming law will close that option. It will force them to stay confined in an institution which they hate and have no interest in, and they will resist by means fair and foul attempts to make them conform to it. This is actually enforced detention without trial or charge, and will come at the expense of all those academic students who wish to get on and study. They will have their educational environment disrupted and made unpleasant by people who do not wish to be there.
One wonders also how this whole draconian nightmare will be enforced. School or jail? Police in the classroom and schoolyard? Snatch squads for absentee young adults? Children seized from young mothers if they don’t conform?
In many countries in the ‘developing world’, young people (unless from very rich families) currently leave school at 12, which is the end of the normal school period, and start work. Why on earth do Lindsey and her ilk think they have the right to demand this no longer happens? If they are to be banned from working until they are 18, how will they and their families live? It is quite absurd to think multinational firms who no longer employ such workers will pay for their education and welfare just because previously they would have employed them. There is an issue of cultural and social imperialism here. Who says that just because the USA and Britain now have an obsession with rendering young adults into children, entirely different cultural traditions and social values in the east should fall into line?
My dad started work at 12 here in Britain, as did all of his friends. I left school at 14 (and, had I been allowed, would have left earlier) and started work at 15. We were young workers, not ‘children’, and while inexperience and foolishness requires special care and tuition in the workplace, the idea that either his generation or mine would be banned from employment would have been seen as totally unwarranted and unjust, which, of course, it is. Successive British governments have raised the age at which compulsory detention in school is enforced, until we reached, one would have thought, a reasonable benchmark of 16. Young workers currently are employed at 16. Few, if any, of them think of themselves as ‘children’. I was working when I was 15 and happy to be doing so and earning a wage. I actually applied to become a boy bugler in the Royal Marines at 14, and only my developing political consciousness stopped me. I did not think then and do not think now that I was too young to have that choice.
While it is vital that we force the multinationals to conform to international standards of health and safety, hours of labour, shift working, time off for educational programmes, healthcare programmes and union rights - all of which are achievable and, more importantly, acceptable to the workers involved - imposing outside bans on working on impoverished third world people desperate for work and income is, I suggest, both impractical and morally wrong. It puts me in mind of the Victorian outrage over child labour in the coal mines pre-1870 (children of six and seven years old upwards, working 10 to 12 or more hours per day). They cared not why the child worked in the mine or mill in the first place; only that they, in order to solve their middle class consciences, should be banned from doing so. The fact was that people were so impoverished that all the family, including the youngest, were forced to work. The ban, applied without any imposition of a higher wage rate for those over 12 years old, literally meant the family starved, but the middle class drawing room was satisfied they had done good.
Poverty and destitution increased after the ban - the legislation hadn’t addressed the problem of low wages. Higher wages would mean children were no longer forced by the whip of poverty to work to support older family members. A simultaneous demand for school and/or skill provision could have been made, but there was simply a blanket ban on employment, with the social context entirely ignored. Certainly, a ban on child workers was in order, as part of an overall social welfare reform programme, but not as a magic bullet in isolation.
In the case of third world society, we need to understand what their norms and accepted cultures of work are. Twelve seems fairly commonly accepted as the age that youngsters start work. That should perhaps be accepted (by outside western observers looking in) as a normal, non-academic life pattern which they would choose at this stage to continue with. However, a graduating scale of hours, educational facilities taking over where the formal school years leave off, health and safety and special supervision measures for young workers should be demanded. This would be far preferable to this social/cultural/moral imperialism, which seeks to impose what are actually minority values on the world, regardless of conditions and the wishes of the workers who live there.
'Child' labour
'Child' labour
Cut out cutters
It is with regret that the Rugby branch of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition announces that it has ended its engagement with the Green Party as part of Rugby Against the Cuts. This has immediate implications for electoral arrangements, as outlined below.
Our main reason for this is the recent decision of the Green Party controlling group on Brighton council to promote and implement £35 million of cuts, which will lead to redundancies and devastate local public services. Tusc, like Rugby Against the Cuts, is against all cuts and believes they should be opposed at every level.
It is politically untenable for an anti-cuts organisation to promote anti-cuts election candidates from a party which, when it has power, implements cuts. The Green Party is clearly not an anti-cuts party and, although individual members may say they are against public spending cuts, as some did in Brighton, and some do in Rugby, if elected they would be in no position to stand up against them, given their party’s national policy.
This will mean that Tusc, standing as Tusc Against Cuts, will field anti-cuts candidates in as many Rugby wards as possible, regardless of whether Green candidates stand or not, and we will clearly not be working cooperatively with the Green Party in the 2012 council elections.
Tusc has a very firm set of policies to oppose the cuts, ratified at a national conference in January, meaning that any elected Tusc councillor shall under no circumstances support cuts in public services, unlike the u-turn recently made by the Green Party in Brighton.
Cut out cutters
Cut out cutters
Labour move
The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy held its annual general meeting on Saturday February 18 at Conway Hall in central London. As usual, the well-attended meeting generated much discussion on the way forward for the left in the Labour Party.
Reporting on the national executive, NEC member Christine Shawcroft said that the election of a new party general secretary, Iain McNicol, was to be welcomed, and the trade union NEC members were a vast improvement upon previous years.
Kelvin Hopkins, MP for Luton North, gave the Parliamentary Labour Party report. Kelvin believed that Ed Balls and Ed Miliband were more successful when they are forced to move to the left on particular issues, as proved by the policy on News International and NHS reforms. The PLP was now much improved and a strong stand against the coalition’s cuts could win the next election. Labour needs policies to expand construction and public services and to create new jobs. David Miliband’s attack on social provision in the New Statesman recently had shown why Ed was the preferred leader for the party.
Seumas Milne from The Guardian led the debate on the way forward. Seumas, an old friend of CLPD, said the Labour left had been marginalised over the last 30 years, but, although the neoliberal model of Thatcher and New Labour was now broken and discredited, the left does not automatically benefit.
Labour move
Labour move
What next?
With the next round of pension strike coming up on March 28, Unite the Resistance, the Socialist Workers Party-dominated anti-cuts front, held a meeting in Sheffield to tackle the subject last week. Unfortunately there appears to have been some bureaucratic shenanigans by the SWP - it seems that some union members involved in organising the event had sought to ensure there were more rank and file speakers rather than just the list of union officers and so on apparently decided on in advance by the SWP.
The meeting was attended by around 30 people - a disappointing number, given the participation of most of the left and labour movement in the city. Comrades were united in trying to make the upcoming strike a strong one, but there was little agreement on what would come after. A PCS union member present also pointed out from the floor that these one-day actions will not get our pensions back, especially if there is ever decreasing union participation. We should have anticipated a sell-out and prepared the rank and file for this.
While this comment was viewed as “pessimistic”, in the absence of a political strategy, it seems to me that ‘realistic’ and ‘sensible’ might have been better descriptions.
What next?
What next?