Letters

Illusion

My response (‘One fight, inside and out’, April 12) to Dave Vincent on the Labour Party (Letters, April 5) has called forth two letters on the other extreme of the argument (April 19), arguing for - at a minimum - more emphasis on socialists working in the Labour Party than my article proposed. Kevin Hind’s and Arthur Bough’s arguments are, however, very different. I don’t have time to write a full article this week, so I respond by letter to comrade Hind this week and will respond to comrade Bough next week.

A small factual point is that Kevin Hind mentions the Independent Working Class Association as having “built solid working class support from the bottom up”. In reality, the website of the IWCA in Oxford, where the organisation has had elected councillors, has not been updated since 2010 and no IWCA candidates are standing in this week’s local elections. The IWCA’s ‘non-socialist’ and ‘bottom-up’ model proves to have produced ephemeral results. The organisation’s national website (www.iwca.info) has been sporadically updated since 2010, but in essence with the sort of grand-theoretical commentary and argument small left groups commonly do. We in the Weekly Worker do this sort of work, too, and I do not mean to denigrate it: it is just that it provides more evidence of the failure of the IWCA project to produce something beyond the usual sort of left group.

Comrade Hind argues for two critical traditional claims of the Labour left. The first is that “To gain these concessions from the bourgeoisie, Labour must actually be in power either at local or national level - and preferably the latter. Therefore, any action which undermines the ability of Labour to gain power can also be seen legitimately as a shot in the foot for the working class and the left as a whole.”

The second is that “It should also be remembered that MPs’ voting records do not necessarily reveal an MP’s true views on legislation. Some Labour MPs are better described as ‘pragmatic Blairites’ - as opposed to ‘ideological Blairites’ - in the sense that they may not support the New Labour neoliberal agenda wholeheartedly, but are willing to go along with it for political purposes. Would it not be better for Labour left and left-of-Labour activists to simply pile pressure on vulnerable MPs rather than reject them as being lost causes?”

The first point is the fundamental one. It is simply not true that concessions can only be won if you form a government. Take, for a single example, the legalisation of trade unions: delivered initially in 1871 by a Liberal government. The 1871 act was overturned by an “ardent Tory” (his own words) judge, J Brett; then reinstated by a Tory government in 1875. There are numerous others more recently.

The converse of this is that if, in opposition, you adapt yourself to the currently dominant ideas in order to achieve office, in office you will have to implement the dominant ideas, and any concessions will be both timid and secretive: the character of Gordon Brown’s very limited improvements to welfare under New Labour. In contrast, Tory oppositions seek to shift the political agenda in their favour from opposition. The result is a ‘ratchet effect’ in which politics can only move to the right: the post-1975 Wilson-Callaghan government leads to Thatcherism, the Blair-Brown government to the Con-Dems’ plans to reverse 1945 by privatising or ‘charityfying’ education and health.

Hence, what is needed and is missing in the labour movement is an active intervention to attempt to shift the political agenda in the interests of the working class - conducted from opposition.

It follows that the second point is almost the reverse of what is needed. ‘Ideological Blairites’ might be persuaded by the course of events that they are wrong. But ‘pragmatic Blairites’ censor themselves (and seek to censor everyone else) for reasons that are at bottom careerist. No doubt some ‘ideological Blairites’ ought to be in the Tory Party and will in due course find their way there. But the ‘pragmatic Blairites’ (and their equivalents in the far left) are the real poison which blocks any attempt to shift the agenda to the left and hence allows the Tories and their backers to say to the working class: ‘What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is also mine.’

This, in turn, is also part of why what is right now needed is a minority communist party which has a serious attitude to the Labour Party and left-right fights in it - not merely Marxists working as individuals in the Labour Party. Labour has always been prone to equivalents of ‘pragmatic Blairism’ (Lib-Labism, and so on), but always used to have outriders to its left working to shift the political agenda. Unfortunately, the Morning Star is too subservient to the trade union bureaucracy to do so, and the groups of Trotskyist origin are currently both too fragmented and too much committed either to the illusion of creating a ‘new old Labour Party,’ or to ‘direct actionism’ without much politics.

Illusion
Illusion

Sect who?

In his article on the latest split in Workers Power, Ben Lewis perfectly summarises all that is wrong with Weekly Worker/CPGB politics (‘Another split, another sect’, April 26).

He takes the new grouping to task for “throwing themselves into the liquidationist Anti-Capitalist Initiative”, when apparently they should be concerned with “Marxist fundamentals”. Ben delivered the same little lecture to the 80 people who came to the first national meeting of the ACI, telling us how we were all on the wrong track, were trying to be too politically broad and how we should be regrouping people around Marxist fundamentals.

If we started only with people who only agreed with “Marxist fundamentals” (whatever they are), we could meet in a very small conference chamber. The point of the ACI is to relate to real struggles, real campaigns, real political movements of activists like UK Uncut, Occupy, climate camp and union activists fighting sell-outs.

Very few of these activists are committed to “Marxist fundamentals”, but they are fighting injustice, oppression and for a new type of society. The point, for those of us who are Marxists, is to convince them in struggle, in working together, in argument, in an organisation, that Marxism has some relevance to 21st century struggles.

What is the CPGB’s alternative? We have already seen it in their ‘Campaign for a Marxist Party’. And what a rip-roaring success that was!

Ben declares that the ACI “appears to consist of distinctly old, recycled variants of previous far-left electoral campaigns”. I don’t know where Ben gets that idea from. I have not heard anyone even suggest it in the ACI, and indeed most participants would run a mile if a proposal was put to turn in that direction. But isn’t this critique a bit ironic now that the CPGB is deeply ensconced in the electoralist party par excellence - the Labour Party, where it is busy making itself at home amongst the strategic entrist right wing of the Labour Representation Committee?

We are happy to be working closely with the comrades who have left WP within the ACI - a group of comrades which the article characterises as a “sect” within a fortnight of its appearance. Surely a record! We have much in common with them politically and very little in common with the sterile, passive propagandism that characterises the CPGB.

Sect who?
Sect who?

Expose them

In the latest issue of the Weekly Worker, Peter Manson calls for critical support for Ken Livingstone (‘Like looking for a needle in a haystack’, April 26) and, in the same issue, an article on the French elections says that “Marxists are calling for a Hollande vote on May 6” (‘Disappointing result for the left’). Same methodology!

The conception of ‘critical support’, where Marxists supported class struggles, even if led by reformists, has been turned into ‘critical support’ for reformist electoralism. Bourgeois elections have nothing to do with the class struggle. Instead, Marxists need to expose the nature of bourgeois elections, which are contests between the various bourgeois elites creating a false sense of democracy. At best we can hope for an outcome like Allende’s Chile, where the left ‘won’ an election and then made an electoral deal with the Christian Democrats - who then later allied themselves with general Pinochet, with the result that the mass movement in Chile was crushed.

No doubt Livingstone will carry out reforms (new traffic rules?), but the system will not change. Marxists should support specific reforms, but not support reformists. Our task is to show why reforms are insufficient, particularly now, given the world crisis of capitalism.

Expose them
Expose them

Racist workers

If we analyse the results of the first round of the French elections, it is clear that Jean-Michel Edwin is wrong (‘Disappointing result for left’, April 26). Mélenchon’s votes did not go to the Parti Socialiste and Hollande. The PS vote held between the polls and the election. Mélenchon’s lost votes were a straight transfer to Marine Le Pen from racist workers and middle class voters, who had been impressed by her father’s defence of their living standards and pensions, but also by his nationalism, his Islamophobia and his support for French imperialism over Libya and Syria, but now became more impressed by a more determined defence of the ‘nation’, Marine. No-one was fooled by Mélenchon’s bogus ‘anti-racist’ attack on Marine Le Pen: ‘I’m not a racist, but no veils and no more immigrants’.

The collapse of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste and Lutte Ouvrière vote is likewise down to this factor - a support for, and a total inability to strongly oppose, French imperialism in its foreign and therefore in its domestic agenda. These racist workers’ votes may now transfer in large enough numbers to elect Hollande, or they may all go to Sarkozy. A rightwing dynamic saw these backward French voters swing back to the right as soon as they recognised a more consistent and determined racist. And on this crucial point we may yet see the victory of Sarkozy over Hollande. After all, who is the more consistent and determined defender of the ruling class and French imperialism? I fear that the rightwing dynamic that shifted these votes from Mélenchon to Hollande may yet result in the election of Sarkozy. I hope I am wrong.

Racist workers
Racist workers

Peak foil

Not too long ago Arthur Bough, basing himself on Kondratiev’s long-wave economic theory, wanted us to believe that capitalism had started a new period of growth and prosperity. But the world upon which Kondratiev based his theory is in the process of disappearing. It was one of cheap, abundant energy and other resources, readily available to a relatively small number of industrially developed countries. It is important to mention this because it is not usually understood that capitalism can only thrive when only a few countries are industrially advanced.

The problem which capitalism faces today is that, the more countries seek development, the more pressure there is on diminishing and scarce resources. We only have to think of China and India, with populations of over one billion each, to appreciate that they are increasing demand and bidding up the price of resources. Arthur Bough was able to put forward the growth and prosperity argument by ignoring the contradiction between rising demand, resulting from more countries seeking development and stagnating supplies of essential resources - in particular, of course, the global peak in oil production, which is now underway. If the global economy is already stalling at peak, what do you think will happen when the decline begins?

Now Bough is raising the possibility of the energy revolution coming along in the nick of time to save capitalism from its well-deserved demise (Letters, April 12). He claims that I ignore the variety of fuels that can replace oil. But it is not simply a technical question of replacing oil, but rather fuels which can replace oil in terms of cheapness and abundance. Running capitalism on sunshine, windmills and biofuels won’t work. To grasp the significance of oil we only have to consider that one barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 8.6 years of labour-power working intensively, according to energy analysts, or that, in the absence of oil, 66 billion energy slaves would be required to maintain the global economy at its present level.

It is no use Bough bringing in billionaire financier T Boone Pickens. While the latter has helped to sound the alarm in regard to peak oil, his suggestion that gas is a way out of our problems cannot be taken seriously; for a start, US gas production peaked around 1973 and the global peak for gas will be only a few years after world peak oil. Bough also turns to seabed methane as a possible answer. There is certainly plenty of it, according to the experts. In this case, its economic potential has not been proved. Even when we overcome the technical challenges of getting seabed methane, what is often overlooked is that it is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Warming the seas further would lead to the uncontrollable release of methane, making a serious problem even worse.

Peak foil
Peak foil