Letters

Rising passion

Jim Creegan’s references to the history of Marxist theory and practice in last week’s article were erroneous (‘Democratic centralism and idiocy of the sects’, June 28).

I contend that he is superficial and wrong, particularly regarding Lenin’s struggle with the Malinovsky/Bogdanov trend toward idealism (see Materialism and empirio-criticism) and Trotsky’s fight against the James Burnham/Max Shachtman ‘minority’ in the US Socialist Workers Party (see In defence of Marxism). In both cases Creegan is a deceiver, whether expressed in ‘fuzziness’ (as scepticism) on Lenin versus Bogdanov, or on his ‘certainty’ to affirm Trotsky wrong versus the SWP minority.

To logically rationalise his split with the Spartacists and whatever his political meanderings since then, Creegan presents himself as a learned pacifier of ‘those tending toward hasty differences’. Our ‘learned unifier’, to give authentication to his method, cites Lars T Lih’s credentials by way of introduction, as an example of a non-sectarian ‘historian’s contribution’, as when he pontificates on the added value of Kautskyism to Leninism before and after August 1914. This is, to a critical Marxist today, so much dirty water under the bridge diverted into a backwater - a flow, density and direction much sought after by sections of the CPGB leadership.

Only half-hearted dabblers in revolutionary politics would claim that Lenin’s break with Bogdanov was founded on “fuzzy” points - but perhaps Mr Creegan was suggesting there was a ‘concrete question’ dividing the two, on which he couldn’t decide. Either way, this suitably takes us to the heart of the theoretical and concrete questions involved in Burnham, Shachtman and others, fulminating against Trotsky’s defence of the property relations and the basic class nature of the Soviet Union, as it degenerated from 1917 to the Stalin-Hitler pact, according to the formalist, anti-Marxist Burnham, and his eclectic, agnostic-platonic-Marxist cohort, Shachtman.

If Mr Creegan had seriously studied In defence of Marxism, he would know that it wasn’t Trotsky who initiated the split, but that it was Trotsky who emphasised the need to give extensive leniency to the SWP minority and recommended that the majority seek to give the minority every reasonable facility to present the ‘grounds’ of their disagreements on their views. The minority demanded a referendum of the whole membership of the SWP to pronounce upon the Stalin-Hitler pact’s effective ‘pro-imperialist’ change - thereby falsely conjoining all the Soviet masses (and all the socialised property relations) axiomatically with Stalin, into a de facto alliance with Hitlerite Germany.

It was Messrs Burnham and Shachtman who had invited anti-Marxists to write pieces for the SWP’s theoretical magazine and this was not separate from their ideals of ‘freedom to criticise’ the party’s Marxism. It was they who took it upon themselves to teach the party, as a whole, what they thought it should newly orient toward. Against what the duo claimed was bureaucratic conservatism by James Cannon’s leading bodies and Trotsky’s theoretical direction from Mexico, Burnham declared he never agreed with Marxism and that to him dialectical materialism was a mystery. Shachtman said he adhered to Marxism, but that for him it was absolutely decided on ‘new’ concrete conditions, which Cannon and Trotsky were not now appreciative of.

Creegan says: “Did not Trotsky, in In defence of Marxism, upbraid Shachtman and Burnham for mentioning their disagreement over dialectics in the pages of the US Socialist Workers Party’s magazine, The New International?” Well, no, he opposed their party intrigue as in opposition to the programme and perspective of the Fourth International, which remained in defence of the social gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution despite Stalinism and its temporary appeasement of Nazism; and their preparedness to split the organisation of the SWP on precisely this issue - in their accord with US-wide petty bourgeois public opinion, as war relentlessly approached.

If Creegan had ever read Trotsky, he would also know that he didn’t make a volte face regarding Brest-Litovsk simply to retain unity with Lenin, although that was a factor in the need to consolidate what borders they could. Trotsky proposed ‘neither war nor peace’ with Germany: he wanted to see if the Russian Revolution would encourage the German proletarians toward revolution itself - as an internationalist. He accepted after a period of months that Lenin’s instinctive evaluation of the balance of forces in Germany meant that they had to submit to even harsher impositions on the young workers’ state.

In the rapidly developing re-emergence of death-agony capitalism, all questions of value and private property between proletarians and bourgeois and all valuable lessons of the difficulties of training and moulding of revolutionary leaders - however small in number they currently be - come to the foreground. But not as Lars T Lih and Jim Creegan would have you think and do.

Rising passion
Rising passion

Fungibility

In his article ‘Miliband turns a deeper shade of blue’ (June 28), Peter Manson argues: “It is most certainly undesirable for workers to seek to defend ‘their’ jobs, pay and conditions from what they see as the incursions of outsiders, but this is fundamentally driven by sectionalism, not racist or any other form of prejudice.”

I understand what Manson is suggesting with his scare quotes around ‘their’ - jobs are ultimately under the jurisdiction of the capitalist class - but is not the whole point that the working class should be challenging for autonomy all the time? It’s called class struggle, right up to the point of revolutionary activity. Also, does the undesirability just apply to workers in Britain or is it international? If the latter, then is it the case that each group of workers in each country in turn would have to turn down a job contract lest they be viewed as sectionalist? A sort of giant game of international musical chairs.

If you take that to its logical conclusion, it is difficult to see how any workers anywhere could work, in that, by so doing, they are inevitably depriving other workers of those jobs. Whilst it is undoubtedly correct that we do not want the bourgeoisie to be in a position to pit groups of workers in different countries against each other, a position of heroic self-sacrifice hardly seems to be the answer. Decent, internationally coordinated trade union action may be one future answer, but in the here and now these organisations are scarcely able to run a one-day event in one country.

Manson goes on: “We say, if capital can move freely across borders, then so must labour. Workers must have the right to travel, work and settle wherever they choose.” Leaving aside the blatantly obvious fact that capital is highly fungible and labour is not, the concept of ‘open borders’ might make people feel good but it simply ignores the existence of organised crime, drugs and arms smuggling, people-trafficking and the rest. It is doubtful whether even in a communist society border movements would be unrestricted, as the system would rely on stringent planning, which would require knowing what people were where and when.

Fungibility
Fungibility

Sectarianism

While I found Mike Macnair’s article, ‘Liquidationism and “broad front” masks’, very useful overall, I was puzzled by his remarks about sectarianism (June 28).

Comrade Macnair presents a formulation - “Sectarian groups put the building of their own organisation before the process of developing the working class movement as a whole” - which I take is an approximation of a common understanding rather than an actual definition. Mike says this formulation is “useless” because, firstly, the existing “mass workers’ movement is dominated by class-collaborationism”; and, secondly, because the “modern sectarians” do not “oppose the mass class movement”, but “actively endeavour to build it”.

It seems to me that neither of these objections is soundly based. Admittedly the formulation he gives us is not the most scientifically rigorous; I would prefer: ‘Sectarian groups put the interests of their own organisation before those of the working class as a whole’. Nevertheless it strikes me as a reasonable description of the behaviour of sectarian groups.

Mike’s first objection appears to conflate the interests of (and “process of developing”) the whole class (and “movement”) with the interests of its current misleaders. The fact that trade union and Labour leaders are class-collaborationist clearly does not lead us to write off the movement they head, or set ourselves the task of creating an ‘alternative movement’. The current one needs to be developed - not “as it is”, as comrade Macnair puts it, but through communist leadership, which in turn demands the building of a single, united Marxist party. Most of the left groups are sectarian because they constantly promote their own interests and their own development in opposition to the building of the party which alone could provide the movement with the leadership that meets its objective interests.

The sectarian groups do indeed “endeavour to build” the mass movement. But they do so in a way that places their own interests above those of that movement - there is no contradiction here. The Socialist Workers Party, for example, endeavours to build the anti-cuts movement through Unite the Resistance, which it set up precisely to further the interests of the SWP - in opposition to those of rival groups and thus the interests of the movement as a whole.

Perhaps it would help if comrade Macnair provided us with his own definition of sectarianism.

Sectarianism
Sectarianism

What crisis?

I agreed with almost everything in Paul Demarty’s article on Greece (‘Taking up extreme opposition’, June 21), particularly his arguments against the left nationalists. But I could not agree with his statement: “It is simply not true that the Greek crisis is something that is being done to Greece by Germany with the EU as a weapon. It is a product of a properly global crisis, which in turn results from global and highly uneven relations between states.”

That position is not sustainable. It’s not sustainable, firstly, because, as I have demonstrated previously, there is no “global crisis”. Despite experiencing the worst financial crisis in 2008-09, the global economy in the last three years has continued to grow strongly, along with global trade. The United States during some of that time has grown at rates around 5% annually. It is still growing at around 2.5% during a cyclical slowdown. China has been growing at 10%, and is still growing at 8.5%.

Secondly, and precisely because of this, global numerous economies have been able to benefit by exporting goods to these large, growing economies. China’s almost insatiable demand for food, energy and raw materials to meet the needs of its massively expanding industries, for instance, has enabled economies in Africa and Latin America to enjoy rapid rates of growth, and increased living standards. So, if small economies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, etc have been able to benefit by selling into China and elsewhere, the question remains why Greece has not been able to benefit in the same way.

But it is not just primary producers that have benefited from this global boom and the demands of China. Europe as a whole has a positive trade balance with China! That is largely due to the fact that Europe’s largest economies, like Germany, have been able to sell into the Chinese economy, not only providing high-value capital goods, but also selling high-value luxury goods. Mercedes’ biggest market is now China, which has overtaken the US as the world’s largest car market. In fact, Germany remains the second largest exporter of goods and services, only recently having been overtaken by China.

It is quite clear that one reason Greece has not been able to take advantage of a booming global economy, in the way that small economies in Africa, Asia and Latin America have done, is indeed, in part, due to the constraints that its membership of the euro zone have placed upon it. For example, one of the areas in which Greece has had an international competitive position is shipping. Over the last 10 years, the massive increase in global trade has seen not just a rise in shipping rates, as a look at the Baltic Dry Index will show, but a significant increase in the size of bulk containers to take advantage of the increase in volume, and to reduce costs. Yet Greece has not significantly benefited from that. In part, that seems likely to be due to the high value of the euro, whose international exchange rate has been determined on the basis of the strength of the large German economy, rather than the small Greek and other economies.

Another aspect of that is inevitably the fact that low interest rates - again set according to the economy of Germany - encouraged Greek capitalists to engage in malinvestments, and particularly in speculative activity, rather than in significant restructuring and modernisation of the Greek economy. Given the nature of the Greek state and government as endemically corrupt, it also led to large amounts of money simply disappearing into deep pockets.

Having found itself in that position, Greece is now being forced to endure an austerity programme that is inflicting anorexia upon its already weakened economy, and the political source of that imposition is indeed Germany. What is worse is that it is being imposed not in the interests of even German capitalists, let alone European capital as a whole, but simply in order to meet the needs of Angela Merkel and the Christian Democratic Union’s electoral interests. The German SPD, who are ahead in the polls, together with the Greens, are in favour of introducing EU bonds, and so on, which would collectivise all European debts, and address many of the problems which caused the crisis in Greece in the first place.

The problems facing Greece, as with those facing the rest of Europe, are essentially political, not economic. They require in the first instance a political solution. That solution involves a clear commitment by EU politicians to move speedily towards political union. It involves an even speedier move towards fiscal union and the collectivising of all European debts - essentially writing off those of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy - and if necessary the monetisation of that debt via money printing by the European Central Bank. A longer-term solution, but again requiring immediate action, would be the introduction of bonds to finance all EU debt via the capital markets, backed by the whole of the EU. Of course, that will mean that Germany will want oversight of all budgets - that is what fiscal union means - but that has to come alongside, not in advance of, the necessary measures to establish the necessary political/state structures to stand behind a single currency/market.

Of course, as workers we have to raise the cry of the American revolutionaries - “No taxation without representation!” A fiscal and political union means we have to have a root-and-branch democratisation of the EU as a whole. We should begin by demanding the convening of a Europe-wide constitutional convention.

What crisis?
What crisis?

Glued up

Is capitalism a glue factory? The Wall Street Journal of June 29 quotes the economist, Douglas Holz-Eakin: “We’re the best looking horse in the glue factory.” He is referring to the relative strength of the dollar compared to other currencies in worse shape.

The article also quotes Hans Hoogervorst, chief of International Accounting Standards, as saying: “The best we can expect is a prolonged muddling through.” By coincidence, the HSBC bank has issued a report on the world economy entitled A colossal muddle and Barclays bank has issued one called Global outlook, a stressful muddling through. The bankers get paid ‘to muddle’.

In the US, we can soon choose in the elections which horse we want to lead us into the glue factory.

Glued up
Glued up