Letters

General strike

The TUC general council is supposed to be committed to investigating the practicalities of a general strike. Unite’s general secretary, Len McCluskey, asked the crowed in Hyde Park on Saturday if they wanted a general strike and got a resounding ‘yes’. The National Shop Stewards Network and Socialist Party are asking the TUC to name the day.

In fact we already have a day: November 14. As things stand, there are plans for simultaneous general strikes in five countries: three major (Spain, Portugal and Greece); two minor (Cyprus and Malta). And Saturday’s large union rally in Rome heard calls for a general strike from the crowd - unfortunately, Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) general secretary Susanna Camusso has said that she needs to discuss this with the leaders of the other union centres, the CISL and UIL, who are likely to sabotage plans for Italian involvement; CISL did not even participate in the recent Italian public sector general strike.

If this international general strike goes ahead it will be unprecedented in the history of the European labour movement. The only previous attempt at something of this sort - on the initiative of the Comintern in July 1919 - flopped due to the last-minute treachery of the leaders of the French CGT and of many, but not all, Italian trade unions.

The bosses’ austerity offensive is being conducted on a European scale. Our response must be European, not national. The European Union-European Central Bank-International Monetary Fund troika cannot be beaten in one country. Nor can the UK escape from the austerity agenda by simply withdrawing from the EU, as certain of our more militant union leaders - the RMT executive in particular - believe. An independent capitalist Britain would be more closely linked to the American neoliberal agenda, rabidly hostile to trade unions and the welfare state. Equally an independent capitalist Scotland, like an independent capitalist Catalonia, is a blind alley. The problem is not the English or the Castilians, but international capitalism.

The European Trade Union Confederation is committed to a ‘day of action’ against austerity on November 14. Whilst its demands and plans are, predictably, inadequate, we must take advantage of this call to urge the maximum solidarity action with our brothers and sisters in southern Europe; even if we cannot push the union leaders into calling for a general strike in the United Kingdom, we must make sure that as many activists as possible are aware of what is going on across the channel and that any ‘day of action’ over here is not limited to some poorly attended lunchtime rallies in a handful of locations.

General strike
General strike

Bloody obvious

Mike Macnair’s article, which advocates the need to rebuild the movement before we can think about general strikes, is long on criticism, short on solutions (‘Rebuild the movement’, October 18).

In the end it boils down to a criticism that demonstrations like October 20 will not immediately lead to a general strike to overthrow the government. Pretty obvious - although it doesn’t seem an unreasonable aspiration to build protests and strikes to a pitch that might cause the government to fall. But it goes on to say that these sorts of actions - including strikes, preferably on a continental scale (does he mean coordinated strike action, or a protest general strike?) help develop the movement. So nothing to criticise then.

As for “the need to rebuild the movement”, again pretty bloody obvious, but surely it will only be rebuilt in struggle against cuts, against the government and for a changed society. Not because someone decides to get more organised. That is the mantra of the union bureaucrats: recruit, recruit, recruit. But the question is what will cause people to join a union other than struggle, and success in that struggle? With the unions failing to fight, or losing consistently, for many not paying out £5-£10 per month to the union is an effective saving in hard times.

Comrade Macnair’s big ideas seem to be ‘area-based’ unions to organise the part-time and unemployed workers, and cooperatives and mutuals, so we can get used to running our own society. To counterpose organising the unemployed to organising in the workplace shows a complete lack of understanding of the complexities of trade union organisation and negotiation, much dictated by legal requirements around ballots. Most of this is done by lay reps released by their employer - thus branches must essentially be employer-based. Employers don’t give you time off to organise the factory down the road, and the unions don’t have enough employees to do all the organising for lay reps - even if this was desirable. Of course, that doesn’t stop initiatives like Unite’s community branches (although they are not exactly being flooded with applications from these layers) and the actions of trades councils in linking up workers and fights. In my area the trades council has pulled all left political groups into an anti-cuts campaign, which has then involved disability groups and others.

Mutuals and coops are being put forward in the public sector by the Tories. They want workers to take over running care services, libraries, bus services, etc, because they will then squeeze them through the contract tendering process, forcing them to cut their own pay and conditions. This would be a façade of control. It is the equivalent of self-employed building workers being used to undermine organisation and cut pay and conditions. Hence, this is not a policy for the left to advocate. It is likely to atomise an already weakened workforce.

Bloody obvious
Bloody obvious

No rebuilding

Mike Macnair’s article has some serious, fundamental flaws. He criticises the demand for a general strike and instead insists that we should rebuild the movement, whatever that means. Like most pessimists in the workers’ movement he doubts the capacity of the working class to fight.

Macnair says: “Slogans or strategies of a general strike to bring down the government are right now simply unrealistic.” This is the old reformist lie: ‘Wait until the movement is ready’. Macnair has a purely pessimistic attitude to the working class when he says: “The level of organisation remains extremely weak.” The fact that the working class has changed from full-time to part-time work is irrelevant. The composition of the class has changed, but that has not changed its capacity to fight. The response to October 20 was massive - a sure indication that it will do so.

Both Lenin and Trotsky wrote about the nature of trade unions in the imperialist epoch. In the Transitional programme Trotsky says: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” This prognosis was true in 1938 as it is now.

In the British working class today the biggest brake on the working class taking power is the trade union bureaucracy, which like Stalinism is a counterrevolutionary caste, representing the wishes of capitalism. The Cameron/Clegg government rests completely on the role of this bureaucracy and, as Lenin said in Leftwing communism: an infantile disorder, “The victory of the revolutionary proletariat is impossible unless this evil is combated, unless the opportunist social traitors are exposed, discredited and expelled.”

That is the task in this period - not solidarity or rebuilding the movement, but a ruthless and relentless struggle to smash this bureaucratic apparatus in the trade unions and build a genuine rank-and-file movement independent of the bureaucracy. That rank-and-file movement is Grassroots Left.

No rebuilding
No rebuilding

Bent stick

Perhaps it’s just me here bending the stick towards the political, but could CPGB comrade Mike Macnair please support his sentence, “At the core of any workers’ movement are the trade unions”?

Maybe that is a British peculiarity, but continental Marxist parties and continental bourgeois-worker parties have quite a different history than said assertion. None of those parties were - thankfully, I should add - based on the ever apolitical trade unions.

Bent stick
Bent stick

Red herring

I genuinely intended to economise in my responses to Arthur Bough but not by as much as the editor of the Weekly Worker dictated when he cut my three observations to one (Letters, October 18). I fully appreciate the constraints of space in last week’s issue and Arthur’s misunderstanding of Marx’s law of value is a particularly egregious error. However, I think my further two points in response to Arthur’s letters of recent weeks are worth making.

First, while I may have differences with Andrew Kliman around how we should conceptualise the formation of individual commodity values (I intend to spend time working through this issue), when it comes to measuring the rate of profit, Arthur appears to confuse the effect of an appreciation of capital values on the rates of profit of individual capitalists with its effect on the aggregate rate of profit. My point has always been - and Arthur himself says the same thing - that one capitalist’s capital gain is another’s capital loss. In measures of aggregate profits (historical cost and current replacement cost alike) such gains and losses will cancel out each other.

It is striking that all Arthur’s examples of capitalist production refer to a single capitalist or a single sector of the economy and all changes in commodity values are represented as phenomena external to the production process under examination. They are therefore useless for the purposes of discussing aggregate behaviour.

Much more important than appreciation is the question of capital depreciation. In my view, capital appreciation and depreciation have neither an equivalent nor symmetrical impact on profit rates. The devaluation of capital values - either as a result of Marx’s ‘moral depreciation’ or in an economic crisis - is not simply cancelled out. Capitalists as a whole can lose - aggregate exchange value can be wiped out and this has an impact on the aggregate economy.

Which brings me to my second point: I think Arthur treats Marx’s discussion of capital in general and many capitals in a manner that is as undialectical as his understanding of the category of value. Marx’s study of capital requires the analytic unity of capital in general and many capitals. Marx’s method was to move from the abstract (capital in general) to the concrete (many capitals, including competition and the division of surplus value between different factions of the capitalist class) and back again.

Many features of Marx’s theory can only be examined by moving towards the study of many capitals: capitalism’s drive towards increasing the productivity of workers; the creation of a general rate of profit; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and its countervailing factors; the role of financial capital; the causes of cyclical crises.

I embrace Arthur’s charge that the role of many capitals interests me, for it is only on the basis of Marx’s complete method that we can usefully analyse the dynamic of capitalist reality. In fact, Arthur’s accusation is a red herring. By measuring inputs and outputs to the production cycle at current replacement costs, the ‘rate of profit’ of Arthur and other opponents of the temporal single-system interpretation has nothing to do with an objective, capital-in-general rate of profit - as they might claim.

Their measurement of the rate of profit does two things. It treats all investments as if they had just been purchased at the prices that currently obtain for all the elements of fixed and circulating capital. It therefore abstracts from the effects of capital devaluations. While such a procedure will clearly miss many disturbances in the economy up to and including a slump, we might think that it ought to tell us something useful about the potential profitability of the economy once the crisis is overcome. It could therefore sit alongside the historical cost rate of profit in our analytic tool box.

However, the second thing a current-replacement-cost rate of profit does is to treat the production cycle as if time were abolished. Inputs and outputs, remember, are valued at the same moment. This is its ultimate absurdity. The procedure cannot capture changes in value over the course of the production cycle - let alone phenomena such as the falling rate of profit. Since an increase in productivity, by definition, will increase the output of physical use-values, productivity increases can only be represented in the current-replacement-cost model by an equivalent increase in the output of values - yet we know that an increase in productivity lowers the socially necessary labour time required to produce commodities and reduces both values and prices compared to the physical quantities of commodities produced.

The current-replacement-cost rate of profit effectively parts company with the labour theory of value.

Red herring
Red herring

Spelling it out

Heather Downs (Letters, October 18) confirms that, for her, class and women’s oppression have no relationship with each other. She suggests, rhetorically, that I am concerned that she hasn’t placed women’s oppression “at the end of a very long queue, including Zionism, imperialism, racism in the deep south”. My whole argument was that the oppression of women is integral to all of these - including, of course, sexual violence against women in racist society.

Let me spell it out in terms that even Heather will understand. Do Palestinians not include women? Did the rape of Arab women by the Palmach shock troops in the Nakba, prior to their murder, not constitute sexual violence? Was the rape of black slave women by their white owners or by colonialists in, say, the Belgian Congo or Rhodesia divorced from women’s oppression? Why then say I am placing women’s oppression at the end of any queue? What Heather really means is that I am placing rape in a class and not merely a sexual and gender context.

Or, since Heather has a problem identifying with women of colour, perhaps she can tell me how many German women identified with and supported Jewish women in Nazi Germany? Was the outlawing of sexual relations between Jewish men and ‘Aryan’ women also not oppressive to Jewish women? Just as white women, unless they had a level of class-consciousness, identified with white men in southern Africa, so that was also true of the German Fräulein.

The fact is that white women were part of the oppressor society and also complicit in the oppression of both black women and men. If Heather had any knowledge of the case of the Scottsboro boys, she would be aware that the US Communist Party did indeed see it as an issue of class, because they sent Jewish attorney Samuel Leibowitz to defend them. He worked with Ruby Bates, one of the two women who had made false accusations of rape, and successfully persuaded her to withdraw her accusations. But, as Heather Downs indicated in a throwaway remark, the accused were nothing more than Jimmy Savile’s counterparts.

I find Heather’s defence of Andrea Dworkin quite remarkable. She was a good example of a rightwing feminist who ended up in bed with the far right in the United States, testifying to the Meese Commission on pornography. Leaving aside her own questionable assertions of rape (questioned, incidentally, by other women), she formed, along with Christopher Hitchens and David Frum, an alliance with the socially conservative right wing in America around the issue of pornography, because, to her, pornography was the theory; rape was the practice. To the right, all discussion and portrayal of sex had to be put back in the box: hence Dworkin located women’s oppression in sexual intercourse per se.

I am also surprised that Heather is unaware that Dworkin was a racist and Zionist, with, for example, her essay ‘Scapegoat: the Jews, Israel and women’s liberation’.

Regarding the rest of Heather’s letter, we don’t disagree that the key issue is consent and whether it is meaningful consent. The issue of the age of consent is problematic, as is the state of someone’s mental health. But this doesn’t therefore mean that there aren’t grey areas where people go to bed and one person feels pressurised to having sexual intercourse, only to regret it later and subsequently reinterpret what has happened. Or perhaps Heather has only ever had perfectly equal sexual relationships. Speaking from my own experience, there are times when I have given in to pressure or gone to bed with a friend to avoid offending them. Maybe the same has happened in reverse, but we are not talking about rape. Sexual relationships are not divorced from wider personal relationships and people can also reinterpret what happened in the light of their own friendship or association. It would appear that that is the case with Assange. Subsequent behaviour is very much to the point. A victim of rape doesn’t usually tweet about her sexual conquests.

To view this in some political perspective, western feminists did indeed exclude questions of class and race from women’s oppression. They were biologically determinist. ‘The personal is political’ was their slogan. The problem was that the personal was often anything but political. In so doing they were partners in the oppression of other women, just as women I know today are in favour of France’s ban on the burqa, a detestable garment in itself, even if it leads to male violence as a result.

Spelling it out
Spelling it out

Human nature

Bourgeois states are bodies of armed men, backed up by judges and prisons. Communists need to be cautious about supporting their laws. This applies to Swedish law too despite its reputation for liberalism. We should on no account support the use of the European arrest warrant (EAW), even for someone who may have committed rape. Extradition procedures are manipulated by the state, but at least they mean a prima facie case has to be made in public - incidentally extradition on to the US would be illegal if this procedure was followed. In the case of Assange, extradition to the US is the question primarily concerning those opposing his return to Sweden under an EAW, not whether he should stand trial for rape.

However, why a rape law which is infrequently used and under which 90% of those charged are acquitted should be relied upon to protect women’s safety leaves me somewhat baffled. Surely we should be arguing for something more effective. However, leftwing arguments that prison does not work or that societal revenge is inappropriate in a modern justice system are brushed aside as rape denial. Rape is evil and evil must be met with hellfire. But we should have confidence in the improvability of human nature and the patience to see it through - despair of humanity creates impatience and recourse to terror. Why do the ‘non-rape denialists’, if I may so call them, despair in human nature?

The law’s approach to the question of women’s rights is also deeply flawed. Take the complaint made by the two women in the Assange case. It was not about rape. Neither woman was seeking his punishment: they just wanted him to have a paternity test to protect the interests of any children that might result from the act of unprotected sex. The law did not require him to have a paternity test; he was allowed to leave the country. In my view the women behaved reasonably, and the law showed no interest in representing their interests. The women also seem to have informed others in their circle of their sexual experience, so if anyone else was considering going to bed with Assange they would know what to expect. A practical and sensible measure. It should be developed. Especially as confronting someone with their behaviour is often the most effective way of changing them.

Heather Downs has studied how women feel when they have been raped, but these particular women didn’t feel raped. I suspect their psychology is different. They are committed to casual sex. If it is good enough for men, it is good enough for them. They practise sexual equality and that means taking responsibility where the temporary relationship fails in some respect. They probably do not expect too much of men’s behaviour and are loath to exaggerate the degree of fear or repulsion they may feel in the overall interests of their lifestyle.

It is strange that we should be talking about rape now, when it was the first problem solved by our species. The females of our immediate genus did not want be dominated by the alpha males. Not so much a battle against rape as a fight for choice. To this end they formed a political alliance amongst themselves, and they lavished their attention on their offspring, because this resulted in a strong, lifelong, emotional bond and also allowed this alliance to extend to include the beta males. Alpha-male domination was overthrown and the alpha males, like all males, became providers, partners and parents. The uniquely useful male ape. Culture and a mode of production based on sex, not class, produced superabundance and modern humans without the need for police or prisons.

Sometimes to solve something you have to solve everything, but really it is the process itself that produces the answer and that process must come out of a belief in human nature, not reliance on the culture of punishment.

Human nature
Human nature

Leave me out

I regret having to raise further disagreements with comrade Dave Douglass, as I have on most issues, including clean coal, found myself in general agreement with him, but I have to address some of the points in his letter of October 18.

I take issue with his comment: “Terry Burns doesn’t express a shred of communist humanity for people in this complex maze of judgment and punishment, but actually introduces a suggestion for further prohibition and restriction - age gap rather than age difference.” Bollocks. I do not hold views of that nature. I agree that I did not address these issues, as I did not feel it was required. My aim was to make generalised comments. As to the views I hold, I would point out that Dave does not know me or my views, be they about these two people or others who face state or community “judgement and punishment”. From his comments he makes assumptions as to my views based on a few sentences in a short section of a brief letter that was not intended to address the issues he raises.

My “communist humanity”, subject to my lack of personal involvement with the two individuals, would include concern for their probable traumatic and complex feelings and, in turn, those facing their families and friends. This humanity would also manifest itself in the cases of others suffering from state, cultural or community actions. These are often extremely repressive actions, many directed specifically towards women and their social, including sexual, place in society - eg, shooting a 14-year-old girl, female circumcision, dress, access to a wide range of activities, etc. There are also attacks on those involved in LGBT activities. Throughout the world, there exist many state and communal taboos, commonly sexual, often highly repressive. These have to be challenged, rejecting claims of history or culture as reason for their continuance.

Dave then proceeds with the idea that I suggest “further prohibition and restriction” based on “age gap rather than age difference”. I never used the terms ‘age gap’ or ‘age difference’, let alone pitted the one against the other. For me they mean the same thing. What prohibition did I suggest? On the age issue I said, “age is not the issue”. In “communist humanity”, I did say that age issues may bring problems and complexity to relationships, as I think Dave acknowledges in his reply.

As to Dave’s past, present or future sexual activities, he is ‘free’ to see “the joy and excitement of that moment”. I don’t believe this freedom really exists for all within our present society. With regard to such activities, I promise not to offer “sound wisdom and advice”. My sole concern regarding free choice and actions was to reassert the views held by the old teachers of communism and libertarianism. There can be no fully free activities in an unfree society. This in no way stops us eating, drinking, sleeping, getting shelter or having sex. What Dave considers before having sex is between his various parts, his libido and, I would hope, his sexual partner. But I make the comradely request - please leave me out of it.

I also ask Dave to point out any comments I made about “suggestions for legislation”. I made none and I make none. The main issue I raised was that of the role of power and authority, which can distort relationships, and pointed out that this had been ignored in Dave’s original letter. I think Dave falls close to me on this issue when he talks about “the not unreasonable proscriptions on relationships with pupils, given the captive nature of teacher-student relations and balances of position and power” Although I regard the law as a factor, it is in itself a reflection of past and existing power and authority relationships in society.

I am for free love and many other freedoms, but all these are in general distorted in a bourgeois society by bourgeois morality and ideology. Further, our everyday life is distorted through the operations of bourgeois commodity relations.

Leave me out
Leave me out

Not comradely

In Maciej Zurowski’s October 18 letter he selectively quotes from my Platypus president’s report of 2011 (‘The “anti-fascist” vs “anti-imperialist” left: some genealogies and prospects’), which concludes: “There are serious problems with the anti-fascist as well as the anti-imperialist ‘left’. So it is important for us to be aware of this divide so that we can properly discern its - entirely symptomatic - character. We cannot afford to be either anti-fa or anti-imp in prioritising our approach to the problem of the left.”

I don’t see how Zurowski can take this as an endorsement of the “anti-fascist left”. Platypus’s mandate of “hosting the conversation on the death of the left that otherwise would not take place” means that we think no significant symptoms of the historical death of the left can be neglected without losing important educational prerequisites for a refounded, true left, on a global scale. Clearly, the Antideutsche are significant. As I wrote in my letter of October 11, “We want readers to think - really think - about how the ‘left’ has ended up taking such bad positions.”

It’s unfortunate that Zurowski cannot abide Platypus’s essential point in presenting the symptomology of the ‘left’ and our clearly stated reasons for doing so, but must instead try to blame the messenger, stooping to insulting dismissal of Platypus as an “internet troll”. Not comradely.

Not comradely
Not comradely

Correction

Just to point out that my letter last week was changed in the editing process (October 18). I wrote of the necessity to avoid “at all costs the splitting and censorious ‘lefty’ of smirking conservative caricature and popular fears”. But this was unfortunately reworded so as to imply that it is we ‘lefties’ who might be smirking.

Correction
Correction