Letters

Into the void

After the Socialist Workers Party’s special conference last Sunday, members of the Democratic Renewal platform collectively resigned, as did Sussex Socialist Worker Student Society, with many other members resigning individually. The International Socialist Network was then formed in order to externally regroup those leaving or being forced out of the SWP.

Several longstanding members, who’ve been in the group since the 1970s, have also told me they’ll be resigning. One In Defence of Our Party faction member told me: “Many IDOP members will now be giving serious thought as to their membership of the SWP.”

The SWP’s student work has been severely damaged, perhaps irreparably. The central committee installed CC member Jo Caldwell as the student organiser in a bid to quarantine the dissident SWSS groups. The SWP barred Jamie Woodcock and a number of other oppositionists from standing in NUS elections and provided very little support for SWSS election campaigns.

We can now expect many SWSS groups to split. As one prominent SWSS member told me, “We’ve tried to work with the party and they’ve refused to work with us. They did nothing for the student union election campaign; they have boycotted our meetings and have continually slated us at their meetings. They don’t provide any material support, any political support, and think we’ve been overrun by feminists! Most of the group wants to leave - I’m the only one to argue for them to stay - and I can’t be arsed having that argument any more. The party’s only going to smash us next year anyway, so might as well lay the ground work now, so we can still function on campus.”

When I asked about their long-term perspectives, particularly when the people currently in SWSS leave university and start work, I was told: “Hopefully between now and 2015 the left has got its act together! My immediate concerns are regrouping people leaving the party with others that are interested in having a dialogue with us on what next, and then have a discussion about what to do. The main thing is people not disappearing left, right and centre.”

I find it incredibly unlikely that the British left is going to get its act together between now and 2015 and I therefore see two probable routes for the International Socialist Network: a theoretically stillborn network of activists like the Anti-Capitalist Initiative; or a slightly more democratic, slightly smaller version of the SWP. Neither of these outcomes is desirable.

Into the void
Into the void

Nonsense

Tony Clark (Letters, March 7) claims that Simon Wells asserted that there were no alpha-males during the period of primitive communism (Letters, February 28), or at any rate that he “wants us to believe” so. Simon Wells did not specifically say that, although it may have been the implication. However, I will leave that to him, suffice to say I agree with his main sentiments and opinions.

Now while I am no paleoanthropologist, or whatever the relevant speciality would be, I think that Tony Clark, whose sentiments and opinions in the letter I find completely distasteful, nonetheless is possibly correct in his contention that alpha-males did indeed exist during this period (Palaeolithic to early Neolithic?). I would agree also that it seems that there were varieties of primitive communism in existence long before Marx came along with his new and arguably improved, version; various forms of non-Marxist communism still exist and flourish, come to that. As for those alpha-males as described by Tony, it makes sense to me that they did exist and were necessary for the fulfilment of the roles he ascribes to them. It is perfectly possible also that those roles had limits, even if ultimately imperfect, unfortunately, allowing the big-man/chief-dominated type of society to eventually emerge practically everywhere. So far, so agreeable.

However, he then veers completely off the rails to make the fantastical assertion that “as a general rule most heterosexual women are not sexually attracted to non-alpha-males, who psychologically resemble females to them”. Do they really? To be fair, I interpret the qualifiers, “general” and “most”, to mean that he is not being completely dogmatic on this, but it is nonetheless an outrageous statement, which develops into an even more outrageous argument. I mean, how does he know? Surveyed most women from ‘Eve’ onwards, has he? Maybe he is simply being mischievous, making provocative statements he doesn’t fully believe in for whatever reason, but from the tone of the letter I don’t believe so. For one thing, there are forms of male/female attraction that are non-sexual in nature and, for another, all men obviously cannot be of the alpha variety; otherwise the description would be redundant. It follows then that many or most women must have been sufficiently satisfied with a sufficient number of those poor, non-alpha, second-rate chaps in order to ensure optimum reproduction rates and the nurture and protection of subsequent offspring.

Added to that, we have, of course, the continuous existence of non-heterosexual men and women, who would also presumably have been attracted to both alpha and non-alpha males and females respectively, according to preference. So what then are we left with? The human condition with all it merits and flaws, I suppose. One of those flaws is, according to him, the “nonsense” of feminism. That’s dealt with the uppity ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft and all her successors in sisterhood then!

We always focus on the “negative side of the alpha-male”, thus missing the “positive sides such as leadership” - but do we? I think we do not focus enough on it, actually, for we have far too many alpha-males gone wrong, whose alphaness has got out of hand to become violent, destructive, sexually predatory or downright murderous, as the shocking statistics of rape and domestic violence demonstrate. Are feminists to blame for all this too, for usurping their natural hunter/warrior/defender roles and leaving them with no valid healthy outlets? Apologies if that is an unfair exaggeration or misinterpretation of what Tony’s claims might lead to (though I would say too that there are other reasons for these kinds of destructiveness).

As to the positive side, we have leadership as an admirable quality in these masculine paragons, which is fine as far as it goes and if it’s of the right sort in the sense of not being overbearing or oppressive. But might alpha-males, as well as their leadership and defender qualities, also be allowed to show their softer, sensitive, caring-sharing sides if they have them, or would that mean that they had come under the tutelage of those evil, emasculating feminists and are therefore really women?

That the far left, or parts of it, has a problem with democracy is all too true, so who are those alpha-males of a leftwing persuasion who can save us all from the horrors of fascism? We have recently been confronted with the spectacle where certain alpha-males on the left, and those who consider them as such, even if not specifically so described, have led their followers, and it was not singing into the sunlit uplands of democracy, as Simon Wells commented comprehensively in his letter.

My opinion is that we do need the various forms of feminism - socialist, anarcho, even aspects of radical feminism, to add to a potentially rich mix of diverse ways of living that will culminate in the extreme forms of democracy and egalitarianism that we desire. But Tony does not even want women to be involved in building this new world. No, it can only be non-feminist men and those wonderful males with their supercharged alpha chromosomes who are able for the job!

I am sure that there will be further responses from Simon and others with more knowledgeable insightfulness than I’ve managed here. I hope so, since it is not feminism’s but Tony Clark’s nonsense which needs to be demolished.

Nonsense
Nonsense

Not worth it

In last week’s Weekly Worker Tony ‘Tarzan theory’ Clark swings through the trees in response to my letter of the previous week. He misses the point that any show of self-aggrandisement would have been summarily quashed by the group which that male belonged to.

Numerous articles have appeared in the pages of the Weekly Worker on the human revolution and it appears that Tony Clark has absorbed absolutely nothing from them. Until he comes up with a considered response, it is not worth responding any further to his cursory letter and ludicrous speculations that alpha-males are going to save us from fascism.

Not worth it
Not worth it

Alpha-rule

Tony Clark’s letter prompted me to think of the contribution of alpha-males to the left in Britain in recent years: Gerry Healey, George Galloway, Derek Hatton, Tommy Sheridan and comrade Delta for their different but distinct contributions all spring to mind. I am sure comrades can summon up many other examples. Just think what a parlous state we would be in without the example of their selfless leadership.

Alpha-rule
Alpha-rule

Off the cuff

In a recent Weekly Worker podcast, Jack Conrad warns against “transposing” sex-strike theory from its proper place, which is in distant prehistory, to our present political situation.

I have to say I am surprised. Listening carefully to his words, Jack seems to be arguing that the struggle against rape and other forms of sexual violence - ie, the kind of struggle that culminated in the human revolution, giving rise to human culture in the first instance - is today too non-political and trivial an issue to have justified a split in the Socialist Workers Party. I sincerely hope Jack’s words were off the cuff and that he doesn’t really mean this?

Off the cuff
Off the cuff

Special offer

The economic prosperity of prostitution as a profession is a very good indicator of the health of the capitalist economy. However, many prostitutes are currently having a bleak time, as the disposable income of the male population has been markedly reduced during our great recession. Evidence of this contraction is given by the number of escorts advertising on Adult Work, which is the premier website in the UK for putting escorts in contact with potential clients. The number of escorts with profiles advertising on the website has mysteriously fallen from more than 18,500 a year ago, to less than 17,800 in March 2013.

The days of the boom years, wherein most escorts could afford holidays in New York, Fiji or Barbados, are long gone, as the UK economy enters a triple-dip recession. Whilst most escorts can still earn £100 an hour, which contrasts very well with women working on the checkouts at Tesco, overall income is well down. Many escorts therefore have to make cut-price ‘special offers’ to attract potential clients, with income being very volatile or non-existent, except for those who have a well-established clientele.

Some escorts are becoming part of the new ‘precariat’ of the growing self-employed sector, which has strangely kept the number of unemployed from rising above the three million mark. This new ‘precariat’ is part of the eight million-strong workforce whose precarious and insecure income can be better than those on benefits but a lot less than the average wage.

Special offer
Special offer

Unreloaded

Lawrence Parker makes passing reference to my take on Lukács, and accuses me of dogmatic anti-Stalinism (‘Lukács reloaded’, March 7). I know that Lukács remained a dissident of sorts. The problem is that the later Lukács opposed Stalinism from the right rather than from the left. As Adorno put it pithily about Lukács’s book The destruction of reason (1962), this expressed merely the destruction of the author’s own.

I agree with Parker that Lenin’s critique of Leftwing communism (1920) was an essential point of departure for Lukács’s book, History and class consciousness. There, Lenin addresses the problem of the workers’ own “bourgeois consciousness” in political practice, but as something to be worked through. About Parker’s critique of the earlier Lukács, however, it only appears that Lukács was mystifying because of the high level of abstraction at which History and class consciousness is pitched.

As Lukács put it at the beginning of his essay on ‘Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat’, the centrepiece of HCC, “… at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. Of course, the problem can only be discussed with this degree of generality if it achieves the depth and breadth to be found in Marx’s own analyses.”

This meant that Lukács took Marx for granted and did not seek to revise him. The same can be said of Lenin and Luxemburg in Lukács’s view. He presupposed them, precisely in ways that we cannot today. As a result, Lukács’s HCC can seem nebulous where it actually aims to be very concrete. But, in Marx’s phrase in the Grundrisse on Hegel’s method, it is the concretion of abstractions. This is the “method”, Marx’s method in Das Kapital, that Lukács championed in HCC.

What justifies such a ‘Hegelian’ or perhaps simply ‘philosophical’ approach? Lukács, following Marx, Engels, Lenin and Luxemburg, among others, is concerned with the transformation of social relations, and this means working through the categories of such social relations’ critical self-reflection in thought - but not only or primarily as a matter of thinking. Lukács joined the Communist Party, and was a commissar in the 1919 Hungarian revolution. Lukács was a responsible comrade in ways that no-one today can possibly be; Lukács wrote HCC as a member of the Communist International, not as an academic.

The ‘commodity form’ and its ‘reification’ after the industrial revolution is a problem of social relations, not directly those of supposed empirical reality. It is rather a matter of how such social reality is ‘mediated’, in both practice and theory. In Lukács’s terms, it is precisely what is most apparently immediate, in practice, that must be grasped in its essential mediations. The problem is how capitalism obscures its mediations. But this also includes how the struggle against capitalism can obscure its own mediations, which are part and parcel of the history of capitalism, not outside or independent of it.

This is a problem of modern society, of bourgeois social relations. These are the social relations of labour in modern urban life specifically, as opposed to the traditional customs of pastoral agriculture and its caste values, which were not so mediated. What the workers do or don’t do affects, essentially, the course of development of capitalism: it is a task of history under which modern society progresses or regresses. The workers’ movement for socialism was grasped by Marxism as part of the dialectic of history. That was the essentially Marxist point that Lukács sought to emphasise in HCC. And it is pointless today because there is no such historical movement.

Reification remained a problem for Marxism to work through, including and perhaps especially the reification of the workers’ movement against capitalism, which threatened, subjectively, to naturalise its object, and thus become what Marx called ‘ideology’. This was already true in the 1840s when Marxism began, and clearly happened to Marxism itself in the 20th century. Lukács gave up his critique of such reification, which didn’t mean going along with Stalinism in its entirety, but enough to disqualify Lukács politically, at least as far as the left is concerned. Lukács’s later work accommodated and promoted the lowered horizons of possibility involved in Stalinism, which meant necessarily renouncing and not merely critiquing his earlier work.

Unreloaded
Unreloaded

Mixed bag

First off, I appreciate the letter published in last week’s edition by Hands Off Venezuela (March 7). I hope there will be a full article in the next couple of weeks on the Venezuelan situation. Chávez was quite a mixed bag, though, who couldn’t accomplish a whole lot, even for substantive left reforms, after the unfortunate 2007 referendum loss, or even help catapult a new international.

Second, much has been said about Syriza’s ‘broad’ programme being illusory (despite the organising of solidarity networks and other work that makes real political parties), that ‘workers’ governments’ don’t work, and so on.

However, one example I’d like to point out for debate on either side is that I’ve not read or heard of any left social democratic programme or platform that committed to the permanent nationalisation of a country’s entire financial system. Unless the ‘populist’ leadership has someone versed in that younger social credit cousin known as binary economics, but that’s just me. This, the full-blown application of those left policies implemented in Argentina (default), Bolivia (land reform), Ecuador (media reform), Venezuela (communal power), Iceland, and even the kitchen sink, should all be a basic starting point for any ‘workers’ government’, whether inside or outside the euro zone.

Mixed bag
Mixed bag

Praise indeed

Wow, that was one helluva letter from Dermot Hudson, praising North Korea to the skies (March 7)! He must be a member of the New Communist Party, who, when it comes to communism and socialism, just make it up as they go along. Or else he is a follower of Harpal Brar.

Where to begin? Well, I suppose North Korea is a hell hole where the population live in constant fear of the gulag, torture and murder. Where the ruling party act as the capitalist class and take the fat of the land, leaving the working class with not enough to live on. Where money is frittered away on pointless monuments, the military and luxuries for their ‘dear leader’, whilst the population slowly starves to death and their health service crumbles.

The regime in North Korea represents everything that was wrongly done in the name of communism and everything that genuine communists are opposed too. If the Morning Star ignores North Korea and refuses to praise them, then more power to them.

Praise indeed
Praise indeed

Reinstate Lee

In a blatant attempt to silence one of the most outspoken and effective trade union activists in Sheffield, the department for work and pensions (DWP) has dismissed Weekly Worker supporter Lee Rock after over 27 years as a union rep.

Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union in Sheffield have launched a campaign against the dismissal and, together with about a dozen other branches, are threatening strike action if Lee is not reinstated. The branch has already voted to be balloted for strike action and is awaiting approval from the national union.

The branch writes: “DWP management dismissed Lee on sickness grounds, but the branch feels that this dismissal was a direct attack on Lee in his trade union capacity, and that the sickness (‘attendance management’) procedures were used as a cover for this. The circumstances surrounding Lee’s sickness are clear that in other circumstances, if he was not a trade union rep, the dismissal would not have taken place.

“At the time Lee was dismissed he had not had a sick day for 12 weeks, and had had only 2.5 days sickness in the previous six months. The branch does not believe this has happened elsewhere and, in the collective experience of our reps, we have never come across such a case in all our decades of representation. Mention of his trade union activity was also made in the recommendation for dismissal.”

This is, of course, not an isolated case (though it is certainly one of the crasser ones). It is part of a wider attack on PCS locally and nationally: for the last couple of years, the government has followed radical plans to roll back working conditions in the public sector - and that includes vicious attacks on those who are trying to defend union members from the worst excesses of the cutbacks. The Con-Dem government has been cutting back facility time for trade union reps and has been trying to effectively shut down employment tribunals (which is often the only way unfairly dismissed staff can at least hope to achieve financial remuneration, if not their job back). This, of course, is all in addition to the vicious attacks on public-sector pensions and the pay freeze.

It has been very encouraging that Lee has received messages of support from Sheffield trades council, PCS branches up and down the country, the local Unite branch, his local MP Paul Blomfield, as well as John McDonnell MP (the chair of the PCS group of MPs). He has also received support from PCS members of varied political persuasion - despite the fact that he has been as outspoken in his dealings with management as in his criticisms of the Socialist Workers Party, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the Socialist Party. In fact, the PCS nationally (which is run by the SP) has expressed its full support and the national conference in May will hear motions that call for his reinstatement and for strike action. Also, Lee has been asked to deliver a message to the Sheffield conference of the SWP’s Unite Against Resistance, which takes place this Saturday.

Other trade union branches, individuals or trades councils who wish to send a message of solidarity to Lee or the branch can email it the branch secretary at tombishell@yahoo.co.uk.

Reinstate Lee
Reinstate Lee