Letters

Extinction

Comrade Camilla Power, a self-described “anarcho-Marxist”, raises some important questions concerning the relationship between Marxists and anarchists (Letters, March 28).

I know many anarchists who are deeply committed to our class and Marxists can and must struggle alongside, and form alliances with, all those who are fighting for the same demands. Yet, when it comes to revolutionary strategy and how our side is going to win, there can be no blurring of the outlooks of anarchism and Marxism. The Marxist project argues that the working class must become a conscious historical subject by forming itself into a party and that it must win the battle for democracy in both the state and society at large, thereby conquering state power and subordinating it to the most thoroughgoing democracy and control from below. These fundamental pillars of Marxism are completely rejected by anarchism in favour of various forms of voluntarism, conspiratorial organisation and rejection of authority tout court.

The incompatibility of two completely different outlooks cannot be wished away. The unavoidable fact is that the different strategic outlooks of reformism, Lassalleanism, Sorelianism, Bakuninism, Labourism, Marxism, etc reflect particular dynamics in the working class’s long struggle to liberate itself. Such differences have meant that comrades have been on different sides of the barricades at particular points in time. We Marxists must honestly seek to explain such differences in order to positively overcome them. We must dispel some of the myths and prejudices common to both anarchist and bourgeois thought on Marx’s supposed ‘elitist’ and ‘dictatorial’ approach in relation to the party, state, etc. Adding an “anarcho-” prefix to our self-description could be seen as a way of pandering to these myths.

Marx and Engels did not simply place the socialist movement on a firm, scientific basis. Contrary to the claims of partisans of the ‘broad party’ so very much in vogue, they also fought a continuous, partyist struggle for the unity of the workers’ movement on clear lines, from the Communist League to the Social Democratic Party of Germany. This struggle often came up against, and to the exclusion of, both left voluntarism (Willich and Schapper, Bakunin, the French ‘general strikists’, the German ‘Young Ones’) and rightists with class-collaborationist illusions in the state (the French possiblists, Lassalle, Rodbertus, Schramm, Dühring, etc). For Marx and Engels, lasting and meaningful unity could only be achieved on the basis of principle: hence the Communist manifesto, the programme of the Parti Ouvrier, the critique of the Gotha programme, the work on the Erfurt programme, etc.

If our movement is to overcome what comrade Power correctly deems our “tragic, splintered past” and become a force capable of changing the world, then we must be equally meticulous in our approach. The role of Marxists, particularly in this period, is to elucidate, explain and differentiate, not to blur, fudge or seek to pass off such political divergences as belonging to the ‘old left’ in the name of some ‘new’ short-term expediency (and in the process allow many of the ‘old’ problems to resurface).

Here we come to one of the main ailments of today’s ‘Marxist’ left: instead of seriously developing the politics and strategy of Marxism in relation to questions like the oppression of women, the environment, the national question, etc, it has grafted perspectives that are alien to the workers’ movement (feminism, ecologism, nationalism, etc).

As paradoxical as it may seem, if our movement is to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs and disappear altogether, then the life, work and struggles of some of the best “dinosaur Marxists” - not least Marx and Engels - must be rigorously interrogated. Their political struggle against the anarchists should not be dismissed as “historical baggage” any more than should their excellent writings on the oppression of women and the origins of class society (something that Camilla, thankfully, has not dismissed, but engaged with and developed to the benefit of our movement as a whole).

Extinction
Extinction

Naive dupe

I am immensely grateful to Tony Clark for his moving suggestion last week that we little ladies be exempt - protected even - from doing the hard, physical labour he describes, since we are such delicate creatures incapable of exerting ourselves overmuch. As he says, “no female-friendly society would want women to do this type of labour” (Letters, April 4).

The reality is that women perform well over half of the world’s work to the degree that, if we were to withdraw that labour, “modern civilisation would not be possible and the living standards of our feminists, not to mention the rest of us, would be at a miserable level”. Women contribute hugely to the growing of food, to the ploughing and harvesting of it, to the maintenance of the men who do the work that makes our “modern civilisation” possible, and are the providers of most the caring work a civilised society requires. Facts and stats here if he cares to peruse them: www.globalissues.org/article/166/womens-rights.

Tony Clark appears also to have an obsession with the notion of “feminised men” and uses his interpretation of this made-up category in a most pejorative way to insult Nick Rogers with regard to his thoughtful letter in a previous issue. What would his nightmare of a ‘masculinised woman’ be like, I wonder? But I forget: they wouldn’t really be proper women at all, but feminists who, if they didn’t eat him alive first, would probably need to be guarded against by means of holy water and a giant crucifix.

Feminism is basically the idea that men and women are equal - not a difficult concept to get one’s head around, surely. To disagree with that or to hold the view that feminism is wrong-headed, or outdated, or no longer necessary, or, as Tony Clark appears to believe, an aberration, must lead one to conclude that males and females are not equal and therefore incapable of true partnership, negating the conclusion he arrives at that to live comfortably “we need each other’s labour” and need to be equally dependent one upon the other. A very pleasant world, to be sure, but sadly not the world we currently live in and one, if the ludicrously reactionary, to the point of parody, ideas of Tony Clark gain currency, we will never in fact inhabit.

The letter from Mark Fischer in the same subject area - ‘the woman question’, let us call it - lacks the entertainment quality of Tony Clark’s, but has the merit of at least not being ludicrous and, on the face of it, quite reasonable. He recounts the experience of a comrade who witnessed the reaction of a female member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty to the appearance of Socialist Workers Party activist Maxine Bowler in a government building in Sheffield. I don’t know Ms Bowler and presume she isn’t a particularly scary person. Yes, the response of the AWL member seems very strange indeed. I can’t explain it other than to presume that perhaps she is, or was on that occasion at least, in a highly emotional state for some reason and overreacted to someone who actually presented no immediate threat to her or to anyone else in that government building, but whom she perceived to represent all that is wrong with the SWP or with the world at large. End of amateur psychoanalysis of the contents of the psyche of a woman quite unknown to me!

The point, as I see it, is that to conflate the experience of one person in an emotionally labile state with the general opinion of women and men who take opposing views to the currently prevailing critique of rape denial and of the ‘safe space’ demand, is unfortunate and, I think, disingenuous. This episode highlighted for Mark Fischer “some of the absurdities - and real dangers - that are implicit in the ‘safe space’ scaremongering currently being whipped up by sections of the left” and, on the basis of that one episode, he riffs on the theme of the ‘absurdity’ of the requirement to take seriously the concerns of women (and men who support the requirement also) with regard to the emergence from some scummy pond last year and its continuing development into the current year, of a vile, misogynistic mindset which has set some sections of the left against others, weakening the left as a whole and giving some hacks in the mainstream press the opportunity to have a field day.

This is why it is vital to get some clarity and consensus on this issue and yet all we are getting is increasing polarisation. “Let’s stop this, comrades”, but stop what? Let us not cry when a prominent member of the SWP walks by? The response of this AWL member is described as “brittle, irrational and childlike”, which is not the best emotional state in which to rationally consider the “deadly serious question of rape”, I agree, but to ascribe her irrational response as either characteristic of those of us who support, for instance, the petition, or feminist theory generally, or characteristic of those who believe not only that the SWP is operated in a “semi-Stalinist” fashion and that its membership has been saddled with an unaccountable central committee, as bad as that is, but that the particular allegation and its mishandling, which triggered all this exposure, is in and of itself a major problem requiring a specific solution. So in that sense rape is the problem.

I do admit to a degree of ambivalence with regard to safe spaces, since they can fulfil whatever role people want them to fulfil at any particular time, but the basic demand is not trivial. Reading through the ‘Women in the labour movement’ statement again, it seems to me that the reference to safe space encapsulates the idea of the whole. It is not saying that women attending a meeting, for instance, must have available to them some sort of closet to which they can retire, should they at any time feel nervous, or a little bit threatened. I think we can agree that most of us are not as thin-skinned as that. Nor is it asking that nothing be said that might in any way at all be perceived as offensive - that would just be silly. Nobody is demanding either that debates should not be robust at times, or that argument should be avoided. It’s quite simple really: it is an acceptance that there do exist particular issues that have relevance mainly or solely to women, that there do exist specific power relationships vis-à-vis men and women, which in the real world transfer into a dominance of men over women, in varying degrees, depending on where you are or who you are with.

That, to sum it up, patriarchy exists and that feminism was developed in order to oppose it and will continue as a practice for as long as that ideology persists. So get used to it: it’s going to be around for a long time! I know there are problems with certain varieties of feminism and that’s the point: feminism is not monolithic and so it should be possible for socialists, trade unionists, Marxists even, to get behind the particular strain that parallels the thinking and practice of the politics of the left. Socialist feminism would seem to fit the bill. I don’t think I’m misreading Mark Fischer’s letter, therefore, when I described it as a conflation of the very specific experience of one woman in an emotionally brittle state with the belief that the viewpoints and concerns of women as a whole need and deserve to be taken seriously, even when they come into conflict with the ‘correct’ line of thinking on the far left - a line of thinking developed in the main by men, after all.

I’m pretty much neutral on whether or not the SWP must continue as an organisation. If so, then it quite obviously needs urgent and fundamental reform. I don’t know how vital it is really. We’ll probably manage quite nicely without it if it does go under, so the necessity of supporting it at all costs is not particularly important to me. Obviously, the CPGB thinks differently, which is fine, but that doesn’t mean that women on the left who think that there are deep and abiding problems in the area of sexism and worse must put up and shut up.

Paul Demarty thinks that a ‘marriage’ between Marxism and feminism is totally unfeasible and, furthermore, that those of us who support the statement are “naive dupes” (‘The world of women, like the world of men, is divided’, April 4). In which case then I must be a naive dupe, although I’ve been around long enough to have had most of the naivety I was born with scrubbed out of me and I do not feel that I’ve been duped. I just hold different opinions to him, and to those in and outside of the CPGB who believe similarly. If that makes me an ‘active participant’ or even a ‘troll’, so be it; better than being a naive dupe, I suppose.

In another contrast, I believe that it is entirely possible, necessary indeed, to be able to be in a position where one does not have to make a choice between ‘sexual politics’ and ‘class politics’. There need be no dichotomy at all. Not that there wouldn’t be debate and argument around the topic, I’m sure, until a satisfactory arrangement was achieved. Similarly, I do not see why a happy, long-term, if occasionally bickering, love match between feminism and Marxism cannot also be made. Anarchism and feminism have more or less managed it - it’s called anarcho-feminism, but it works, I suppose, because of the non-monolithic nature of both anarchism and feminism - something I view as a strength.

The rest of the article requires a whole other letter, which I may or may not bother to write - heads and brick walls come to mind. However, I’d just like to conclude by remarking that I don’t find all of Paul Demarty’s piece to be uncongenial. There are aspects I agree with, to some extent, such as the no-platform policy - which, for the record, I think is, on the whole, a bad idea.

Naive dupe
Naive dupe

Emancipatory

Hats off to the creator of ‘Tony Clark’. From the comedy insults against men who stand shoulder to shoulder with women in their struggle against oppression (“feminised males”) to the Stalinesque idolatry of an ahistorically entirely male proletariat - muscular and no doubt glistening from sweaty toil - coupled with the belittling of the social role of women, the parody perfectly portrays the sexism that still weighs down our movement. If only the left were more hegemonic in society, this latter-day, but leftwing, Alf Garnett could be a TV hit.

Turning to more serious fare, Paul Demarty still seems loath to define feminism. He chides the definition I offered as being set at too high “a level of generality”. Paul suggests that it does not allow us to distinguish between different brands of feminism.

Well, I thought the CPGB was opposed to feminism, full stop. Not just bourgeois feminism, or liberal feminism, but the whole feminist shebang which it sees “antithetical” to Marxism. It was precisely my intention to identify a core set of beliefs which would be common to all feminists - including the socialist or Marxist feminism that the CPGB sees as oxymoronic. It was my attempt to shed some clarity on the furious debate in the pages of the Weekly Worker, in which feminism per se has been lambasted as “idiotic”, etc, without any attempt to discuss what feminism is.

But, just as I feared a terrible misunderstanding on my part, it transpires that Paul does object to my formulation, “those at the sharp end of that oppression [against women] should play a leading role in combating it”. Paul: “There is an assumption in feminism that there is an underlying objective basis for solidarity among women as such: that is, a solidarity which stems from the fact of sexual oppression against the oppressors.”

Paul sees a contradiction between this understanding and “the basic claim of Marxism … that it is in the material interests of the working class as a class to act collectively, and to fight for the radical democracy which enables truly collective action, which stands or fall independently of the particular experience of oppression”. “Class solidarity of women and men” is the correct way “to oppose all oppression of women and all expressions of sexist ideology”.

At last we have something concrete to debate. Class solidarity against oppression. A fine objective shared by all Marxists. But how to achieve it? Paul admits that the record of the labour movement and left on this score has frequently been pretty lamentable. I would put it more strongly than that. Women play a noticeably less prominent role in the organisations of the ‘revolutionary’ left than they do in much of the rest of society.

In the absence of second-wave feminism (whatever criticisms we may wish to lodge against particular feminist arguments and actions), would women in the workers’ movement have made even the limited progress they have? For that matter, would anyone have bothered to recover the writings of Alexandra Kollontai, whose polemics against the bourgeois feminism of her era are beloved of actually existing Marxist organisations? The anti-feminist Marxists rarely touch on the difficulties of Kollontai’s usually lonely struggle in the Russian workers’ movement to advance the cause of women.

So to suggest that Marxism needs to pull up the drawbridge on the contribution of feminists is to ignore the actual relationship between the workers’ movement and feminism in the course of at least the 20th century. All too often, it has been only by women acting together as women that trade unions, labour parties and Marxists have been galvanised into taking seriously the question of women’s oppression.

Yes, it is the clarion call of the self-emancipation of the whole working class (men and women, black and white, etc) that Marx issued. But, if that self-emancipation is to be more than a dead letter, the actual experience of the individual members of the working class should at least contribute to the policies and strategy of the revolutionary movement. You might even want those with specific experiences to play a - occasionally even the - leading role in the relevant campaigns.

If that is the case when it comes to a particular workplace or housing estate, why would communists refrain from adopting the same approach when it comes to tackling historic patterns of prejudice and oppression - especially as these inevitably infiltrate our own ranks? As “a non-alpha male”, it even strikes me as worthwhile to seek the advice and encourage the leadership of black women, when it comes to confronting the problems arising from their specific experience.

Paul poses that example as the ultimate in “sectionalism”. I think the only way to overcome the divisions within the working class and unite it is to empower the most oppressed within our class - as part of the democratic transformation to which we both aspire. At a profound level, women’s liberation involves overcoming women’s atomisation within the family. Female solidarity is a necessary precondition for defeating patriarchy.

There is a core theoretical difference here. Paul and most other Marxists quite explicitly subordinate the issue of women’s oppression to the question of class. The title of Paul’s article emblazoned on the Weekly Worker’s front cover represents just this thinking.

The first problem it that this slips very easily into a form of economism that focuses exclusively on the economic aspects of oppression. Class exploitation and class oppression magnify the experience of any particular oppression, sexism included. But since oppression, by definition, transcends class boundaries (which Paul admits), communists cannot be “champions of the oppressed” if they limit the fight against oppression to the members of a particular class. The emancipatory communist project encompasses the whole of humanity - paradoxically, and much against their class interests, even individual members of the bourgeoisie. That is precisely why the workers’ movement has the potential to become socially hegemonic.

The second problem is that patriarchy and women’s oppression historically precede (and are the basis of) class society. In a very real sense, women were the first oppressed and exploited class. So it is not a question of conquering state power for the working class and then watching, as the oppression of women dissipates before our eyes. Either we fight against the patriarchy and sexism under which half of humanity suffers in the here and now and make it integral to our revolutionary movement or we will not win.

Emancipatory
Emancipatory

Safe everywhere

Unless the AWL are simply running scared of the SWP in the public arena (and the AWL’s recent criticism of the SWP crisis seems more muted than I expected - why? Damage control?) then last week’s letter from Mark Fischer is not an indictment of safer spaces so much as an indictment of expecting safety everywhere.

The limit of ‘safer spaces’ is in the term ‘spaces’, not ‘everywhere’, since the limit (and obligation) of what socialists can do under capitalism is prefigurative politics in their own organisation.

Safe everywhere
Safe everywhere

Women trouble

In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky writes that, “in spite of all directives” from the Bolshevik leadership on International Women’s Day, 1917, “the women textile workers in several factories went on strike, and sent delegates to the metal workers with an appeal for support”. With reluctance, the Bolsheviks agreed to this.

Trotsky continues: “… the February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat - the women textile workers … The upper leadership in the party was hopelessly slow … they hesitated, they lagged - in other words, they did not lead”.

I agree with our insightful alpha-male revolutionaries - Dave Douglass, Tony Clark, Paul Demarty and so many others (Letters and articles, March 7, March 28, April 4) - that it was obviously a mistake for the ‘feminised’ Petrograd metal workers to accept leadership from a bunch of women in overthrowing the tsar. I would also alert comrades to the danger of future incidents of feminised men taking action of this self-abasing kind.

Particularly worrying in this respect are the increasing numbers of electronics, textile, call centre and other workers mounting resistance in sweatshops across India, China and elsewhere - predominantly women. Lest men follow women’s lead, let’s stamp this nonsense on the head.

Women trouble
Women trouble

Respects

Just heard the fantastic news that Thatcher is dead. My partner and I have had the T-shirts stating, “A generation of trade unionists will dance on Thatcher’s grave” for over two years, waiting for this day.

Unlike with Princess Diana, the media cannot provide wall-to-wall coverage of ‘a nation mourns’. The media well know how many trade unionists and socialists hated Thatcher and all she stood for. The more loopy feminists proclaimed that, if we had a woman prime minister, there’d be no wars and a much more compassionate society!

That she has died on the day benefit cuts are to start is priceless. That she has died under a Tory-led government that is once again dividing communities, attacking fighting trade unions, like the RMT and PCS, allows us to link what Thatcher did and what today’s Tories (the nasty party) are continuing.

But where will the Labour leaders stand on this? Will they attend her funeral to pay their respects or will they stay away and reflect the anger of people they expect to vote for them in 2015? I expect they will attend her funeral and they will be despised because of it. Will ‘Red Ed’ stand with Blair and Brown paying their respects?

Respects
Respects

Fruitbat

Great to read in an NBC report that the CPGB has exposed Andy Brooks of the New Communist Party for the fruitbat he is (NBC news, April 4). I’ve spoken to him and I think he just makes it up as he goes along. But if you ever read The New Worker you will see it is just full of puff pieces for the nastiest regimes on the planet, such as North Korea, China and Syria. As for them leaving to live in North Korea, that was brilliant! Of course, they never will.

As you can see from his constant pictures in The New Worker, Brooks certainly enjoys his grub. Every week he’s there, smiling beneath a picture of the North Korean flag, pre-empting criticism by saying those who oppose the regime don’t understand that they are building socialism. When you ask him about the prison camps for political prisoners, his response defies logic on several levels, by telling you that he’s never seen any, so that must mean they don’t exist. He kinda puts socialism back 200 years.

As for the NCP in general, they are the kind of ‘commies’ that think that fighting against the Con-Dem cuts equates with socialism. They tell us we must fight against the cuts, yet at the same time they hate the British state, the police and the armed forces. Surely the cuts will reduce all three! So they should be supported. Oh well, even funnier are the anarchists fighting against these cuts ... yeah, they really want more police on the streets.

Though the letters page of The New Worker is worth the cover price alone, do they even know what socialism/communism is? The Soviet Union was never socialist nor even communist, but they seem to think that Stalinism equals socialism and that Gorby was overthrown by the people because he deviated from this course! When anyone would see his reforms were too little, too late. He didn’t go far enough in reversing Stalinism and that is why the Soviet union failed, not because he strengthened Stalinism.

Given that the NCP must only have a few score members, how do they keep afloat? Do you think they are funded by North Korea? If so, that is even more despicable, as any money the DPRK give them is money they could have spent importing food.

Fruitbat
Fruitbat

Press freedom?

Paul Demarty is surely having a laugh (‘Long live the free press’, March 28).

The media at large is owned, controlled and operated entirely in the interests of the capitalist class. The press feels no obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth or at times any truth at all. It sets agendas which suit the system, creates public opinion to ensure the safety of the system and the dominant line in morality being peddled by the administrators of the state at any given time. It supports imperialism worldwide, advancing all the arguments for reaction and counterrevolution in the four corners of the globe.

It lacks the basic sense of fair play and justice which the majority of the population aspires to and has no qualms in focusing its entire weight to crush any individual who it feels is a threat or has earned their displeasure. It has operated quite outside the law, grossly manipulating its power, money and patronage to buy politicians and police.

This is what they mean by the ‘freedom of the press’. It has nothing whatever to do with some abstract ‘right’ of the micro left press to print its side of things - something equivalent to a kid’s John Bull printing set - in competition with a mass propaganda industry with factories of print machines and armadas of distributors.

Paul is prepared to give carte blanche defence to them in the process of what he thinks is defending our rights too. Get a grip, Paul. The population has been outraged by the excesses of the pot-bellied media, its magnates and its dupes - that is a progressive outrage. The demand to try and subject them to some form of public accountability is also progressive and should be supported.

Nothing in Leveson or the subsequent fig leaf of voluntary codes of conduct comes anywhere near providing what is needed. A right to reply before movements, peoples, causes, liberation struggles, moralities, races and exploited classes and individuals are attacked would be a good starting point. The right to reply to political misrepresentation would be another good demand. Both of these would confront the so-called ‘freedom of the press’: a freedom to print lies and propaganda.

Press freedom?
Press freedom?