Letters

Cowardice

As the drums of war start beating for Syria, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty once more breaks into dance. This time, it is the solemn duty of Mark Osborn, the consummate hack’s hack, to strain a muscle offering mealy-mouthed support for the oncoming slaughter.

The headline, in its own way, is striking: “Against Assad, for democracy and peace in Syria” (www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/08/27/against-assad-democracy-and-peace-syria). Well, who could object to “democracy and peace”? Except, of course, that it is the usual substitute for working class socialism offered by ‘official communist’ front organisations the world over. In any other theatre of political struggle, the AWL would consider it a hopelessly liberal mish-mash of a clause. When it comes to British and US wars, however, the AWL is ever reduced to the intellectual level of the worst kind of Guardianista.

That intellectual level is rehearsed throughout Osborn’s foaming tirade. The crimes of Assad are listed - chemical attacks, collective punishment, sectarianism ... Of course, the vast bulk of the Syrian opposition forces are also sectarian, also implicated in collective punishment and may also have access to chemical weapons. But what does that matter, anyway?

No: “The main problem in Syria is Assad’s policy, not the US. And if the UK’s left wants to oppose meddling foreign powers - and we should - it should start with demanding Iranian forces and Hezbollah militia get out of Syria.” Come again? Should we all move to the Lebanon to demand this, or does Osborn really think that we have any lever over Iran and Hezbollah - barring demanding that our governments open military action on these forces as well? That, after all, is ruled out by the AWL’s increasingly dog-eared ‘get out of jail free’ card - “it is not our job to advocate the US intervenes. We do not trust the US.” Well, that clears things up.

In fact the only clear message in this article is facile finger-pointing. The state of Syria is the “fault” of Assad, not the US. This is theoretically impoverished to the point of comedy. No, comrade. There is not a sectarian civil war in Syria purely because Assad is a tyrannical ogre. He inherited an artificial state, in a region composed of artificial states - left in that condition by British and French imperialism, who are now champing at the bit to bomb Syria. This arrangement has not only been sustained by US foreign policy since the war, but has been actively aggravated by the decomposing effects of the Iraq war (for which, of course, the AWL also apologised throughout its entire running time).

Osborn’s piece, at the end of the day, is like Tony Blair’s wild-eyed rant in The Sunday Times - only without the moral courage. The AWL will not take political responsibility for their de facto attempt to demobilise opposition to the imminent war. The US does not care if some insignificant group of sub-Shachtmanites “advocates” it goes into Syria. It is only concerned (and only mildly, this time around) that militant opposition to such an intervention does not arise. It is quite simple: if you do not oppose the war, you are in the camp of the warmongers. The only difference between Osborn and Nick Cohen is the AWL’s total political cowardice.

Cowardice
Cowardice

Achcar on Libya

Yassamine Mather in my opinion missed the point when she produced a rather patronising checklist of ‘right-on’ and negative aspects of Gilbert Achcar’s political positions (‘Progressive sentiments amidst reactionary illusions’, July 25). It produced a shotgun response from Achcar and the end result is more heat than light.

The issue is a rather narrow one. Gilbert Achcar supported imperialist intervention in Libya. The grounds of exceptionalism do not appear significantly different from earlier shifts by the Euston group, although the political distance they had to travel was much shorter.

His defence was worse than the original error, managing to compare imperialism with the police, while at the same sowing illusions in the supposed role of the police. He then went on to draw a bizarre comparison with the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk.

Two issues arise from this. One is that these positions put Achcar outside the revolutionary Marxist tradition. No amount of correct positions on other issues can compensate for this basic error. The second is that this revisionism passed largely in silence. Yet another sign of a collapse in political morale in the revolutionary socialist movement.

A political discussion that focused on the issues would be of help. An exchange of insults will not.

Achcar on Libya
Achcar on Libya

LU in Scotland

Having spent the last week visiting Scotland, one thing that struck me is the dominance of the referendum debate in all the Scottish news media. While newspaper readers in England and Wales are occasionally reminded that there is to be a referendum on Scottish independence in the autumn of next year, in the Scottish press in appears to be a daily editorial/comments section debate (as well as often the front-page story). In other words, it’s a hot topic in pubs, at dinner tables or in the queue at Tesco.

Support for Scottish independence has stuck at around 30% for the last 30 years or so and, short of any political miracle, the Scottish nationalists can’t seriously expect a majority ‘yes’ vote. Yet vast sections of the left have opportunistically jumped enthusiastically on the nationalist bandwagon. The left-nationalist Scottish Socialist Party, Chris Bambery’s International Socialist Group, Socialist Resistance and most recently the Socialist Workers Party, to name but a few, are backing the ‘yes’ campaign. What is marginally more healthy is that Left Unity in Scotland has agreed not to take a formal position on the referendum campaign, leaving it up to individuals to vote how they choose.

Of course, LU will continue to find itself at a loss for a political line on anything remotely controversial if it continues to duck away from debates it considers divisive. That is why it is of the utmost importance that it adopt a principled, revolutionary, Marxist programme. It must also maintain full rights for platforms to operate openly before, during and after its November conference (not put an end to platforms after conference, as is being discussed in some LU branches).

It was telling that in the debate I had with Tim Nelson of the International Socialist Network at Communist University, he commented that he is, as yet, agnostic on the question whether LU comrades in Scotland should organise separately or be a part of an all-Britain organisation. It is, in his view, a matter to be decided by comrades in Scotland. This is, of course, true. But too many on the left today consider it axiomatic that comrades in Scotland should do their own thing. ‘Disunity is strength’ sums up their ‘bottom-up’ approach.

Yet it isn’t true that the left in Britain as a whole should have no say in the matter. The working class, after all, does have a vested interest in organising over the largest possible territorial units. There is a historically constituted working class in Britain and the left should seek to come together on an all-Britain basis, while also aiming for EU-wide organisation. Left Unity should avoid the traps of the left in the past, where Scottish sections have left their all-Britain organisations to operate not just autonomously, but entirely independently, as separate organisations. This has never ended well for the organisations involved on either side (just ask Peter Taaffe or Tommy Sheridan, to cite an obvious example).

So it is important, at this fledgling stage of LU, that it gets the politics of this right, instead of appearing to ‘play nice’ and not take a position. Comrades in England and Wales do have an interest in what happens in Scotland, and comrades in Scotland have an interest in being in a united organisation with those in England and Wales. Therefore comrades north and south of the border should be committed to building Left Unity as an all-Britain organisation. I would hope that this commitment will be adopted by comrades from branches across the country in November.

LU in Scotland
LU in Scotland

In or out?

Left Unity’s Socialist Platform (‘Resistance and socialist change’, August 8) reads like a modern version of the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s 1904 ‘Object and declaration of principles’ (see www.worldsocialism.org/principles.php).

“Capitalism does not and cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority” and there needs to be democratic, majority political action to bring about socialism! There are some key differences, but it’s not Leninist. What will happen to the Socialist Platform when it’s rejected (as it will be) at the founding conference of the Left Unity party in November? Stay in or approach the SPGB instead?

In or out?
In or out?

Not uninvested

Whilst I always enjoy reading Hillel Ticktin’s writings on the economy, I feel it necessary to draw attention to an error in his recent piece, ‘Declining forms, failing system’ (August 8).

An orthodox reading of Marxist political economy would point to an overaccumulation of capital in many of the western national capitals as one of the main drivers behind their current malaise. Further investment in an overaccumulated capital base would only lead to more pronounced overaccumulation and diminishing returns or losses, so capital remains horded and uninvested.

To try and illustrate this in dramatic fashion Hillel Ticktin cites the example of the Bank of New York Mellon holding some $25 trillion of uninvested capital. First of all, this is an incredible amount of money - equivalent to some 16 times the GDP of the UK economy. The $25 trillion dollar holding is in fact indirect foreign investment or, in other words, the valuation of the many investment portfolios it holds on behalf of others.

The Bank of New York is a custody bank - like its Chicago-based rival, Northern Trust. The $25 trillion figure is related to its assets under custody and it also has approximately $1 trillion of assets under management. When institutional investment managers like Invesco Perpetual or Aberdeen Asset Management buy equities and bonds to include in their portfolios, which is the basis of our privatised pensions, these assets have to be held somewhere. So globally investment managers will hold their portfolio securities at a custody bank like the Bank of New York. The figure, then, is akin to global investments that have taken place already, so it is not correct to deem this “uninvested”. The $1 trillion it has under management means that they are actively managing these assets (buying, selling, portfolio rebalancing, risk management, reporting, etc) and here behaving like a fund manager rather than just a custody bank.

Critically you could say the figure is subject to leverage and what Marx referred to as ‘fictional capital’, because the valuation of the assets under custody and management is based on companies’ market capitalisation rather than on the realised values of underlying commodities - price over value if you like.

Not uninvested
Not uninvested

Absurd energy

What planet does Hillel Ticktin live on? He continues to peddle the line that the capitalists do not want to reflate the economy because it will lead to their overthrow. To air such views in what is probably the most important newspaper on the British left should not go unanswered.

Ticktin’s argument is absurd and contradicts the facts. The truth is that interest rates in both America and Britain are the lowest they have been since the post-war years, to my knowledge. The new governor of the Bank of England, Canadian Mark Carney, wants to keep interest rates at 0.5% until 2016. Whether he will succeed in keeping them at this level is another matter, but rates this low do not suggest to me a ruling class afraid of reflation.

What scares the leaders of capitalism most of all is not reflation, but its opposite - ie, the end of growth. The appearance of the end of growth, following the world entering the peak oil zone, is what the political leaders are fighting against at the present time. It is not reflation, but economic decline which is the biggest threat to capitalist control of society in the longer term. Hence the relentless campaigns to get the economy moving again, but the cost of energy renders this an uphill struggle.

As I always remind people, capitalism was built on cheap energy. There are no models of capitalism built on expensive energy. It’s possible that many people on the left may take longer to grasp the true nature of the present crisis than most. This is because the left has been wrongly educated by Marxism to believe that modern capitalism originates in money or, as Marx would put it, M-C-M. The truth is that money existed for thousands of years without leading to capitalism. We must look for the origins of modern capitalism in the new forms and characteristics of the energy sources which formed the foundation of the industrial revolution. It is problems with these energy sources which lie behind the present crisis.

And this is why pre-energy economists, like Ticktin, will continue to make absurd statements about the present crisis.

Absurd energy
Absurd energy

Undetermined

Readers of the Weekly Worker, and those involved in the CPGB’s weekly Capital reading group in London in particular, might be interested in the following Marx passage that I recently came across from the (now very rare) first German edition of Marx’s Capital (Hamburg 1867).

It was originally part of the notoriously difficult opening chapter on the commodity so rich in Hegelian terminology, but did not make it into any of the subsequent German editions or, as a result, any of the English translations. For the moment is only available in the original German in the ongoing project known as the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). As far as I know, then, this is the first time that the passage has appeared in English. I would like to thank David Fernbach, translator of the Penguin edition of the three volumes of Capital, and Maciej Zurowski for their help with the translation.

“Human labour plain and simple, the expenditure of human labour-power, may be capable of any determination, but in and of itself is undetermined. It can only be realised, only objectified, when human labour-power is expended in a specific form, as specific labour, for only specific labour is confronted with a natural substance, an external material, within which it is objectified. Only the Hegelian ‘concept’ [Begriff - often translated in the 19th century as ‘notion’] is capable of objectifying itself without external material.”

Undetermined
Undetermined