Letters
Blame game
“Throughout most of the natural history of humanity,” Jack Conrad tells us in his address to the ‘Fighting for a mass party’ session at the Communist University, “we have been communists. Class society has been around for a mere 10,000 years” (‘Communicating across the archipelago of isolation’, August 29).
So what went wrong? This is a question worth discussing with reference to history, anthropology and genetics. What spoilt the long period of ‘primitive communism’ or ur-communism, as the Socialist Workers Party’s Lionel Sims has it? What was the bite into the apple in the Garden of Eden?
Because, if we commit ourselves to “we have been communists” (no qualification), we are committed to a corruption narrative; development of class society being loss all the way through. Was it Eve? Was it Adam? Was it a serpent? Or a conspiracy of two or three together? Because, if we do fix the blame in the past, this may have repercussions for acting against the blameworthy in the future.
This is how Engels described a future revolution: “With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer … The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity inspired by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action” (Socialism: utopian and scientific).
That is, if I may gloss, humanity has reached a stage in the development of social life where the hitherto wish for an egalitarian society need no longer be a dream, but a reality, when the current means of production are “seized” by us all.
As we well know, of course, recognising this doesn’t iron out all the problems of strategy, such as fighting for a mass party, quality of personnel, organisation of a global society or questions of countervailing ‘survivals’: patriarchy, consumerism, fear and depression, or whatever you want to call them.
But it states the aim: to use the present economy as a starting point to create a new society, not to recreate one. This is basic ABC of scientific socialism: it’s the social that prevents communism, not the technical. Capitalism is the seed bed.
The ‘blame’, by the way, probably lies with the evolution of that spectacularly flexible and inventive limb, the human brain. But if it got us into this mess, it may yet get us out.
Blame game
Blame game
Madness
As soon as I started reading Mike Macnair in the Weekly Worker an eternity ago, I got a sinking feeling. The game was up. Exactly what the CPGB didn’t need it got. An Oxford University lecturer in legal tort law who thinks:
“For the argument I have put forward above, in contrast, the purpose of historical inquiry is to grasp the processes of historical change in which we are - unavoidably - embedded in order to make choices between real available options. These political choices are in my view no different in principle from individual choices in everyday life. Memory mistakes and belief in false theories (which are built on inadequately tested claims about the past) can have real and catastrophic implications. My grandmother was lucky not to be run down when, in her 90s, she set out to cycle to town, forgetting that traffic speeds and density on the road passing her house had changed since the 1930s; my mother was less lucky when her belief in treating her ‘neuralgia’ with homeopathy and other ‘alternative remedies’ led to late diagnosis of lymphoma” (‘The study of history and the left’s decline’, June 2 2011).
This is madness. The Flann O’Brien, Jarndyce and Jarndyce theory of revolution. Marx was on the cusp of data collection. But now we are able for each and every aspect of life on earth, and off it, to bring to bear all and every scientific, legal and statistical evidence on any point, any time, any place, and correctly adjudge right from wrong. This entails the entire history of life on earth, an immense Lacanian YouTube always traumatically returning and watching your mother’s mother and your mother cycling away and leaving you, to prove I told you so - please don’t go.
In last week’s issue, Danny Hammill writes: “This theme - what party model? - was revisited by comrade Mike Macnair in his fascinating talk (at least for this journalist) on ‘Lukács, Korsch et al: philosophers of Leninism or ultra-left?’ - focusing mainly on Georg Lukács. The latter is significant because his short work, Lenin: a study in the unity of his thought, and History and class consciousness have essentially operated as organisational text books for the British far left. Alex Callinicos (‘Stalinicos’) and John Rees have repeatedly praised the ‘master work’” (‘Learning to talk to each other’, August 29).
It’s not “fascinating” to prove Callinicos and Rees are using Lukács as a text book. It’s an authoritarian, non-dialectical, velodrome gradgrind of quantity round and round like this: “So I am not saying we should never send people to work in industry - for example, it seems to me that it is better to go and work in a factory than it is to be on the dole” (‘Lessons of May 68’, June 6).
Working in sweatshops and call centres for 50 years? Or 10 minutes? Either? Neither? Whatever, you’ll be at Oxford University. Like They shoot horses, don’t they?, I suffer from a terrible vision of Mike Macnair, John Bridge and James Turley dancing badly on and on and on.
Madness
Madness
On this planet
As Tony Clark points out, the industrial revolution and the ‘factory system’ of capitalism was indeed unimaginable without coal (Letters, August 29).
However, the industrial revolution in England was in the 18th century and, since then, human ingenuity and production have made many different arrangements and methods of production possible, which place the limited supplies of fossil fuel energies into the background. The invention and, by the late 1800s, the mass production of bicycles, for example, was vastly important for society as a way for many more labourers to reproduce their labour-power and join the pool of available labourers for capital. Similar things can be said for the invention and mass production of automobiles for workers, which in Europe was not a reality for most until after World War II.
Yet I fail to see the lines in front of the gas station. In fact, I read that the state of Bavaria already has a fourth of its electricity being generated through renewable energy, an electric automobile from Ford being available for $36,000, etc, and the price of renewable energy and transportation constantly developing downward.
The current global crisis of capitalism is not an energy crisis. This is a very strange argument that I’m surprised to find on a Marxist platform. Perhaps in 15 to 20 years, when wells in the deeper, inaccessible, more labour-intensive parts of the oceans are drilled, there will be a rise in the costs of fuel which could threaten the normal functionality of modern economies (however, by then, it is thought the cost of green energies will outweigh the cost of fossil fuels).
Here we get to the point: what is the ‘normal’ functioning of our modern economies? Constant decline of growth rates in the west and, notoriously, China as well. Systemic low rates of profitability for capital, declining rates of return on investments and increasing pressures on the capitalist class to ‘cut costs’ have ended up producing, over the decades (alongside political failures of the left), a complete dictatorship of capital. Cut costs they have: since the early 1970s US, since the early 1990s German, average workers’ wages have stagnated, along with rising productivity.
What Tony Clark does not seem to understand is that this crisis is an economic crisis, in which an unstable financial system over a general lack of global demand, rooted in a systemic crisis of profitability, is still perfectly treatable (though not curable) within the capitalist framework. The bourgeoisie have shown that they are not only able to make concessions to the working class if there is a revolutionary left threatening more, but that they are perfectly capable of independently utilising their state for the economy to secure their rule. Obviously there is a very strong, ideological sensitivity still among the bourgeoisie not to stray away from their ideal way of doing business (as much private gain as possible); otherwise the rulers over money and politics would do what’s best in the interest of sustaining the stability of their system, and make concessions to the working class.
Obviously, for some reason the very common-sense things to do, which would be the hiring of millions of the unemployed to work in the countless idle places of work, investing in researching and developing green technologies, initiating renewable energy-based public works programmes, and so on, are not being done. There is massive untaxed and idle wealth in financial transactions, royalties, inheritances, properties and bank accounts, which could be used to reflate the economy. But the politicians administering the modern capitalist system of mad financial speculation and biting wealth/social inequality are wholly unable to even mutter a word of dissent, lest it make one bourgeois party donor or lobbyist uncertain about the loyalty of their representatives and fund another competitor.
Perhaps the argument that the lack of current initiative by capital to revive the global economy is due to ‘ideological’ or rather strategic class reasons is overseeing the lack of left political strength and primitive drive for accumulation, self-interest and ‘greed’. But it’s still on this planet.
On this planet
On this planet
Precisely
I notice Ben Lewis shies away from explaining what Marx’s supposedly golden paragraph means (Letters, August 29).
In saying “expenditure of human labour-power may be capable of any determination”, what Marx really means is the exact opposite. In the abstract, any concept may be capable of any determination (form, connection), which is why in a pure dialectic of ideas - abstract idea against abstract idea - all ideas can be compatible and can harmoniously sustain the most contradictory ‘determinations’. Such dialectics never come to any resolution.
This morning I heard Jamie Oliver argue on Radio 4 that a family of four can be fed adequately on £42 a week. I do not doubt that, in the world of abstract budgeting and Hegelian gastronomy, this is true. But in practice we all know it is balls.
“Human labour plain and simple”: there is no such thing as labour ‘pure and simple’. It is the one thing that is always concrete and socially specific. Even ‘abstract labour” (value) is only an abstraction forced upon specific labour.
“In and of itself is undetermined”: a bit of a tautology. Everything that is “in and of itself” is undetermined - that is the definition of what is ‘undetermined”. It exists independently. Needless to say, nothing that exists is undetermined.
“Only the Hegelian ‘concept’ is capable of objectifying itself without external material.” An unfortunate formulation by Marx. It is pointless trying to fight Hegelianism with Hegelian modes of expression. It would have been much better as: ‘An abstract and idealised concept of labour can only achieve a false objectification, since to be objective - real - labour must find a concrete expression, which is always a social expression of labour.’
There is nothing “notoriously difficult” about the opening chapter of Das Kapital once you get rid of all the “rich Hegelian terminology”. It can all be explained by anyone with a good command of precision English.
Precisely
Precisely
Class issue
Geary Middleton has announced a new Marxist discussion group on the internet (‘Reappropriating basic principles’, August 29). His article refers to the need to “win the battle of democracy” and the need for a “democratic republic”.
However, the omission of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ does not seem accidental. If the phrase is offensive, we can use another one. But we need to be clear that workers’ democracy does not apply to our oppressors.
This discussion group seems to be a revival of the Menshevik and Bolshevik positions of 1905, when the tsar was forced by the mass movement to institute a congress or duma. Both factions then thought the tsar could be overthrown to institute a ‘democratic republic’. Trotsky broke with that position at the end of 1905 and proposed the process should lead instead to socialist revolution.
Though there are a few tsars and military dictators still left today that might justify focusing on a ‘democratic republic’, most capitalist regimes now maintain that they already have a ‘democratic republic’. But ‘democracy’ is a class issue. Democracy for whom? Democracy for what?
Class issue
Class issue
Not too broad
I don’t support the CPGB’s amendments to Left Unity’s Socialist Platform, apart from the amendment to point 9 and the additional point 11 (Weekly Worker August 29). The others would turn the Socialist Platform (and Left Unity if that platform wins the arguments at the November 30 founding conference) into a Marxist party.
The Socialist Platform statement unamended has a good balance, clearly stating that capitalism has to be replaced by socialism, but leaving it unspecified as to whether that can/should happen quickly through a revolution or slowly through a series of gradual reforms. I am in favour of a broad (but not too broad) party, in which revolutionary socialist ideas are reflected in the programme.
The Revolutionary Platform I have formed is intended to bring revolutionary socialists in different organisations or none to overcome sectarian divisions that have plagued the left for so long, cooperating together rather than intervening primarily to recruit. This makes my platform different from the others in not intending to become the template for Left Unity’s politics, even if that were possible (and frankly, if the Socialist Platform adopts many of the CPGB’s amendments, that platform winning the day at the conference is not desirable or possible either).
Not too broad
Not too broad
Exclusive
With regard to Nick Wrack’s article, ‘Self-liberation, not manipulation’ (August 29), mutualism and socialism are mutually exclusive terms vis-à-vis guild socialism.
Exclusive
Exclusive
Hands on Syria?
I read with interest the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty statement on the Syrian conflict (‘No support for US bombs: but Assad is main enemy’, Solidarity, August 28). The statement that Assad is the main enemy is not a socialist analysis.
I understand the distancing from isolationist-sounding slogans like ‘Hands off Syria’ and distancing from varying degrees of support for Assad, but the main enemy for workers of the world is capitalism. This is not a trite, facile or impractical observation; this was the essence of Marx’s observations.
World socialists argue the immediate task is for the establishment of socialism. This is not utopian merely because it has never happened before. All progress goes beyond what has happened before and it is socialists’ duty to argue this.
Hands on Syria?
Hands on Syria?