The Trouble With Centrism

Speak the truth

2009-07-02T22:58:00.000+01:00

What do we get from the usual anti-Welsh language bletherers that litter our public life? `It’s too expensive, it’s not fair, etc. etc.’ But sensible people in Wales are voting with their voices. Through bi-lingual education we are equipping our young people with unique skills that will not only help them find work in their own land but will enrich their lives for ever. If in England they were to concentrate on educating their youngsters they wouldn’t have to worry so much about immigration but it is cheaper for selfish employers to import ready-trained workers from elsewhere and allow hundreds of thousands of young families to rot in sink estates and slums rather than fund quality education. The empire builders were proud of how they had made English the world language of business, often at the point of a bayonet, usually through economic pressure, but the English worker and even the English capitalist is paying for that arrogance now. In Wales, despite our lack of independence, we try to give our young people an education that will help them through life with pride and dignity. In England, it seems, the lazy way out is to just blame the foreigner and vote BNP. Cheap economics followed by cheap politics followed by cheap outcomes. Just like the outmoded and backward politics of the anti-Welsh language crowd: cheap, cheap, cheap. With that attitude no-one wins especially not the young people of Wales but it is an attitude that hasn’t done the young people of England much good either.

Socialist Electoral and Class Struggle Alliance in Wales now

2009-06-10T19:55:00.001+01:00

Cynghrair Gweithwyr Cymru/Workers Alliance Wales

What are the lessons of the recent Euro elections? Here in Wales, hundreds of thousands of workers boycotted the poll allowing the Tories to come out on top in a national election in Wales. It was a very bad day for Wales. It was the first time Labour have failed to come top in Wales since 1918 and we even saw a candidate for the hard right UK Independence Party elected. New Labour has effectively disenfranchised huge swathes of the working class who can no longer bring themselves to vote contrary to their interests for the sake of some nostalgic loyalty. But their votes did not go to Plaid Cymru and there was no other well enough known alternative in place to switch to. They simply stayed at home whilst right wingers made hay.

Clearly Plaid Cymru is not socialist enough. Whilst its cultural and soft-left approach is effective in the West, only a socialist programme in the teeth of this recession will be sufficient to give voice to the now voiceless South Wales working class and its communities. In addition, Plaid’s attempt to spearhead a parliamentary coup against the Labour government when the Tories are riding high in the polls will not have impressed. That said, Workers Alliance Wales would not be interested in perpetuating the anti-nationalist sentiment of the Labour machinery anxious to defend its own sectional, bureaucratic interests by dividing the Welsh people. We would support a referendum on a Welsh Parliament and also campaign for a yes vote in such a referendum. We would support all things that advanced the Welsh culture. We would, however, remain socialists first and prioritise work in the labour and trade union movement.

There is then a large swathe of disenfranchised workers in the South who can no longer vote New Labour and who, for whatever reason, do not see Plaid Cymru as a natural alternative. This is the constituency that Workers Alliance Wales is interested in. We want to give this most important section of society a voice. As was said WAW is not sectarian, it would not stand candidates against Plaid in the West or any constituency in the South where it has a good chance of winning. It would also not stand against a number of left labour MPs or candidates. Our target would be New Labour and corrupt Labour MPs and candidates who are likely to lose to Lib Dems and Tories and whose election in any case would bolster the right of the Labour Party and do nothing for the people. An alliance would do nothing to oppose the People’s Voice MP Dai Jones from getting re-elected. On the contrary it would positively support that outcome and would hope that People’s Voice would join and help to establish Workers Alliance Wales. Politically any alliance should consider Respect in England a sister party and possibly the Scottish Socialist Party in Scotland similarly. Workers Alliance Wales would be a broad alliance of radical socialist forces from a number of different backgrounds and traditions. It should look to establish a party structure whereby affiliated organisations are delegated through their own internal mechanism to 40 per cent of the executive whilst the other 60 per cent are elected at annual conference having been delegated to attend by local constituency branches. Branches will eventually select parliamentary and other election candidates.

Should any of our candidates be elected they should be instructed not to join any government or any other party’s whip. They should propose and vote for that which is in the interests of the working class and oppose that which is not but they would never vote with class enemy parties to bring down a Labour Government to the benefit of the right. The positions they take will be the product of thoroughgoing internal alliance discussion either held in public or subsequently made public and they will be employed by the alliance at rates democratically decided. Any salary they receive from the state should be paid into alliance election fighting funds. The Alliance should view the election of candidates not as an end in itself but as a means to an end. Its main objective should be the encouragement and building of the working class movement as a whole and its branches should be like local working class and community parliaments.

An alliance programme must be radical socialist. It should include the following basics but should be adaptable and put intelligently in accordance with the prevailing political possibilities and priorities:

Nationalisation of the job-cutting and supplier squeezing multi-nationals under workers control;
Nationalisation of the banks into one state bank each for Wales, England and Scotland;
Bring the monopoly service providers who are using their position to skin consumers into public ownership;
Cheap credit for small businesses and farmers;
Local tax collection;
Not economic growth but economic consolidation is the order of the day
Share the work: unemployment is ruining both the employed and the unemployed financially not to mention the tax payer but is seriously undermining our class as a class;
Share the work: halve the working week for female and male equality in the home and the workplace;
Share the work: productivity gains to be directed towards cutting hours not jobs;
Share the work: release our energies for use in the community so that police, social workers and the rest of state paraphernalia are no longer required in our abandoned communities to look after our children and old people or to keep a watchful eye on us and so that industry can be released from crippling tax burdens so that its surplus can be socially distributed to make life better;
Share the wealth: homes, heating and quality food for all. There are already plenty of these available they must be properly distributed;
Share the wealth: supermarkets profits to be distributed to the towns and districts they allegedly serve to pay for local services instead of being paid out to distant shareholders or into the Swiss bank accounts of over-paid executives.
Repeal all anti-union laws;
Family committees to determine the true rate of inflation;
Workers control of hiring and firing and immigration;
Fair and humane treatment for asylum seekers and an amnesty for illegal immigrants who are here already;
Participation in any serious anti-fascist and community self-defence initiatives;
An end to the parasitic and imperialist relationship of Britain to the developing world;
An end to global migration based on economic disparities which is turning workers into rootless tramps;
Sovereignty for Wales and a federal Britain with any areas of pooled sovereignty administered by instantly recallable delegates from the constituent nations selected as each nation sees fit;
No to the neo-liberal EU, social dumping and the race to the bottom: for a socialist united states of Europe;
A serious, urgent and comprehensive programme of carbon reduction to save the environment for human habitation in alliance with our global friends.

Marxism and `The End of History’

2009-03-14T13:13:00.001Z

Francis Fukuyama’s famous tract `The End of History and the Last Man’ published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union was a direct intellectual challenge to Marxism. It was designed to complement the West’s physical victory in the four-and-a-half decade long Cold War.

Surfing on a heady atmosphere of triumphalism, Fukuyama taunted Marxists by declaring liberal democratic capitalism to be the pinnacle of historical development. It was the only game in town and nothing could challenge it. Gone were the dreams of a transition through socialism to communism as promised by the scientific socialist Karl Marx. History, in the sense of a distinct social process had come to an end and liberal democratic capitalism was the victor. Who now would give Fukuyama’s thesis a second glance as the world economy disintegrates whilst Marx’s seminal works fly off the bookstore shelves?

Fukuyama’s was a challenge to one of Marx’s greatest achievements: his solution to `the riddle of history’. Dubbed historical materialism, this elegant solution eschewed the increasingly turgid dichotomised debate that came before it.

Marx started from the empirically verifiable real activity and conditions of human existence examining the way in which humankind produces its means of subsistence which is a thoroughly materialist approach. He did not start from a collection of dead, unconnected facts or from human consciousness as a driver of human history. `Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,’ he argued. In producing their means of subsistence, human beings enter into social relations. History proper begins when those relations become class relations and unfolds by way of a reciprocal conflict between these social relations, or modes of production, and the ever more efficient means of production.

Previously history was believed to have no developmental logic at all, it merely proceeded randomly. For this school there was nothing going on apart from what appeared to be going on and all historians need do was reconstruct what had been lost in the mists of time and praise history’s `great men’. At best this school rose to the notion of history as some kind of metaphysical process endlessly and mechanically repeating itself over the eons. Alternatively, there was a far more sophisticated idealist approach. For this school, history was heading towards some sort of god-given destiny or pre-determined absolute ideal. At least these thinkers acknowledged the existence of a process or system out-with the intentions of the agents that comprised it.

But it was Marx who answered the call for a scientific theory of history. He rejected the mutually exclusive, dichotomised, contradictory approaches of crude materialism and sophisticated idealism and sought a theory that could encompass and reveal history’s true inner dynamic and logic. Men, agreed Marx, make history, and then qualified it by adding, but not under conditions of their own choosing. Marx rejected the contradictory approaches of randomness and predetermination in favour of an approach to contradictions. History for Marx was a dynamic and evolving structure containing the logic of its own end

At society’s base is the class struggle between two historically conditioned classes, a minority ruling class and a working class, corresponding to a particular mode of production and appropriate to the prevailing means of production. As we have seen, for Marx social being determines social consciousness. It is an individual’s relationship to the means of production that determines your outlook on life and, indeed, all of society’s institutions, ideas, discourses etc are super structural to the political-economic base.

Schematically speaking, primitive society gave way to the social relations of ancient slavery which facilitated a huge growth of the means of production at humanity’s disposal but these means eventually outgrew that mode. Great slave-based empires fell into ruin including the greatest of them all, Rome, to be replaced by feudal empires in Europe and Asia. These in turn were replaced by capitalist nation states with their own imperial abmtions which now too are facing the end. Capitalism is the last antagonistic form the economic conditions having entirely outgrown the possibility of continued private ownership and control of the productive capacity by a minority ruling class. It must give way to socialism and finally a classless society.

The study of the centuries of human existence prior to the process of class formation, or pre-history, whilst obviously of more than passing interest and relevance, is little more than a natural history of the species. History proper, as an emergent and discrete social process with its own logic and therefore a distinct subject for study, begins with the production of the first surplus and the ensuing efforts of an emerging ruling class to establish its dominion over that surplus and over society. History will end when classes have finally disappeared and there is nothing driving humanity’s development and progress outside of its own conscious activity. When there is no hidden social process to study.

Fukuyama makes liberal democracy and its achievement the purpose of history but any ruling class could and has picked out their time and rule and claimed it to be the aim and end of history. Fukuyama fails to point out in any serious way that democracy, the pinnacle of liberal capitalist rule, by definition, means that society is divided by conflicting interests. So much so the ruling class requires police forces and armies to keep these contradictory interests in check along with endless legislation. These partial interests are of course determined, in the final analysis, by whatever an individual’s relationship is to the means of production. History as a process is, then, ongoing. Despite the formal political equality of every individual in a democracy the economic divisions of society remain. The class struggle between the wage slaves and the capitalists goes on as the current economic catastrophe is proving.

There has always been a mode and a means of production since human society first emerged but they haven’t always been in contradiction. Only for perhaps the last six thousand years out of the two hundred thousand or so of human existence has that been the situation. In the future mode and means will be in harmony again. This new unity of opposites will be that of humanity with nature consciously re-established: communism. That will be the end of a social evolutionary process separate from our consciousness of it. That will be the end of history.

Anti-EU Platform for NO2EU

2009-03-05T17:05:00.001Z

There is no doubt that Britain’s withdrawal from the EU would immediately put the question of power at the top of the agenda in every European state. Who will control the resources and decide the fate of the nation: the imperialist capitalist class or the working class? That it is being called for by both right and left demonstrates not just that the objective conditions for intensive class struggle are with us but that both sides want it. The working class cannot live in the old way and the ruling class cannot rule in the old way.

The decision of the RMT to bank roll a slate of candidates for the forthcoming Euro elections under the banner of NO2EU is, therefore, very much to be welcomed. It is always better to go out to meet the enemy when ever possible rather than wait to be winkled out of our fox holes to be picked off one by one. The name NO2EU is certainly emphatic and that too is to be welcomed as faint heart never won fair maiden as they say. However, after the name things get a little blurred and at times it looks like the RMT have got on the wrong platform which is not good for a railway union.

The platform itself represents a gradual retreat from the name. Here it is:

* Reject the Lisbon Treaty
* No to EU directives that privatise our public services
* Defend and develop British manufacturing
* Repeal ECJ anti-trade union rulings and no to social dumping
* No to racism and fascism
* No to EU militarisation
* Restore democracy to EU member states
* Replace unequal EU trade deals with fair trade that benefits developing nations
* Scrap EU economic rules designed to stop member states from implementing reflationary policies
* Keep Britain out of the Eurozone.

There is no prospect and no plan to put the Lisbon Treaty to a referendum in Britain so the very first demand is going to strike people as somewhat irrelevant. The recent spate of wildcat strikes were aimed not at something that has yet to happen but something that is already here. Posted workers and gang masters are a product of Maastricht, the founding treaty of the EU that Margaret Thatcher so eagerly signed despite being a hard line Euro sceptic. So, if the platform is going to live up to the name is should start as it means to go on:

* For immediate withdrawal from the anti-working class EU; so that we can
* Repeal all anti-socialist and anti-trade union legislation; and
* Restore national and local democracy;

The next demand is another retreat from the name:

* No to EU directives that privatise our public services;

Well if you are saying no to the EU then it goes without saying that you are opposed to EU directives unless you are not really opposed to the EU just bits of it. A simple

* Defend public services from cuts and privatisation;

will do.

The next demand,

* Defend and develop British manufacturing

Manages to be both too vague and too particular. Too vague in that it doesn’t say how we can defend British manufacturing in the current economic collapse and too particular in that it only talks about manufacturing when every sector is his.

* Nationalise the job cutting monopolies, restore manufacturing and share the work;

is both broader and deeper.

The next three demands can be reduced to one:

* No more social dumping: trade union control and deployment of labour;

The no to fascism and racism is superfluous and sound apologetic rather than sincere as is no to EU militarization.

The restore democracy demand we’ve already dealt with and the fair trade demand should come near the end. That leaves

* Scrap EU economic rules designed to stop member states from implementing reflationary policies
* Keep Britain out of the Eurozone.

Both of these are problematic. The last is not needed as again it is a retreat from the name and if you are against the EU then obviously the Euro is a no, no. Reflationary policies are those currently being implemented by the Bank of England to protect the financial institutions, we need socialist policies. So here we need to say what we propose to do with our new found national freedom. This is where we differentiate ourselves conclusively from the kooks and psychos of the far right in UKIP and the BNP:

* For a workers’ government in Britain and a United Socialist States of Europe;

We then come in with the fair trade point:

* End imperialist plunder of the developing world: fair trade, fair aid and fair play.

And sum up with a little something for the environment to show that we are in no way little Englanders or a bunch of ostriches:

* Full participation in an equitable and effective global carbon cutting regime.

In summary:

* For immediate withdrawal from the anti-working class EU;
* Repeal all anti-socialist and anti-trade union legislation;
* Restore national and local democracy;
* Defend public services from cuts and privatisation;
* Nationalise the job cutting monopolies, restore manufacturing and share the work;
* Nationalise the banks: initiate a debt amnesty for small businesses and individuals, repudiate the toxic debts;
* No more social dumping: trade union control and deployment of labour;
* For a workers’ government in Britain and a United Socialist States of Europe;
* End imperialist plunder of the developing world: fair trade, fair aid and fair play;
* Full participation in an equitable and effective global carbon cutting regime.

However, even if none of the changes I have proposed are adopted or even thought about I would still support getting the left anti-EU message out there even with the original faltering platform because it will smash open the debate on Europe in a most dramatic way and that has to be done by the left because if it is done by the right the battle will already have been lost. I do, however, think the left should try to get it right first time.

This is posted in the spirit of discussion.

Why Marxism is true

2009-02-28T16:26:00.002Z

Part Two: Historical Materialism

Historical materialism is the name given to Marx’s theory of history. As with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, when it arrived it was breathtakingly simple and elegant. Great solutions are that way being contained within the problem they are attempting to solve. Formulating the problem correctly is to virtually solve it. This tends to make even the more unenlightened wonder why they hadn’t thought of it themselves.

Prior to Marx, history was believed either to have no developmental logic at all, it merely proceeded mechanically or in metaphysical circles and could be taken at face value, or was heading towards some sort of god-given destiny or pre-determined absolute ideal. Marx answered the call for a scientific theory of history. He rejected these two contradictory approaches for an approach to contradictions. He sought a theory that could encompass and reveal history’s true inner dynamic.

Marx started from the empirically verifiable real activity and conditions of human existence examining the way in which humankind produces its means of subsistence which is the materialist side of the equation. He did not start from a collection of dead, unconnected facts or from human consciousness. `Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,’ he argued. In producing their means of subsistence, human beings enter into social relations. History proper begins when those relations become class relations and unfolds by way of a reciprocal conflict between these social relations, or modes of production, and the ever expanding means of production.

Schematically speaking, primitive society gave way to the social relations of ancient slavery which gave a huge boost to the growth of the means of production at humanity’s disposal but these means eventually outgrew that mode. Great slave-based empires fell into ruin including the greatest of them all, Rome, to be replaced by great feudal empires in Europe and Asia. These were replaced by capitalism and its own great empires which now, in their turn, are facing their end. Capitalism is the last antagonistic form; the economic conditions having entirely outgrown the possibility of continued private ownership and control of the productive capacity by a minority ruling class. It must give way to socialism and finally a classless society.

At society’s base is the class struggle between two historically conditioned classes, a ruling class and a working class, corresponding to a particular mode of production and appropriate to the prevailing means of production. Slaves and slave owners, feudal lords and peasants, capitalists and proletariat, and all of society’s institutions, ideas, discourses etc are superstructural to this political-economic base.

Here nothing remains of the tedious notion of history as just a series of events to be simply reconstructed or of the equally tedious but opposite notion of human beings working their way towards a pre-determined perfection or pre-existing consciousness. Marx shows that consciousness itself evolves as a result of practical activity reflecting interests but in an ideological way because the logic is external and unknown to its participants.

There has always been a mode and a means of production but they haven’t always been in contradiction and in the future they will be in harmony again but on a whole new level. The new unity of opposites will be that of humanity with nature re-established on a conscious level.

The study of the hundreds of centuries of human existence prior to the process of class formation, or pre-history, whilst obviously of more than passing interest and relevance, is little more than a natural history of the species. History proper, as a discrete social process with its own logic and therefore a fit subject for study in its own right, begins with the production of surplus and the ensuing efforts of the first emerging ruling class to establish its rights to this surplus. It will end as an ongoing subject of scientific study when classes have finally disappeared and there is nothing driving humanity’s development outside of its own conscious activity. When there is nothing taking place that is not the result of conscious activity, or when results are consciously sought and attained, then there is no process outside of and separate from that purposeful activity that can be studied. That is the real end of history.

So much for history in general. What is attracting people now is Marx’s incredibly insightful analysis of capitalism.

Part Three: Capitalism (to follow)

Why Marxism is true

2009-02-28T16:21:00.003Z

Part One: Introduction

The current global economic crisis which threatens to engulf us all like some natural disaster has sparked a revival of interest in the ideas of the great 19th Century political economist and scientific socialist, Karl Marx. His two most famous works, `The Communist Manifesto’, written jointly with life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels, and the three or four-volumed, depending on your point-of-view, `Das Kapital’ are, apparently, flying off the bookstore shelves at an unprecedented rate of knots. The urge it seems is to rationally understand what on earth is going on.

That people are looking for a scientific explanation for the crisis is surely to be welcomed but there is also a philistine or eclectic tendency amongst some to see Marx as just one possible contributor among many. A tendency to view him as just another theorist competing with many other theorists from whose work one can select the bits one likes and discard the bits one doesn’t. That would be a mistake because Marxism is not just a unified, holistic theory it is a fact.

Darwin

It is a pleasant co-incidence that the global economic crisis and the renewed interest it has sparked in Marxism are happening at the same time as the 200th anniversary of the birth of the celebrated natural scientist and expounder of natural evolution, Charles Darwin. The anniversary has sparked a spirited defence of his work by a host of renowned modern day scientists against a growing army of fundamentalists, biblical literalists, creationists of all religions and the pseudo scientific intelligent design narrative.

This happy co-incidence has helped strengthen an atmosphere generally sympathetic to enlightened values. One stand-out contribution amongst the many to have appeared this year intent on defending Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is Jerry A Coyne’s ` Why Evolution is True’. In his book Coyne presents a spirited defence of the general scientific method of reason applied to empirical research where practical results act as the yardstick of truth. He develops a contemporary demonstration of the truth of Darwin’s theory and how it has been proved again and again. Evolution by natural selection, he rightly argues, is a proven fact.

The theory, he says, makes testable predictions leading to the discovery of genes and DNA and makes retrodictive sense of facts and data that without its illuminating effect would otherwise not. It becomes ever more rounded, deep, rich and complete as we observe and recreate its principles on a daily basis.

Given the overwhelming success of Darwin’s theory why, asks Coyne, are there still those who attack it? We don’t we have to defend other scientific theories such as the germ theory of disease in this way he muses. He does not answer the question but, after a devastating defence of the theory and a withering assault on its religious opponents, he counsels that to recognise the full import of the theory does not lead to despairing nihilism or rob your life of purpose and meaning. It won’t make you immoral, he insists, and is in fact, as Darwin said, is really quite ennobling. It doesn’t even necessarily make of you an atheist even while it destroys the basis of literalism and particularity in religion.

Marxism

Marx’s main interest was not the natural evolution of the human species but its social and historical evolution from that point on. Incredibly, his scientific insights into society were made prior to Darwin’s explanation of human kind’s biological origins. Even before Darwin had solved the riddle of human evolution, Marx had already solved the more difficult riddle of history. He had explained and revealed the drivers for historical evolution.

Needless to say Marx immediately embraced Darwin’s theory as soon as it was made public recognising a scientific theory brilliant in its own right but that complemented and reinforced his own. He even sent Darwin a copy of Volume One his own great work `Das Kapital’ for which he received a thank you letter though sadly there is no evidence that the naturalist ever actually read it.

There are, in actual fact, three different elements to Marxism each a piece of brilliance in its own right. They are historical materialism, the analysis of capitalism and dialectical materialism.

Part Two: Historical Materialism (to follow)

Britain's Long Term Decline Confirmed

2009-02-19T07:25:00.002Z

The current slump is both quickening and confirming Britain's century-long slide from global top dog to Third World also ran and the policy of bailing out the financial institutions for the sake of the financial institutions will add to the
bone-crunching impact of such a sharp descent. The banks are doing to Britain
what the victorious allies did to Germany after the First World War. Instead of
crippling war reparations, however, we are paying over the nation's wealth to cover Eton and Harrow's finest `masters of the universe' by racking up a truly staggering public debt. This in the hope that our one and only `industry', if saved, might one day make a few bob again. This madness will be followed by tax hikes, money printing, mass unemployment, deflation then hyperinflation, public sector and welfare
provision meltdown, destruction of the NHS, extreme austerity measures, endemic and
widespread violent gang crime, a police state, pockets of starvation, a growing fascist menace and permanent civil war. How much more sensible would it have been to have nationalised the bankrupt banks, guaranteed deposits then wiped out all individual (mortgages, credit cards, personal loans) and small and medium enterprise debts to these institutions thereby bailing out the people? That would have ended the credit crunch overnight. Instead we have mass repossessions and small business
bankruptcies driving us ever further into permanent depression whilst the trading, energy and manufacturing monopolies (most of which are also technically bankrupt)
squash their competitors underfoot, shed jobs by the hundreds of thousands and put the squeeze on their remaining small suppliers and workers. At the same time, the neo-liberal EU, Gordon and Mandy and the Cameroons tell us that to take these giants into public control would be `protectionist' and that we should get on our inter-continental bikes while they elect a new population. Sacre bleu!

Capitalist Austerity or Socialism?

2009-02-14T10:40:00.001Z

Bailing out the financial institutions for the benefit of the financial institutions will be followed by extreme austerity measures. The tax payer has been ruined and next will come the pension funds and pensioners alongside the ruination of the working class through mass unemployment, public sector and welfare slashing and unbridled money printing leading to hyper-inflation and scarce basic goods.

If workers are not to pay for this crisis they must get militant and lead the rest of the country out of it.

Britain needs a workers’ and small business-friendly government that will:

* withdraw from the neo-liberal EU;
* nationalise the banks and write off all debts;
* nationalise the major capitalist monopolies to prevent job slashing, downsizing and the ruination of small business;
* repudiate the anti-union laws;
* initiate a programme of job creation in manufacturing and environmental projects in deprived areas;
* incorporate all unemployed workers into the newly expanded state sector by sharing the work bringing the benefits of the huge productivity gains of recent times to the working class and parents;
* establish a national pension fund;
* localise decision making in planning, tax collecting, health, education etc.
* bring the troops home;
* work immediately towards a Socialist United States of Europe;
* participate enthusiastically in a global carbon-cutting regime that is fair to the colonial and semi-colonial world.

Letter to a Paper

2009-02-11T20:08:00.000Z

Sir - If Gordon Brown is successful in saving the banks it will cost this
country far more than the victorious allies ruinously managed to squeeze
out of Germany following the First World War in reparations.

Collecting the toxic debts or collecting the taxes needed to cover the
toxic debts will prove impossible and the currency will collapse under the
weight of an unsustainable national debt leading to hyper-inflation,
vicious new levels of gang crime, mass unemployment and even pockets of
starvation as benefits are cut. In this state of near civil war, the only
remaining solvent institutions will be the banks that got us into this
mess in the first place.

The banks will be in a position to carry out the greatest leveraged buyout
the world has ever seen snapping up an entire nation at bargain basement
prices using taxpayers money borrowed from the government at 1% or less.
No doubt the world will welcome its first trillionaires. Then, to
distract us from the fact that the country is owned and run by about a
dozen CEOs and Bankers and the grinding poverty and violence all around
us, they will start to equip the nation for war because everything else is
over-supplied and un-profitable.

We need to nationalise the banks, tear up the toxic debts and stop the
multi-nationals from shedding jobs and closing down the competition. OK,
so a lot of people will get a free house or their debts cleared as a
result as will small and medium companies but surely that is better than
the total ruination of the economy. The debt free can then go on to spend
sensibly and put something aside for their own and the country's future
investment needs.

David Ellis
Campaign for a Debt Amnesty

The Right to the City

2009-02-11T19:41:00.001Z

Opening speech at the Urban Reform Tent, January 29, 2009, World Social
Forum, Belem

David Harvey

I'm delighted to be here, but first of all I'd like to apologize for
speaking English which is the language of international imperialism. I
hope that what I have to say is sufficiently anti-imperialist that you
people will forgive me. (applause)

I am very grateful for this invitation because I learn a great deal from
the social movements. I've come here to learn and to listen and
therefore I am already finding this a great educational experience
because as Karl Marx once put it there is always the big question of who
will educate the educators.

I have been working for some time on the idea of the Right to the City.
I take it that Right to the City means the right of all of us to create
cities that meet human needs, our needs. The right to the city is not
the right to have - and I'll use an English expression - crumbs from the
rich mans table. We should all have the same rights to further construct
the different kinds of cities that we want to exist.

The right to the city is not simply the right to what already exists in
the city but the right to make the city into something radically
different. When I look at history I see that cities have been managed by
capital more than by people. So in this struggle for the right to the
city there is going to be a struggle against capital.

I want to talk a little bit now about the history of the relationship
between capital and city building and ask the question: Why is it that
capital manages to exercise so much rights over the city? And why is it
that popular forces are relatively weak against that power? And I'd also
like to talk about how, actually, the way capital works in cities is one
of its weaknesses. So at this time I think the struggle for the right to
the city is at the center of the struggle against capital. We have now -
as you all know - a financial crisis of capitalism. If you look at
recent history you will find that over the last 30 years there have been
many financial crises. Somebody did a calculation and said that since
1970 there have been 378 financial crisis in the world. Between 1945 and
1970 there were only 56 financial crises. So capital has been producing
many financial crises over the last 30 to 40 years. And what is
interesting is that many of these financial crises have a basis in
urbanization. At the end of the 1980s the Japanese economy crashed and
it crashed around property and land speculation. In 1987 in the United
States there was a huge crisis in which hundreds of banks went bankrupt
and it was all about housing and property development speculation. In
the 1970s there was a big, world-wide crises in property markets. And I
could go on and on giving you examples of financial crises that are
urban based. My guess is that half of the financial crises over the last
30 years are urban property based. The origins of this crisis in the
United States came from something called the sub prime mortgage crises.
I call this not a sub prime mortgage crisis but an urban crisis.

This is what happened. In the 1990s there came about a problem of
surplus money with nowhere to go. Capitalism is a system that always
produces surpluses. You can think of it this way: the capitalist wakes
up in the morning and he goes into the market with a certain amount of
money and buys labor and means of production. He puts those elements to
work and produces a commodity and sells it for more money than he began
with. So at the end of the day the capitalist has more than he had at
the beginning of the day. And the big question is what does he do with
the more that he's picked up? Now if he were like you and me he would
probably go out and have a good time and spend it. But capitalism is not
like that. There are competitive forces that push him to reinvest part
of his capital in new developments. In the history of capitalism there
has been a 3% rate of growth since 1750. Now a 3% growth rate means that
you have to find outlets for capital. So capitalism is always faced with
what I call a capital surplus absorption problem. Where can I find a
profitable outlet to apply my capital? Now back in 1750 the whole world
was open for that question. And at that time the total value of the
global economy was $135 billion in goods and services. By the time you
get to 1950 there is $4 Trillion in circulation and you have to find
outlets for 3% of $4 trillion. By the time you get to the year 2000 you
have $42 trillion in circulation. Around now its probably $50 Trillion.
In another 25 years at 3% rate of growth it will be $100 trillion. What
this means is that there is an increasing difficulty in finding
profitable outlets for the surplus capital. This situation can be
presented in another way. When capitalism was essentially what was going
on in Manchester and a few other places in the World, a 3% growth rate
posed no problem. Now we have to put a 3% rate of growth on everything
that is happening in China, East and Southeast Asia, Europe, much of
Latin America and North America and there is a huge, huge problem. Now
capitalists, when they have money, have a choice as to how they reinvest
it. You can invest in new production. An argument for making the rich
richer is that they will reinvest in production and that this will
generate employment and a better standard of living for the people. But
since 1970 they have invested less and less in new production. They have
invested in buying assets, stock shares, property rights, intellectual
property rights and of course property. So since 1970, more and more
money has gone into financial assets and when the capitalist class
starts buying assets the value of the assets increases. So they start to
make money out of the increase in the value of their assets. So property
prices go up and up and up. And this does not make for a better city it
makes for a more expensive city. Furthermore, to the degree that they
want to build condominiums and affluent housing they have to drive poor
people off their land. They have to take away our right to the city. So
that in New York City I find it very difficult to live in Manhattan, and
I am a reasonably well paid professor. The mass of the population that
actually works in the city cannot afford to live in the city because
property prices have gone up and up and up and up. In other words the
people's right to the city has been taken away. Sometimes it has been
taken away through actions of the market, sometimes its been taken away
by government action expelling people from where they live, sometimes it
has been taken away by illegal means, violence, setting fire to a
building. There was a period where one part of New York City had fire
after fire after fire.

So what this does is to create a situation where the rich can
increasingly take over the whole domination of the city. And they have
to do that because this is the only way they can use their surplus
capital. And at some point however there is also the incentive for this
process of city building to go down to the poorer people. The financial
institutions lend to the property developers to get them to develop
large areas of the city. You have the developers but then the problem is
who do the developers sell their properties too? If working class
incomes were increasing then maybe you could sell to the working class.
But since the 1970s the policies of neoliberalism have been about wage
repression. In the United States real wages haven't risen since 1970, so
you have a situation where real wages are constant but property prices
are going up. So where is the demand for the houses going to come from?
The answer was you invite the working classes into the debt environment.
And what we see is that household debt in the United States has gone
from about $40,000 per household to over $120,000 per household in the
last 20 years. The financial institutions knock on the doors of working
class people and say,
"we have a good deal for you. You borrow money from us and you can
become a homeowner, and don't worry, if at some point you can't pay your
debt the housing prices are going to go up so everything is fine".

So more and more low income people were bought into the debt
environment. But then about two years ago property prices started to
come down. The gap between what working class people could afford and
what the debt was was too big. Suddenly you had a foreclosure wave going
through many American cities. But as usually happens with something of
this kind there is an uneven geographical development of that wave. The
first wave hit very low income communities in many of the older cities
in the United States. There is a wonderful map that you can see on the
BBC website of the foreclosures in the city of Cleveland. And what you
see is a dot map of the foreclosures that is highly concentrated in
certain areas of he city. There is a map beside it which shows a
distribution of the African American population, and the two maps
correspond. What this means is that this was robbery of a low income
African American population. This has been the biggest loss of assets
for low income populations in the United States that there has ever
been. 2 Million people have lost their homes. And at that very moment
when that was happening the bonuses paid out on Wall street were coming
to over $30 Billion - that is the extra money that is paid to the
bankers for their work. So $30 billion ends up on Wall Street which has
effectively been taken from low income neighborhoods. There is talk
about this in the United States as a financial Katrina because as you
remember Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans differentially and it was the
low income black population that got left behind and many of them died.
The rich protected their right to the city but the poor essentially lost
theirs. In Florida, California and the American South West the pattern
was different. It was very much out on the periphery of the cities. And
there a lot of money was being lent to the building groups and the
developers. They were building housing way out, 30 miles outside of
Tuscon and Los Angeles and they couldn't find anybody to sell to so they
actually went for a white population that did not like living near
immigrants and blacks in the central cities. What this then led to was a
situation that happened a year ago when the high gas prices made it very
difficult for communities. Many of the people had difficulties paying
their debt and so we find a foreclosure wave which is happening in the
suburbs and is manly white in places like Florida, Arizona and
California. Meanwhile what Wall Street had done is to take all of these
risky mortgages and to package them in strange financial instruments.
You take all of the mortgages from a particular place and put them into
a pot and then sell shares of that pot to somebody else. The result is
that the whole of the mortgage financial market has globalized. And you
sell pieces of ownership to mortgages to people in Norway or Germany or
the Gulf or whatever. Everybody was told that these mortgages and these
financial instruments were as safe as houses. They turned out not to be
safe and we then had the big crisis which keeps going and going and
going. My argument is that if this crisis is basically a crisis of
urbanization then the solution should be urbanization of a different
sort and this is where the struggle for the right to the city becomes
crucial because we have the opportunity to do something different.

But I am often asked if this crisis is the end of neoliberalism.. My
answer is "no" if you look at what is being proposed in Washington and
London. One of the basic principles that was set up in the 1970s is that
state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. And
there is a conflict between the well being of financial institutions and
the well being of people you chose the well being of the financial
institutions. This is the principle that was worked out in New York City
in the mid 1970s, and was first defined internationally in Mexico it
threatened to go bankrupt in 1982. If Mexico had gone bankrupt it would
have destroyed the New York investment banks. So the United States
Treasury and the International Monetary Fund combined to help Mexico not
go bankrupt. In other words they lent the money to Mexico to pay off the
New York bankers. But in so doing they mandated austerity for the
Mexican population. In other words they protected the banks and
destroyed the people. This has been the standard practice in the
International Monetary Fund ever since. Now if you look at the response
to the crisis in the United States and Britain, what they have done in
effect is to bail out the banks. $700 billion to the banks in the United
States. They have done nothing whatsoever to protect the homeowners who
have lost their houses. So it is the same principal that we are seeing
at work - protect the financial institutions and fuck the people. What
we should have done is to take the $700 billion and create an urban
redevelopment bank to save all of those neighborhoods that were being
destroyed and reconstruct cities more out of popular demand.
Interestingly if we had done that then a lot of the crisis would have
disappeared because there would be no foreclosed mortgages. Meanwhile we
need to organize an anti-eviction movement and we have seen some of that
going on in Boston and some other cities. But at this historical moment
in the United States there is a sense that popular mobilization is
restricted because the election of Obama was a priority. Many people
hope that Obama will do something different, unfortunately his economic
advisors are exactly those who organized this whole problem in the first
place. I doubt that Obama will be as progressive as Lula. You will have
to wait a little bit before I think social movements will begin to go in
motion. We need a national movement of Urban Reform like you have here.
We need to build a militancy in the way that you have done here. We need
in fact to begin to exercise our right to the city. And at some point
we'll have to reverse this whole way in which the financial institutions
are given priority over us. We have to ask the question what is more
important, the value of the banks or the value of humanity. The banking
system should serve the people, not live off the people. And the only
way in which at some point we are really going to be able to exert the
right to the city is that we have to take command of the capitalist
surplus absorption problem. We have to socialize the capital surplus. We
have to use it to meet social needs . We have to get out of the problem
of 3% accumulation forever. We are now at a point where 3% growth rate
forever is going to exert such tremendous environmental costs, its going
to exert tremendous pressure on social situations that we are going to
go from one financial crisis to another. If we come out of this
financial crisis in the way they want there will be another financial
crisis 5 years from now. So its come to the point when its no longer a
matter of accepting what Margaret Thatcher said, that "there is no
alternative", and we say that there has to be an alternative. There has
to be an alternative to capitalism in general. And we can begin to
approach that alternative by perceiving the right to the city as a
popular and international demand and I hope that we can all join
together in that mission. Thank you very much.

Britain needs a workers' government ...

2009-01-29T20:23:00.002Z

and Europe a United States

Part One

Many will be tempted to respond to this title: `Hey,
isn't that what we've already got? Labour in power and
the EU long established.' I'm afraid they'd be wrong.
These pale imitations of the real thing are in many ways
the opposite of what is so urgently required especially
now that the global capitalist system has gone into
meltdown. The EU and New Labour constitute a sort of
post-modern, ironic, farcical, bourgeois piss-take of a
long-standing, and possibly fatally overdue, requirement
for socialistic measures in both politics and economy.

In Britain, New Labour has been using the capitalist spur
to discipline the public sector and maintain the fiction
that capitalism is both working and efficient at the same
time as bending over backwards to the monopolies. A sort
of constant reasserting and recreating of the class
struggle sometimes where there was none by people who
called themselves socialists. Now, with the credit crunch
the pretence is over and the opposite tack of using the
public sector to prop up capitalist monopolies while they
chuck millions on the dole has been adopted. Let's face
it, for reformism to have any credence then there must be
at least a modicum of potential for it and when there
isn't the reformists openly become both the captives and
the policemen of the system. With the economy collapsing
all around, what's to reform?

Yes, New Labour have partially nationalised some of the
banks but the rest have gone to foreign billionaires who
are sucking the remaining credit out of the economy by
charging 14% interest on their investments. And what is
the point of nationalising the bankrupt banks in order to
get credit to small businesses, and pass on interest rate
cuts to home owners, if the major monopolies are free to
carry on closing down competitors and shedding jobs by the
million? In these circumstances where do the tax dollars
used to bail out the banks so they could lend again go?
Why, back to the banks of course. Small businesses use
the money to pay their debts rather than invest to bid for
increasingly non-existent work from the `restructuring'
monopolies or big state departments. Home owners aren't
spending, they're paying their crippling mortgages. And
what do these banks do with the money? Pay off their
debts to American pyramid schemers, hold on to the
remaining cash and wait for the economy to totally
collapse so they can buy everything up on the cheap. As
it was after World War II. Anybody holding some folding
at that time was king and could buy whatever they wanted
(mostly the draught dodging spivs). Ironically, New
Labour are organising things so that at the end of this
recession/depression the only people with cash will be,
you guessed it, the banks and the monopolies that got us
into this mess. They, and Gordon Brown are plotting the
greatest leveraged buyout the world has ever known,
featuring an entire economy, purloined tax payers' money,
`rationalising', downsizing and mass unemployment. Even
the recent VAT cut which left everyone scratching their
heads and which was sold as an effort to stimulate the
economy was nothing of the sort. If was the transference
of £12 billion of tax revenue through the indebted often
bankrupt retailers straight into the coffers of the banks
to cover yet more of their toxic debt and help them
`recapitalise'. Public services and public workers will
pay dear for that alone. But of course Brown and the
bankers can't fulfil their little plans. This collapse is
beyond their ability to cope with let alone comprehend.
The City of London, the greatest casino the world has ever
known, is bust to the tune of billions possibly trillions
and Gordon Brown is squandering the last of the nation's
wealth trying to keep it open. That will not happen. The
current collapse will both confirm and complete Britain's
historic decline, relative to its competitors, that has
been taking place over the past 120 years. Even if global
capitalism as a whole climbs out of this new wreckage
Britain's place in it will be immeasurably and irrevocably
weakened. Now that the City has collapsed the result of
turning Britain from a one-time manufacturing hub into
nothing more than a global casino and a usurious state are
apparent? It is an economy owned by an increasingly tiny
minority hardly any of whom live here consisting of
enormous pockets of ghettoised poor. As a capitalist
economy Britain is a bankrupt old gambler, pissed up and
sleeping rough. Just as an aside, isn't it funny how
capitalism celebrates how efficient it is, how competition
spurs us on to greater and greater achievements yet in the
world of banking it seems inefficiency is both encouraged
and required? The more banks there are the more they can
get away with ripping off the public by charging interest
rates that bare no resemblance to those at which they
themselves borrowed the money from the Bank of England.
They call it the inter-bank lending rate i.e. the rate at
which banks lend to each other before lending on to us.
Of course, the more banks there are the higher the
inter-bank lending rate is. If there was only one,
efficient state bank then it would be lending at virtually
the base rate with maybe a small percentage difference to
cover costs.

Anyway, where were we? Historic decline. Right, so there
is no point nationalising the banks if we don't at the
same time nationalise the big capitalist monopolies. They
will shed jobs and close down competitors making solving
the credit crunch superfluous in any case. For all the
talk of `doing something' this government is doing nothing
specifically for the working class and Brown's taunting of
the Tories on this score must have an exceedingly hollow
ring to it for the freshly redundant or bankrupt or
homeless. These two things, then, would be the priority
tasks of a workers' government: complete nationalisation
of the banks and credit system and nationalisation of the
major capitalist concerns to prevent mass unemployment and
the collapse of small business. Mass unemployment through
job shedding, bankruptcies and takeovers is the biggest
danger facing, and happening to, the working class whether
they become unemployed or remain employed. It will be
necessary for the nationalised and state sectors to take
in the unemployed and share the work. Let's make this
even clearer: the struggle against unemployment is the
most important issue of the day. It is not a question of
enacting socialism as such but potentially involved the
very survival of the working class. Simply to bring these
important economic instruments under the control of a
workers' government so that they may be wielded in their
interests and those of society in general is the most
important immediate task we face.

Part Two (The United States of Europe) to follow . . .

Put work in its place: the bosses wont

2008-12-21T16:32:00.001Z

Good news that the European Parliament has voted to end the right of members to opt-out of the Working Time Directive. The Directive prevents employers from forcing employees to work longer than 48 hours per week. It is a pity that the Commission itself reversed its opposition to keeping the opt-out only the week before Wednesday’s vote thereby undermining the impact of the MEPs’ stand. Or perhaps it was the Commission’s change of mind that gave rise to such a large majority of MEPs (421-273) voting against the opt-out safe in the knowledge that without the Commission’s blessing there is no chance of the opt-out actually coming to an end?

Closer to home, how strange that at a time when 100s of thousands of skilled and experienced workers are faced with being thrown out of their jobs leaders of the Institute of Directors and the Confederation of British Industry should greet the vote as `misguided’ and with the demand that they be allowed to impose as long a working week as they see fit? It is their human right you see and their operational needs, not the worker’s, are paramount. They want fewer workers doing more and more and they want to use this recession to `lock in’ these `productivity’ gains by making longer hours and lower wages the norm in post-recession Britain should that ever emerge.

Of course, some workers will echo the employers’ sentiments on the grounds that they should be allowed to work as long as they want to further their careers or earn extra money or simply enough to cover food bills and mortgage payments. The truth is, however, that those who work long hours, when its not imposed by employer fiat, are selfish and cost the rest of us money and happiness. We, along with their put-upon partners, pick up the tab for looking after their socially neglected children even more so if the partner too is working excessive hours. We pay higher prices in the shops and for houses because of their `extra’ earnings. Their ruthless careerism creates an unfair competition at work which some, particularly those with young children that they care about, cannot hope to compete with. At a time like this, hours (but not pay) should be cut dramatically so that the newly unemployed can be absorbed into the workforce before their skills and experience are lost forever. This should be incentivised in the tax system until it becomes the norm by reducing PAYE tax on the first 20 hours worked. Employers would then have a reason not to work us to death, our children and the elderly would be looked after by . . . ourselves (instead of policemen, social workers, borstals, nannies and care homes) and we’d all have a lot more time to participate in our communities and in democratic life. Alternatively, we could just kick back and enjoy a rest from our productive, manageable, fulfilling and, above all, short working week.

Recession: Socialism the middle ground?

2008-11-18T15:41:00.003Z

The debate on how best to respond to the financial crisis and the worsening recession has now become completely polarised between the New Labour government on the one side and the Tory Opposition on the other. The Tories, 1980s style, want to cut off public spending and allow businesses and the most bankrupt banks to go to the wall. Let it rip they say and we can profitably rebuild from there. This is monetarism. Arch Thatcherite John Redwood is waiting in the wings for a chance to enact such a policy. Unfortunately there can be no way back for Britain from such a devastating contraction of the economy. Not this time. Everything that can be privatised has been privatised. Huge swathes of the economy are owned abroad and the financial and service sectors that led us out of the Tories’ last mess, but which have made this mess so much worse, will be irredeemably destroyed and the remnants relocated to the continent. It will be us heading to Poland in our millions and not the other way round if the Tories get their way. On your inter-continental bicycle, as they say.

New Labour takes the opposite tack. Fiscal stimulation has become their new mantra having so quickly and rudely replaced Gordon Brown’s once legendary prudence. Public borrowing, public spending, tax cuts and so on to inject money into the economy so that people will spend, spend, spend to save jobs and prevent bankruptcies. What about the pound, say the monetarists, and inflation? In the not so long run, they warn, it is 1930s Germany here we come. In the long run, replies New Labour, echoing the recently rediscovered economist John Maynard Keynes (although he was never forgotten by the reckless lenders), we are all dead. Very cynical but the Government’s must act or at least be seen to be acting.

In the excluded middle is a possible solution that incorporates both monetarism and fiscal stimulation but also reaches beyond the capitalist system itself to the possibility of a better future. It is a debt amnesty. A debt amnesty would wipe out the mortgages, credit card, student and personal loans of individuals and the debts of small and medium enterprises to the banks. That represents both a monetarist policy wiping out billions in accumulated, unprofitable capital (the dead capital which weighs on the living) and a huge fiscal stimulation as the newly debt-free can go on to spend on the things they need instead of paying off crippling debts. Yes, the banks would be wiped out by such a move but better they are wiped out than the entire economy. You will notice that both the Tory and New Labour plans are geared to saving the private banking system – the last of our net earners (cough!). They should be replaced by a single state bank which, by cutting out the private middle man, could lend at just above the Bank of England base rate to the businesses and individuals that need it. The state should also of course repudiate the accumulated toxic debts of the City geniuses who brought them in shiny packages from their seemingly more sophisticated rivals in Wall Street. The US had no qualms leaving Britain holding the pawned baby when they let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt effectively ending London’s once central role in world finance for ever.

The recently nationalised Northern Rock, in an effort to be more capitalist than thou after its nationalisation, started viciously repossessing homes. It has now reversed that policy. The more it repossessed, the more homes it was putting on the market, the more it was driving down prices and undermining its own (or our own) asset base. Now it is bending over backwards to help people to stay in their homes offering, in some cases, to virtually wipe off all mortgage arrears. This, essentially, is a nascent debt amnesty. It needs to be extended to the population as a whole.

Of course, like GM and Ford in the US many of our biggest companies are effectively bankrupt. They are being eyed-up by rivals for purchase and asset stripping. The massive unemployment that results will undermine any fiscal stimulation one cares to make and render it pointless. These big companies need to be nationalised to prevent this happening. Giving them money wont work as they will simply use it to buy out others and close them down or take it offshore where it will sit and wait for better times in other places and they’ll shed jobs anyway.

Keynes said it would be a good idea to get half the population burying five pound notes in bottles and the other half digging them up. The modern equivalent is to build airports and golf courses across the whole country to keep people working and stimulating the economy. Japan tried it and it didn’t work and now it is covered in unused airports and golf courses. Better that people are doing socially productive work. The unemployed from the luxury goods manufacturing and selling sectors must be incorporated into the wider economy by sharing the work. The forty-hour week must become the twenty-hour week. For instance, when the ten or so private banks that litter the high streets are organised into one state bank, instead of the economic benefits of such a rationalisation going to the few in the form of job cuts let them accrue to the workers in the form of cuts in working hours. Apart from the economic benefits of keeping everybody working in proper jobs, the social benefits to the family and community of everybody working a twenty hour week are incalculable.

A debt amnesty will of course require mobilising the population in support of such a thing as it will not happen if the bankers and politicians get their way. It is people who must act when governments will not or will only give the appearance of acting. On the back of such an achievement it would be possible for the first time to discuss what kind of bank we want and what kind of things we want it to finance. We could have a bank that is socially and environmentally responsible because that is its job and that is what it wants to be not because it is `regulated’.

Bonfire of the Cold War Sects

2008-09-18T17:45:00.001+01:00

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1871

Marx to Friedrich Bolte
In New York

[London,] November 23, 1871

The International was founded in order to replace the Socialist or semi-Socialist sects by a real organisation of the working class for struggle. The original Statutes and the Inaugural Address show this at the first glance. On the other hand the Internationalists could not have maintained themselves if the course of history had not already smashed up the sectarian system. The development of the system of Socialist sects and that of the real workers' movement always stand in inverse ratio to each other. So long as the sects are (historically) justified, the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historic movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity ail sects are essentially reactionary. Nevertheless what history has shown everywhere was repeated within the International. The antiquated makes an attempt to re-establish and maintain itself within the newly achieved form.

And the history of the International was a continual struggle on the part of the General Council against the sects and amateur experiments which attempted to assert themselves within the International itself against the genuine movement of the working class. This struggle was conducted at the Congresses, but far more in the private dealings of the General Council with the individual sections.

In Paris, as the Proudhonists (Mutualists) were co-founders of the Association, they naturally had the reins in their hands there for the first years. Later, of course, collectivist, positivist, etc., groups were formed in opposition to them.

In Germany--the Lassalle clique. I myself went on corresponding for two years with the notorious Schweitzer and proved irrefutably to him that Lassalle's organisation is nothing but a sectarian organisation and as such hostile to the organisation of the genuine workers' movement striven for by the International. He had his "reasons" for not understanding this.

At the end of 1868 the Russian, Bakunin, entered the International with the aim of forming inside it a second International called the "Alliance of Social-Democracy," with himself as leader. He--a man devoid of theoretical knowledge--put forward the pretension that this separate body was to represent the scientific propaganda of the International, which was to be made the special function of this second International within the International.

His programme was a superficially scraped together hash of Right and Left--EQUALITY Of CLASSES (!), abolition of the right of inheritance as the starting point of the social movement (St. Simonistic nonsense), atheism as a dogma to be dictated to the members, etc., and as the main dogma (Proudhonist), abstention from the political movement.

This infant's spelling-book found favour (and still has a certain hold) in Italy and Spain, where the real conditions of the workers' movement are as yet little developed, and among a few vain, ambitious and empty doctrinaires in French Switzerland and Belgium.

For Mr. Bakunin the theory (the assembled rubbish he has scraped together from Proudhon, St. Simon, etc.) is a secondary affair--merely a means to his personal self-assertion. If he is a nonentity as a theoretician he is in his element as an intriguer.

For years the General Council had to fight against this conspiracy (which was supported up to a certain point by the French Proudhonists, especially in the south of France). At last, by means of Conference resolutions I (2) and (3), IX, XVI, and XVII, it delivered its long prepared blow.

Obviously the General Council does not support in America what it combats in Europe. Resolutions I (2) and (3) and IX now give the New York committee legal weapons with which to put an end to all sectarian formations and amateur groups and if necessary to expel them.

The New York Committee will do well to express its full agreement with the decisions of the Conference in an official communication to the General Council.

Bakunin, personally threatened in addition by Resolution XIV (publication in Égalité of the Netchaev trial) which will bring to light his infamous doings in Russia, is making every possible effort to get a protest started against the Conference among the remnants of his followers.

For this purpose he has got into contact with the demoralised section of the French political refugees in Geneva and London (a numerically weak section, anyway). The slogan given out is that the Geneva Council is dominated by Pan-Germanism (especially Bismarckism). This refers to the unpardonable fact that I am by birth a German and do actually exercise a decisive intellectual influence on the German Council. (N.B. The German element on the Council is two-thirds weaker numerically than either the English or the French. The crime therefore consists in the fact that the English and French elements are dominated by the German element where theory is concerned (!) and find this domination, i.e., German science, very useful and indeed indispensable.)

In Geneva, under the patronage of the bourgeois Madame Andrée Léo (who at the Lausanne Congress was shameless enough to denounce Ferré to his executioners in Versailles), they have published a paper, La Révolution Sociale, which conducts arguments against us in almost literally the same words as the Journal de Genève, the most reactionary paper in Europe.

In London they attempted to establish a French section, of whose activities you will find an example in No. 42 of Qui Vive? which I enclose. (Also the number which contains the letter from our French Secretary, Seraillier). This section, consisting of twenty people (including a lot of spies), has not been recognised by the General Council, but another much more numerous section has been.

Actually, despite the intrigues of this bunch of scoundrels, we are carrying on great propaganda in France--and in Russia, where they know what value to place on Bakunin and where my book on capital is just being published in Russian....

N.B. as to political movement: The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.

On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.

Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands, as the September revolution in France showed, and as is also proved up to a certain point by the game Messrs. Gladstone & Co. are bringing off in England even up to the present time.

Multipolar Disorder

2008-08-19T20:09:00.003+01:00

Here is a little tet-a-tet I had with a member of the SWP recently. It is a comment I posted in the discussion on the fine Splintered Sunrise blog here:

http://splinteredsunrise.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/dont-mess-with-the-tsar/#comment-6653

It was very hastily written in the last five minutes of a lunch break so please excuse the clunkiness. I should really work on it further.

`However I still don’t understand the relevence as we are not here dealing with a bipolar world.’

And here is the SWP’s sophistry out in the open. In a bipolar world the major powers fight proxy wars, in a multi-polar world the major powers fight each other directly. This is a multi-polar world, Russia is fighting Georgia therefore Russia is fighting the West. Therefore Georgia can go to hell and we won’t take sides. And why do the SWP peddle this line? Because they have Stalinist friends in the Stop the War Coalition who support this war outright either because they still have some nostalgic or financial relationship to the ultra-chauvinist and ultra-servile Russian Communist Parties or both. Unfortunately the cost of maintaining their alliances will be the complete and utter discrediting of the coalition itself at a time when it needs all its strength to organise against an attack on Iran. It is ironic that the same people who bang on about Cuba all the time support this Russian onslaught as if the Oligarchy who completed the blockade of that island and nearly starved its people to death and who have plundered the people’s property through outright theft or state organised financial scams are capable of anything remotely progressive whatsoever.

In actual fact, what is happening is that the major powers are redistributing the world between each other, smashing up, betraying, making false promises, pandering to semi-colonial nations, invading them, conceding what they have to to each other. When the redistribution is finished and it is clear who has won and who has lost the most then and only then, due to their own internal contradictions, will the major powers confront each other directly in a full blown, global conflagration. Before that, however, they will have to smash the will of the world proletariat, that spectre which haunts them all but which, in the SWP’s hands, looks more like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

If you oppose the SWP’s tacit support for the Russian invasion of Georgia you will be called a `liberal bomber’ and an `ethnic cleanser’ which would be correct if you supported direct Western intervention but which, are in fact, a lie. If a direct confrontation between Russia and the USA comes about on Georgian soil then we will be for the defeat of both sides through the self-organised opposition of their respective working classes.

The reverse arguements are used by the AWL to support Zionism. They are prepared to justify ANY Israeli assault on Iran and anybody who isn’t is an anti-semite and a BNP supporter. Doubtless when Iran is attacked we will get the same arguement about the major powers and the main enemy being at home intended to make us turn a blind eye to what has been done to Iran as the SWP want us to turn a blind eye to what is being done to Georgia. The AWL has handed its organisation over to Zionism lock, stock and smoking barrels. The SWP have handed theirs over to Stalinism.

Tough negotiations are taking place between the US, Britain, Poland, the Czechs on one side and the Russians, French and Germans on the other on how this conflict will play out in the near future. How far can the Russians take their assault on Georgia, will they finally give the green light to an Israeli/US strike on Iran in exchange for Israeli complicity in their invasion and getting the missile shield moved onto Russian soil where they all agree it would be better placed to confront the `real’ enemy China, possibly the last thing the imperialists will agree on before tearing each other apart.

The SWP and the AWL are centrist remnants of the Cold War whose theoretical weaknesses stand exposed in their inability to cope with the new realities and in their treacherous and opportunist alliances.

Bureaucratism and Factional Groups

2008-08-01T02:59:00.001+01:00

By Leon Trotsky (1923)

THE QUESTION of groupings and factions in the party has become the pivotal point of the discussion. In view of the intrinsic importance of the question and the extremely sharp form it has taken on, it demands to be treated with perfect clarity. Often enough, however, the question is put in an erroneous manner.

We are the only party in the country and, in the present period of dictatorship, it could not be otherwise. The different needs of the working class, of the peasantry, of the state apparatus and its functionaries, act upon our party, through the medium of which they seek to find political expression. The difficulties and contradictions inherent in our epoch, the temporary discord of interests of various sections of the proletariat, or of the proletariat and the peasantry, act upon the party through the medium of its workers’ and peasants’ nuclei, of the state apparatus and of the young students. The nuances of opinion, the episodic divergences of view may express the remote pressure of definite social interests and, under certain circumstances, may transform themselves into stable groups. The latter, in turn, may sooner or later take on the form of organized factions which, pitting themselves as such against the rest of the party, are by that token even more subject to external pressure. Such is the logical evolution of groupings in an epoch when the communist party is obliged to monopolize the leadership of political life.

What results ensue? If one does not want factions, there must be no permanent groups, if one does not want permanent groups, temporary groups must be avoided; naturally in order that there be no temporary groups, there must be no differences of opinion, for where there are two opinions, persons inevitably group themselves together. But how, on the other hand, are divergences of view to be avoided in a party of half a million men which directs the country under exceptionally complicated and painful conditions? This is the essential contradiction that resides in the very position of the party of the proletarian dictatorship and from which it is impossible to escape by purely formal procedure alone.

The partisans of the “old course” who vote for the resolution of the Central Committee with the assurance that everything will remain as it was in the past, reason about as follows: Just see, the lid of our apparatus has barely been lifted and already tendencies toward groupings of all sorts are manifesting themselves in the party. The lid must be brought down again vigorously and the boiler hermetically sealed. This is the short-sighted wisdom with which numerous speeches and articles “against factionalism” are permeated. In their innermost conscience, the partisans of the apparatus regard the resolution of the Central Committee either as a political mistake which an effort should be made to render harmless, or else as a manoeuvre which should be utilized. In my opinion, they are grossly mistaken. And if there is a tactic calculated to introduce disorganization into the party, it is that of those persons who persist in the old orientation while feigning to accept respectfully the new one.

It is in conflicts and divergences of view that the working out of the public opinion of the party inevitably takes place. To localize it in an apparatus charged with subsequently supplying the party with the fruit of its labor in the form of instructions, of orders, is to sterilize the party ideologically and politically. To make the whole party participate in the working out and the adoption of resolutions, is to promote temporary ideological groupings which run the risk of being converted into lasting groups and even into factions. What is to be done? Is it possible that there is no way out? Is it possible that there is no intermediate line for the party between the regime of “calm” and that of crumbling into factions? No, there is one, and the task of the leadership consists, every time it is necessary and particularly at turning points, in finding the line that corresponds to the given real situation.

The resolution of the Central Committee says plainly that the bureaucratic regime is one of the sources of factions. This is a truth which now hardly any longer needs to be demonstrated. The “old course” was pretty far from democracy, and yet it did not preserve the party from illegal factions any more than the present stormy discussion which, one cannot conceal it from himself, may lead to the formation of temporary or lasting groupings. In order to avoid it, the leading organs of the party must lend an ear to the voice of the mass, without regarding all criticism as a manifestation of the factional spirit and thereby driving conscientious and disciplined communists to maintain a systematic silence or to constitute themselves into factions.

But this is neither more or less than a justification of Miasnikov [1] and his supporters! – the bureaucrats will say. How so? In the first place, the phrase which we have just underlined is only a textual extract from the resolution of the Central Committee. Furthermore, since when is explanation equivalent to justification? To say that an ulcer is the result of a defective blood circulation due to an inadequate afflux of oxygen, is not to “justify” the ulcer and to consider it a normal part of the human organism. The only conclusion is that it must be scarified, the wound sterilized, and above all, the window must be opened up to permit fresh air to supply the oxygen needed by the blood. But the trouble is that the most militant wing of the “old course” is convinced that the resolution of the Central Committee is wrong, particularly in the passage dealing with bureaucratism as a source of factions. And if it does not say so openly, it is only because of formal reasons, quite in harmony with a mentality impregnated with that formalism which is the essential attribute of bureaucratism.

It is incontestable that factions are a scourge in the present situation and that groups, even if temporary, may be transformed into factions. But as experience shows it is far from enough to declare that groups and factions are an evil for their appearance to be prevented. They will be forestalled only by a correct policy, adapted to the actual situation.

It is enough to study the history of our party, be it only during the revolution, that is, during a period when the constitution of factions is especially dangerous, to see that the struggle against this danger can not be confined to a formal condemnation and a prohibition.

It was in the autumn of 1917, in connection with the cardinal question of the seizure of power, that the most formidable disagreement arose in the party. The furious rhythm of events invested this disagreement with an extreme sharpness which led almost immediately to the constitution of a faction. Involuntarily, perhaps, the opponents of the forcible overturn made a bloc with elements not belonging to the party, published their declarations in outside organs, etc. [2] At that moment, the unity of the party hung by a hair. How was a split averted? Solely by the rapid development of the situation and its favorable outcome. The split would inevitably have occurred if the events had dragged out, and even more certainly if the insurrection had terminated in a defeat. Under the firm leadership of the majority of the Central Committee, the party, in an impetuous offensive, passed over the heads of the opposition; the power was conquered and the opposition, not very numerous but qualitatively very strong, adopted the platform of October. The faction, the danger of split, were overcome at that time not by formal decisions on the basis of the statutes, but by revolutionary action.

The second big dissension arose on the occasion of the Brest-Litovsk peace. The partisans of the revolutionary war [3] constituted at that time a genuine faction with its own central organ. How much truth there is to the recent anecdote, according to which Bukharin was almost prepared, at one moment, to arrest the government of Lenin – I am unable to say! [4] However that may be, the existence of a Left communist faction represented an extreme danger to the unity of the party. To proceed to a split at that time would not have been difficult and would not have required on the part of the leadership ... any great intellectual exertion: it would have sufficed to issue an injunction against the Left communist faction. Nevertheless, the party adopted more complex methods. It preferred to discuss, to explain, to prove by experience, and to resign itself temporarily to that menacing anomaly represented by the existence of a faction organized in its midst.

The question of organizing the military work also engendered the constitution of a fairly strong and fairly obdurate grouping, opposed to the creation of a regular army with a centralized military apparatus, specialists, etc. [5] At times the struggle became extremely sharp. But as in October, the question was resolved by experience: by the war itself. Certain blunders and exaggerations of the official military policy were straightened out under the pressure of the opposition, and that not only without harm but with profit to the centralized organization of the regular army. As to the opposition, it exhausted itself little by little. A large number of its most active representatives participated in the organization of the army, in which they often occupied important posts.

Clearly defined groupings constituted themselves at the time of the memorable discussion on the trade unions. [6] Now that we have the possibility of embracing this whole period at a glance and clearing it up in the light of subsequent experience, we observe that the discussion did not at all revolve around the trade unions, nor even around workers’ democracy. What was expressed in these disputes was a profound uneasiness in the party, whose cause was the excessive prolongation of the economic regime of war communism. The whole economic organism of the country was in a vise. The discussion on the role of the trade unions and of workers democracy concealed the quest for a new economic road. The way out was found in putting an end to the requisitioning of food products and to the grain monopoly, and in the gradual liberation of state industry from the tyranny of central economic direction. [7] These historical decisions were unanimously adopted and completely smothered the trade union discussion, all the more so as, following upon the establishment of the NEP, the role of the trade unions themselves appeared in a completely different light and as, a few months later, it became necessary to alter radically the resolution on the trade unions.

The most lasting and, from certain aspects, the most dangerous group, was that of the “workers’ opposition”. [8] It reflected in a distorted manner the contradictions of war communism, certain mistakes of the party, as well as essential objective difficulties of socialist organization. But this time also we did not limit ourselves to a formal prohibition. On the questions of democracy, formal decisions were made, and on the purging of the party effective and extremely important measures were taken, giving satisfaction to what was right and healthy in the criticism and the demands of the “workers’ opposition”. And what is most important, it is only thanks to the decisions and the economic measures adopted by the party, the result of which was to lead to the disappearance of the divergences of view and the groupings, that the Tenth Congress was able to lay down a formal prohibition against the constitution of factions, with reason to believe that its decision would not remain a dead letter. But, as experience and political common sense show, it goes without saying that, by itself, this prohibition contained no absolute or even serious guarantees against the appearance of new ideological and organizational groupings. The essential guarantee in this case is a correct leadership, attention to the requirements of the moment which are reflected in the party, the flexibility of the apparatus which must not paralyze but rather organize the initiative of the party, which must neither fear criticism nor seek to put a stop to it by the bugbear of factions. The decision of the Tenth Congress prohibiting factions can have only an auxiliary character; by itself, it does not give the key to the solution of all the internal difficulties. It would be “organizational fetishism” to believe that regardless of the development of the party, the mistakes of the leadership, the conservatism of the apparatus, the influences from without it, etc., a decision is enough to preserve us from groupings and from the disorder inherent in the formation of factions. To look at things in this way would be to give proof of bureaucratism.

A striking example of this is furnished us by the history of the Petrograd organization. Shortly after the Tenth Congress, which interdicted the constitution of groups and factions, a very lively organizational struggle arose in Petrograd, which led to the formation of two groupings flatly opposed to each other. The simplest thing, at first thought, would have been to issue an anathema against at least one of these groupings. But the Central Committee categorically refused to employ this method which was suggested to it from Petrograd. It assumed the role of arbitrator between the two groups and, in the long run, succeeded in assuring not only their collaboration but their complete fusion in the organization. There is an important example which deserves to be kept in mind and which might serve to clarify some bureaucratic heads.

We have said above that every important and lasting group in the party, and this is even truer of organized factions, has a tendency to become the spokesman for some social interests or other. Any deviation may, in the course of its development, become the expression of the interests of a class hostile or semi-hostile to the proletariat. Now, bureaucratism is a deviation, and an unhealthy one; that, let us hope, is not open to dispute. From the moment that this is the case, it threatens to run the party off the right road, off the class road. Therein precisely lies its danger. But – and this is a fact which is instructive to the highest, and at the same time the most alarming degree – those who asseverate most flatly, with the greatest insistence, and sometimes most brutally, that every difference of opinion, every grouping of views, even if temporary, is an expression of the interests of classes opposed to the proletariat, do not want to apply this criterion to bureaucratism.

And yet, the social criterion is perfectly in place in this instance, for bureaucratism is a well-defined evil, a notorious and incontestably harmful deviation officially condemned but still showing no signs of disappearing. Moreover, it is pretty difficult to make it disappear at one blow. But if bureaucratism, as the resolution of the Central Committee says, threatens to detach the party from the masses and consequently to weaken the class character of the party, it follows that the struggle against bureaucratism can in no case be the result of non-proletarian influences. On the contrary, the aspiration of the party to preserve its proletarian character must inevitably engender resistance to bureaucratism. Obviously, under cover of this resistance, various wrong, unhealthy and injurious tendencies may manifest themselves. And they cannot be disclosed save by the Marxian analysis of their ideological content. But to identify resistance to bureaucratism with a grouping which allegedly serves as a channel for alien influences, is to be oneself the “channel” for bureaucratic influences.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to understand in too simplified a manner the thought that party differences and, even more so, groupings, are nothing but a struggle for influence of opposed classes. Thus, in 1920, the question of the invasion of Poland produced two currents of opinion, one advocating a more audacious policy, the other preaching prudence.[9] Did that show different class tendencies? I do not think that that can be affirmed. There were only differences in the appraisal of the situation, the forces, the means. But the essential criterion of appraisal was the same in both camps.

It often happens that the party can resolve one and the same problem by different means. And if a discussion then arises, it does so for time purpose of learning which of the means is the best, the most expedient, the most economical. According to the question involved, these differences may embrace substantial layers of the party, but this does not necessarily mean that there is a struggle of two class tendencies.

There is no doubt that we shall still have many disagreements, for our road is a painful one and the political tasks as well as the economic questions of socialist organization will unfailingly engender divergences of view and temporary groupings of opinion. For our party, the political verification of all the nuances of opinion by means of a Marxian analysis will always be one of the most effective preventive measures. But it is this concrete Marxian verification that must be resorted to, and not stereotyped phrases which are the defense mechanism of bureaucratism. If the road of the “new course” is trod more seriously, it will be possible to control all the better the heterogeneous political ideology which is now rising against bureaucratism and to cleanse it of any alien and injurious element. But this is impossible without a serious turn-about-face in the mentality and the intentions of the party apparatus. But what we are witnessing on the contrary at the present moment is a new offensive of the latter, which pushes aside all criticism of the “old course”, formally condemned but not yet liquidated, by treating it as a manifestation of factional spirit. If factions are dangerous – and they are – it is criminal to close one’s eyes to the danger represented by the conservative bureaucratic faction. It is precisely against this danger that the resolution of the Central Committee directs its main shafts.

The maintenance of the unity of the party is the gravest concern of the great majority of the communists. But it must be said openly: if there is a serious danger at present to the unity or at least to the unanimity of the party, it is unbridled bureaucratism. It is from this camp that provocative voices have been raised. It is there that some have dared to say: we are not afraid of split. It is the representatives of this tendency who dig into the past, hunting there for everything that might be used to inject more rancor into the discussion, who artificially revive the memories of the former struggle and the former split in order imperceptibly to accustom the mind of the party to the possibility of so monstrous, so disastrous a crime as a new split. Some wish to counterpose the need of unity in the party to its need of a less bureaucratic regime.

If the party let itself be swayed, if it sacrificed the vital elements of its own democracy, it would succeed only in exacerbating its internal struggle and in shaking its cohesion. One cannot demand of the party confidence in the apparatus when he himself has no confidence in the party. There’s the whole question. Preconceived bureaucratic distrust towards the party, towards its mind and its spirit of discipline, is the principal cause of all the evils engendered by the domination of the apparatus. The party does not want factions and will not tolerate them. It is monstrous to think that it will smash, or permit anybody to smash its apparatus. It knows that this apparatus is composed of the most valuable elements, embodying the greatest part of the past experiences. But it wants to renew it and to remind it that it is its apparatus, that it is elected by it and that it must not detach itself from it.

In meditating well on the situation created in the party and which has showed itself in a particularly clear light in the course of the discussion, one sees that the future presents itself in a double perspective. Either the organic ideological regrouping which is now taking place in the party along the line of the resolutions of the Central Committee will be a step forward along the road of the organic growth of the party, the beginning of a new great chapter – and that would be the most desirable way out for all of us and the most beneficial one for the party, which will then easily overcome excesses in the discussion and in the opposition and, with greater reason, vulgar democratic tendencies. Or else, passing over to the counter-offensive, the apparatus will fall more or less under the sway of its most conservative elements and, on the pretext of combating the factions, will throw the party back and reestablish “calm”. This second eventuality would be incomparably more grievous; it would not prevent, it goes without saying, the development of the party, but this development would take place only at the cost of considerable efforts and disturbances. For this method would only still further foster tendencies which are harmful, disintegrating, opposed to the party. These are the two eventualities to envisage.

1. Old worker-Bolshevik, expelled in 1922 for Menshevik tendencies. Years later, Stalin sent him into exile, whence he escaped to Persia in 1929, then to Turkey<./p>

2. The principal opponents, Zinoviev and Kamenev, revealed and criticized the party’s plans in Gorky’s paper on the eve of the uprising. They were supported by Rykov, Nogin, Miliutin, Losovsky, Shliapnikov, Riazanov, Larin and others.

3. Led by Bukharin, they published an independent extra-party paper in Petrograd, The Communist, violently attacking the Lenin policy. Others in the group included Radek, Krestinsky, Ossinsky, Sapronov, Yakovlev, Pokrovsky, Piatakov, Preobrazhenskv, Safarov, etc. Trotsky, before abstaining from the vote in order to accord Lenin a majority for his standpoint defended the position “Neither peace nor war.”

4. On December 21, 1923, Pravda published a letter signed by nine of the former Left Communists, confirming the anecdote. At a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Soviets, the Left Social Revolutionist, Kamkov, said “in a joking tone” to Bukharin and Piatakov: “Well, what are you going to do if you get the majority of the party? Lenin will resign and we will have to constitute a new Council of People’s Commissars with you. In that case, I think we would elect Piatakov as chairman ...” Later, the Left Social Revolutionist, Proshyan, said laughingly to Radek: “All you do is write resolutions. Wouldn’t it be simpler to arrest Lenin for a day, declare war on the Germans and then reelect him unanimously chairman of the Council ?”

5. The “military opposition” of 1918-1919 was led by V.M. Smirnov, and supported by Voroshilov, Piatakov, Mezhlauk and Stalin, among others, against Trotsky. The Eighth Congress of the RCP in 1919 voted support for the latter’s policy.

6. From November 1920 (Fifth trade union Congress) to March 1921 (Tenth party Congress). The Central Committee was divided into two groups, one of eight led by Lenin, the other of seven, including Trotsky, Bukharin, Dzherzhinsky, Andreyev, Krestinsky, Preobrazhensky and Serebriakov. The party congress supported Lenin’s group. .

7. The directing centers (glavs) of production, vertically divided, as it were, had to be abolished in 1921 as an unhappy attempt at economic organization.

8. Led by Shliapnikov, Kollontay, Medvediev, Kisseliev, Lutovinov and others, who advocated that the management of economic life be turned over to the trade unions.

9. Lenin led the former, Trotsky and Radek the latter.

Driving into the night: traffic jams and tragedies, a literary approach

2008-07-15T18:53:00.003+01:00

A bit off topic this. A quirky look at the tragedy of traffic jams by a good friend of mine:

By Owen Davies

`The dream of freedom can quickly sour to nightmare, as the defiant boast of the modern (`I take value from myself alone!’) dwindles into a cry of anguish (`I am so lonely in this universe!’).’

Terry Eagleton1

Social and economic science has long appropriated the literary form of tragedy as a metaphor to describe the traffic jam. However, I will argue, whilst the correct metaphor has been selected it has in fact been misappropriated due to a misunderstanding of what a tragedy in literature actually is. What they are describing equates to an all together different literary form.

This misappropriation has serious consequences in the field of policy. It leads to prescriptive, conservative policies which merely tinker with the problem or make it worse. They are either supply-side (more roads) that threaten accelerated environmental destruction or demand-side (road-pricing) that threaten the overnight ruination of huge swathes of the middle classes.

Terry Eagleton’s acclaimed and contemporary theory of tragedy outlined in his book Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic 2, I will argue, can give us insight into the modern phenomenon of the traffic jam where sociological and economic theories have often left us cold.

The idea here is that literature and literary theory has developed a better understanding of the relationship between agent and structure than the social sciences which have long been embroiled in an interminable debate between the advocates of agency and the champions of structure. 3

In literature, character and plot are dialectically related, identical opposites struggling with each other for resolution. An author or dramatist is well aware that only a certain kind of character will make the chosen plot work in the required way. Get it wrong and either the plot becomes unfeasible or the character unbelievable.

Before looking at Eagleton’s theory of the tragic I would outline two examples from sociology and economics that describe the `tragedy’ of the traffic jam.

In 1966, the economist Alfred Khan developed a thoroughly structuralist theory of the traffic jam which owed a great deal to game theory. 4 In Khan’s `tyranny of small decisions’ there is absolutely no room for human agency in establishing or escaping this tyranny. Khan’s theory can be applied to economics, war, in fact a great number of things. Khan applied it to the traffic jam using the withdrawal of train services in Ithica, New York as more and more took to the once empty roads, despite the fact that the majority claimed to want to keep them, as an example of such post hoc decision making.

Two years later came G. Harding’s influential 1968 paper `The Tragedy of the Commons’ which dealt with population.5 Simply stated, it is in the interests of say a group of goat-herders with common ownership of a piece of land to maintain a certain equilibrium in use of that land. However, as individuals it is in their interest to cram as many of their own goats on to the land as possible and, as they all do this, all the goats and subsequently they themselves, starve to death. The traffic jam is thought to be a par excellence modern example of such a tragedy whereby empty roads are soon utilised way beyond their capacity. Harding’s answer to the tragedy is a` fundamental extension of morality’ though it is not clear how this is to be achieved.

Both approaches are hyper-structural leaving little room for meaningful agency and so a more appropriate literary metaphor would be the farce where plot so dominates the characters that they might as well not be there. In farce, the dazzling logic of the plot renders the nature of the characters near meaningless.

At the heart of tragic drama is the hubris of the main character. A character with inflated, even arrogant pride and an overestimated sense of his or her own power. It is important that they are seen as the authors of their own downfall. Aristotle was one of the first and certainly the most influential thinkers to attempt a theoretical grasp of poetics and, of tragedy, he authoritatively declared that it can only depict those with power and high status. With the advent of modern democracy traditionalist thinkers, at least, have declared `the death of tragedy’. Eagleton shows this to be a type of hubris in its own right. Democracy is, after all, only a legitimising of differences, an acknowledgement that we all have different and opposed interests, a breeding ground for hubris if not of kings.

For Eagleton, explained playwright Howard Brenton in his review of Sweet Violence, `tragedy did not die in the 20th century, but mutated into modernism’. 7

Brenton further elucidates on Eagleton’s thinking: `There is a tragic predicament at the very centre of contemporary western culture.

`Hegel defends the Enlightenment with a theory of struggle between reason and what he calls ``the night of the world’’, the chaotic lava of hatred and irrationality within us which can destroy us and what we build, but which is nevertheless the source of enormous energy. For Hegel, our history is about our attempts to negate the destructive negativity of ``the night of the world’’, and turn it to productive thought and social construction.

`Eagleton finds this reinforced by Freud’s vision in Civilisation and Its Discontents in which the death instinct, Thanatos, struggles forever within us with Eros, love, the instinct to build and prosper. Our modern tragedy is that Eros makes us desire individual freedom against all else. But we have made a Faustian bargain with the extremes of the late capitalist world, in which freedom hovers over the nightmare of chaotic social breakdown: ``What if reaching for one’s own fulfilment is the crippling, betrayal and scapegoating of others . . ?’’.’

Where, in this modern world, could we find a better example of the urge to build and prosper coming into conflict with the death instinct than the traffic jam? Millions of people jump into their cars in the morning full of the desire to go out and make a living for themselves and their families and then sit alone for hours on end in a metal coffin vegetating away to the inane chatter of DJs. Having put in a hard day’s work they then climb back into their cars to waste even more precious time such that when they arrive home they find the whole purpose of their labours have either gone to bed or do not recognise them.

Obviously, somebody sitting moribund in their motionless vehicle is not exactly great drama but the consequential social and economic dislocation is, and tragic they are too.

And what of the Faustian bargain that led to this nightmare. The rise of the motor car was certainly not an example of Khan’s post hoc decision making resulting from small decisions but was a conscious effort by late capitalism to prolong its existence. The transport infrastructure was essential but unprofitable and operated by an increasingly well organised working class. In return for the undermining of public transport, particularly the railways, the carrot of leafy suburbs and the open road, a car owning democracy if you will, was dangled in front of the vain middle classes. Their weight was to be used to undermine the growing threat to the domination of the 20th century monopolies.

A massive programme of road building was swiftly followed by a ruinous programme of railway closures and the car was relentlessly sold as the ultimate commodity for the fetishist. Now you could live miles away from the polluted area you worked not to mention the hideous dwellings of the workers.

Every good tragedy is accompanied usually by violence and crime and often ends with everybody dieing. Whilst the social and economic dislocation caused by the traffic jam is tragic, the damage done to the environment is criminal. In escaping smaller pockets of pollution and heading for the suburbs the middle classes have succeeded only in turning pollution into a global phenomenon from which no one can escape. In literary terms that is known as ironic.

Social and economic scientists like Khan and Harding owe the genesis of their work to an observation by Aristotle from his writings on politics: `That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.’ 9

This has long been appropriated by neo-liberals as proof that if a thing cannot be privatised it is not worth bothering with or, if it is worth bothering with it must be privatised. So far efforts to privatise the global environment have failed therefore, it would surely be better if we took Aristotle’s words as a warning and stopped the long drive into `the night of the world’.

This is a discussion paper as opposed to a policy paper and so I will leave it at that. Suffice to say that I am not advocating some kind of neo-medievalism. In fact, it is only the incredible technological advances associated with the computer and the internet which allow us to travel virtually and arrive instantly that raises the possibility of a different approach.

Ultimately, however, changing the way people move is going to require a political rather than a technical solution. At the moment the traffic jam is a tragedy, let’s not make it a farce.

1. Terry Eagleton is currently Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at University of Manchester.
2. (2002) Eagleton, T: Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Blackwell.
3. Structuralism seems to be all about history mechanically arriving at system whilst post-structuralism is a purely political explanation of system.
4. Khan, Alfred E. (1966) The tyranny of small decisions: market failures, imperfections and the limits of economics. Kylos 19: 23-47.
5. Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons, Science 162, 1243-1248.
6. The Death of Tragedy
7. Brenton H. (2002) The Guardian, September 21.
8. Ibid.
9. Aristotle Politics Book II.

Centrism and the Fourth International

2008-07-04T18:20:00.002+01:00

By Leon Trotsky (1934)

(1) The events in Austria, after the events in Germany, place definitely a tombstone over “classic” reformism. Henceforth, only the obtuse leaders of English and American Trade Unionism, their French imitator, Jouhaux, Vandervelde, the president of the Second International, and similar specimens of the political ichthyosauri will venture to speak openly of a perspective of peaceful development and democratic reforms, etc. ... The majority of reformists now deliberately employ new colours. Reformism gives place to the innumerable shades of Centrism, which now, in the majority of countries, dominate the workers’ movement. Thus an absolutely new situation presents itself, in a way unprecedented, for work in the spirit of revolutionary Marxism (Bolshevism). The new International cannot form itself in any other way than that of struggle against centrism.

Ideological intransigence and flexible united front policy are, in these conditions, two weapons for attaining one and the same end.

(2) Above all a clear picture must be gained of the features most characteristic of present day centrists. It is not easy; firstly because centrism in view of its organic indefiniteness is difficult to define precisely, being characterized much more by what it lacks than by what it holds: Secondly, never has centrism reflected so many of the colours of the rainbow as now, for never before have the ranks of the workers been in such a ferment as now. The political fermentation from the very depths of its origin signifies a re-grouping, a displacement between the poles, reformism and Marxism, that is a passage through the many stages of centrism.

(3) Difficult as a general determination of centrism, which has always, necessarily, the character of a combination due to crisis- may be, one can and one must separate, all the same, the principle traits and peculiarities of the centrist groupings which are consequent upon the collapse of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals.

• In the sphere of theory centrism is impressionistic and eclectic. It shelters itself as much as possible from obligations in the matter of theory and is inclined (in words) to give preference to “revolutionary practice” over theory; without understanding that only Marxist theory can give to practice a revolutionary direction.

• In the sphere of ideology, centrism leads a parasitic existence: against revolutionary Marxists it repeats the old Menshevik arguments (those of Martev, Axelrod, and Plekanhov) generally without re-evaluating them: On the other hand it borrows its principle arguments against the “rights” from the Marxists, that is, above all, from the Bolshevik-Leninists, suppressing, however, the point of the criticisms, subtracting the practical conclusions and so robbing criticism of all object.

• Centrism voluntarily proclaims its hostility to reformism but it is silent about centrism more than that it thinks the very idea of centrism “obscure”, “arbitrary”, etc.: In other words centrism dislikes being called centrism.

• The centrist, never sure of his position and his methods, regards with detestation the revolutionary principle: State that which is; it inclines to substituting, in the place of political principles, personal combinations and petty organizational diplomacy.

• The centrist always remains in spiritual dependence upon right groupings, is induced to court the goodwill of the most moderate, to keep silent about their opportunist faults and to re-gild their actions before the workers.

• It is not a rare thing for the centrist to hide his own hybrid nature by calling out about the dangers of “sectarianism”; but by sectarianism he understands not a passivity of abstract propaganda (as is the way with the Bordiguists) but the anxious care for principle, the clarity of position, political consistency, definiteness in organization.

• Between the opportunist and the Marxist the centrist occupies a position which is, up to a certain point, analogous to that occupied by the petty bourgeois between the capitalist and the proletariat; he courts the approbation of the first and despises the second.

• On the international field the centrist distinguishes himself, if not his blindness, at least by his short-sightedness. He does not understand that one cannot build in the present period a national revolutionary party save as part of an international party; in the choice of his international allies the centrist is even less particular than in his own country.

• The centrist sees as outstanding in the policy of the CI only the “ultra-left” deviation; the adventurism, the putchism, and is in absolute ignorance of the opportunist right zigzags. (Kuomintang, Anglo-Russian Committee, pacifist foreign policy, anti-fascist bloc, etc.).

• The centrist swears by the policy of the united front as he empties it of its revolutionary content and transforms it from a tactical method into a highest principle.

• The centrist gladly appeals to pathetic moral lessons to hide his ideological emptiness, but he does not understand that revolutionary crisis can rest only on the ground of revolutionary doctrine and revolutionary policy.

• Under the pressure of circumstances the eclectic centrist is capable of accepting even extreme conclusions but only to repudiate them later in practise. Recognizing the dictatorship of the proletariat he leaves plenty of room for opportunist interpreters: Proclaiming the need for a fourth international he works for the creation of the two-and-a-half international.

(4) The worst model of centrism is the German group “New Beginning”.
Reporting superficially the Marxist criticism of referendism, it reaches the conclusion that all the proletarian calamities arise from splits and that salvation lies in the maintenance of the unity of the Social Democratic Party. The organizational discipline of Wells and Co. is placed by those gentlemen above the historic interests of the proletariat. And since Wells and Co. submit the party to the discipline of the bourgeoisie, the group “New Beginning” disguising itself with a left criticism stolen from the Marxists, is in fact, a mischievous agent of the bourgeois order, although an agent of the second degree.

(5) An attempt to create a common testing ground of eclectic centrists is constituted by what is called the London Bureau (now of Amsterdam) under a banner which attempts to unite these centrist groups, both right and left, which have not dared to choose definitely a direction and a banner. In this case as in the others the centrist attempts to lead the movement diagonally. The diverse elements which make up the bloc tend in opposite directions: The Norwegian Labor Party (NAP) goes discreetly towards the Second International, the Independent Labor party of England goes in part towards the Third and in part towards the Fourth International, the Dutch Independent Socialist Party (OSP) and the German Workers Party (SAP) move vacillating towards the Fourth International. Exploiting and conserving the ideological uncertainty of all its participants and seeking to oppose the work for the creation of the new International, the London Bureau plays a reactionary role. The collapse of this grouping is absolutely certain.

(6) The definition of the CI’s policy as bureaucratic centrism even to this day retains all its force. Only bureaucratic centrism is capable of continuous jumps from opportunist treason to ultra-left adventurism; only the powerful soviet bureaucracy could for ten years give an assured place to this melancholy policy of zigzag. Bureaucratic centrism, differing from the centrist groupings which spring from the social-democracy, is a product of the degeneracy of Bolshevism, retaining in the form of caricature, many of its features; still followed by an important number of revolutionary workers; controlling material means and extraordinary technique and in its political influence this variety of centrism is now the most inert, the most disorganizing, and the most pernicious. It is plain to all the world that the political collapse of the CI signifies the extreme decomposition of bureaucratic centrism. Our task in this sphere is to spring the best of its elements for the cause of the proletarian revolution. Side by side with untiring principled criticism, the main instruments which will permit use by us to the benefit of workers who still stand under the banner of the CI is the pushing forward of our ideas amongst the large masses, who in their overwhelming majority still hold apart from the influence of the CI.

(7) It is just now – when reformism is constrained to disavow itself, in cleaning itself into centrism or in taking on that appearance – that some groupings of left centrism, on the contrary, halt in their development, and even go back upon it. It seems to them that the reformists have already understood almost everything, that it is only necessary not to frighten them with extraordinary demands, criticism or extreme phraseology, and thus one will be able with a single blow to create a “revolutionary” mass party.

In fact, reformism’s renunciation of itself, made a necessity by the events, with a clean program, without a revolutionary tactic, is only capable of lulling to sleep the advanced workers, by suggesting to them the idea that the revolutionary re-birth of the party is nearly realized.

(8) For the revolutionary Marxist the struggle against reformism now changes itself almost completely into struggle against centrism. The mere empty opposing of legal struggle to illegal struggle, of peaceful means to violent, of democracy to dictatorship in the majority of cases now passes; for the frightened reformists, who must now disavow themselves, are ready to accept the most “revolutionary” of formulas, if only they are not obliged today to break with the hybridity, irresolution, “passivity” which are native to them. That is why the struggle against the hidden or masked opportunists must principally transport itself into the sphere of the practical conclusions from revolutionary promises.

Before taking seriously the fine words of the centrists concerning the “dictatorship of the proletariat” it is necessary to exact from them a serious defence against Fascism, a complete break with the bourgeoisie, the systematic building up of a workers’ militia, its training in a will to fight, the creation of inter-party defence centres, of anti-fascist main centres, the expulsion from their ranks of parliamentarians, trade-union bureaucrats and other traitors, of bourgeois lackeys, careerists, etc. ... It is precisely on this plane that one must now deliver the principle blows at centrism. For carrying out this work with success it is essential to have one’s hands free, which means not only maintaining complete organic independence, but also critical intransigence concerning the most “left” of the ramifications of centrism.

(9) The Bolshevik-Leninists of all countries must render to themselves the clearest accounts of the circumstances of the new stage of the struggle for the 4th International. The events in Austria and France give a powerful impulsion to the re-grouping in the revolutionary direction of the forces of the proletariat; but precisely the general substitution of centrism for reformism offers the development of a strong powerful attraction for the centrist groupings of the left (SAP, OSP) which even yesterday made ready to unite themselves to the Bolshevik-Leninists.

This dialectical process, viewed superficially, may give birth to the impression that the Marxist wing would from its beginning isolate itself from the masses. Profound error! The oscillations of centrism to right and left proceed from its very nature. We shall yet meet on our way some dozens or some hundreds of such episodes. To fear to go forward merely because the route is strewn with obstacles or because all our fellow marchers will not go the whole way with us would be most miserable cowardice.

When the new opportunist oscillations of our centrist allies show themselves to be conjunctural or organic (in fact they will have to be one or the other) the general conditions for the formation of the Fourth International upon the basis of true Bolshevism will have grown most favourable. The chase by the centrists of the “extreme right” of those who are plainly left, by those of the left, after those of the middle, those of the middle after those of the right,—a pursuit which resembled the efforts of a man to catch his own shadow—cannot create a permanent mass organization: The sad experience of the Independent Party of Germany (USP) even yet retains all its force. Under the pressure of events, with the help of our criticism and our slogans, the advanced workers will pass over the hesitations of the most left of the centrist leaders and, if it must be, even the leaders themselves.

On the road towards the new International the proletarian advance-guard will find no replies other than those already elaborated by the Bolshevik-Leninists on the basis of the international experience of ten years of uninterrupted theoretical and practical struggle.

(10) Our politics influence in the last year is considerably strengthened. We can, with relatively little delay, extend and develop our success by observing the following conditions:

Do not try to deceive the process of history; do not play hide and seek with the truth, but state what is.

Render yourself a theoretical balance sheet of all changes in the general situation, which in the present period often take the character of sharp turns.

Lend an attentive ear to what the masses are saying, without prejudice without illusions, without deceiving oneself; for upon the basis of a correct appreciation of the relation of forces within the proletariat avoiding as much for opportunism as for adventurism, leading the masses forward but not holding them back.

Each day and each hour say clearly to yourself what must be the next practical step; untiringly prepare this step, and upon the basis of living experience explain to the workers the principle difference from Bolshevism of all the other parties and tendencies.

Do not confuse the actual tasks of the united front with the fundamental historic task: The creation of new parties and of the new International.

For a practical demand do not disdain even the weakest of allies.
Follow with a critical eye the most “left” ally as if a possible adversary.

Conduct yourself with the greatest attentiveness towards these groupings which actually tend towards us; lend a patient and attentive ear to their criticisms, to their doubts, to their hesitations; help their evolution towards Marxism; do not fear their caprices, their threats, their ultimatums (the centrists are always capricious and susceptible); do not make any concession of principle to them.

Yet, once again: Do not fear to state that which is.

Left Centrism: Britain's Once Big Three

2008-01-01T11:58:00.000Z

Unfortunately, Trotsky's Fourth International did not survive his assassination, WWII and the emerging Cold War and post-war economic boom. It split and degenerated into many forms of left centrism. The most prominent trends in Britain became the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers Revolutionary Party and The Militant led by Tony Cliff, Gerry Haley and Ted Grant respectively. All three have been through a fatal or near fatal process of splits and fragmentation since just before the end of the Cold War. Below are links to a history of each of the three organisations. I do not agree with all the politics on display (particularly Bob Pitt's Preface, Ratner's hostile attitude to Trotskyism and Jim Higgins's underly critical take on the SWP's politics per se) but there is plenty here to give more than just a flavour of the nature and history of British left-centrism during the Cold War. Despite the grimness of a lot of the material there is plenty of great humour on display too:

The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy – Bob Pitt

More Years for the Locust – Jim Higgins

Ted Grant and Trotskyism: The Unbroken Thread? - Harry Ratner

Hopi: the opportunist anti-war front

2007-12-17T17:43:00.000Z

The Hands Off the People of Iran (Hopi)’s inaugural conference on 8 December 2007 must have been a fairly subdued affair. It took place just a few days after US intelligence reports revealed that Tehran is not, after all, developing a nuclear weapon. It will surely have come as an unwelcome shock for the delegates to discover that one of Hopi’s key criticisms of the Iranian regime was based on misinformation.

Hopi is the brain child of the Communist Party of Great Britain and prior to Saturday’s conference its paper, the Weekly Worker, carried a propaganda piece by Mehdi Kia (`For a non-sectarian anti-war movement’).

The article extolls the virtues and rationalises the purpose of Hopi in light of the fact there already exists an anti-war movement in the form of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) steeled in the struggle against the invasion of Iraq.

Against New Labour’s imperialist chauvinism, StWC came out with an unequivocal `No’ to the invasion of Iraq. No conditions, no provisos, no ifs, no buts, just a straight, principled `no’. It resisted the media smokescreen about Saddam is this and Saddam is that, about the fictitious WMD, the equally fictitious Al Qaeda training camps and the Blairites’ cant about a democratic crusade. StWC successfully argued that US and British imperialism wasn’t interested in the fate of the people of Iraq but in oil and its own geopolitical position vis its re-emerging imperialist rival Russia and the economically booming People’s Republic of China. 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians, four million Iraqi refugees, a destroyed infrastructure, a privatised oil industry and a disintegrating and thoroughly undemocratic and dismembered country later, StWC has been vindicated albeit in the most grotesquely negative ways and the world is consequently that bit nearer to world war than to world peace.

With the Soviet Union now gone, the CPGB is in search of a purpose in life. No longer able to pursue a slavish devotion to the degenerate foreign policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy, a policy geared to its own narrow self interest as opposed to the world revolution, the right-centrist CPGB thinks it has spotted a gap in the market.

In between the principled anti-imperialism (i.e. unconditional anti-imperialism) of the StWC and the imperialist cheer-leaders of the so-called `pro-war left’, the CPGB is pushing a third position, unprincipled anti-imperialism (i.e. conditional anti-imperialism).

Hopi’s two central slogans, Mehdi tells us in his article, are `no to imperialist aggression’ and `no to the Islamic regime’. The two, we are assured, are completely interdependent. That is, each follows from and implies the other. But this is not dialectical logic, it is not even formal logic, it is in fact faulty logic or sophistry.

If one is against imperialist aggression then, the interdependent slogans naturally imply, one must be against the Islamic regime. Where, we must ask, does that leave the regime itself? And, contrawise, if one is against the regime then one must, it follows, be against imperialist aggression. George Bush will be surprised.

Mehdi imports two external justifications to bolster the faulty internal logic for the interdependence of the two slogans. The first is that ` . . . the reactionary and repressive policies of the Islamic regime in Iran plays into the hands of imperialist propaganda’. There follows a long list of the regime’s crimes for our perusal but this is far from exhaustive, he emphasises, as its crimes are `legion’. The CPGB’s website even carries what can only be described as a snuff movie of a public hanging, introduced by Peter Tatchell, undeniably demonstrating just how criminal this regime is. But this is not the same as imperialist propaganda you understand; no, this is high grade workers’ propaganda. Not the same thing at all.

So much for the `no to the Islamic regime’ part of the interdependent slogan. What about the supposedly equally important `no to imperialist aggression’? A paragraph suffices to expose imperialist aggression: ` . . . the US has designs on the region and these designs are clearly contrary to the interests of the peoples of that region.’ Clearly!

Nevermind, perhaps the second imported justification for the slogans’ supposed interdependence will clarify matters? The regime uses the threat of war to tighten its grip domestically says Mehdi and, he threatens, if the anti-war movement doesn’t give full and equal weight (and we have just seen his idea of equal weight) to a critique of the regime then the anti-war and anti-imperialist forces within Iran will swap sides. Yes, the anti-war forces will block with the imperialist war-mongers! Clearly resistance is not just futile, it is counter-productive. There is no sign here of Lenin’s demonstration that the interests of the working class and the semi-colonial masses are objectively opposed to those of imperialism. Surrender is not an option and neither is accommodation except for a `lucky’ few and any leadership that would block with imperialism must be exposed for what it is not provided with excuses.

Let’s give the CPGB the benefit of the doubt however and say that Mehdi demands we take fire at the regime not because he is about to switch sides, which we don’t believe for a minute, but because emotion has replaced logic and he hopes that the timely overthrow of the theocrats from within will save Iran from an imperialist attack. Alas, this approach can only give rise to political illusions in imperialism. Illusions that if Iran became a democracy it would be safe from imperialism and, therefore, that imperialism is sincere in its publicly-stated aim of bringing democracy to the region. Mehdi has already shown that criticising the regime strengthens it internally and so, amazingly, we come to the conclusion, unexpected at first, that by giving equal weight to the two parts of its slogan as against emphasising an implacable and unconditional opposition to imperialist aggression stengthens both imperialism and the regime.

But, let us return to the inner logic of the interdependent slogans. If, as we saw, to be against imperialist aggression automatically means one is against the regime then, of course, the regime is nothing less than imperialism’s agent in Iran and so, prior to any war, the duty of the anti-imperialist is to soften the regime up (militarily if possible) and then, when the actual war comes, to launch an open attack on it. Hence the name Hands Off the People of Iran, the regime is specifically excluded.

Further, if being against imperialist aggression puts you automatically against the regime then, whilst you are fighting the regime why can it not be permissible to take arms, money and other support from . . . the invaders? They are against the regime and therefore logically against imperialism. Are they not, in fact, at least temporary allies in the liberation of the country?

It was by this tortured logic that some Kurdish groups ended up assisting the US invasion of Iraq. Of course those Kurds had somewhat more of an excuse than British Communists for their errors and, in fact, they were proved at least partially right. Imperialism did give the Kurds a measure of autonomy in northern Iraq albeit for the time being and at the more general expense of the Middle Eastern masses.

Undoubtedly there are various feudal and petty bourgeois forces inside Iran itching to block with imperialism in the event of war hoping for some crumbs to come their way. The usual suspects will be queuing up no doubt. That is obviously not the case with Hopi but surely we can conclude that conditional opposition to imperialism is, at best, interdependent with a half-hearted struggle against it.

Hopi expended a great deal of energy organising its conference in good time for any assault on Iran. However, with the war’s apparent temporary postponement, the comrades will have plenty of time to propagandise more comprehensively about the criminality of the Islamic regime. So much so in fact, if they do their job well, by the time the war is actually launched it might have difficulty persuading a majority of its supporters to actually oppose it. That is the danger with an opportunist anti-war movement. Witness the unprincipled clamour for imperialist intervention in Zimbabwe for instance. Behind the logic of the sophist anything is possible.

Giving equal billing to one’s propaganda against the regime of a semi-colonial country that is facing imperialist attack as you do to your opposition to the attack itself is not a principled method for defending the right to self-determination, a basic principle for socialists and not an act of sectarianism as the title of Mehdi’s article would seem to suggest. Neither can it be a principled basis upon which a serious anti-war movement can hope to proceed.

But what of the Iranian regime? Is it opportunist to criticise it? No, of course not. Is it opportunist to give equal weight to one’s criticisms of it and one’s anti-war slogans at this dangerous time? As we have seen, yes of course it is.

How then should communists in Iran proceed at the current time? Naturally, from here it would be difficult not to say arrogant to attempt anything to specific but surely in the most general terms one would imagine workers in Iran concentrating on exposing the regime’s shoddy preparations for the defence of the country, on its lacklustre opposition to imperialism and its attempts at accommodation. Until an independent policy is possible, workers will surely be demanding that the regime arm them for the coming war. That they be allowed to train. That factories, oil wells and refineries have their own regiments. Oppressed minorities will pledge allegiance to the defence of Iran and demand arms and joint training operations under separate command. The successful defence of Iran would make it very difficult for any future regime to deny minority rights to such allies of the working class. Anything less would be taking advantage of the imperialist assault and would be pure chauvinism

And British opponents of imperialist aggression? StWC was not able to stop Britain’s involvement in the war against Iraq despite the mass opposition. However, internal and external opposition to the Iraq invasion made the imperialists much more circumspect. It frustrated their plans to push on into Iran for the time being. It is hoped that StWC may be in a position to call more than just demonstrations in opposition to any war on Iran. It must reach down into the labour movement, the trades unions, and build for industrial action to oppose any attack. Naturally, any genuine rebellion by the working class against the regime must be supported. Imperialist-inspired or wrong-headed provocations must not.

Hopi on the other hand, instead of reaching down into the working class for support, plans to reach up towards the liberal bourgeoisie and it has compromised its slogans accordingly: `Hopi is not a political party or a political organisation. Hopi is a broad campaign. It is not a communist socialist or workers’ organisation. It is not and should never become a front for this or that political organisation. As a campaign it should be able to attract all political organisations and individuals who accept its aims.’ What a criminal squandering of the hard won lessons of the imperialist assault on Iraq. Two steps backward indeed.