Weekly Worker 440 Thursday July 11 2002
Letters
AWL economism
As a recent member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, perhaps you can clarify some questions that have been exercising myself and the bright young things (I am not young, and only intermittently bright, sadly). We work with you on joint initiatives such as round Marxism 2002 and the euro. Sometimes there seems an enormous gulf of political culture, history and class orientation. At other times there seems less dividing us than there is internally within the AWL - on the euro, for example.
So what do you mean when you call us ‘economists’? My understanding is Lenin used this term to describe those who believed that the economic struggle would spontaneously evolve into political struggle, without the conscious intervention of revolutionaries. Have I got it wrong? I don’t know anyone in the AWL who subscribes to that view. But you seem to mean something different by it - any intervention in the economic struggles of the working class. Hence what I mean by the huge gap in political culture. If we don’t even mean the same things when we use the same words, how are we going to talk to each other?
You appear to believe that the AWL is riven by a ‘fault-line’ between the ‘politicals’ and the ‘economists’. Now my understanding of a fault-line is that you really want to decide which side of it you’re on before it moves apart irrevocably. Here’s my problem: on which side of the line do I belong? On the one hand, I think one of the strengths of the AWL is its working class orientation, its concern to do long-term, patient work in the unions and working class communities, to build an organic base there. Does that make me an economist? On the other, the immediate precipitating issue for me joining was supremely ‘political’ - September 11 and the bombing of Afghanistan. Only the AWL (I didn’t know of the CPGB’s existence at that point) put forward what I considered an independent working class perspective (No to the war; no to the Taliban). Similarly with Israel/Palestine and now the euro.
Is the euro political or economist? And do the differences run along the fault-line or across it? I don’t know who is supposed to represent the two sides. Mark Osborn and Jill Mountford are the supposed economists, but who’s on the other side? Martin Thomas? But he’s Mr Median AWL (sorry, Martin, it’s true). Sean Matgamna? Cathy Nugent? And where does Solidarity stand on the line? Straddling it? First one side, then the other?
Gerry Byrne
email
Union link
Your position on the complete disaffiliation of the unions from New Labour is, I believe, entirely correct. I write as a member of the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alliance and an activist within the Communication Workers Union.
Within a CWU context, the motion calling for disaffiliation from New Labour at our recent conference was shown to be a step too far at this stage and was tactically naive. Whilst there is some rank and file support for immediate disaffiliation, as yet there is not enough to ensure we reach this goal. Had it not been for other motions (passed) which called for severe reductions in donations, the union leadership would have used the defeat of the disaffiliation motion as a big stick with which to beat the left, both within and outside of the union. The real winners would have then been New Labour.
As it is, the CWU has sent a clear message to its members, as have other unions, that disaffiliation could be an actual future prospect, should the relationship with New Labour not improve, or indeed degenerate even further.
It was interesting to me that those most vociferous in calling for complete disaffiliation, including the movers of the motion, are either members or past members of the Labour Party and not part of any organisations of the left! Perhaps this is due to their greater sense of betrayal now that it is apparent to them that New Labour cannot be reformed from within to become a party of the working class and never has been.
Fran Choules
email
Hopeless
So the silly Swappies (SWP) have now taken over the Socialist Alliance. This is clearly very bad news. The Swappies will feed off the SA, use it only to recruit for themselves and generally take it nowhere fast.
The CPGB and others calling for an SA party and a paper are pissing in the wind, as the Swappies will not let this happen. You might as well propose living on Venus for all the practical effect it will have. Anyone who has ever had anything to do with SWP knows what a completely clueless and upper-middle class bunch of posers they are.
One anecdote will suffice. A friend of mine worked at the BBC. A Swappie was active in the union. He called himself Bill, lived in the East End and had a quite convincing working class accent. It turns out that Bill’s father was a professor of divinity at Jesus College, Cambridge. Swappies have a party membership book called Speak prole and learn working class accents at evening classes - ‘ain’t’, ‘awright’, etc. This is the only relationship the SWP has to the working class. It is pathetic and offensive.
Ditto in smaller amounts Workers Power and all the other pitiful little left groupings. The only left organisation with any understanding of or membership from the working class is the Socialist Party. Unfortunately they are led by Taaffe, a fairly clueless old duffer, who is clearly over the hill, and Walsh, who seems to have stepped straight out of the Oxbridge debating society.
They told us how the euro would never happen, expelled an organisation of a thousand in Pakistan, favouring instead the true party of some seven or eight. They are both obsessed with the notion that ‘Labour’ is a dirty word and use this mad dogma to destroy the international. Neither of them were ever democratically elected by anybody, but they will remain in charge for as long as they feel like it.
Frankly it all seems quite hopeless at the moment.
Geoff Dennis
email
SA independents
Pete Weller and Pete Webster’s report of the independents’ conference is a good reflection of the debates. Why does your headline make assertions that are not included in that report? For example: “… in the Socialist Alliance they have no perspectives other than moaning about the SWP being a majority.” This is simply not the case: there were many positive and non-sectarian proposals put forward.
The Weekly Worker has much to be applauded for. Slagging off fellow comrades in this ill informed manner damages that reputation.
Phil Pope
email
Kiwi alliance
An Anti-Capitalist Alliance has recently been formed in New Zealand, by two small left groups: the Workers Party (which publishes a fortnightly called The Spark) and the group around Revolution magazine.
While having substantial differences over historical questions - the WP is a pro-Mao group, while the Revolution circle is hostile to Stalin and Mao - the two groups have found a substantial field of agreement in contemporary world and NZ politics.
The ACA was formed as an explicitly revolutionary alliance, to stand candidates in the NZ elections which are now to take place early, on July 27. However, the two participating groups have found common ground sufficient to consider a number of other joint initiatives and to maintain the ACA after July 27 to carry forward these projects.
In New Zealand, under proportional representation, a party which signs up 500 financial members becomes eligible for the party vote. This means the name of the organisation appears on all ballot papers throughout the country. In the first few weeks, the ACA signed up over 100 people and we intend to work to reach the 500 figure for the next elections, in 2005.
In the meantime, we are running a slate of four candidates in the three main cities, with a particular focus on working class areas hard hit by the ‘new right’ policies pursued by the bourgeois Labour Party in the 1980s and its National Party successor in the 1990s. Modest as this is, it amounts to the largest left electoral intervention in several decades.
Several left groups chose not to participate in the formation of the ACA. Several others were not invited, as we did not wish to be swamped by left-reformism. None of the Trotskyist and Maoist groups have called for a vote for the ACA, preferring the capitalist NZ Labour Party, the social democratic Alliance (which appears on its last legs) or - in the case of the British SWP’s local faithful followers - the Greens!
Philip Ferguson
Revolution
Support England
I think John Dove is unfair to John Reid (Letters, July 4). Surely Reid’s argument was that supporting other nation’s nationalism against English nationalism does nothing to resolve the problem of national prejudice in sport (Weekly Worker June 27).
While he admits he supports England at football, I am sure he would deny supporting imperialism, racism, chauvinism, pig-ignorant behaviour and yob violence. I expect he campaigns actively against all these things, as many football fans do. Sport is an important aspect of a great many people’s lives and it is where their sense of national identity, to a large extent, is constructed.
The love that people have for the place where they have grown up is natural and universal, and not something that anyone need feel ashamed of. Rather they should have good cause to be proud of it. We need to be politically engaged in this process and not leave it to The Sun and Daily Mail to define our national identity - lest they do construct an identity that we are ashamed of.
On an optimistic point, I have seen no reports of bad behaviour by English fans in Japan, nor for that matter the fans of any other nation. Tourism has shrunk the world and ordinary people go everywhere and usually get on well and understand each other. International football is part of a developing world culture that can be dominated by the working class.
Phil Kent
London
House prices
Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, the Halifax, recently reported the biggest monthly rise in house prices since its records began 19 years ago. Prices jumped 4.2% in May, beating the previous record of 4.1% at the peak of the last boom in 1988.
The bull run in the housing market is looking overblown and a significant slowdown in house-price inflation is on the cards. The longer the bull run continues, the greater is the danger that the market will see a crash rather than a gentle slowdown. Low interest rates are making houses affordable but, should interest rates rise, the true level of prices will be exposed.
A prop under the market that is weakening is rents. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors recently warned that rents are falling for the first time since January 2000. Another survey, by the Association of Residential Letting Agents, reported that the average rental return has fallen from 7% to 6.4%. Rents are weakening because of a flood of ‘buy to let’ properties coming on the market. The danger is that investors will struggle to meet mortgage payments if rents fall much further. They will then be forced to sell their properties.
A collapse in house prices would test the support of working class and middle class homeowners for the New Labour government. Socialists should be preparing themselves now for the changes that this would bring to politics in the UK.
John Smithee
Cambridgeshire
US and Al Qa’eda
An Al Qa’eda front organisation, the Alliance of Eritrean National Forces (AENF), is sponsoring a tour of the US by a member of the Eritrean exile ‘opposition’ as a part of their ongoing efforts to transform Eritrea into an islamic regime.
Al Qa’eda was founded by Osama bin Laden in Sudan in 1991. The first organisation in Al Qa’eda was the Eritrean Islamic Jihad (EIJ), a terrorist group of Eritrean exiles whose goal is to establish bin Laden’s version of an islamic regime in Eritrea, which is about half muslim, half christian. The EIJ played a major role in starting the AENF.
Bin Laden got his start in the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s. The war against the Soviet occupation was funded by the CIA in what remains the largest covert US military operation in history. Bin Laden and his cohorts in this war worked closely with the CIA. Bin Laden and his Saudi-based family have a long history of close ties to past and present members of the top echelons of the US government, including the Carlyle Group, which includes Bush senior and other former US cabinet members.
While most people have assumed US ties to bin Laden were cut after Al Qa’eda carried out the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, a number of well respected western news services, including Le Monde Diplomatique, reported that as recently as July 2001 bin Laden met with the CIA station chief during bin Laden’s alleged stay in a hospital in Dubai.
With the September 11 attacks on the WTC and Pentagon and the resulting ‘war on terror’ by the US, any connections between Al Qa’eda and the US would seem out of the question. So why is the US allowing, actually facilitating, a US tour of a jihadist-linked member of the Eritrean ‘opposition’, sponsored by the Al Qa’eda front, the AENF?
This AENF member has also been anointed by Amnesty International with their ‘special award for human rights journalist under threat’, following his fleeing Eritrea for the US via Sudan and Ethiopia. The AENF tour this ‘award winning’ Eritrean opposition member is on can be followed on the AENF front websites - Asmarino.com and Awate.com. More documentation on other member organisations in the AENF, including those former top members of the Eritrean government who were detained or defected known as the G-15 (named after the 15 executive committee members of the Eritrean government caught cooperating with the jihadists, the Ethiopians and the US intelligence community), can be seen in their ‘manifesto’ at Eritrea1.org.
For more on the Al Qa’eda links to the AENF see National Review Online, June 10, ‘Our new ally’ by J Mowbray. Also of particular interest is the Voice of America story of July 2001 on the AENF convention held in Gonder, Ethiopia. This story reports the inclusion of the Eritrean Islamic Jihad in the AENF, though it does not mention the connection to Al Qa’eda.
Thomas Mountain
Hawaii
State socialism
Many on today’s left advocate, as the CPGB does (one need only read the Draft programme), state socialism. Indeed most state socialists justify their aim/method by citing Marx from the Communist manifesto: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state - ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class ...”
I put it to you that state socialism arises from the reversal of Marxist theory. The aim of many communists is for the proletarians to assume political power and use this to take power from the capitalists over production: ie, use political power to achieve economic power. The Marxist base-superstructure model developed in The German ideology shows us that political power is determined upon the pattern of ownership of the productive instruments, so those who own the instruments of production hold the dominant political power. Hence the “executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. The workers through their activities hold the lesser political power in capitalism via trade unions and their influence on pro-proletarian parties, eg: the Labour of old (since 1979 this lesser political power has fallen dramatically). To summarise, political power is only achieved via the possession of economic power - be it land, labour or capital. Without economic power political power is unachievable.
This is illustrated by the occurrences of the late 1500s and early 1600s (laying the foundations of capitalism in England). Here the land market opened up due to sale of land by the crown to raise money and the dissolution of the monasteries, and lesser church houses put most of the associated land onto the open market. This enabled the rise of the gentry, as their share of land rose at the expense of the traditional nobles. This then resulted in a consequential shift in political power in the country from the nobles to the rising gentry, lawyers, financiers and merchants. All this indicates is that, as economic power rises - ie, gentry - so political power rises. And as economic power falls - ie, nobles - so political power falls. It indicates a third point: without economic power you hold no political power, for the gentry held little political sway prior to getting more land; once this was achieved their political standing rose.
The aim here is to show how misguided the demand is for political power to achieve economic power when ignoring the Marxist stance that the only way to hold political power is to hold economic power. Hence to demand workers conquer the capitalist state to establish socialism is the reversal of historically proven scientific fact - Marxism. Those who make such a claim then may be called ‘vulgar socialists’.
“… at this stage the economy will be fully socialised and will in the main be communally owned: that is in the ‘hands of the state - ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class’” (CPGB Draft programme section 4.3).
Socialisation is the transfer of all property and capital into the hands of society, not, as this indicates, into the hands of the state. What the above reeks of is a policy of demanding bourgeois economics with a capitalist administration and control of production projected in perverted communist terms.
State socialism (nationalisation) bears the characteristics of a system of domination over the proletariat. The proletarians have no control over the productive apparatus due to the fact that control and ownership rests in the hands of a clique of state officials. Any promise of workers’ control under this system is mere tokenism to appease the proletarians. Nationalisation results in an “unrestrained bureaucracy in which the absence of any objective framework of economic regulation gives rise to both unbridled economic power and privilege and a heartless, despair-ridden mode of distribution [and production]”- Mike Baker.
Distribution under nationalisation will require a price policy, because wage labour still exists so the workers do not have the socially exercised right of disposal over production. This then infringes upon the principle of a direct relationship of the producer to the product of his labour, in just the same way as this occurs under capitalism (hence alienation from the product takes place). What is advocated here shall lead to a new class of bureaucrats who own the productive instruments through the state. This is not socialism! Socialism is the absorption of state power by society, not, as the above indicates, boosting state power.
“Class and social strata exist under socialism because of different positions occupied in relationship to the means of production” (section 5).
The above is often used to justify state socialism’s class structure. However, under socialism the property and capital of today are owned socially due to the fact that during the revolution the “proletarians take possession of the factories and other productive establishments” and then proclaim them to be social property - ie, owned by the workers themselves. Here also the proletarians establish the system of self-management in industry whereby everyone has an equal say in industry. Hence there exists an equal basis of ownership and control, thereby no classes exist as relationships to the productive instruments are equal.
To quote Paul Mattick, “Communism will be a system of workers’ councils or it will not exist. The ‘association of free and equal producers’ which determines its own production and distribution is thinkable only as a system of self-determination at the point of production and the absence of any other authority than the collective will of the producers themselves.” In the council system the central institutions will be collective enterprises without the apparatus to assert their will outside the consent of other councils or of other collective enterprises. The structure of such a system must combine central regulation with the self-determination of the producers. This is in stark contrast of the state socialist way seen in the USSR with central ownership and control over the producers who are subservient to the state planning department and no discussion.
The method to achieve socialism then is through a general strike. The working class take over workplaces and proclaim them to be social property and through this they set up workers’ councils which become the political manifestation of the workers’ economic power.
Richard Sherratt
email
Rail sabotage
Last week saw the publication of a report by the health and safety executive on the Potters Bar disaster. It confirmed that the cause of the derailment was a set of defective points.
These points (type 2182A) require particularly high maintenance, partially because they were introduced almost 20 years ago - under British Rail in the late 1980s. Another example of the antiquated nature of large parts of the rail network. Now, Railtrack has been given one month to conduct a risk analysis of points with adjustable stretcher bars (the same type as those at Potters Bar). The replacement of more than 1,700 sets of these points would cost up to £350 million. However, despite its renationalisation in all but name, Railtrack is notoriously miserly when it comes to spending money on passenger safety and nobody is seriously expecting that to change.
Unsurprisingly, the report dismissed the theory that vandalism or deliberate sabotage were the cause of the damage to the points. Jarvis, the company responsible for the maintenance of the points, had suggested sabotage to cover for their own incompetence. The facts are that they failed to record the absence of nuts from set 2182A a week before the Potters Bar crash. What is more the HSE report found that 20% of nuts in the area were not fully tightened either.
However, some people are not to be deterred. Having failed dismally to find a scapegoat for Potters Bar in the form of a phantom saboteur, they are now attempting to shift the blame for the poor condition of the east coast main line onto the ‘malpractice’ of railworkers. One “industry source” told The Independent that there is “evidence of old Spanish practices among maintenance workers” and that “what the records [of work completed] are saying isn’t true” (July 8). Despite this, the same article admits: “Officers have discovered no evidence suggesting that false claims were made about work on the points involved in that crash.”
What is more, the whole story was based on claims made by the mysterious “industry source” of ‘evidence’ - not spelled out - which has supposedly been found by the police. Needless to say, any attempt to scapegoat workers should be exposed for what it is. The only sabotage committed at Potters Bar and indeed on the whole network is by those more concerned with profit margins than the lives of passengers.
Despite the findings of the HSE report, Jarvis are still deemed fit to take over the maintenance contracts for three London Underground lines as part of its privatisation. We have already seen the horrifying consequences of what is, in effect, corporate sabotage of the rail network in the shape of numerous disasters on the above-ground network. A repeat performance on the tube is a truly horrifying prospect. How long before a rail disaster where the number of dead runs into the tens or even hundreds? If the current chaos continues then surely it can only be a matter of time.
The Socialist Alliance as a whole, but especially its rail fraction, urgently needs to take a campaigning lead on this issue. We should argue clearly and forcefully for the rail network to be brought under the control of those who work on and use it. Only then will the safety of the travelling public be made the top priority and only then will essential improvements that will save lives be made.
Derek Goodliffe
RMT (personal capacity)
