|
But no one is going to sign up to democratic centralism, because
it doesn’t work. The argument has to be one politically and
ideologically in society at large, and then the ideology of socialism
can become the ideology of society - and the class enemies, mainly
the private media, will have to be defeated. Once it grips the masses,
to paraphrase Marx, an idea becomes a material force. Look at Venezuela
- a battle for democracy and social justice against imperialism
in the media age.
Somehow I suspect that Chavez and the mass movement doesn’t
quite fit your ideologically pure, monolithic view. Thank you, Lenin,
may you rest in peace. As Marx said, I for one am not a Marxist.
There is no doubt that we have to openly discuss what kind of new
formation is needed on the left to bring us into the 20th century
- never mind the 21st - with an avowedly socialist organisation
that is mass, broad, inclusive, democratic and responsive to its
activist base. Whether it has initially to be a party I am not sure.
Respect has shown that for the first time in more than half a century
the left can effectively challenge at elections. The whole political
spectrum seems to be moving left - look at the Lib Dems (republicans
according to their party conference vote too) and even Howard and
IDS’s incredible Commission for Social Justice.
I think Che Guevara said that unity is a strategy and, whatever
you think of his politics, there is no doubt that Marxists must
seek to take the lead on all fronts - democratic, cultural, political,
economic - to create unity, as did the likes of Lenin and Ho Chi
Minh. You rightly criticise economism, which is a disease the Stalinist
and Trotskyist left long suffered from. I am a media worker, so
I may be biased - but the struggle of ideas seems to me to be critical
in addition to the struggle for power itself.
I just don’t think you can apply putschist tactics now - and
October was essentially a putsch. It may well have been the only
option, given the circumstances in Russia at the time, and who can
deny Lenin’s audacity and his ability to revise classical Marxism
for Russia then. The same must be true for Marxists today. What
is new and particular about conditions now?
Ticktin has the nub of it, I think. The times are promising. But
the version of dictatorship of the proletariat I prefer is social
democracy. Abolition of wages and markets - that is too big a jump,
and it is not something you can put in a programme. The superseding
of capitalism by a new system is surely a process aided by revolution,
social and economic change and the crisis of the system itself.
It cannot be declared. The law of value may be around for a while
yet. Surely the main aim is the abolition of the dictatorship of
capital, and the introduction of thorough-going social democracy?
The historical comparison I see today is with that of immediate
pre-reformation Europe, when the spread of the printing press undermined
the traditional social order, and allowed millions to interpret
the bible without official intermediaries. New technologies can
do that now in the realm of ideas and politics. But standing in
the way is the capitalist mode of production and a revanchist imperial
reaction. The wars of religion were of course not obviously class-based,
but they did give rise to the new class in Holland, England and
elsewhere.
It took a good 300 years to abolish feudalism (1530-1848). And if
we take the Commune as the first attempt to abolish capitalism,
we only have 160 years to go! After all, it is, according to a recent
New Left Review article, only in the next year or so that the majority
of the world population will live in urban areas, mostly in highly
marginalised, non-traditional forms of subsistence, often below
that. And they are muslim or protestant rather than socialist. That
fact - along with the internet, demographic explosion in the developing
world (they are nearly 90% of the world population, making your
United States of Communist Europe a bit of a marginal effort), rising
inequality of asset and income wealth and the integration of global
production and markets - defines our age.
Joe Gill
email
Conscience?
I just wanted to put some thoughts down after a distressing discussion
relating to the purchase of goods from Israel. The reason given
was “What am I supposed to do when they were offering the cheapest
price?”
Does capitalism have a conscience? Is it morally bankrupt? What
are its business ethics? Is anything allowed to obstruct the profit
drive? Does it have an acceptable ‘face?’ It certainly
has a disregard for occupational health and environmental consequences.
Social responsibility is not much in evidence either.
Prior to World War I asbestos was known to carry risks to health.
Asbestosis and mesothelioma are life-debilitating and life-ending
diseases. The manufacture of asbestos products, their use, transportation,
removal and disposal all carry grave risks, and because of its nature,
the risks remain. Asbestos does not become less dangerous with time.
Even as the knowledge of the problems associated with asbestos exposure
grew, its popular use was not curtailed and controlled for many
decades.
Tetra-ethyl lead, the anti-knocking agent in leaded petrol, provides
another example of capitalism’s callousness. It was Thomas
Midgeley junior who discovered the use of this compound whilst working
for General Motors in 1921. Lead is a neurotoxin, and acute lead
poisoning causes terrifying hallucinations, coma and death - it’s
a bad thing! In its early days of production, at the Ethyl Corporation,
workers immediately began to exhibit symptoms, and at least 15 died.
Despite press interest, the company embarked upon a policy of calm
and unyielding denial that served it well for decades.
During research, Clair Patterson discovered that prior to 1923 there
was almost no lead in the Earth’s atmosphere, and 90% of that
present at the time of his study was the result of car exhaust fumes.
The trouble with lead in the human body is that it is not excreted:
it accumulates in bones and blood. It isn’t eliminated from
the atmosphere either. Americans today have 625 times more lead
in their blood than people a century ago.
The next in line is the tobacco industry. This product is a little
different: it doesn’t have a useful purpose whatsoever, except
for making money. The proven health risks are still disputed by
those who stand to lose profit in this industry.
This brings me onto capitalism’s trading partners. The US,
EU and the British all have preferential trading agreements with
Israel - a nation that stands accused of ethnic cleansing, state-sponsored
assassinations, a brutal military occupation, and the flouting of
numerous UN resolutions and the Geneva Convention on human rights.
The people with whom you choose to do business can indicate your
ethical and moral standing. It will also show the level of your
conscience.
The Caterpillar Corporation is Israel’s primary supplier of
bulldozers, one of the most destructive weapons in Israel’s
arsenal. Israel has used Caterpillar bulldozers since 1967 to demolish
nearly 9,000 Palestinian homes, leaving 50,000 people homeless.
Caterpillar is complicit in the war crimes perpetrated by the Israeli
army. Physical distance between the aggressor and victim, even if
the act of killing is mediated by machine, still implicates the
manufacturer of the instrument of death as much as the soldier behind
its controls.
The Israeli Supreme Court agrees with this assessment - it stated
when sentencing Adolf Eichmann: “The extent which any one of
many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of
the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of responsibility
is concerned. On the contrary, the general degree of responsibility
increases as we draw away from the man who uses the fatal instrument
with his own hands.”
Caterpillar has a special division devoted to ‘social responsibility’,
its purpose being to enable “positive and responsible growth
around the world, and we believe in the value of social and environmental
responsibility”. But Caterpillar spokesman Benjamin Cordani
maintained: “We do not and cannot base sales on a customer’s
intended use for our product.”
I think this just about sums up capitalism’s ethics, morals
and conscience.
Dave Edwards
email
Red and green
I am writing you to let you know that I disagree with the article,
‘Fight for a red planet’ (Weekly Worker July 15). However,
I should say that I am not completely surprised you published it.
It fits into what I believe has been a traditional position of communist
parties vis-à-vis the environmental problematic, which I
believe should be changed, because the world has changed and we
must face new realities.
I would start by claiming that classical Marxists were never interested
in the environmental problems, nor in the question of relations
between mankind and nature, with the exception of Karl Kautsky,
who published a book on these issues in 1910 - quite bad in my opinion.
The first Marxist who did publish a good work on these subjects
was the German, Wolfgang Harich: Kommunismus ohne Wachstum (Communism
without growth), published in 1975, and never translated into English.
Communists should take environmental issues seriously, and in this
I mean accepting the existence of limits - not necessarily of population,
but of natural resources: water resources, desertification, and
so on. The catastrophist claims - for example, about the greenhouse
effect - cannot be lightly dismissed. Also, the suggestion that
socialism requires a higher level of development of the productive
forces was made in the 19th century, and they have developed enormously
since - in this I follow Harich. Therefore what is needed is probably
a radical restructuring that would eliminate waste of resources
and limit environmental contamination.
I agree completely, however, on one point: the bourgeoisie cannot
offer any serious programme to solve these problems. Therefore it
is the communist movement that defends the long-term interests of
all mankind, that has the duty to defend radical environmentalism
or to join in defending radical environmental solutions. By this
I do not mean using bombs to destroy whale processing factories.
I mean a programme of limitation of the use of the automobile and
gradual extinction of the use of fossil fuels. Of course this might
mean loss of jobs, but the answer is to reduce the labour journey.
Only socialist parties with weight and authority within the working
class could mobilise for such a programme.
Mauricio Schoijet
Mexico
White Ken
Whereas I largely share your concern about Ken Livingstone (apart
from the diversion on Northern Ireland), it is much more fundamental
than that (‘Ken pays the piper and now calls the tune’,
August 5).
The World Social Forum and those supporting it are notorious for
failing to address the fundamental global problems, but opting instead
for wishy-washy attempts at an alternative which amount to cooperatives.
They fail to address the fundamental problem of the onset of the
‘free market’, its massive promotion by the US and the
EU power-elite and the IMF/World Bank’s adjustment programme
- ‘economic fundamentalism’, I believe, is the phrase
I’ve seen - causing economies to implode and go into continuous
recession.
Also Ken has an alter ego - ‘White Ken’, as shown in his
track-record on Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Total
support, in spite of the fact that everything we warned about American
covert operations and involvement has proved to be totally true.
The key issues of the ESF have to be the “leveraged” implosion
of the economies of eastern Europe, and the assault on and break-up
of Yugoslavia and occupation - I repeat: occupation - of Bosnia-Herzegovina
and Kosovo.
None of this is likely to be effectively addressed, and I foresee
a complete diversion of running off after the UN, entry of third
world goods into the EU, discrimination against third world countries,
etc. Result - yet another ineffective leftwing body.
Richard Roper
email
Zero degrees north
There is clearly something wrong with the collective perception
of BBC TV programme makers, if 55 degrees north is anything to go
by (the six-part series finished on August 10).
An attempt to make yet another cop programme different, by setting
it on Tyneside, starts off by making the lead character a black
cockney. Then, because it wishes to be politically correct, it feeds
in large doses of ethnic minorities, so it looks like scenes from
East Enders. In fact I don’t know why they just didn’t
paint out the Queen Vic and paint in the Tyne Bridge and move the
cast over en masse.
But what about Geordies? This is supposed to be Newcastle upon Tyne
- we know that, because we keep seeing fancy shots of the Tyne Bridge,
but have you discovered any Geordie speakers? Nope, not a one. Lots
of sort of ‘somewhere up north’ accents that they teach
in the acting schools, and some Geordie-ish accents, but working
class Geordie dialect? Not a ‘gaan’ or a ‘yem’
or a ‘hoose’ to be heard.
So where’s the political correctness in relation to Geordie
folk then? We can be excluded from our own city in order to paint
a totally unreal picture - in fact make it like any other southernocentric
programme with the Tyne as a backdrop, and a few northern vowels:
that’ll do ’em. I get heartily sick of this painting out
of local and regional differences in order to fit some imaginary
image of us all being the same everywhere you go. Doubtless that’s
the way they would like it to be, but nobody who lives north of
the Watford Gap believes this to be anything other than a totally
artificial picture.
Ha-weh, if Glasgow can have Rab Nesbitt and his genuine Glasgow
twang, and East Enders can have genuine cockney, any chance of a
bit of Geordie for Tyneside? Incidentally, apart from the total
destruction of the Northumbria dialect, the programme itself is
like watching paint dry. Dull? To the point of suicide.
David Douglass
email
|
