The Economic Content of Narodism, Chapter 2 - Part 12

Lenin sets out the process by which Marxism had arrived at this objective, materialist definition of social class, and analysis of class struggle. Firstly, it develops the concept of the socioeconomic formation. This is arrived at by taking The Law of Value, as set out in his Letter to Kugelmann, as its starting point. The Law of Value, like the laws developed by Darwin, is a law of nature, because it is itself materially based and determined. It is a law that applies to all socioeconomic formations. This law starts from the premise and material fact, that Man must consume to live, and that to consume, Man must produce. The basic, physical, material fact that Man must consume drives the reality that he must also produce. Material reality also determines constraints on that production, such as the time each of his products requires to produce. The value of his products is determined by the time taken to produce them. His consumption is determined by certain objective needs, for example, he must consume sufficient calories, protein, vitamins and minerals, so as to reproduce himself. 

Beyond that, his consumption is determined by what he assesses will bring him the greatest utility/use value. He continually seeks to increase this utility, but he has limited labour-time in which to produce it. So, The Law of Value says that the value of products is determined by the labour-time required for their production, and the proportion of labour-time devoted to the production of each type of product is determined by what maximises the amount of utility/use value that can be achieved with the given labour available. The Law of Value is a natural law that applies to all modes of production. It is the material basis of Marx's theory of Historical Materialism. The law simply manifests itself in different forms in each mode of production. 

“Taking as its starting-point a fact that is fundamental to all human society, namely, the mode of procuring the means of subsistence, it connected up with this the relations between people formed under the influence of the given modes of procuring the means of subsistence, and showed that this system of relations (“relations of production,” to use Marx’s terminology) is the basis of society, which clothes itself in political and legal forms and in definite trends of social thought. According to Marx’s theory, each such system of production relations is a specific social organism, whose inception, functioning, and transition to a higher form, conversion into another social organism, are governed by specific laws. This theory applied to social science that objective, general scientific criterion of repetition which the subjectivists declared could not be applied to sociology.” (p 410) 

The subjectivists argued that it was impossible simply by looking at the real world, and the relations within it, to separate the important from the unimportant. Consequently, they said, this separation could only be achieved by enlightened “critically thinking” and “morally developed” individuals. In other words, this is the application of Kant's Categorical Imperative. 

“And they thus happily succeeded in transforming social science into a series of sermons on petty-bourgeois morality, samples of which we have seen in the case of Mr. Mikhailovsky, who philosophised about the inexpediency of history and about a path directed by “the light of science.” It was these arguments that Marx’s theory severed at the very root.” (p 410-11)

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Captain Tom and COVID

I was very sorry to hear that Captain Tom Moore, who last year raised money for the NHS, has gone into hospital, and is being treated for pneumonia, as well as now having contracted COVID.  But, I am prompted to ask a number of questions.

Firstly, its reported that Tom has been treated for pneumonia for several weeks, so obviously this came before him contracting COVID, which he only tested positive for last week.  The first question then is why the NHS is still not able to ensure that some of the most vulnerable people are shielded from contact with the COVID virus, when they are being treated in its care for other illnesses.

The second question, here, is why Tom had not been given the COVID vaccine.  Its reported that this was due to being treated for pneumonia, but at over 100, you would think that Tom should have been first in line to get a jab, and jabs have been given out now, since the start of December.  That's two months ago, so I am still puzzled as to why he didn't get a jab before starting to suffer with pneumonia.  After all, we are told,

"Captain Tom and his family travelled to Barbados for a family holiday over Christmas after he was gifted the trip by British Airways."

So, presumably he was not suffering with pneumonia during that period.  That begs the question as to why Tom was not given the vaccine, in that three week period prior to Christmas.

Given the lack of data about the effectiveness of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine on th over 65's, this leads to further questions, such as, given that Covid affects almost exclusively elderly people, why is it that its amongst the over 65's that Astra-Zeneca did the least testing?  Surely, as its that group that was clearly going to be the priority for vaccination, all testing and trials should have focused heavily on people in that age group rather than amongst the young.

Could it be that there was an emphasis on doing trials amongst the young, because its amongst that demographic that the best trial results would be obtained, which was important given that governments, as part of the medical-industrial complex, had pumped large amounts of money into this vaccine development, and as lockdowns had completely failed to dent the virus, and as astronomically expensive test and trace systems - which now, after spending over £12 billion on, we hear nothing about - had been even more useless, that governments only hope was a quick roll out of vaccines?

Of course, the question that always arose in relation to Captain Tom, was why it should be necessary for a centenarian to raise money for the NHS, by walking around his garden, rather than the NHS having been provided with the funds it required by a Tory government more concerned with giving tax handouts to the rich, or bankrupting the economy with its ideological pursuit of its crazy Brexit agenda.

A New Leadership? - Part 9 of 11

The lobby of the DHA was well attended. At the time, I was still a Stoke City Councillor, and the local media covered the DHA meeting, which was open to the public, and also covered our lobby of it, at which I made a speech setting out the opposition to cuts and hospital closures. We produced another leaflet for the lobby, which had been produced using material in Socialist Organiser, for use by local groups in such activities. 

Here, is where the welfare state comes to be used as a means of disciplining class fighters. Between 1981 and 1985, I worked as a part-time, temporary lecturer. In the period after I qualified as a teacher in 1981, it was a very difficult time. Unemployment was soaring generally, eventually reaching around 6 million in real figures, and more than 3 million on official figures. The Labour controlled Staffordshire County Council had begun closing schools, and slashing teachers jobs. Bob Cant, the MP for Stoke Central was also a County Councillor, and Chair of the Education Committee. They used excuses about falling school rolls as a justification for closing schools, but the truth was that this was simply an exercise in which compliant Labour Councils once more acted as managers of the system, complying passively with Tory instructions for cuts and closures. They could, for example, have taken falling school rolls as an opportunity to reduce grossly inflated class sizes, to reduce the disparity with those in private schools. 

With thousands of teachers being laid off, it was not the best time to be starting to look for work teaching. On the other side of the coin, the government, to hide some of the effects of soaring youth unemployment, introduced its Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP), and later Youth Training Scheme (YTS), which also had an educational component, requiring the participants to undertake college based training. That opened up lots of the kind of part-time, temporary lecturing posts that I did in the following period. The problem was that, although these posts had very good hourly rates, to compensate for no tenure, and no sickness or holiday pay, they were extremely precarious. There would be a reasonable amount of work at the start of the academic year, when all these courses started, but by Christmas, when many had dropped out, the hours were cut substantially, by Spring, you might have only a couple of hours a week of work. Moreover, from one year to another, you did not know whether you might find any work or not. 

Fortunately, at the start of all this, it was possible to sign on the dole for those days of the week when you had no work, provided it amounted to at least three days. Later, the government changed this, so that, even if you worked just 2 hours per week, and it was the same 2 hours, this was taken to be a regular contract of employment, so that you could not sign on at all. It was necessary, every time you signed on, to provide the dole with the details of what work you had done, which I made sure I did scrupulously. During this period, I was also involved in producing an unemployed newsletter, called Dole Mirror, which was produced in the newly opened Unemployed Workers Centre in Hanley, sponsored by the North Staffs Trades Council. 

When I became a City Councillor, it was also required to provide the dole with details of what official council meetings you had attended. Again I did this scrupulously. On going to sign on, shortly after the lobby of the DHA, I was called into a back room, and told to sit down, and that I was under official caution for the statements I provided to them. I was asked if I had attended the meeting of the DHA. I said that I had. Attendance at this meeting was not listed in your notification of meetings they replied. Do you have any explanation as to why you did not list this meeting, they asked. “Yes”, I responded, “it was a meeting that was open to the public, and I attended it as a member of the public, not as a Councillor.” They looked somewhat downcast, and with that, the interview came to an end, without them offering any kind of apology. 

The implication, here, was clear that the representatives of the state were looking for grounds with which to use the welfare state as a means of disciplining class fighters, as resistance to the cuts and attacks on workers intensified. It was an equivalent of the witch-huts against, and sacking of, militants in industries across the country, such as at BL. If, it had been an official council meeting, then I would have listed it, as I had done scrupulously with every other, and if I had not, it would have been purely an oversight, an error. Yet, had they had any grounds for their interview, I have no doubt that I would have been charged with Benefit Fraud. But, the only reason I was needing to sign on, in the first place, was because of the mass unemployment that capitalism had created, and that, in the case of teaching, Labour Councils themselves were contributing to, by placidly implementing those Tory cuts. Being paid between £20-£25 an hour for such teaching, I would have been highly delighted to have had a full week's work, and to have foregone £20-£30 of dole money! 

This is the way the welfare state operates in general. It atomises people, which was one reason we set about creating a collective for the unemployed, via Dole Mirror, the UWC, and attempts to create unemployed sections of trades unions. But, the welfare state, is the same kind of paternalistic state that existed under feudalism, and which breeds dependency upon it, turning those reduced to such dependency to the same kinds of conditions of serfs. It might also be worth noting that one of the more pernicious, senior members of the soft left, at the time, also sat on one of the DHSS Benefits Appeals Panels.

Back To Part 8

The Economic Content of Narodism, Chapter 2 - Part 11

For Marx, the class struggle is not about individuals, who can be mechanically placed in this box or that box, but a continual struggle between the boxes themselves, the personnel within each box being relatively fixed, in aggregate, at any one time, but is itself subject to flux. To understand the class struggle, we do not need to be able to say this individual is a proletarian and this individual is a capitalist, because, for one thing, these definitions are never absolute as phenomenal forms. It is only necessary to be able to say there exists, say, capital, and those that own capital, in aggregate, come into an antagonistic relation with those, on aggregate, who do not own capital, and who must perform wage labour. It is then only necessary to recognise that, in society, there is an aggregate mass of people who represent this condition to one degree of purity or another, of owning capital, and only owning capital, i.e., as Marx puts it in The Grundrisse capital is not labour. Similarly, it is only necessary to know that there is an aggregate mass of people who represent this condition of not owning capital, again to varying degrees of purity. 

If it were ever the case that these aggregate masses, in these different boxes, were 100% pure personifications of a given form of property, then social science would have an easier task in identifying not just how these aggregate social masses would act, but of how each individual would act. Forms of property are material conditions that are objectively determined. The social classes, as aggregates, that arise on the basis of these forms of property, are also, thereby, objectively determined, in so far as they represent a 100% pure manifestation of those forms of property, but they never are 100% pure, because the individuals that comprise these aggregate masses are never themselves 100% pure representatives of one form of property exclusively. We can say, therefore, that this box, or aggregate mass will tend to act in this way, but we can never say that this individual will act, or tend to act, in this way or another. For that, individual psychological analysis is required. The more homogeneous each box, i.e. the more the individuals comprising each box actually do only own their labour-power, or capital, the more each box will tend to act in the way that box would be expected to act, as determined by the objective interests of that particular form of property. 

That is why, of course, Lenin was right to note that, in terms of identifying the way forward, it was the industrial proletariat, and not the peasantry, that had to be looked to. It was the industrial proletariat that was most clearly the representative of “not capital” that was most clearly divorced from any ownership of capital, compared to, for example, the small peasants and handicraft producers, who, whilst depending upon their labour-power, also owned means of production, and small scale capital. 

But, even where the boxes are more or less homogeneous, in terms of the individuals relationship to different forms of property, they may be extremely heterogeneous in terms of those other social groups, and the individuals association with them. Those other social groups tend to divide society vertically, whereas social class and status divides it horizontally. For example, society is divided into people who are men and women, in each of the social classes. This creates a series of cross-cutting cleavages, forming the kind of matrix that Engels describes in his Letter to Bloch, so that the division of society along purely class lines is never absolute. Indeed, in societies where social classes are far from being homogeneous, for example where the peasant producer, and petty-bourgeois may be preponderant, it may well be that these vertical cleavages play the most significant role. The role of religious division, in the Middle-East, or in Northern Ireland, is an obvious example. 

The more developed the mode of production, the sharper the class antagonism becomes, and so the less importance the vertical cleavages exert. Indeed, the expression of the vertical cleavages and their resolution often, then, becomes inseparable from the resolution of the class struggle itself. The granting of privileges to a particular religious or other group is often related to economic development. For example, Protestant workers in Northern Ireland, did not require huge privileges to keep them separated from Catholic workers, thereby frustrating any joint class struggle. Male workers, in the past, did not require huge privileges over women workers to keep them divided etc. Economic development, in Ireland, has largely undermined the Protestant Ascendancy, and the privileges that went with it. The demand for labour, in the post-war period, drew in large numbers of women workers, who, over the years, have gained in strength, so as to be able to challenge the subordinate position they faced relative to men in society, even though that struggle is not yet won. 

These vertical divisions may be consistent with previous modes of production, and capital itself may use them opportunistically, in the short-term, to its advantage, but, overall, they are detrimental to capital accumulation. When capital needs additional labour, so as to extend the social working-day, and, thereby, increase absolute surplus value, it does not want to be impeded in that by sexist male workers opposing the employment of women, nor does it want to be impeded in employing immigrant workers by restrictions on free movement, by racist workers demanding immigration controls, or demands like “British Jobs for British Workers”. It may, opportunistically, seek to use such divisions by paying lower wages to women or foreign workers, who find themselves in a weaker position, but it is usually the plethora of small capitalists for whom these kinds of penny-pinching means of obtaining profits are significant, not the dominant large-scale capitals. 

If we look at the increasing role of the British-Indian bourgeoisie in the Tory Party, it is not at all difficult to ascertain why they supported Brexit. It is not to stop immigration, but to stop EU immigration, the better to replace it with large-scale immigration of cheap labour from the Indian sub-Continent, labour required by that British-Indian bourgeoisie of small business owners, labour that will not have the protections of immigrant EU workers. 

But, also, if we look at those countries that sought to industrialise rapidly, where they have faced these kinds of vertical cleavages, they have also invariably had to resort to some form of Bonapartist regime, which acts to contain, usually brutally, these cleavages, in order that the process of capital accumulation can proceed. Indeed, as Marx identifies, that is effectively what British colonialism did in India. In societies riven with these vertical cleavages, it is hard for capital accumulation and economic development to proceed, but without the capital accumulation and economic development it is difficult for the horizontal cleavages, along class and status lines. to become the dominant and determining factor. Much as Marxists abhor the brutality of colonialism, and of the role of the Bonapartists, therefore, they also recognise that they often play a progressive historical role, in breaking this impasse.

Back To Part 10

Northern Soul Classics - Do The Whip - The Gravities

 Instrumental of the Bobby Newton stormer.

Friday Night Disco - I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet - Gonzales

 

A New Leadership? - Part 8 of 11

The other lesson to be learned from the 1980's, as I also set out in my response to Paul Mason, some months ago, is the unreliable, spineless, and treacherous nature of the soft left. The lack of numbers of the Left itself means that it is forced to make tactical alliances with the soft Left against the Right, but, as I set out in my response to Paul, such tactical alliances can never be on the basis of the Left itself reducing its programme to that of the soft Left, or failing to criticise, and elaborate the true nature of the politics of that soft left. 

I have set out some of the history of the betrayal of that soft Left in Stoke, over the issue of fighting rent rises, and spending cuts and hospital cuts and closures, at the time. I have also described how they used their control of NSLB to provide themselves with left cover for their acts of betrayal. But, it was not just a matter of even just utilising their numbers to achieve this, but also the usual resort to bureaucratic and undemocratic manoeuvres. The issue came to a head over hospital cuts and closures. The events also show how the welfare state itself can be used as a means of attacking class fighters. 

Across the country, hospitals were facing cuts and closures. In a number of places, hospitals threatened with closure were occupied by their workers. Everywhere, members of Socialist Organiser, as well as the National Labour Briefing, and other revolutionary groups supported these actions. But, in Stoke, the soft left, within the Briefing group, refused to back such action. For them, the local Briefing was to be nothing more than an informational magazine. Its response was merely to present, on its front cover, an interview with Michael Meacher, setting out “A Labour Programme for Health”. The problem was that, at this time, in April 1984, Labour was a long way from being in government, to be able to implement any such programme, and such imaginary programmes of what Labour might do, several years into the future, offered no answers for the actual health workers or patients suffering in the here and now from the Tory attacks. 

Socialist Organiser supporters in Stoke, responded to the failure of the now soft left controlled NSLB to engage in the fight, by taking up the cudgels on behalf of health workers ourselves, with whatever resources we could muster. This illustrates the point that the Left can never subordinate its own programme and actions simply to that of the soft left, purely in order to maintain what can only ever be a short-term tactical alliance. 

We produced our own leaflet, which was distributed to health workers, and across the local labour movement. It said, 

• Thousands of doctors, nurses, and other health workers on the dole, whilst waiting lists grow, and patients suffer 

• Geriatric hospitals like Westcliffe closed when there are more old people than ever. Hospitals that need building and repairing whilst thousands of building workers rot on the dole 

• Massive profits for the drug companies, and private medicine whilst the NHS is starved of funds 

• Billions spent on weapons of war whilst people die because there are not enough kidney machines. 

• This is the waste of Tory Britain. This is the logic of the capitalist system based on production for profit rather than production for need. There is an alternative. 

And, it went on, 

“All over the country health workers, patients and supporters have been fighting the Tory cuts. Experience shows that the only way of protecting patients is to occupy threatened hospitals. As long as patients are being cared for in the hospital the Health Authority has to pay the staff wages by law. 

The proposals of Kinnock and the labour leadership of trying to convince the Tories and their henchmen on the Health Authority is whistling in the wind.” 

The leaflet invited people to join a lobby of the DHA that Socialist Organiser had organised for 9th January 1984. It also noted, 

“Socialist Organiser is campaigning in the local Labour Party for it to adopt a serious fight against the NHS cuts. Join the Labour Party and help make them do it.”

Back To Part 7

Forward To Part 9