Oliver Kamm

Europe and its detractors

Apologies for the lack of posts this week, owing to pressure of work. Here is a canter round current British politics, with reference to the municipal and European elections to be held here on 10 June.

In short: Labour will do badly; fringe parties will do well. For my part, I am supposed to be assisting the campaign of the Independent Martin Bell - who is standing in East Anglia for election to the European Parliament - by offering him advice on issues of European policy.

It is disturbing that an explicitly anti-European fringe party, the UK Independence Party, should be attracting apparently committed support from a significant minority of a generally uninterested electorate. The European Union’s economic achievements are admittedly overstated by its proponents, and the well-known market distortions in agriculture a continuing cost to European consumers and Third World producers. But the single market is an important achievement, and the political benefits of the EU are almost impossible to overstate. One of my particular interests in politics is post-war Germany, of which I am a great admirer (excepting the current Chancellor and government, for whom I have no respect at all). Germany’s transformation within a generation from a defeated and monstrous despotism to a thriving, tolerant, liberal democracy was eased and hastened by the supranational structures of the emerging union. The symbolism of the accession to membership of ten new states that formerly lived under Communist tyranny is of great significance. The EU is both a solvent for formerly intractable political disputes, and a symbolic welcoming of polities that have managed to free themselves from tyranny and become constitutional democracies governed by the rule of law.

It’s a shame that the principal message of the European elections in the UK may prove to be the extent of anti-European feeling. Johann Hari wrote a valuable piece in The Independent this week on the character of the UK Independence Party, which he rightly portrays as a xenophobic organisation with disturbing links to the extreme Right. (One piece of the evidence doesn’t stand up, though: the tiny UK Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, whose web site the UK Independence Party links to, is not the sectarian organisation that Hari supposes. Its opposition to the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ derives from its integrationist position. Right or wrong - and I think it's wrong - this is a strictly constitutional argument: the former Irish Cabinet minister Conor Cruise O’Brien ran for the Northern Ireland Assembly on the UK Unionist ticket because the party was not sectarian in the way that unionism traditionally has been.)

For all that, I am not in favour of the proposed European constitutional treaty, and will vote against it in a referendum as it currently stands. As the economics columnist of the Financial Times, Sir Samuel Brittan, has shrewdly observed:

The treaty makes sense only on the assumption that there is already a will to create a superstate but that in some areas there is still a lingering need for unanimous decisions. The government is making a mistake in supposing that it is enough to require such unanimity just for tax, foreign policy and defence. The EU has been most intrusive in a dirigiste direction via so-called social policy, health and safety and similar areas; and the existing document lists no areas where power is returned to national governments, despite lip service to subsidiarity.

This argument isn’t a nationalist one; it’s an observation about the nature of government. A consistent liberal would argue that good government, especially in the economic sphere, consists in establishing a framework of rules rather than in discretionary intervention. Without those constraints, governments are responsive to the demands of sectional interests. Brittan’s point, as I understand it, is that a confederation is peculiarly liable to this problem:

The EU functions neither as a union of separate states nor yet a federation. It is a confederation in which different governments can obstruct each other but none has the authority to override sectional interests in the way the US president or UK cabinet can attempt.

The treaty as it stands doesn’t circumscribe discretionary intervention, but appears to envisage its extension. It is in that respect illiberal, and while I deeply dislike the notion of allying with some of the most unpleasant elements in British politics on this issue, I would not support a constitutional treaty that took that form.

I shall, however, be voting Labour in both sets of elections. My reasons are not especially to do with Europe, I just want to support the Prime Minister. As I foolishly said on a local Liberal Democrat questionnaire that asked my voting intentions (for I have since received visits from the local party seeking my support), my vote is determined by the issue of the Iraq war. The Conservative Party seems to me have behaved on that issue in a way that discredits the notion of honest opportunism, while its policy mix on economic and social issues is chaotically populist. A party that imagines opposing tuition fees (or to give the policy its proper name, supporting middle-class subsidies) is consistent with a pro-market approach is not to be taken seriously.

That exhausts the sensible voting options in the elections. On the same day, of course, the election for Mayor of London, also takes place. Having lately acquired a family and hence moved out of London, I do not have a vote this time; this is a great relief to me, as there is no candidate I could support, even for tactical reasons. The Labour candidate Ken Livingstone simply ought not to have been accepted back into membership by the Labour Party, let alone been given its candidature. His fiscal profligacy, philistine and dirigiste approach to urban planning, fascination with courting business interests, and outright-stupid political extremism render him a frivolous politician with a large budget. The Tory candidate Steve Norris has, with astonishing obtuseness, failed to realise that his business affairs represent a conflict of interest with mayoral responsibilities in public transport.

As for the Liberal Democrat candidate, Simon Hughes …. Well, I am thick-skinned and I am not a political naïf, but I am taken aback by the plain odiousness of the man’s campaign. This is a recurring problem with the Liberal Democrats. I recall the 1989 Vauxhall by-election, in which the Labour candidate, the estimable Kate Hoey (for whom I voted), was the target of a despicable Liberal campaign on the subject of the death of a child in care. I also recall the party’s campaign in the Brecon and Radnor by-election a few years earlier, which made sly insinuations about the sexuality of the Tory candidate. This sort of personal campaigning, alternating between the bigoted and the calumnious, has been characteristic of too many Liberal Democrat campaigns to be classed as aberrant in the party’s behaviour.

Beyond the fringe IV

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal remarks on The Guardian’s running an anti-war article by the father of Nick Berg:

Here's what the elder Berg says America should have done in response to the Sept. 11 attacks: "I say we should have done then what we never did before: stop speaking to the people we labelled our enemies and start listening to them."

This is sick stuff, though perhaps partly understandable as an irrational reaction of a man who's lost his son. Shame on the Guardian for exploiting Michael Berg's grief to further its own anti-American agenda.

I agree, though I would place the blame elsewhere. Last week the BBC reported:

The father of Nick Berg - the US civilian beheaded in Iraq - has sent a message of support to the Stop the War Coalition. Michael Berg contacted the coalition to offer his backing after it sent him a letter of sympathy. His strongly-worded message will be read out at an anti-war demonstration in London on Saturday. Mr Berg said that his son had suffered the consequences of policies of the Bush administration….

The Stop the War Coalition will release Mr Berg's full statement at a press conference on Wednesday.
One of the march's organisers Chris Nineham told the BBC: "He [Mr Berg] feels that what needs to come out of the horrific death of his son is that a message has to be sent to Bush and Blair to say that the barbarity of war has to stop. That's his response to the terrible events that have happened to his son.”

He continued: "I think the fact that someone has responded so thoughtfully to the death of their son is a message to the people of America and elsewhere to say that we understand that violence breeds violence. That violence was originally perpetrated by the American government, the British government and by the military and the only way to end the cycle of violence is for the US and British troops to come out immediately."

Little did I know when I resolved on a series of posts about the Socialist Workers’ Party that I would shortly be able to cite a prime and topical instance of what the Observer columnist Nick Cohen has aptly termed that organisation’s parasitism.

As I have documented before, the Socialist Workers’ Party is parasitic on the activities of anti-war campaigners, through the intermediary of its creature the Stop the War Coalition. Chris Nineham, here judiciously identified as ‘one of the march’s organisers’, is a ubiquitous, though rather dense, SWP functionary whose task is to make up the numbers of the caucus for whatever front organisation the party decides to set up next. He sits, for example, on the steering committee of the anti-globalisation pressure group Globalise Resistance. Acting on a scheme that I fear my readers may be unconvinced by, the SWP demonstrated the autonomous character of Globalise Resistance by taking only ten places on the steering committee of 24 while reassuringly labelling the rest ‘independent’.

Michael Berg's grief and horror can scarcely be imagined, but I still have no intention of taking seriously, let alone respecting, his political judgement in having Chris Nineham as his spokesman. To attribute to the Bush administration responsibility, even indirect, for an act of barbarism by Islamist terrorists against an unarmed and helpless American civilian is just flatulence. The proper attribution of responsibility is zero to Bush and 100 per cent to our theocratic enemies. There is no ‘cycle of violence’: there is an enemy with whom no compromise or negotiation is possible, and an overriding duty on our part to defeat it. If you seek a taste of, or a pointer towards, the moral bankruptcy of the SWP front organisation that Nineham represents, note his precious evasion:

…. the terrible events that have happened to his son.

Events! Nick Berg's death wasn’t a misfortune caused by incorporeal phenomena. He wasn’t struck by lightning. He didn’t drown at sea. He was murdered with scarcely conceivable barbarism as part of a declared war against everything we value.

The Stop the War Coalition is undoubtedly the principal success the Socialist Workers’ Party has had in its parasitism, but it is not the first. I would date that as the Anti-Nazi League, which the SWP established in November 1977 after the failure of its ‘turn to class’ (a risible campaign of persuading its largely student membership to take factory jobs). The ANL was certainly successful in organising mass protests, and even carnivals (which I attended), against the National Front in the late 1970s. What was not widely appreciated among the participants was that, at leadership level, the ANL and the SWP were essentially one organisation. I have previously cited the judgement of SWP founder Tony Cliff, in the now-defunct magazine The Leveller in 1979 (and quoted in John Callaghan’s The Far Left in British Politics):

The leadership of the Anti-Nazi League is in reality the SWP and we don’t give a damn.

(In my own defence, I didn’t realise this myself till later. My first major encounter with the SWP was when, in the early 1980s, one of its members in our sixth form lambasted me, a Labour supporter, for favouring Denis Healey against Tony Benn in the party’s internal warfare of that time. His name was Sean Moore, and to my lasting shame I gave him the name Sean Bore, which caught on.)

No SWP front organisation other than these two has achieved significant levels of support. In a sense it’s handicapped by the patent eccentricity of its analysis. In the 1980s, for example, it made clear the ideological deficiencies of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (in a pamphlet by party ideologue Peter Binns, ‘Missile Madness’, 1981):

Unless within that Campaign there is a growing nucleus of people who understand the need to make connections with the other issues, who see nuclear weapons as a class issue, then at the end of the day the Movement will tragically fail as much this time as it did last…. The alternatives are Socialism or nuclear annihilation….

Neither of these alternatives appears to have come to pass. Perhaps, as with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s just a matter of time.

In the meantime, I suggest a general approach to political hygiene. I am strongly opposed to the views – which I consider immoral - of CND and the Stop the War Coalition, but there is a legitimate democratic argument to be had with anti-nuclear and anti-war campaigners. The SWP, however, is a party of totalitarian ideology, antisemitic bent and intolerant (and often thuggish) conduct. I reject and condemn anyone who would knowingly ally with its front organisations, let alone speak from those organisations' platforms – as the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy did in Hyde Park in February last year. Such conduct is like signing up to an anti-Mugabe campaign run by the British National Party: there are boundaries that should never be breached in democratic politics.

Culture spot

Director Michael Moore's controversial anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 has won the prestigious Palme d'Or best film award at the Cannes festival.

'Anti-Bush film tops Cannes awards', BBC News, 23 May 2004

[S]peaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they‘ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

Christopher Hitchens, MSNBC transcript, 18 May 2004

Incidentally, as the BBC ought to know but doesn't, the noun from which 'prestigious' derives is 'prestidigitation', or the art of doing conjuring tricks. This strikes me as quite apt in the circumstances.

"A crossing of the Rubicon"

A letter in The Guardian from a veteran campaigner maintains - with the characteristic self-centred formulation of such correspondents ("As a ..., I deplore/condemn/am ashamed by...") - a moral equivalence that has to be read to be believed. It reads in full:

Yesterday's front page describing the crimes of the US military in Iraq and the Israeli military in Palestine denote [sic] for me, late in the day, a crossing of the Rubicon. I have until now, perhaps foolishly, been prepared to admit that in both situations one could agree to differ with the apologists. But no longer. These are not "military actions", but crimes against humanity. The occupations in both cases have no basis in law. They amount to the brutal repression of civilian populations. As a British citizen I am ashamed to be party to all that. Those old enough to remember will recollect that the French Resistance were held to be heroes when they killed the German occupiers. I did not rejoice at German deaths then, any more than I rejoice at Israeli, American and, yes, British deaths now. But there is no difference.

Canon Paul Oestreicher
Former chairman
Amnesty International

Oestreicher was for many years Canon (and is now Canon Emeritus) of Coventry Cathedral. His invocation of his past chairmanship of Amnesty is not quite the most relevant aspect of his political record to cite in this context. In the 1960s he was a leading figure in a curious exercise dubbed the Christian-Marxist dialogue. The dialogue nominally owed its inspiration to the intellectual ferment in Christendom associated with radical political ideas. These included Liberation Theology, a series of papal encyclicals condemning global capitalism, and the romanticised Marxism then popular among those certain that western liberal democracy was repressive but unable to identify quite why.

What has become of these notions must be the subject of another post (they extend - in the person of Roger Garaudy, French former Communist and Christian Marxist, and now an octogenarian Islamist propagandist - to Holocaust denial). But it’s interesting that in Britain the Christian-Marxist dialogue of the 1960s was scarcely touched by the newer currents of thought. Instead the Marxism that left-wing Christians were ‘in dialogue’ with was of the standard - and shameless – variety espoused by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The principal figure on that side was James Klugmann, editor of Marxism Today, one of the Cambridge Communists of the 1930s, and a man prepared to tailor his convictions to whatever the current line happened to be from Moscow. When in 1948 the Cominform issued instructions that Tito was to be denounced, Klugmann wrote the CPGB’s version of that directive – under the title From Trotsky to Tito – despite being a personal friend of Tito’s. He was also, incidentally, a Soviet spy: he recruited John Cairncross, the ‘Fourth Man’, at Cambridge, and as a member of the wartime SOE passed classified information to the Yugoslav Communists.

This was the man with whom Oestreicher edited a volume of proceedings of Christian-Communist dialogue. They formed a complementary duo: Klugmann, an ideologue of high intellect and low morals; Oestreicher, a political naïf of the first order. Oestreicher’s own contribution to the book can most politely be described as bizarre. He maintained that in order to be a Communist in the (1960s) United States required courage of a similar order to that required to be a Christian in the Soviet Union.

I surely don’t need to say what’s wrong with that analogy. For a brief period after the war some American Communists – and others falsely accused of being covert Communists – lost their livelihoods owing to their political convictions, in certain cases outrageously and in others with reasonable cause (on which, see the provocative analysis, which stands up well in historical retrospect, given in 1953 by the Social Democrat Sidney Hook, a political hero of mine, Heresy- Yes, Conspiracy – No). A few Communist leaders were gaoled under the Smith Act, which was later gutted by the Supreme Court. All of this was history by the time Oestreicher offered his preposterous parallel. Conversely, Soviet persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church – which under Stalin had taken the form of executing hundreds of clergymen – was active and brutal. According to former Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev (in his riveting account, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia), almost half of all Orthodox churches in the USSR were closed between 1960 and 1969. Hundreds of clergymen were exiled to remote parts of the country.

I have to assume Oestreicher intended his analogy to be rhetorical rather than literal. Indeed that’s my point. The alternative to assuming that he’s a historical ignoramus is to conclude that he has neither perspective nor judgement, nor even – despite his Jewish family’s having fled Nazi Germany in 1938 – a sense of the moral import of totalitarianism. His animating characteristic is, by contrast, an aversion to the idea that the international order reflects competing value systems, and that all civilised people by definition take one side.

Oestreicher has been quite consistent in this. Despite being neither a theologian nor a political scientist, he was one of the authors of the celebrated – or notorious – Church of England Board of Social Responsibility Working Party report The Church and the Bomb, in 1982. Urging unilateral British nuclear disarmament, the report ludicrously presented itself as a pragmatic middle way on the grounds that it didn’t actually call for British withdrawal from Nato. As one (left-wing) critic with genuine competence in the subject, Professor Neville Brown, pointed out (‘The Church and the Bomb: A Critical Review’, ADIU Report, November/December 1982):

[A] credibility problem is presented by a report that extols exemplary disarmament but spares not so much as a couple of paragraphs on what to make of developments in Afghanistan and Poland or the blatant Soviet flouting of the non-territorial aspects of Helsinki accords.

A man as ideologically obtuse as Oestreicher proved irresistible during the Cold War to the East German secret police, the Stasi. In his recent analysis of Stasi propaganda operations against Britain, The Stasi Files, Anthony Glees records Oestreicher’s ambivalent record. Genuinely believing he was advancing the cause of human rights behind the Iron Curtain and disarmament, Oestreicher both maintained contacts with dissidents and:

… not only took great pains to stay in with the East German regime but gave its officers useful information and some real propaganda help.

Glees quotes Oestreicher insisting, even in 2001, that “at its root Communism is a good idea, fundamentally right”, but that it had been “corrupted, rather as the Church had been”.

This is, of course, exactly wrong. Communism is not “a good idea”: it is conceptually disastrous. In the words of its most formidable philosophical critic, Leszek Kolakowski, it is “a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations [will] be fulfilled and all values reconciled”. As such, it is totalitarian at root and not only in application, for it has no place for the notions that human values are incommensurable and human aspirations unbounded. Oestreicher’s Christian social witness has for decades failed to acknowledge what is distinctive and vital in the imperfect but humane societies of the liberal West. In now adopting the malevolent conceit that Islamist terrorists and the remnants of Baathist tyranny are comparable to the French Resistance, he does indeed - consistent with his 'Rubicon' cliche - announce his permanent exile to the political fringe.

Oxfam's bitter coffee

Following is an article in The Times today.

OXFAM, we learnt last week, is going to back a chain of “fair trade” coffee bars. Meanwhile Gap clothing company has disclosed that many of the factories that it uses in developing countries do not comply with minimum labour standards. For those consumers whose prime concern is Third World development, the proper course is clear: buy clothes at Gap and avoid Oxfam’s coffee.

The rationale of Oxfam’s venture is to lessen the hardship that coffee growers have suffered since coffee prices slumped in 1997. The organisation claims: “Coffee growers will win three times . . . They’ll be selling their coffee at a fair trade price; they’ll share directly in the profits and will also showcase their coffee to the UK.”

Unfortunately the sharp decline in world coffee prices is not only cyclical. Over the past decade, exchange-rate movements and new technology have made the Brazilian coffee industry more productive, while Vietnam has used its low wage costs to become a large and efficient producer. Low coffee prices are not the result of market failure, but a sign that there are too many producers.

Of course laissez-faire is no reputable response to the farmers’ hardship. Oxfam is right that there is an obligation to assist poor coffee farmers. But its Scargillite remedy of subsidising enterprises that can never be profitable will prevent the development of new businesses which could be. A better scheme is to support farmers’ efforts to diversify production.

GAP and other multinational companies have long been targets of trade union and activist campaigning against Third World sweatshops. Dangerous, unsanitary and ill-paid conditions do exist in some textile and footwear factories in developing countries. Yet multinational corporations help to improve those conditions. Innumerable studies in South-East Asia have shown that foreign-owned companies employing unskilled labour typically pay higher wages than local employers. Those wage rates are still low compared with advanced industrial economies because productivity is low. They are not evidence of exploitation.

The anti-corporate campaigners are now focusing their attention on the gap between the price of the finished goods on Western shelves and local wage rates. It is a massive non sequitur. As Jagdish Bhagwati, former special adviser to the UN on globalisation and a leading trade economist, has pointed out, it makes no economic sense to “shift the criterion from where and at what wage you buy labour to where and at what price you sell the output”.

It is also actively damaging. There is evidence that, through the transfer of technology to local economies, multinational companies such as Gap improve the productivity of both labour and capital and so help developing countries to industrialise and become richer. Far from being corporate villains, they improve poor people’s living standards.

The most egregiously ill-informed of the anti-corporate pressure groups, CorpWatch, claims that a “race to the bottom” is taking place in global wages and working conditions. In reality, a race to the bottom is evident principally in the quality of campaigners’ analysis. A pervasive fallacy of Thirld World campaigning is the notion that economic decisions have no costs. In supporting Oxfam’s coffee venture, we enable poor coffee growers to “win three times ” — yet by insinuating that other coffee is ethically dubious, Oxfam threatens the livelihoods of other more successful, but generally poor, coffee farmers.

By castigating multinationals, these campaigners are not promoting living wages but are impeding developing countries’ efforts at economic progress. This is neither ethical campaigning nor guilt-free consumption: it’s narcissism.

Beyond the fringe III

I am discussing this week the politics (and possibly the economics) of the Socialist Workers’ Party. This post identifies the party’s most obvious characteristic: its rejection of constitutional democracy and its adherence to totalitarianism.

Much has been written about the relation between Marxist theory and the dictatorships that for much of the last century bore Marx's name (as some still do). An illuminating exposition of the issue comes from Leszek Kolakowksi, in a paper on ‘Marxist Roots of Stalinism’. He argues that, while it is obvious that Marx himself envisaged socialism as a non-coercive order, there may yet be:

… logical reasons why his theory implies consequences incompatible with his value judgements.

That is indeed my view; there are essential – not contingent - elements of Marxism that preclude democracy unless supplanted by ethical criteria determined independently. Leninism may not be what Marx had in mind, and Stalinism may not be what Lenin had in mind, but it is wrong to say that these outcomes are perversions of Marxism. They are, rather, consistent applications of its axioms. A remarkable statement of Marxist politics comes from Plekhanov, in his speech to the to the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, and recounted in the SWP founder Tony Cliff’s hagiography of Lenin:

Every democratic principle must be considered not by itself, abstractly, but in relation to that which may be called the fundamental principle of democracy, namely salus populi suprema lex. Translated into the language of the revolutionist, this means that the success of the revolution is the highest law. And if the success of the revolution demanded a temporary limitation on the working of this or that democratic principle, then it would be criminal to refrain from such a limitation. As my own personal opinion, I will say that even the principle of universal suffrage must be considered from the point of view of what I have designated the fundamental principle of democracy. It is hypothetically possible that we, the Social Democrats’ might speak out against universal suffrage. The bourgeoisie of the Italian republics once deprived persons belonging to the nobility of political rights. The revolutionary proletariat might limit the political rights of the higher classes just as the higher classes once limited their political rights. One can judge of the suitability of such measures only on the basis of the rule: salus revolutiae suprema lex.

This is in fact – as Cliff remarks – quite an accurate prognosis of how the Bolsheviks actually behaved in 1917: the establishment of dictatorship was not due merely to the exigencies of war. More to the point of this post, it’s difficult to see where Plekhanov can be faulted on orthodox Marxist grounds (which is, of course, not to say that all orthodox Marxists would share Plekhanov’s sentiments). The problem is one not merely of methods, but of ends – the harnessing of all social forces in pursuit of collective aims. As Isaiah Berlin stated in his last book, The First and the Last, any such conception is flawed:

Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet when they are incompatible, they cannot all be attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end. But if, as I believe, this is not merely empirically but conceptually true - that is, derives from the very conception of these values - then the very idea of the perfect world in which all good things are realised is incomprehensible, is in fact conceptually incoherent. And if this is so, and I cannot see how it could be otherwise, then the very notion of the ideal world, for which no sacrifice can be too great, vanishes from view.

Let us turn, though, from the despotic potential of Marxism in general to the totalitarian character of the SWP in particular. My claim is quite a limited one, because I think it’s sufficient to demonstrate my point. The SWP says very little in its propaganda about what it means by socialism. I read recently a book entitled An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto by the SWP ideologue Alex Callinicos, Professor of Politics at York, and I am no clearer to the answer. The SWP denounces ‘competitive accumulation’ and foresees war and ecological catastrophe arising from it, but has next to nothing to say about the post-revolutionary social order. Yet not long ago Socialist Worker published one of the most illuminating documents it has ever produced, on precisely this question, and I turn to it now.

Jonathan Neale is an SWP ideologue who has been particularly concerned with insinuating the SWP into the anti-globalisation movement. In a speech to the European Social Forum (a portentous name for a political rally) in Florence 18 months ago, he sought to answer the question, “What would a socialist society be like?” Those who have encountered the SWP at any length – literally at any length – will already know Neale’s answer: it will comprise political meetings. And note in particular the simultaneously ominous and unintentionally comic last sentence of this passage:

The representatives from every workplace could meet together in each city every week to make decisions about what to do with the economy. In most towns the only place big enough to hold them would be the football stadium. Then they could elect reps to a national meeting, and that national meeting could elect reps to international meetings.

At the base of this would be meetings at each workplace every week. Every week we could replace our reps if we wanted, at every level. Of course some people don’t work. Retired people could elect reps at clubs, and so could children at school.

All these meetings would make decisions about what to do with our work. In capitalism every company must compete, and profit is the criterion. In our new world we could make decisions based on what we need, not on profit. There would be endless debates in those meetings.

The standard economic critique of this type of direct democracy on economic decision-making is that there is no signalling device to determine “what we need”. In the absence of a price mechanism – and in particular shifts in relative prices – we lack information necessary for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to productive uses. Generations of socialist economists have contended with this problem, and ingenious schemes have been constructed by some highly proficient economists. The best-known is probably Oskar Lange’s proposal whereby consumer goods would be allocated by the market, while factor prices would be set by a Central Planning Board operating millions of simultaneous equations. (The advent of computing power was naturally very attractive to socialists of this type.) It’s a flawed and unworkable scheme, but at least it takes the issue of information seriously, which is more than can be said for Jonathan Neale.

But my point about the SWP’s ideology is about politics more than economics. (I do in fact think that in principle it’s possible to combine a centrally-planned economy with political liberty, though I think the chances of achieving this in practice are low. There is thus a link between markets and political liberty, even though not all market economies are free societies, and free societies may have a wide range of mix between public and private sectors in economic activity.) The political vision that Neale outlines here is destructive. What’s wrong with it is the notion of the essential unity of post-revolutionary society. What happens, for example, if citizens don’t want to turn up to meetings with ‘endless debates’? What happens to those citizens who even do want to turn up to endless debates, but are repelled by the revolutionary party’s history of manipulation of the outcomes – by caucus, and sometimes threat? (Those who have come across the SWP’s parasitism in broader campaigns will know of what I speak.) The post-revolutionary order does not merely do away with liberal political rights: it does way with the sphere of private judgement, by politicising ordinary ways of living and replacing them with a continual urge to communal solidarity.

The Socialist Workers’ Party – in its own conception of its revolutionary tasks – posits a social order in which conflict has been sublimated to a particular conception of human ends. Therein lies the character of the party’s ideology, the inspiration for its coercive and sometimes violent political conduct, and the inescapably totalitarian nature of its politics.

Spinning against Israel

It's an advance of sorts that the BBC invited the acting Israeli ambassador to contribute a short piece expounding the rationale of demolishing houses as part of a strategy against terrorism:

Houses are destroyed but the target is not houses; the target has been and is those groups of terrorists who are using them, either to attack civilians and soldiers or to construct tunnels underneath them in order to smuggle tons and tons of explosives.

This seems to me - on current evidence - the crucial point, to be distinguished from any notion of collective punishment, which would be wrong. It's interesting that the Amnesty International spokesman, who puts the opposing view, apparently hasn't listened to the case he's been invited to rebut:

Nearly 100 homes have been destroyed; every one of these, according to the Israeli army or security forces, has been an imminent threat to the lives of soldiers.

Given that this is plainly an absurdly expansive claim, the Israeli Defence Forces may be assumed to be disingenuous at best - were it not for the fact that, so far as I can see, the IDF do not make the claim in the first place. Rather they follow the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which clearly adduces two reasons. One is the direct security risk; the other is this:

A further factor necessitating the demolition of buildings is the use made by terrorist groups of civilian buildings in order to conceal openings of tunnels used to smuggle arms, explosives and terrorists from Egypt into the Gaza Strip. Other buildings in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are used for the manufacturing and concealment of rockets, mortars, weapons and explosive devices to be used against Israel. The demolition of these structures is often the only way to combat this threat.

If terrorist groups make use of residential buildings in this way, then that surely does alter the character of the building in a way that is morally significant. It's odd that Amnesty's spokesman should make no mention of the point - even to take issue with it. Amnesty discredited itself, and undermined its reputation for political disinterestedness, in the Iraq war when it complained of the British government's publicising Saddam Hussein's human rights record. It would be nice if it now explicitly acknowledged that a democratic government contending with a terrorist threat is entitled to anticipate the source of such attacks and take preventive action.

Meanwhile the BBC is up to its customary linguistic evasions. Here is how it introduces the acting ambassador's contribution:

Acting Ambassador to London, Zvi Rav-Ner, stresses that ordinary Palestinians are not the target but the militants who hide in their midst...

Except he doesn't say that. The word 'militants' appears at no point in the brief article. The noun the acting ambassador uses is 'terrorists'.

It is straight bad journalism for the BBC to describe those who commit acts of violence - or, if you prefer, are alleged to be responsible for acts of violence - in terms that obfuscate that distinguishing feature. In conventional parlance, a 'militant' may be someone who merely holds immoderate opinions strongly while refraining from physical force. By employing the term idly and expansively, the BBC is taking a political stand that denies the import of the terrorism that Israel suffers.

But it's also worse than that. In this case the BBC has actively bowdlerised someone else's words, because they offend the corporation's sensibilities. Such behaviour is intellectually corrupt, and it's time the BBC put a stop to it.

Beyond the fringe II

Slightly to my surprise, one of my regular correspondents has asked for more coverage of the Socialist Workers’ Party as opposed to the Liberal Democrats. So here goes - but first a note on sources.

Of the political thought of Trotsky himself, there are a few works of high quality that I have found illuminating. Most voluminous is Baruch Knei-Paz’s unparalleled survey, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky. I’ve also learned much from a paper by Norman Geras, 'Political Participation in the Revolutionary Thought of Leon Trotsky', in Geraint Parry (ed.), Participation in Politics. Beyond this, there is little apart from the flawed hagiography by Isaac Deutscher, and an interesting memoir by Trotsky’s former aide Al Glotzer, written once the author had sensibly abandoned Trotskyism and become a Social Democrat.

Very little has been written about the SWP specifically other than by its partisans. Indeed the political tradition of Trotskyism generally, unlike Communism, has had, so far as I am aware, no reliable and objective survey ever written about it. There are two good books on the British scene – British Trotskyism and The Far Left in British Politics - by John Callaghan that cover it, but both are now dated. A brief survey of Trotskyism, by Alex Callinicos – SWP ideologue and Professor of Politics at York – strikes me as self-justifying rubbish. (It’s only fair to add that one Marxist theorist I have immense respect for – Paul Hirst, a friend who died prematurely last year – thought highly of Callinicos. I may be wrong, but I put this down to Paul’s having written various impenetrable tomes on Althusser – also a subject of interest to Callinicos - in his misguided youth, before a startling transformation rendered him both lucid and politically sane.)

But despite the dearth of published material, almost everything you need to know about the SWP is contained in the succinct observation of the left-wing Observer columnist Nick Cohen that the party is totalitarian and parasitic. It’s also antisemitic, and with these two rhyming adjectives it becomes possible to construct a perfectly serviceable piece of doggerel.

This week I shall post brief comments on each of the three characteristics of the SWP that I’ve identified. I may also write something on the economic theories by which the SWP is best-known – state capitalism, and the permanent arms economy – but as these are really not at all convincing as economic explanations and make sense only as part of the SWP’s wider ideology, they will probably fit easily enough into my discussion of the party’s totalitarianism.

I’ve already intimated something of the character of the SWP’s campaigning on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and will merely add one or two details here. While anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic, the SWP’s variant of it in my judgement does cross an important and regrettably porous boundary. The party line is provided by an obscure, crude and prejudiced work by a Belgian Trotskyite, Abram Leon, entitled in English The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation and published shortly after the war (in which Leon died in the camps). Unlike most Marxist polemicists, Leon did know the writings of Zionist theorists well, but his own attempt at explaining the emergence of Jewry with reference to the development of capitalism is unintentionally comic. This is how he accounts for the burgeoning of Zionism:

The Jewish bourgeoisie is compelled to create a national state, to assure itself of the objective framework for the development of its productive forces, precisely in the period when the conditions for such a development have long since disappeared.

I hope that my readers will generally share my admiration and support for Israel, though I am aware that some do not. Whatever their views on the subject, however, I do not believe there can be a single one who regards that seriously economically mismanaged nation as the product of the Jewish bourgeoisie’s need for the development of its productive forces.

I’ve noted the inconsistency of the SWP’s position in supporting nationalist movements while vilifying Jewish nationalism. In the past year or so, this has reached the absurd stage of the party’s allying with Muslim particularism; an outstanding example is the publication in the party’s quarterly review, International Socialism, last autumn of the following sentiments by Salma Yaqoob of the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition:

The challenge for many non-Muslims, especially in the West, is to admit the possibility that there are values as universally valid as their own, and that it does not have a monopoly over the production of modernity. For example, the breadth and complexity of the Islamic movement and the Muslim presence, with its contribution to Western culture historically and its current role in extending modernity in the Middle East, needs to be acknowledged.

Encouragingly, there is even an important progressive role for the wearing of the hijab:

It is notable that the majority of the Muslims playing a leading role in the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition were women, confident in their Islamic identity and increasingly confident in their ability to present themselves as leaders of this broad movement. Contingents of young Muslim women, well organised and often more forthcoming than Muslim men, were a striking feature of all our demonstrations and protests. I would attribute this effect to the fact that, by wearing the hijab (headscarf), many of these women are constantly conscious of their Muslim identity when interacting in public. Having to continually combat and overcome perceptions of Muslim women being oppressed, and challenging negative stereotypes of Islam, they are actually more experienced and confident than many Muslim men in engaging with others.

But the SWP’s campaigning evidences uglier forces than mere inconsistency. Take this example from Socialist Worker’s US edition, 17 May 2002, under the monstrous sub-heading – implicitly comparing Israel under Sharon to Nazi Germany – “Is this Sharon’s ‘final solution’?”:

"Nazis never openly declared their intention to massacre Jews and Gypsies," wrote Israel Shamir in a recent article titled "The Jewish state must be de-Nazified as thoroughly as Germany after 1945." "[T]hey spoke of ‘deportation’ and ‘transfer’ as their ‘Final Solution.’ Even in 1938, these ideas did not have such wholehearted support in Nazi Germany as they have now in the Jewish state."

Get the message? Israel is worse than Nazi Germany.

But note that reference to Israel Shamir. Shamir is a Russian emigrant to Israel who trades on his distinctive name to engage in virulent antisemitic tirades. He writes for extreme Right-wing Russian newspapers, and is featured prominently on the web site of the British National Party – appropriately, given his association with neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. In the late 1990s he even tried to come to an arrangement with the Holocaust denier David Irving to sell Nazi memorabilia confiscated by the Russians at the end of the war. He is on record as describing the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy as a ‘great man’. His vitriolic anti-Jewish bigotry has even been disowned by (some) elements of the anti-Israel movement. The founder of the Electronic Intifada, Nigel Parry, put together a page of links warning his associates against Shamir, whose writings he correctly described as “a classic anti-Semitic repertoire”.

All of this material has been in the public domain for a long time. Yet Socialist Worker has no compunction at citing in its cause a man of far-Right sympathies and highly traditional antisemitic prejudices (revealingly he terms the Jews ‘Christ-killers’, for example). More significant, the SWP has no means of distinguishing its position on this issue from that of the far-Right, whose propaganda it mirrors in important respects.

I shall be dealing later in the week with the variant of Trotskyism that the SWP has made its own, but in a sense the ideological questions are less central to this organisation than they are to almost any other group on the Marxist fringe. Something that will not have been lost on anyone who comes into contact with the SWP is the implicit violence of its sentiment and language, and the intimidatory nature of its agitation. Among repellent and recurring campaigns are attempts by the party’s student wing to ban Jewish societies from campuses (on the spurious rationalisation that ‘Zionism is racism’). So far as I know they have been successful only once in this, and then only briefly – at what used to be Sunderland Polytechnic, in the mid-80s. (One of my rare and doubtless unsuccessful one-liners was when, attending an anti-apartheid rally shortly after this event, I found myself immediately in front of the banner of the Sunderland Polytechnic Students’ Union, and commented on its bearers’ public-spiritedness in taking time off from banning Jews to come and oppose racism.) But the attempts are legion – most recently, according to my information, at Manchester in 2002.

I heard the SWP’s founder, Tony Cliff (himself, irrelevantly, Jewish, whose nom de guerre appears to have been chosen from Mills & Boon), speak on one occasion. He spent a good deal of time expounding to his audience the imperative of building the revolutionary party. As an instance of its success, he cited the case of a member of the National Front who, convinced by the stirring appeal to his class interests, had come straight over to the SWP. Perhaps because I was less surprised at the scope of the party’s potential appeal, I was also a good deal less impressed than most of the rest of Cliff’s audience at the news.

"It really is exceedingly stupid..."

Last July in The New Statesman, the Observer columnist Nick Cohen raised, and answered, a perplexing question:

Why is a British socialist group forming a political alliance with repressive, Islamic fundamentalists? Because it really is exceedingly stupid....

As with Voltaire's Holy Roman Empire, the Socialist Workers Party negates the meaning of every word in its title. It never had much to do with the workers: like a minor public school, the SWP is a home for dim, middle-class children. For years it has been a sect or cult rather than a party--think of the Moonies, but without the smiles. Now it is giving up on socialism to form an alliance with Islamic fundamentalism.

The enemies of political freedom and the enemies of religious and sexual freedom are at one, and will soon be presenting joint candidates to the electorate. Party allies are feeling the shock of the SWP's opportunism.

They are one indeed. Among the illogical propositions the SWP has thus now committed itself to – as I commented earlier this week – is that Jewish nationalism is reactionary, but Muslim particularism is progressive.

The party in fact goes a good deal further than that in its anti-Israel campaigning. It maintains the calumnious notion that Zionism is a form of racism, and on those grounds campaigns for the banning of Jewish societies on university campuses. Its ideological stance goes beyond even calling for the abolition of the Jewish state. The party regards Israeli Jews collectively as comparable to the colons of French Algeria, rather than as a people with a legitimate claim to a national homeland. (The notion that the Jews’ attachment to the land of Israel, which extends back millennia, is comparable to French colonisation of Algeria, which lasted approximately 130 years, is one of the many historical eccentricities the SWP inculcates in the ‘dim, middle-class children’ who predominate among its membership, and who are apparently susceptible to that type of thing if it’s said with enough righteous conviction.) While anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic, the SWP’s variant crosses the boundary that marks legitimate critique from bigotry.

But that side of the SWP’s campaigning is not the subject of this post. Instead, I’d merely draw your attention to the manner in which the party is increasingly determined to demonstrate the acuity of Nick Cohen’s analysis.

The ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ Cohen is alluding to are an organisation called the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), which is an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. (Technically, Cohen is wrong to use the term ‘fundamentalist’, which relates to a specific event in American Protestantism, but it is obviously now widely used to apply to sectarian religious groups generally.) MAB was a co-sponsor of the huge Hyde Park anti-war rally last year, with the Stop the War Coalition (a front organisation for the SWP) and CND. An indication of MAB’s approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict may be gleaned from its response to Israel’s assassination of the Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in March:

For millions of Muslims around the world and for many freedom lovers and justice defenders across the globe Sheikh Yassin was a symbol of struggle for freedom and justice.

I can understand, though do not agree with, the argument that the assassination of Yassin (and that of his immediate successor) was wrong on moral and prudential grounds. It is something else again to describe the purveyor of hatred and begetter of terrorism in terms such as these, however. MAB goes on, adopting a hackneyed and dehumanising trope of modern antisemitism:

The Zionist entity in Palestine is the last remaining manifestation of Apartheid and fascism.

MAB thus stakes its ground on the extreme, embittered and ignorant political fringe. For that reason, it naturally appeared to the SWP to be a promising political ally in the ‘Respect’ coalition. Yet, as Cohen rightly observes, MAB also has a distinctive stance on matters of sexual freedom, as is evident from a press release it issued on 23 April:

The Muslim Association of Britain welcomes comments made by George Galloway MP on abortion in an interview published recently [in the Sunday Independent]. Mr Galloway who is currently leading the newly formed ‘Unity Coalition; Respect’ into the forthcoming European Parliamentary Elections on the 10th of June, outlines his own conviction that abortion is morally and ethically wrong. When asked about the woman’s right to choose, he appropriately posed the question: ‘what about the child’s right to choose?’.

These comments, as well as his statements on faith and God in the same interview, will surely be welcomed by British Muslims who see Respect as a real alternative to the main political parties in the approaching European elections. They also affirm George Galloway’s standing as a man of principle who does not shy away from putting his own position on the line for his beliefs and convictions.

Now, Galloway’s consistent opposition to liberal abortion legislation is an unusual stance on the far-Left, but not a unique one. For myself, while I disagree with his position, I don’t regard it as dishonourable or illegitimate (least of all in comparison with the rest of his political record). I share the judgement of the late Roy Jenkins, Home Secretary in the 1960s during the passage of two of the most important pieces of social legislation in British political history - the reform of the laws on, respectively, abortion and homosexuality - that the permissive society is more accurately termed the civilised society. I consider that liberal abortion legislation is an important constituent of a society that respects individual liberty and the welfare of the family. But Galloway holds a view that an important minority espouses on moral or religious grounds, and it’s right that it be heard in British political debate (and countered politically, rather than by judicial fiat as happened in the US in the Roe vs. Wade case). I don’t attribute to Galloway a bigoted stance for his view on abortion, any more than I would necessarily do so in the case of someone who believed gay marriage (a cause I also support) would be detrimental to the public good.

But the SWP, by contrast, always has denounced and confronted the opponents of legal abortion. Here, to take an example almost at random, is a BBC Scotland report of an altercation in 1999:

Scuffles broke out in Glasgow when more than 300 pro and anti abortion campainers clashed at a rally in the city centre. The rally on Wednesday night, organised by the anti-abortion group Life, was interrupted by students and members of the Socialist Workers Party. Banners were torn down and there were minor scuffles. Police had to be called to keep the two sides apart. The Life rally has been an annual event for 15 years and they had planned a candle-lit march to mark 32 years since the abortion act became law.

The action by the Socialist Workers' Party follows revelations on Newsnight Scotland that a militant anti-abortion group called Precious Life were planning to start campaigning in Scotland. Rosaleen Doyle of the SWP said: "I've been following this organisations progress, Precious Life's progress in news reports. I'm incredibly disturbed at some of their antics and the strategies they've been employing in other parts of the country. I felt it was really important that, where they show their faces, we should be here."

You would have thought that the SWP, ever eager to define its position as the true path to socialism, would have had words about Galloway’s apostasy and MAB’s social reaction. Yet – you can go and check this on the party’s web site – it has had literally nothing to say about either. I phoned the SWP’s inquiries desk this afternoon to ask what the party’s position was on Galloway and MAB’s schismatic approach to the unity of ‘Respect’. Unfortunately the affable young lady I spoke to didn’t know, but she seemed genuinely interested that I write a left-wing web log, so I hope she finds her way here.

In the interests of political transparency, I aim to find out the reasons for the SWP’s unusual reticence. I am not alone in my interest in the matter. The Communist Party of Great Britain has issued an ‘open letter’ to Respect’s executive asking the same question:

Respect’s founding declaration is for “the right for self-determination for every individual in relation to their religious (or non-religious) beliefs, as well as sexual choices”. Most in and around Respect would have regarded this as a fairly routine defence of basic democratic rights, not least those relating to a women’s control over her own fertility. Yet after comrade Galloway’s interview and its subsequent welcome by MAB it is clear that this formulation needs clarification.

If, in the forthcoming European and municipal elections, readers of this blog happen to come across a canvasser or candidate from Respect, I should be grateful if they would ask the same question. Surely there is a more nuanced explanation than that the heroic comrades of the SWP, staunch in their opposition to US imperialism and Zionist aggression, have sold out to the forces of reaction.

Do-It-Yourself Economics

Samuel Brittan calls it businessmen's economics. David Henderson, long an international civil servant, prefers DIY economics. Both refer to propositions that people who have practical knowledge but no qualifications in economics hold to be self-evident, but which are false. Countries would do better to export more and import less. New technology destroys jobs, and public spending on my projects not only helps me but also creates jobs. Manufacturing is more important than other forms of economic activity....

Professor John Kay, 'Economics in Action', Financial Times, 22 October 2003

Making things like cars or frozen food has shrunk in importance in most developed countries during the past half century as SERVICES have grown. In the United States and the UK, the proportion of workers in manufacturing has shrunk since 1900 from around 40% to barely 20%. More than two-thirds of OUTPUT in OECD countries, and up to four-fifths of employment, is now in the services sector. At the same time, manufacturing has grown in importance in DEVELOPING COUNTRIES.

Many people think that manufacturing somehow matters more than any other economic activity and is in some way superior to surfing the Internet or cutting somebody’s hair. This is prob­ably nothing more than nostalgia for times past when making things in factories was what real men did, just as 150 years ago growing things in fields was what real men did. Mostly, the shift from manufacturing to services (as with the earlier shift from agriculture to manufacturing) reflects progress into jobs that create more UTILITY, this time for real women as well as real men, which may explain why it is happening first in richer countries.

The Economist, entry for 'Manufacturing', Economics A-Z

The Liberal Democrats today attacked the Government for presiding over the worst ever decline in manufacturing. Official figures out today show that manufacturing jobs have hit the lowest point since records begain in 1978. Today's figures from the Office for National Statistics show that manufacturing jobs have halved since 1978. (From 6,892,000 manufacturing jobs in 1978 to 3,390,000 March 2004).

Calling the figures "shocking", Paul Holmes MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Minister for Work, said:
"It is a shocking indictment of this Government that they are presiding over the worst ever decline in manufacturing. While manufacturing jobs heamorrhage [sic], Gordon Brown twiddles his thumbs..."

Liberal Democrats, press release, 'MANUFACTURING JOBS: LOWEST SINCE RECORDS BEGAN - HOLMES', 12 May 2004