Are Chris Bambery and Alex Callinicos being entirely objective (July/August SR)? In Britain today, not only has Blair moved Labour to the right of centre, but he has done so with extraordinary ease. Despite postal and tube strikes, strike figures are among the lowest ever recorded, and workers are not flocking to join the unions. Socialist ideas have all but disappeared from the media, where the triumph of the market is taken for granted, while most socialist meetings are sparsely attended. The small victories we can point to stand out precisely because the trend is in the opposite direction. Socialists have been almost entirely unable to influence events.
Given this reality, how can these not be 'hard times for socialists'? Events can, and will, alter this situation, but until then a small increase in the membership of the SWP is slight compensation for 15 straight years of decline and defeat. When that decline began the SWP was critical of those who allowed their optimism to override their objectivity so why are Chris and Alex doing just that today?
I was born in 1971, which means that I've spent 20 years of my life under Tory rule. I want them out. I want them totally defeated, smashed and ground into the dirt.
Since I was old enough, I've supported the Labour Party. At 17 I joined up thinking that it would make at least a small difference to the world. I saw the miners' strike, NHS cuts, cruise missiles, mass unemployment, environmental destruction, and wanted to stop this crazy system.
I believed that Labour did too. Even when I left over poll tax non-payment, I still had a touching faith that, whatever its faults, Labour was on our side. That's why after John Smith's death I rejoined. I was wrong.
The Labour Party no longer exists to change society, but solely to win elections. In all its policy documents there is hardly a word of change, only of more effective management of Thatcherism. Yet thousands of good socialists up and down the country are putting up with promises of harsh spending cuts and crackdowns on beggars, and little else, just to beat the Tories. This is not good enough and we shouldn't put up with it. Outside the Labour Party hundreds of thousands of people are crying out for change, and though they may look to Labour, New Labour no longer wants them.
From the poll tax through the CJB, Twyford Down to the postal and tube disputes, Labour officially refuses to support those who are fighting against the Tories. The leadership condemns party members for getting involved.
It is time for those of us who believe in socialism and want to fight for our class to make a choice. Either stay in and shut up, or get out and build the fight. Don't fart around with trying to 'change Labour from within', as it can't be done look at the number of ex-Bennites in the shadow cabinet.
We can stay put and give up, or leave and join forces with the thousands of activists and socialists outside Labour in the SWP, SLP or whatever other organisation we can form together.
Good socialists should no longer defend or campaign for the likes of Blair, Brown and Harman. Instead we should be building the opposition to the spending cuts and attacks they will surely make.
As socialists our duty is to our class, irrespective of who is in government. We have to start rebuilding from the grass roots now. We have a world to win.
With regards to Pat Stack's 'If' article (July/August SR), I think the issue needs to be seen in a much wider context than one of being pro- or anti-abortion. The issue of euthanasia has been with us recently and rightly many people with disabilities are concerned the debate is always centred around the 'right' of disabled people to die. Many assume disabled people lead miserable lives, which of course isn't true, and society continues to portray disabled people as being incapable, lonely and suffering. People may therefore feel the media is being anti-disabled rather than anti-abortion. However, this is no excuse for joining the anti-abortionist lobby.
Anti-abortionists are very clever at raising emotive issues. To bring disability into the equation is more powerful because they are referring to living, not unborn, human beings who are battling against all the obstacles society places in front of them. I myself survived a bout of meningitis and became deaf when I was four.
Socialism is about providing for every new born child, regardless of ability or disability. This is important because often deaf women want their child to be deaf. Present day society is perfectly capable of meeting all our needs, but doesn't, since fostering divisions between able-bodied and disabled people allows them to oppress and rule.
Equally, socialists do not condemn women who prefer to have a child aborted because they know the baby is to be born with disabilities. The fact the unborn child may have disabilities is hardly the issue, for there are so many reasons why women have abortions. Socialists support a woman's right to choose, abortion or non-abortion, for whatever reason.
Pat Stack's commentary on gay and lesbian politics (June SR) was disappointing in its flip response to the recent demands of gays and lesbians to have gay marriage recognised by the state, as well as the demand to be allowed into the armed forces.
Stack asks in his article, 'Why is it the things you want most from the state are the things many of us, gay or straight, should want to get rid of?' This is an incredibly ridiculous question. What gays and lesbians want from the state are the same things that straights are fighting to strengthen, not get rid of.
In America these things include the ability to be covered by a spouse's medical insurance, social security benefits and pension. We also want the right to visit our partners if they are hospitalised, without harassment or question. We want our children not to be taken away from us if our gay or lesbian partner dies.
The issue of gay marriage is not simply about being blessed in the eyes of the church, it is about bread and butter issues. The same is true when it comes to gays demanding the right to be allowed entry into the military. This is not about responding to some patriotic calling. For the majority of gays and lesbians, entry into the military is an issue of having a job versus not having one. It is no coincidence that in the US the military does most of its recruiting in the south, where job opportunities are fewer and wages are lower.
Going into the military offers you, at the very least, $18,000 a year, a place to live for you and your family, and health insurance. This is what most working class gays and lesbians are looking at.
But regardless of the economic issues, there are political and ideological matters at stake. Socialists emphatically support reforms that make working class unity and confidence stronger. In the cases of gay marriage and gays in the military, if both were ever allowed by the state, it would deliver a huge blow to the perception of gays and lesbians as freakish or abnormal, which in turn would make it harder for bosses and politicians to divide the working class around sexual orientation.
When black people fought for the right to vote in the Jim Crow South in the 1950s and 1960s we would not have cynically asked why the movement should put at the centre of its demands the right to do something that has palpably failed to bring happiness to the majority of those who are trying it today. Black people gaining the right to vote dealt a blow to racism and emboldened the confidence of black people to fight further.
As socialists we don't just offer half heated support for things like gay marriage which may not be as radical a demand as we would like, we stand shoulder to shoulder with the oppressed and fight for reforms that will make workers' lives better today, will strengthen class unity, and will give workers the confidence to demand more in the future.
An all out employers' offensive has been waged in the arms industry since the mid-1980s. It is a pity that Gareth Jenkins's 'A Farewell to Arms' (June SR) article did not reflect this.
Gareth is quite wrong to suggest that 'not even in capitalist terms does promotion of the arms industry make sense'. This is close to Kautsky's argument that imperialist wars were 'irrational' from the point of view of capital.
Marxists, from Engels onwards, have always pointed to the intimate connections between the arms industry and capitalism. Indeed the most important aspect of the arms industry is that it is becoming increasingly like the rest of capitalist industry with the growing centralisation and concentration of capital being held in private hands.
In Britain GEC monopolises war shipbuilding and defence electronics, while British Aerospace dominates military aircraft and ordnance. GEC's profits for this year were a record £981 million while British Aerospace's defence division alone made £487 million profits in 1995.
But the arms industry is first of all a creature of the state. It is raw pork-barrel politics which decides where lucrative arms contracts go. This is what the argument about Portillo's sale of Ministry of Defence housing to private speculators is about.
Gareth also exaggerates the effects of competition between workers to undercut each other to do the job cheaply. Even where cheaper costs are claimed, this is little more than an ideological smokescreen. After all, the costs of refitting Trident at Devonport have already rocketed out of control by £100 million. While the Rosyth
Devonport competition for the Trident refits did divide workers to some extent, shop stewards at both yards fought to retain worker unity for the survival of two dockyards instead of the one that the Tories planned.
Even worse, the construction of the new Trident facilities on the Clyde was £800 million over budget before completion. Such waste is endemic to the arms industry. Meanwhile, civil servants and generals line their own pockets with directorships, consultancies and straightforward corruption. Incredibly, five custom designed dog kennels were built for the home of one senior officer at a cost of £50,000!
Amid the mammoth profits of the arms companies, the corruption and the endemic waste, job losses in the industry have been nothing short of calamitous. Gareth is wrong to say the Tories are 'unusually anxious' to protect jobs in the arms industry. Workers in the arms industry are not some privileged layer of the working class for which the Tories have a sentimental fondness. Around 100,000 jobs have been lost in aerospace in the last six years and the workforces in most arms companies have been cut in half.
Yet workers in the arms industry have immense potential strength. It was at Rolls Royce, Vickers and British Aerospace, where the campaign for the 35 hour week in engineering was most effective. And it was workers at Rosyth who blacked work for a Chilean submarine after the Pinochet coup in solidarity with the Chilean working class. Similarly, an unofficial overtime ban and a go slow at Ferranti in Edinburgh in 1991 disrupted the supply of spare parts for electronic warfare in the Gulf War.
Contrary to Gareth's assertion, such workers are not merely the 'victims' of militarism but potentially its greatest enemy.
I have only just seen your June issue, carrying Alex Callinicos's review of my book, Marx at the Millennium. At first, the review is not unfriendly. But then your reviewer rather spoils it: 'It is unclear why Smith thinks there is anything particularly new in what he says about Marx's humanism.'
This contrasts somewhat with the reception of the book by 'orthodox' Marxists . They are furious that I dare to depart from the old stories about 'dialectical and historical materialism', which they were told when young, and which I have the temerity to point out are found nowhere in the works of Karl Marx. Now your reviewer is telling me off for not saying anything new.
I was a bit surprised that he seemed to approve of 'humanism'. I heard that one of Callinicos's heroes was Louis Althusser, who scanned the works of Marx, expunging any which smelt even slightly of humanity. (When he had finished, there wasn't much left.)
The review continues, 'And he offers no guidance as to how to integrate the humanist strand in Marx's thought with analysis of the economic structures that at any time define the horizons of what human beings can achieve.'
I'll assume that 'analysis of economic structure' here means Marx's. Am I wrong? Because, if the reviewer would be kind enough to take another look at the book, he would see that it argues that Marx wasn't engaged in 'analysis of economic structure' at all, that he had no 'theory of history', no 'theory of value', no 'theory of state', in fact, no theory of anything.
His revolutionary critique of other people's theories and analyses revealed how all theory expressed the inhuman nature of those 'horizons to what human beings can achieve'. So there wasn't 'a humanist strand to Marx's thought': the struggle of humanity against its inhuman 'integument' were at the heart of all his thought, in all his writings, from the Doctoral Thesis to Capital.
Now, anyone is entitled to say I am wrong about all this. But then shouldn't they cite texts from Marx which contradict my account? Is it enough to brush me aside with a few 'isms'?