Issue 14 Cover

• Offering a Socialist vision, RCN
• Peak Oil, Oil Depletion, & Alternative Energies, Rod MacGregor
• One year on, Jim Aitken
• Against Imperialist war, for Iran’s workers, Yassamine Mather
• No War On Iran!, Hands Off People of Iran
• Naming women’s oppression, Catriona Grant
• The Sinn Fein Ard Fheis and the collapse of Republicanism, Joe Craig
• Footprints on the face, Rod MacGregor
• Secularism, Socialism and Religion, Bob Goupillot
• Bono finally finds what he’s been looking for – a knighthood, JM Thorn
• Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought, Benjamin Zephaniah
• Bought and Sold, Benjamin Zephaniah
• Parecon: participatory economics and socialism for the 21st century, Neil Bennett
• The Republic of the Imagination, Allan Armstrong interviews John Manson

In August 2006, Allan Armstrong interviewed the literary critic and poet John Manson about his life and works

Could you please give us some background information about your life?

John Manson

I was born on a croft on the coast of the Pentland Firth in 1932. My mother was widowed in 1941. Within that year, 1941-2, she lost her husband, my father, and his brother, who lived with us (both to pneumonia), and her own brother, a wireless operator, whose ship was torpedoed. She worked until 1968 with no pension, except the old age pension at 60.

In 1950 I went to Aberdeen University to study English Literature and Language and completed the first three years. In the winter term of 1952-3, I attended David Murison’s Extra-Mural lectures on Scottish Literature and must have heard of Hugh MacDiarmid’s work there for the first time. At the same time I became interested in Franz Kafka and have followed the two strands of Scottish and European (and World) literature ever since. At the same time, or perhaps a little later, I began to read articles from a Marxist point of view, although I wasn’t living in class-conscious circumstances. I started to do some writing. This was the period of the Korean War, the colonial repression in Malaya and Kenya, and the suspension of the constitution in British Guiana.

At home in the summer of 1953 I began to have a partial breakdown of health (psychosomatic) – no hospitalization – and this went on for a few years. In 1955 my mother and I moved to a smaller place in Sutherland and I recovered my health there to a large extent. For the first time, I felt free from pressure. Later I qualified as a primary teacher and taught in Fife, Edinburgh and Dumfries and Galloway.

I began to read widely in literature. Of the novels I read at that time, I expect the works of Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Sholokhov would most stand rereading. I also read the trilogies of Konstantin Fedin and Alexei Tolstoy. When Dr. Zhivago, Lolita and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were published I read these as well. MacDiarmid published some of the Zhivago lyrics in The Voice of Scotland and introduced a selection of Pasternak’s work in a translation by his sister, Lydia Pasternak Slater (she moved to Britain before the Second World War).

The poets I read at that time were Christo Botev, the national poet of Bulgaria, in Paul Eluard’s French translation; Nicola Vaptsarov, also Bulgarian, who was shot by the Fascists; Martin Carter of (then) British Guiana, whose Collected Poems and Selected Prose, University of Hunger, was published in early 2006; and Nazim Hikmet, who is now regarded as the major poet of Turkey in the last century. I also became aware of Louis Aragon’s poetry in 1956, through his weekly paper, Les Lettres Francaises; and then read two of his 6 volume series, Les Communistes, and other novels in French. I still have a copy of a letter from Collet’s, listing eight volumes of Antonio Gramsci in Italian. Some of the other writers in whom I became interested at this time will emerge during my answers. I read the early works of Alan Sillitoe and Arnold Wesker, nearly all Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, and at least one each of John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Erskine Caldwell and James T. Farrell.

How would you describe yourself in political terms?

A non-Party Socialist, since the dissolution of the CPGB

What do you see as the significance of the literary side of politics?

Politics is part of the public life of the times and it should be recreated as an important aspect of culture.

You see 1991 as forming a break in a certain period of literary politics. Why is this?

1991 witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It’s the end of an era in that sense, but not the end of other Communist Parties. It’s much more difficult to say how this affects the literary side of politics. The Portuguese Communist, Jose Saramago, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, for example.

You see Hugh MacDiarmid as the most important literary figure in Scotland in the 20th century. Why is this?

MacDiarmid was a great lyrical and satirical poet and he was also a national regenerator through his anti-imperialist writing. He had enormous influence on other people, mostly when they were young and this influence extended to the worlds of art, music, history, language, philosophy, politics and economics as well as imaginative literature. He made the greatest single-handed contribution to ensure that Scotland would not be, as in the line from Tom Buchan’s poem, a one-way street to the coup of the mind. He wrote instead:

For freedom means that a lad or lass
In Cupar or elsewhaur yet
May alter the haill o’ human thocht
Mair than Christ’s altered it

I never set een on a lad or a lass
But I wonder gin he or she
Wi’ a word or deed’ll suddenly dae
An impossibility.

(Complete Poems, 1, pp. 257-8, Hugh MacDairmid, Manchester, 1993.)

MacDiarmid was at the centre of a number of political and literary controversies:

• a. His alleged Scottish fascist past
• b. The ‘bomb London’ poem from the Second World War(On the Imminent Destruction of London, in The Revolutionary Art of the Future – Rediscovered poems by Hugh MacDairmid, edited by John Manson, DorianGrieve and Alan Riach, Manchester, 2003.)
• c. His ‘flytings’ with Hamish Henderson and Ewan MacColl.

What are your views on these particular issues?

• MacDiarmid was never a Fascist in the sense of a supporter of a right-wing dictatorship; he didn’t belong to a Fascist group, for example. A study of his article in The Scottish Nation (1923), Programme for a Scottish Fascism, shows that he saw ‘a Scottish Fascism’ as Nationalist –
  

  ‘Scotland First’ for us as it was ‘Italy First’ for them’ – and Socialist – ‘… a Scottish Nationalist Socialism … will restore an atmosphere in which the fine, distinctive traits and tendencies of Scottish character which have withered in the foul air of our contemporary chaos, will once more revive.’

  He thought that …Fascism in Italy must incline to the Left. He also quoted The Fascist Movement in Italian Life where Pietro Gorgolini says that,

  Fascism understands the immense social importance of land, hence it condemns absentee and unproductive possession, which leaves vast tracts of land uncultivated that could be highly productive.

  (Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Prose, pp. 34-8, Alan Riach, editor, Manchester, 2000.)

  Obviously, MacDiarmid thought this kind of ‘fascism’ could be applied to the Scottish Highlands but he failed to give weight to the fact that the Peasant Leagues were being broken up in Italy at this time. At the time MacDiarmid wrote the article he was a member of the Scottish Home Rule Association, the ILP and the No-More-War Movement through the League of Nations. He was also becoming interested in Social Credit.

  Similarly, MacDiarmid took ideas from Wyndham Lewis’s book on Hitler (1931) which seemed to chime with his own.

  Hitler’s ‘Nazis’ wear their socialism with precisely the difference which post-socialist Scottish nationalists must adopt. Class-consciousness is anathema to them, and in contradistinction to it they set up the principle of race consciousness.

  (The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea in Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, Duncan Glen, editor, London, 1969.)

  He takes over the concept of ‘Blutsgefuhl’ or ‘blood feeling’. He equates Hitler’s attacks on ‘Leihkapital’ (loan capital) with Major Douglas’s (the main advocate of Social Credit). MacDiarmid was very impulsive and often wrote reviews and articles in great haste. MacDiarmid was certainly deceived by Hitler as a man in 1932-3.

  Here are some quotations from his Free Man articles At the Sign of the Thistle:

  In view of the recent discussion in Scotland of the necessity of militant action, readers should carefully weigh what [the poet] Mr [John] Gawsworth says:-[Hitler] is as much a prophet as Mahomet, Mussolini, or Lenin, but he is an armed prophet’.
  (23/6/32)

  Compare the mental calibre of the members of the Scottish Development Council with men like De Valera in Ireland, Hitler in Germany, Gandhi in India.
  (9/7/32) The SDC had been formed in 1931.

  … it is just this vital force, this resourcefulness and colour which attracts me in Hitler as, say, against the utter nullity of Sir Robert Horne or the horrible local preacherism, writ large, of Ramsay MacDonald.
  (3/9/32)

  I agree with Hitler in one thing – probably the only thing in which I do agree with him at all – and that is his doctrine that action must not negate propaganda.
  (4/11/33)

• b. MacDiarmid saw London as metropolitan city, the centre of empire.
• c. MacDiarmids ‘flytings’ with Hamish Henderson were public. Ewan MacColl records his private discussions in his autobiography, Journeyman. MacColl writes:

  So why had he chosen to single out the folk revival as a special target for his venom? Because of the kailyard, the nineteenth century parochialism which had poisoned Scots literature and condemned it to a debilitated existence in the cabbage patch. MacDiarmid had rescued it and, with the help of a talented band of devotees, restored it to its proper role. And now it was being threatened again by vandals calling themselves folk-singers, by a movement which had within it seeds which, if allowed to germinate, would produce such a crop of weeds that the kailyard would triumph again. MacDiarmid’s fears were not entirely unfounded.
  (Journeyman, an autobiography by Ewan MacColl, pp. 284-5, Ewan MacColl, London, 1990.)

  Macdiarmid had positives as well as negatives. He drew attention to modern epics such as Pablo Neruda’s Canto General and Hikmet’s Human Landscapes.

Could you explain how you came to persuade MacDiarmid to fully publish his Third Hymn to Lenin?

On my first visit to Macdiarmid’s house, Brownsbank, in February 1955 I asked him if it had been published in full (one-third had already been published in Lucky Poet). I saw he made a mental note and he published it in the next issue of The Voice of Scotland in April. Almost fifty years later I discovered that it was originally written as part of The Red Lion project (in the mid-Thirties) and that he then realised that it could be regarded as a ‘third hymn’ – but it wasn’t directly conceived as a ‘hymn to Lenin’ like the first and second hymns. Although it does address Lenin in parts of the poem it is more of a ferocious attack on the housing conditions in Glasgow and on the modes of thought which allowed these conditions to exist.

MacDairmid: a great lyrical & satirical poet

How did you discover the material which formed the basis for The Revolutionary Art of the Future – rediscovered poems by Hugh MacDiarmid?

In 1990 the National Library of Scotland purchased (for £250,000) the archive of material which Kulgin Duval and Colin Hamilton had been buying from him in his lifetime. An American University would have paid double. This has been classified into 246 folders and notebooks. As soon as I opened one of these I realised that some important poems had remained unpublished through lack of opportunities at particular times.

Other people had realised this before but perhaps I made a more thorough search than they did and recorded them in typescript. I had made several (more limited) discoveries of uncollected and unpublished poetry and prose on previous occasions, e.g. From Work in Progress in Penguin (1970), now retitled Kinsfolk, and the eight stories in Annals of the Five Senses(1999).

Your house contains many photographs and maps of places associated with MacDiarmid. Do you see ‘place’ as being important in his work?

Yes. Langholm, his birthplace; Whalsay, where he lived in the 1930’s; and also Liverpool and London. In Liverpool he wrote the poems in the abcbdd stanza (with the truncated sixth line) which he didn’t use before or after, when he was thinking back to Langholm; and in London he began The Red Lion project perhaps because he joined the CP there in August 1934 and had also just read Allen Hutt’s pamphlet Crisis on Clydeside.

Scott Lyall’s book, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry of Politics and Place was published last year by Edinburgh University Press.

You have also located unpublished Lewis Grassic Gibbon writings in your researches.

Gibbon signed a contract with Faber to write a biography of William Wallace. He never completed it, but I found the first ten pages in the National Library of Scotland. Gibbon presents Wallace, At the head of a force that bore the significant title of the ‘Army of the Commons of Scotland’ and that after his defeat at Falkirk, not again, tell on tale, did the Commons of Scotland gather to battle under their ain folk till the Covenanting times.(William Wallace – Knight of Scotland, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, with introduction Braveheart in Kinraddie by John Manson, in Cencrastus, no. 61.)

In an important literary/political debate in the 1930’s Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Barke seemed to reject a Scottish national identity. Yet MacDairmid later claimed that Gibbon had become a supporter of a Scottish Workers Republic. What is your view of this?

MacDiarmid may have drawn this impression from his last meeting with Gibbon in Welwyn Garden City in September 1934 but there is no evidence for it in Gibbon’s writing. Less than five months later he was dead.

You have spent some time recently working on James Barke. What do you see his significance was/is in the literary side of politics?

I think The Land of the Leal remains an important popular novel. Major Operation should also be republished though it is spoiled a bit by speeches like MacKelvie’s on materialism (in the context of the novel).

Jim White, a long time member of the Communist Party, has claimed James Barke was a Party member. Why do you dispute this?

Jim only had Bill Cowe’s word for it. I’ve rehearsed the evidence in my essay, Did James Barke join the Communist Party? (Communist History Network Newsletter, 19, 2006, published by Politics section, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, M13 9PL, website)

Why do you think James Barke was a member of the Freemasons?

I’ve no evidence here. Maybe it was the Burns connection? He was also a member of the Boys Brigade 1920-22 and spoke warmly of the Brigade in an article in 1956 (among other organisations).

Sorley MacLean doesn’t appear to have figured as much as MacDiarmid, Barke or Gibbon in your work on the literary side of politics. Is there a reason for this?

The reason is that I have no Gaelic and am therefore dependent on translations of his work. I’ve read his poems and his prose collection Ris a’ Bhruthaich (1985) and Joy Hendry and Raymond Ross’s Critical Essays (1986), the interviews he gave, and I’ve also heard him reading.

You have translated several European writers, particularly from the ‘God That Failed’ tradition, e.g. the Italian, Ignazio Silone; from dissident communists, like Victor Serge; and you have been interested in and sympathetic to non-Communists like the Icelander, Halldor Laxness. Why do you draw from these traditions?

A misunderstanding here. I’ve only translated one letter of Silone from Italian and though I’ve translated two books and a number of articles by Victor Serge I only became aware of him in the 1970s. But I’ve certainly been reading and rereading Silone from time to time since the late Fifties initially because he recreated the life of peasant societies and later because he reveals the debates within the minds of some of his leading characters with regard to the Communist Party.

The poets from whom I have translated the most are Pablo Neruda (Chile), Louis Aragon (France), and Paul Eluard (France)- Communists, though Eluard wasout of the Party for a decade,roughly 1932 to 1942. They had lifelong careers as authors and wrote intensely personal as well as political poetry – Resistance poetry in the case of Aragon and Eluard, anti-Franco and anti- Yankee poetry in the case of Neruda. Another poet I have translated, Cesar Vallejo (Peru), was also a Communist. But I’ve also translated from poets whose political positions cannot be so easily identified, e.g., Eugenio Montale (Italian), Constantine Cavafy (Greek), Manuel Bandeira (Brazilian), Henri Michaux (Belgian), whose work appears in my pamphlets.

Again I’ve read and reread Laxness since the late fifties, initially Independent People, about Icelandic crofters, and Salka Valka, about fishing communities (along with the Latvian, Vilis Lacis’s A Fisherman’s Son). I have read Max Frisch (Swiss), whose novels deal with questions of identity and who was also a great dramatist; Elias Canetti, Nobel prize-winner (1981), for his threevolume autobiography; Andre Malraux (France), for his novels of the political life of the Thirties; Albert Camus (France), for his stories and his posthumously published novel, The First Man, involving the search for his roots (Nobel prize-winner 1957); many of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (France), and more recently, the novels of the recently deceased Pramoeda Ananta Toer, who spent many years in the Indonesian gulag.

What attracted you, in particular, to Victor Serge, who has been part of the anarchist and Trotskyist tradition in the past?

I was first attracted to Serge in the 1970s through his novels, of which six have been translated into English (and one is currently being translated – Les Annees Sans Pardon. It was through Serge’s literary and historical works that I first became aware of the Left Opposition in the Communist Party; and this led to a much slighter knowledge of other Oppositionist novelists like Panait Istrati (Roumania) and Charles Plisnier (Belgium).

Why do you think there has been a resurgence of interest in Victor Serge recently?

I think Serge appeals because of his probity. But this doesn’t mean that I think he was right about all the positions he took up, particularly after the Second World War where he preferred the semi-dictatorship of the right to the Communist government which would have been in power if the ELAS-EAM hadn’t been defeated by our own forces (Carnets, p. 158, Victor Serge, Arles, 1985.). Recently I’ve heard that the well-known American essayist, the late Susan Sontag, wrote a preface to Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

You are not just a literary critic and translator but also a poet. How important is this to you?

It is important to express my feelings but most of my poems are occasional rather than constructed to a theme. It’s only after they’re written that I begin to see the themes.

Why do you see the land as so important in a Scotland that has become very urbanised?

Simply my own experience.

I’ve lived the life and done the work. And it was also the experience of my forebears on both sides.

You have had a working relationship with the writer, David Craig. How did this develop?

I met David at Aberdeen University in 1951. In On The Crofters’ Trail (1990) which is dedicated to me as ‘poet and crofter’, David writes that … our discussions of literature and history have been incessant ever since.

How much influence have the places you have lived had upon you?

Caithness negative (as explained), Sutherland positive (my adopted county] West Fife positive, modern industry (then) and historical background, Edinburgh positive for its libraries and galleries.

You wrote to Emancipation & Liberation, in response to the article, Beyond Bayonets and Broadswords, which was trying to retrieve the revolutionary roots of Scottish Presbyterianism’s left wing. What prompted you to contribute to the wider discussion on Jacobites or Covenanters?

This was purely a literary interest, since the article made mention of MacDairmid’s literary use of the ‘white rose’. (Beyond Bayonets and Broadswords, Allan Armstrong, Emancipation & Liberation no. 5/6, and letter by John Manson, Emancipation & Liberation, no. 10.)

What is your view of the impact of Scottish Presbyterianism on society after your early experiences?

I found the impact of the particular brand of Presbyterianism with which I came into contact (when I was powerless myself) as harmful and repressive. I try to express this in my poem, To An Unconceived Child. Ian Macpherson’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1931) comes closest to my own experience. The author, Tom MacDonald (Fionn MacColla) called it nay-saying.(10 At the Sign of the Clenched Fist, p. 185, Fionn MacColla, Edinburgh, 1967.)

What literary projects are you currently involved in?

I’ve reconstructed the manuscript of Mature Art, which MacDiarmid hoped to publish with the Obelisk Press in Paris (before its occupation in 1940). After that he withdrew, and sometimes adapted, sections of the poem which he included in In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) and The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961). The poem has never been published in full and some parts remain unpublished. I’ve also found the plan of The Red Lion, but not all the parts.

A major project has been making a selection from the letters to MacDiarmid in the National Library of Scotland and Edinburgh University Library, which may well number fifteen thousand.

What do you want?

It’s a question that we, as revolutionary socialists (or communists) face more often than any other when talking about our politics. We are more than happy to tell people what we are against – war, exploitation, suffering, injustice…but more often than not, when it comes to telling people exactly what it is we stand for, our answers fall short.

We might point out, for example that we stand for real socialism, for a democratic socialism – and contrast this with what was called ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ in the Soviet Union, for the propaganda purposes of both sides of the Cold War.

But what does this really mean?

None of the phrases we might use goes into much detail about what an alternative to capitalism, a ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ economy, might look like. What do we imagine the structures of such an economy to be? And how will it function?

These are questions that the socialist movement, and even the broader global anti-capitalist movement cannot leave unanswered. Sure we can make powerful and legitimate demands – from shutting down the WTO and stopping climate change to scrapping the council tax and getting free school meals. But without an economic vision, our campaigning will lack structure and direction, and we will struggle to convince more people to join us in the fight if we cannot articulate more clearly what it is we are fighting for.

An economic vision

As a starting point for exploring the question of what socialism might look like, it is important to discuss what an economy is, and what features characterise the different possible forms one might take.

The primary functions of any economy are the production, allocation and consumption of goods and services. Historically the most important division for socialists has been concerning ownership – that is who owns the means of production. However other things can influence class relationships in an economy just as powerfully, and must be considered when proposing a good economy or socialist economic model. But first let’s look at the basic differences between economic systems.

The two defining features of capitalism are the private ownership of the means of production (utilised for profit) and a market allocation system – that is a system where buyers and sellers attempt to maximise their own advantage at the expense of the other. There are many other features which flow from these, such as massive hierarchies of wealth and power, wage slavery and remuneration (payment) according to output and bargaining power. However ownership and market allocation are the aspects that define an economy as ‘capitalist’ in the commonly understood sense, so let’s stick with those.

So what other models have existed in the past? The most obvious answer is the command economy that existed in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block countries. What had changed in these places that differentiated them from capitalism? Well ownership has certainly changed – in place of private capitalists we have an authoritarian state. And market allocation no longer exists, having been replaced with central planning performed by the state bureaucracy. But which of the injustices of capitalism does this actually resolve? Jobs still exist in a hierarchy – with people at the top having greater access to wealth and power, compared to those at the bottom. Some people are still forced into demeaning work for little reward, while other use power to gain privilege, and privilege to gather yet more power. In fact by concentrating power in ever fewer hands, command economies create new horrors, distinct but comparable to those inherent in capitalism.

What about ‘market socialism’? In this model (such as could have said to have been attempted in Tito’s Yugoslavia) ownership is distinct from capitalism, the means of production either being owned by the state, or by workers collectively. However the market allocation remains, the profits ostensibly shared amongst the workforce. So the question arises – do markets themselves have a negative impact on the people in an economy, or are they only so destructive when combined with private ownership? I think the answer becomes obvious if we again look at the defining features of a market – that is selfishly motivated buyers and sellers, prices determined by competition, profit and surplus maximisation and remuneration according to output and bargaining power – again necessitating hierarchical corporate divisions of labour.

So we have reached a crossroads.

We understand that no current or historical economic model achieves what we want to achieve. So what model can? Well first we have to consider what it is exactly that we want from our economic system.

An economy of values

What do we want our economy to do? We know we want it to produce, allocate and consume things, and we know we want to avoid the destructive and unjust qualities of other systems. So what values should our economy promote? Advocates of Parecon (or participatory economics) suggest they should be the same values we hold as important: equity, diversity, solidarity, and participatory self management. The last of those values is of fundamental importance, and is reflective of what should be meant when we talk of democratic socialism – that is that decisions should be made democratically by people in proportion to how much they are affected by those decisions.

Parecon overview

What are the important questions we have to answer when proposing a new economic model? What areas merit our attention when deciding on the institutions our model needs? The points highlighted below should be of primary concern:

• how people should be remunerated (paid)
• how workplaces should be organised
• how decision-making should take place
• how we can settle on what is produced and consumed

Remuneration due to effort and sacrifice

How do we define a just form of economic remuneration? Marx wrote From each according to ability: to each according to need. But is that an accurate picture of a just economy? And is it a realistic one?

I would suggest that it is not – that it is utopian and fails to take into account a concept of just rewards – making it wholly unworkable. What then are the alternative norms of remuneration we could consider? The forms that exist currently are mixed, and dependent on many variables. Income can be determined by output (i.e. the productive output of you as an individual), by bargaining power, by some natural advantage (perhaps you a smarter or stronger than I am), or often simply by luck. Under capitalism greed and cunning are also useful attributes in maximising your income.

However none of these could be said to just. There is no moral reason why someone should have more money because they were born into a rich family, happened to have a particularly useful skill, or worse because they lacked compassion for their fellow human beings.

The only just way for workers to be remunerated in an economy is according to effort and sacrifice.

In other words it is not economic output that should be measured in a just socialist economy, but the amount of work someone puts in – that is how hard they work and for how many hours. Who can determine how much effort and sacrifice is expended? Peers in the same workplace would presumably be better able the mos to determine such a thing. What’s more, in an optimal economy, effort and sacrifice would tend towards an average – meaning most people would be remunerated to a similar degree, variation occurring mostly in number of hours worked. But more on this later.

But let’s go back to Marx’s catch-all phrase first. There is something I’ve neglected to account for above. There will of course in any economy be those unable to work – be they too old, in hospital, incapacitated etc. Here Marx’s phrase comes into some relevance, as there are those with need but without ability. According to Parecon, those unable to work (and those between jobs) should be remunerated according to social averages. That is they should be paid as if doing the ‘average’ amount of work in an economy – that way neither gaining significantly nor losing out significantly from being unable to work. Of course medical treatment etc should be considered a social cost and underwritten by all.

Balanced job complexes

Orthodox Marxist theory defines two social classes – the capitalist class (who own the means of production) and the working class (who sell their labour to the capitalists). In other words the class system is solely down to ownership of the means of production. Sure there are other sub-classes described, but that is the basic model as understood by most.

Advocates of Parecon see things differently. Ask any regular worker about their job, and what pisses them off about it, what do you think they will say? Will they name some remote venture capitalist, or board of investors?

Or will they tell you how their boss treats them like shit?

Pareconists define three broad economic classes. As well as the capitalists and the majority working class, there is a third class situated between the two know as the ‘coordinator’ class. These coordinators include managers, professionals, doctors, lawyers, academics. They have a large degree of empowerment in their workplace, are often in charge of others and usually receive far greater levels of income than the majority working class. They have their own class interest – acting (like the working class) for greater gains and concessions from the capitalists, but at the same time trying to maintain their position of privilege and power over the majority working class.

Economists estimate the coordinator class to compose around 20% of the working population in developed countries such as in Western Europe and the USA.

It is this class of people that – with the absence of the capitalists – came to power in the Soviet Union.

And while we continue to allow this class division to exist, we will never achieve true equality of circumstance. Workplace hierarchies are an anathema to equity and diversity, and so have no place in a socialist economy.

So what is the answer? If we are to rid ourselves of the capitalist divisions of labour, what are we to replace them with? Parecon’s answer is the ‘balanced job complex’.

Put simply our demand is that everyone should do their fair share empowering, interesting work, and their fair share rote, boring, or unpleasant tasks. As we have already decided on remuneration according to effort and sacrifice, if we were to maintain capitalist labour divisions, people doing crappy jobs would be paid more for their extra sacrifice. This would be just, but would undermine equity. Similarly those doing more empowering jobs would be more able to take part in decision making, meaning others would be overpowered and lose all relative influence. This would undermine self-management and democracy.

If however peoples work is balanced into a variety of empowering and rote tasks, so that everyone’s job is more or less equal (though all very different), we re-enforce all the values we seek to promote.

Of course certain workplaces will sometimes have more or less empowering tasks than the social average. In these circumstances individual workers will have to spend some of their working week (or month, or quarter etc) in another workplace, in order to balance their complex.

Workplace decision-making

At the moment in capitalist workplaces, with corporate hierarchies, decision making is concentrated in the hands of the few. At the top level the capitalists decide where to invest their money. Below that decision making powers are monopolised by high-level management – whose decisions are influenced less by the needs of the workers or consumers, but more by the need for company profit and their own power within the organisation.

In a parecon workplace – where as we have established all workers will be paid according to effort and sacrifice for doing more-or-less balanced job complexes – decisions will be made by the whole workforce. But not by some abstract mechanism of majority rule. Rather each individual worker will have a say relevant to how each decision affects him or her. So if we are deciding which colour to paint your office, only you have the power to influence that decision, as only you are affected by it to any large extent (presuming you don’t share the office, and you don’t choose extravagantly expensive paint!). If however a decision affects a whole team – such as hiring a new colleague – then that decision must be made by the team as a whole, using norms they themselves have agreed upon. This system of democratic decision-making would form part of a working day, and would be paid for as such.

Larger scale decisions – such as on workload, productive outputs etc – for whole workplaces or even whole industries would be conducted by democratic councils of workers, with each group or department sending a delegate. Delegates would of course be immediately recallable and all decision-making and background information available to all. This brings us neatly onto the process itself.

Participatory planning

Readers may be familiar with the participatory budgeting, as practised by some Workers Party controlled local authorities in Brazil, such as in Porto Alegre. In these projects the limited local budget is controlled directly by delegated popular assemblies – an example of a community taking control of public spending and deciding its own priorities. This could be described as a form of participatory planning, only limited to social consumption. In a parecon, we would apply a similar model to the whole of the economy, for both production and consumption.

Participatory planning is the form of allocation system we describe as an alternative to markets and the central planning of the command economies. The main process is that of council democracy – both of workers in a workplace or industry, and of consumers in a community. The reasons for this are quite simple – every worker is also a consumer – that is they have two specific relationships within the economy. If we want a democratic economy we have to democratise both these relationships.

So how does the participatory economy settle on what is to be produced and consumed in any given time?

At the start of each planning period (say a year) every individual makes a proposal of how much they want to work, and how much they want to consume. This is easier than it sounds – last years production and consumption information will be available, so any changes can be considered relative to this. These proposals are taken to workplace and community councils and combined into joint proposals. These proposals are delegated to higher level councils and federations of councils, until at the end of the first round of planning there are full production and consumption proposals for the whole economy.

Now after this first round, it is quite likely that consumption proposals and production proposals do not match. These initial proposals are submitted to what are known as Iteration Facilitation Boards (IFBs). These would process the submissions, generating indicative prices based on the value of social inputs needed to produce different products and services. Based on these values, as well as all available qualitative information, people reassess there proposals and come up with new ones. This is repeated several times (i.e. iteratively) until consumption and production proposals are reasonably close, and a workable plan is created.

It should be made clear that the IFBs hold no economic power – they will simply be making calculations based on various data and socially agreed algorithms. In fact most of the process could be automated. To the extent that work has to be done, the IFBs would be a workplace like any other and subject to the same conditions of remuneration and balanced job complexes. If there was still any concern over the possibility of IFBs employees gaining some undue economic influence, the positions could be rotated amongst many individuals. However this would be exceedingly cautious.

Socialism for the 21st century?

Described above are the basic attributes of the parecon model of a democratic socialist or communist economy. I hope from this introduction that I have at the very least convinced you of the need for economic vision. I hope too that you might consider that some of the arguments for participatory economics make sense, and that you might be interested enough to explore these ideas further.

If so, I suggest you visit the website, or read some of the many books and articles on the subject by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel – the principal proponents of Parecon. immediately recallable and all decision-making and background information available to all. This brings us neatly onto the process itself.

The ancestors would turn in graves
Those poor black folk that once were slaves would wonder
How our souls were sold
And check our strategies,
The empire strikes back and waves
Tamed warriors bow on parades
When they have done what they’ve been told
They get their OBEs.

Don’t take my word, go check the verse
Cause every laureate gets worse
A family that you cannot fault as muse will mess your mind,
And yeah, you may fatten your purse
And surely they will check you first when subjects need to be amused
With paid for prose and rhymes.

Take your prize, now write more,
Faster,
Fuck the truth
Now you’re an actor do not fault your benefactor
Write, publish and review,
You look like a dreadlocks Rasta,
You look like a ghetto blaster,
But you can’t diss your paymaster
And bite the hand that feeds you.

What happened to the verse of fire
Cursing cool the empire
What happened to the soul rebel that Marley had in mind,
This bloodstained, stolen empire rewards you and you conspire,
(Yes Marley said that time will tell)
Now look they’ve gone and joined.

We keep getting this beating
It’s bad history repeating
It reminds me of those capitalists that say
‘Look you have a choice,’
It’s sick and self-defeating if our dispossessed keep weeping
And we give these awards meaning
But we end up with no voice.

Taken from Too Black, Too Strong. Published by Bloodaxe Books (2001)

I woke up on the morning of November 13 wondering how the government could be overthrown and what could replace it, and then I noticed a letter from the prime minister’s office. It said:

The prime minister has asked me to inform you, in strict confidence, that he has in mind, on the occasion of the forthcoming list of New Year’s honours to submit your name to the Queen with a recommendation that Her Majesty may be graciously pleased to approve that you be appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire.

I get angry when I hear that word 'empire'

Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours,
I thought. I get angry when I hear that word “empire”; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my fore mothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised. It is because of this concept of empire that my British education led me to believe that the history of black people started with slavery and that we were born slaves, and should therefore be grateful that we were given freedom by our caring white masters. It is because of this idea of empire that black people like myself don’t even know our true names or our true historical culture. I am not one of those who are obsessed with their roots, andI’m certainly not suffering from a crisis of identity; my obsession is about the future and the political rights of all people. Benjamin Zephaniah OBE – no way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly anti-empire.

There’s something very strange about receiving a letter from Tony Blair’s office asking me if I want to accept this award. In the past couple of months I’ve been on Blair’s doorstep a few times. I have begged him to come out and meet me; I have been longing for a conversation with him, but he won’t come out, and now here he is asking me to meet him at the palace! I was there with a million people on February 15, and the last time I was there was just a couple of weeks ago. My cousin, Michael Powell, was arrested and taken to Thornhill Road police station in Birmingham where he died. Now, I know how he died. The whole of Birmingham knows how he died, but in order to get this article published and to be politically (or journalistically) correct, I have to say that he died in suspicious circumstances. The police will not give us any answers.

We have not seen or heard anything of all the reports and investigations we were told were going to take place. Now, all that my family can do is join with all the other families who have lost members while in custody because no one in power is listening to us. Come on Mr Blair, I’ll meet you anytime. Let’s talk about your Home Office, let’s talk about being tough on crime.

This OBE thing is supposed to be for my services to literature, but there are a whole lot of writers who are better than me, and they’re not involved in the things that I’m involved in. All they do is write; I spend most of my time doing other things. If they want to give me one of these empire things, why can’t they give me one for my work in animal rights? Why can’t they give me one for my struggle against racism? What about giving me one for all the letters I write to innocent people in prisons who have been framed? I may just consider accepting some kind of award for my services on behalf of the millions of people who have stood up against the war in Iraq. It’s such hard work – much harder than writing poems.

And hey, if Her Majesty may be graciously pleased to lay all that empire stuff on me, why can’t she write to me herself. Let’s cut out the middleman – she knows me. The last time we met, it was at a concert I was hosting. She came backstage to meet me. That didn’t bother me; lots of people visit my dressing room after performances. Me and the South African performers I was working with that night thought it rather funny that we had a royal groupie. She’s a bit stiff but she’s a nice old lady.

Let me make it clear: I have nothing against her or the royal family. It is the institution of the monarchy that I loathe so very much, the monarchy that still refuses to apologise for sanctioning slavery.

There is a part of me that hopes that after writing this article I shall never be considered as a Poet Laureate or an OBE sucker again.

Let this put an end to it. This may lose me some of my writing friends; some people may never want to work with me again, but the truth is I think OBEs compromise writers and poets, and laureates suddenly go soft – in the past I’ve even written a poem, Bought and Sold, saying that. There are many black writers who love OBEs, it makes them feel like they have made it. When it suits them, they embrace the struggle against the ruling class and the oppression they visit upon us, but then they join the oppressors’ club.

They are so easily seduced into the great house of Babylon known as the palace. For them, a wonderful time is meeting the Queen and bowing before her presence.

I was shocked to see how many of my fellow writers jumped at the opportunity to go to Buckingham Palace when the Queen had her “meet the writers day” on July 9 2002, and I laughed at the pathetic excuses writers gave for going. I did it for my mum; I did it for my kids; I did it for the school; I did it for the people, etc. I have even heard black writers who have collected OBEs saying that it is symbolic of how far we have come. Oh yes, I say, we’ve struggled so hard just to get a minute with the Queen and we are so very grateful – not.

I’ve never heard of a holder of the OBE openly criticising the monarchy. They are officially friends, and that’s what this cool Britannia project is about. It gives OBEs to cool rock stars, successful businesswomen and blacks who would be militant in order to give the impression that it is inclusive. Then these rock stars, successful women, and ex militants write to me with the OBE after their name as if I should be impressed. I’m not. Quite the opposite – you’ve been had.

Writers and artists who see themselves as working outside the establishment are constantly being accused of selling out as soon as they have any kind of success. I’ve been called a sell-out for selling too many books, for writing books for children, for performing at the Royal Albert Hall, for going on Desert Island Discs, and for appearing on the Parkinson show.

...and this is what he could have won!

But I want to reach as many people as possible without compromising the content of my work. What continues to be my biggest deal with the establishment must be my work with the British Council, of which, ironically, the Queen is patron. I have no problem with this. It has never told me what to say, or what not to say. I have always been free to criticise the government and even the council itself. This is what being a poet is about. Most importantly, through my work with the council I am able to show the world what Britain is really about in terms of our arts, and I am able to partake in the type of political and cultural intercourse which is not possible in the mainstream political arena. I have no problem representing the reality of our multiculturalism, which may sometimes mean speaking about the way my cousin Michael died in a police station. But then, I am also at ease letting people know that our music scene is more than what they hear in the charts, and that British poetry is more than Wordsworth, or even Motion. I have no problem with all of this because this is about us and what we do. It is about what happens on the streets of our country and not in the palace or at No 10. Me, OBE? Whoever is behind this offer can never have read any of my work. Why don’t they just give me some of those great African works of art that were taken in the name of the empire and let me return them to their rightful place? You can’t fool me, Mr Blair. You want to privatise us all; you want to send us to war. You stay silent when we need you to speak for us, preferring to be the voice of the US. You have lied to us, and you continue to lie to us, and you have poured the working-class dream of a fair, compassionate, caring society down the dirty drain of empire. Stick it, Mr Blair – and Mrs Queen, stop going on about the empire. Let’s do something else.

This article is reproduced from the Socialist Democracy website

I have no embarrassment at all. No shame.

Bono, 2006

The quotation above was Irish rock star’s Bono attempt at self deprecating humour. However, being devoid of the humility required to make it work as a joke, it stands more as a statement of obvious fact; a self penned epitaph if ever there was one. Its accuracy was confirmed yet again with the announcement late last month that Bono was being awarded an honorary knighthood by the British Government. This important news was relayed to the world in a statement from Tony Blair posted on the Downing Street and U2 websites. Greeting readers with Hi folks and describing himself as a huge fan of the singer, he went on to express his delight that the award, which recognised an outstanding contribution to music and remarkable humanitarian work, had been accepted. A spokesman for Bono said he was very flattered to receive the award, particularly if it helped him with his campaigning work.

Most of the mainstream media either welcomed Bono’s knighthood or wrote it off as yet another gimmick. However, in many ways it does signify the changing relationship between Britain and the southern Irish state. In the past, such awards were rare. With a stronger nationalist sentiment amongst the population, which could be heightened by events such as Bloody Sunday and the hunger strikes, acceptance would have been frowned upon and the recipients written off as west Brits. However, the ending of the Republican struggle and the development of the peace process in the North, along with influx of foreign capital into the South over the last fifteen years has changed that. The southern bourgeoisie, increasingly dependent of imperialism for the maintenance of their economy and the political settlement that secures partition, now feel free to dump their watered down nationalist ideology and grab their gongs. After all isn’t this all part of the process of reconciliation?

Bono is merely the amplified personification of this class. He is one of the wealthiest men in the state, and his group U2 are a corporate entity. They have benefited greatly from the neo-liberal polices pursed by successive Irish governments. As artists they pay virtually no tax.

However, even this minuscule amount is too much. Last year the band moved part of their multipound operation to Amsterdam to avoid paying tax on royalty earnings. Around the same time Bono’s California-based venture capital firm, Elevation Partners, invested £157m in Forbes, the US business magazine described as the bible of capitalism. Roger McNamee, an Elevation partner, said Bono was drawn to Forbes because it has a point of view. He said the singer drove this part of the discussion and likes the fact that there has been a consistent philosophy throughout its history. This philosophy is an unabashed celebration of wealth and capitalist consumption.

Self-styled image

While this might seem at odds with Bono’s self-styled image as an anti poverty campaigner in reality they are wholly compatible. In the guises of both corporate predator and campaigner, he is preaching the gospel of capitalism. This can be seen in the campaigns that he has associated himself with. The campaigning vehicle he created for himself, Project Red, advocates a combination of consumerism and charity as a means of tackling the AIDS epidemic in Africa. This has seen Bono and his celebrity friends promoting the products of mobile phone and credit card companies on the basis that a tiny percentage of the profits go to AIDS charities.

The ethos of Project Red was expounded most extensively when Sir, Dr, Mr Anthony, Tony O’Reilly allowed Bono to edit an edition of the London Independent. The Red Indy as it was styled consisted of photographs and profiles of self promoting celebrities, sycophantic interviews with politicians, and extensive corporate adverts.

Inevitably Bono found space to tip his hat to the White House with Condoleezza Rice naming her top ten musical works. Declaring herself a big fan of Bono, she named anything (couldn’t even remember one of their songs) by U2 as number seven on her list. The best summary of Project Red came in the interview with BBC radio DJ Zane Lowe in which he declared that: The only thing people who are trying to make a difference can do is work alongside corporations. Another glaring thing about the Red Indy was the absence, apart from the Nigerian finance minister, of any African voices. There was also no mention of the arms trade or the exploitation of the continent’s natural resources. It was surely no co-incidence that some the corporate sponsors of the Red Indy, Motorola for example, were implicated in this gangsterism.

Privatisation of aid

The ethos of Project Red is very similar that underpinning Band Aid and more recently Live8, both vehicles of that other Irish knight Bob Geldof, in which Bono has been heavily involved. Band Aid was Geldof’s response to the famine in Ethiopia in the mid eighties. People will remember the pop concerts in London and Philadelphia, the charity records, appeals for donations, and the lobbying of politicians. While all this appeared very worthy, apart from boosting the careers of the people involved (it gave U2 their break in the US), it actually achieved very little. Indeed, it could be argued that Band Aid exacerbated the famine as most of the money raised went to the Ethiopian government, enabling it to prolong the war that was its main cause. At that time Geldof liked to portray himself as challenging the British and US government over their polices towards Africa, cultivated the image of the angry impassioned man banging the table and demanding action. In reality Band Aid fitted well with the polices that were being pursued by Thatcher and Regan, of reducing the social responsibility of the state, and putting the responsibility for the ills of society onto the individual. In this schema, famine in Africa could be solved through charitable giving; the privatisation of aid as one of Thatcher’s assistants described it. Governments (particularly the US) who were helping to fuel the crisis in Africa through political and military intervention were absolved of any responsibility.

Live8 was a figleaf for imperialism's responsibility for displacement and poverty in Africa

Minimal concessions

More recently, Bono and Geldof have been campaigning against extreme poverty in Africa. The centrepiece of this was Live8, a lobby of the G8 group of the world’s wealthiest nations to reduce the debt owned by Africa states. This involved another pop concert in London, and a demonstration at Gleneagles in Scotland where the G8 leaders were meeting. In the event, Live8 produced very little in concrete terms to reduce poverty in Africa.

The G8 offered only minimal concessions on debt, and even these were conditional on African governments introducing further neo-liberal reforms such as privatisation of public services and concessions for foreign investors.

While anti-poverty campaigners were disappointed with the G8 proposals, Geldof and Bono enthusiastically endorsed them.

This once again exposed their phoney radicalism, posing as challengers to the status quo while in fact they are among its strongest defenders. Live8 provided a fig leaf for the continued imperialist domination of the continent of Africa, by accepting the political and financial structures that have plunged millions of Africans into extreme poverty. It proposed a programme for alleviation of poverty that would actually deeper poverty and inequality. For example, Bono and Geldof go on about on increasing trade, but they ignore the fact that record trade surpluses and extreme poverty for African states exist side by side. There was also an element of racism in Live8. This was not just in the almost all-white line-up at the pop concert, but in the portrayal of Africans as victims who are dependent upon the benevolence of western states and wealthy individuals. The idea that people who are oppressed can free themselves through their own struggles is dismissed. When a movement does arise in Africa to challenge imperialism the Bonos and Geldofs of this world will be among the first to denounce it.

In some ways the likes of Bono and Geldof are more dangerous that politicians. Few have any illusions in Bush and Blair, but people are willing to give a hearing to pop stars who appear to have humanitarian impulses. Unfortunately, this delusion has been aided by sections of the left who threw their weight behind the demands of Live8. Socialists should be exposing the fact that Bono, Bush, Geldof and Bair share a common agenda. Blair himself made this clear in the personal letter that accompanied Bono’s knighthood:

I want personally to thank you for the invaluable role you played in the run up to the Gleneagles G8 Summit. Without your personal contribution, we could not have achieved the results we did

.

Bono and friend

Bono bashing is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, your attacks can’t fail to hit the target. Despite his rock star status he is an enemy of the working class and the oppressed, and should be exposed as such. If you have any doubts then the selection of his quotes in the box should quickly dispel them.

Condemned from his own mouth

Bono on Blair leading Britain into the war in Iraq. – …anyone can make a mistake….,

Bono on Bush. – Well, I think [President Bush has] done an incredible job

Bono on racist and anti-gay US Senator, Jesse Helms. – I found him to be a beautiful man

Bono on Blair and Brown – the Lennon and McCartney of poverty reduction.

Bono introducing a song about Bloody Sunday – this song is not a rebel song. This song is Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Bono on the struggle for an Irish Republic – Fuck the ‘revolution’!

Bono advising Bush on how to conduct the war in Iraq – I think America has no experience with terrorism or even with war. In Europe, we know a little bit more about these things. We must not make a martyr out of Saddam Hussein. He’s good at propaganda. Let’s not make it easier for him.

Bono on the ‘War Against Terror’ – The war against terrorism is bound up with the war against poverty.

A Marxist understanding of religion

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people

Karl Marx

Marx understood the religious impulse to be a human response to a world that sometimes presents as scary, terrifying and out of our control. Thus the religions of hunter-gatherer people focus on asserting control over their prey animals, the religious festivals of farming peoples focus on marking the passing seasons and placating the gods and goddesses of the earth and sky. Religion is a human, spiritual response to an uncertain world.

Under capitalism, Marx argued, religious faith and religion in general are a result of and a response to, capitalist oppression and exploitation. Thus the religious impulse today is a way of responding to the uncertainty of a world based on impersonal market relations rather than direct human relationships. A world in which we are not expected to love our neighbour or be our brother’s (or sister’s) keeper but are encouraged to relate to others, as competitors for limited resources, or at best, fellow consumers. In the modern world Religion is a product of alienation-our atomisation and isolation from each other and our selves.

Thus religion is a response to, rather than a direct cause of, oppression. This explains the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Arabic and Asian world. An important factor here was the failure of socialist and revolutionary nationalist movements e.g. Nasser in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, to defeat encroaching capitalism in the form of western imperialism. In the absence of an effective socialist movement Radical Islam provides a channel for the rage of the oppressed. Hamas and Hizbollah offer solace in the next world whilst being vehicles to deal with issues in this one e.g. the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

(As an aside I would argue that the historical Jesus was part of the Jewish resistance to Roman occupation and an early anti imperialist)

A progressive socialist approach to religion – secularism.

Marx criticised religion but he was equally scathing about liberals or anarchists who made the criticism of religion a point of honour and insisted on everybody being atheists.

Such thinkers would often argue against supporting campaigns in support of religious tolerance and against religious oppression (in our time, Islamophobia, in Marx ‘s time, anti Judaism) on the grounds that this was tolerating or even supporting religion. This misses the point that the right to freely express ones spiritual or philosophical beliefs is a hard won, democratic right, that should be ‘religiously’ defended by all progressive people, socialists in particular.

Marx argued that religious beliefs will erode to the degree that the material conditions that promote them erode, that is the exploitation and oppression of capitalism. Thus rather than focussing on a fight against religion we should be uniting with all those, believer and non-believer, who genuinely oppose capitalism.

Secularism – a definition

The attitude that religion should have no place in civil affairs.

Collins English dictionary

Secularism denotes the separation of religion from the state and abolishing discrimination between religions. That is a person’s spiritual or philosophical beliefs are their own affair and should be free from outside pressure or interference. People should be free to practise their religion, agnosticism or atheism as they see fit (provided it does not harm others). It expresses the equality of believers and non-believers.

Thus it is possible, for example, to be a secular, Christian, Moslem or Jewish socialist.

A secular state means no public funds would be given to any religious schools nor would any specific religion be preferentially taught although there might be the study of religions as a branch of philosophy.

The religious instruction of children into one faith is indoctrination as they are being deprived of choice – some Baptists kind of believe this and they only baptise adults.

State has no place in personal spiritual development. Opposition to state religion.

There are virtually no truly secular states. Interestingly, the writers of the US constitution firmly rejected any idea of a state religion and the final document omits any reference to god. The US state officially derives its authority from the people not God whatever George Bush and other American Christian fundamentalists may say.

Misguided socialist approaches to religion

Since Marx’s time socialists have wrestled with the issue of how to relate to religion and religious believers. This history has produced a number of misguided approaches to this important question:

• 1) State atheism, crackdowns on religions. This happened in Enver Hoxha’s ‘socialist’ Albania. It also happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He later ensured that the Russian Orthodox Church became an arm of the state.
• 2) Separation of church and state but secularism used as stick to beat religious minorities e.g. the banning of the Muslim hijab in France was supported by some sections of left as a defence of ‘secularism’. The correct approach was to support the right of Muslim women to freedom of choice over what they wear (or don’t wear) in opposition to the capitalist state and the religious authorities.
• 3) Sections of the left, including within the SSP, oppose a Secularist position. Thus at our last 3 national conferences motions favouring secularism in our education system have failed to be discussed or have been voted down. Arguments against us promoting secularism usually take the following forms:
  • i) Given that some religions have their own schools funded by the state e.g. Catholicism it is discriminatory or even racist to refuse funding to other religions e.g. Islam.
  • ii) State schools are in practice Protestant schools and parents who subscribe to other religions are perfectly entitled to support for schools that are based on their religion.
  • iii) A distorted anti-imperialism/cultural relativism – i.e. we mustn’t judge other cultures. Some of those who attack secularism defend “Islam” to try and be seen as defending Muslims.

    However Lenin argued that all societies have ‘two cultures’ a democratic progressive culture and a repressive, backward culture and socialists must distinguish between the two. Therefore defend Muslims from state oppression and Islamophobia but don’t sweep disagreements under carpet.
    What is often proposed instead is a variety of multiculturalism or religious equality whereby every religion has the right to state support for its own ‘faith’ school.

    Note: what is not proposed is the equality of believers and non-believers i.e. secularism.

    Multiculturalism is a means whereby the capitalist state divides the working class and manages social conflict. In place of class struggle, religious, cultural, or ethnic groups are supposed to compete with each other for the state’s favours.

  • iv) Some socialists inside and outside Iraq and Iran see Islamic regimes or even Islam itself as the main or as great an enemy as the UK/USA imperialism. This is a mistake.

Socialism and secularism in Scotland/UK today – what should we campaign for?

• Separation of church and state
• No state support for ‘faith’ schools
• No religious teaching in schools but the study of religions
• The abolition of the UK’s blasphemy laws.

All belief systems should be open to criticism. That doesn’t mean that all criticism is useful e.g. the Danish anti-Islamic cartoons which were merely insulting. The Blair government is seeking to extend the blasphemy laws from Christianity to cover other religions. This has been supported by the likes of George Galloway, the SWP and Respect in England on the grounds that it would give some legal protection against Islamophobia.

Socialists should oppose all attempts to divide the working class on the basis of religion. Class unity in this world is more important than agreement about the nature of the next world.

Socialists consistently demand the earthly equality of believers and non-believers. We campaign for a democratic, secular, republic.

Intelligent design?

On a clear autumn evening I watched the moon rising,
It was big, it was bright, in its heavenly place,
How clever we are, I thought, we’ve walked on you,
And behind us we’ve left footprints on your face.
No wind will blow there to ever remove them,
No one will build over that desolate place,
Till time ends they’re there, a giant leap for mankind,
The greatest exploit of a wandering race.

Aye, we are clever, there is no denying,
We soar higher than eagles on silvery wings,
We talk to each other though vast miles divide us,
Seems every new day some new marvel brings.
Yet, smart as we are, we are not far sighted,
Profit being all makes our actions unwise,
We plunder the earth, take from it its treasures,
Then poison the oceans, the land and the skies.

Cut back, said some sage ones, ignored by the leaders,
Who, asked what was needed, would always say, More.
And so we kept ripping the black oil, the dark coal,
And everything precious from Earth’s bounteous store.
But the Earth was a live thing, and being mistreated,
Ever so slowly it counter-attacked
Against the humans who, clever but greedy,
Just kept on taking and gave nothing back.

Time now grows short, the rainforests vanish,
The ice is fast melting as the temperatures rise,
Four horsemen show face, is their time upon us?
No place is there now for the spin doctors’ lies.
We must listen well to those who would tell us
The old path is done, and is now out of date,
For if we do not, our days may be numbered,
And extinction could well be our ultimate fate.

The seas will rise higher, proud cities will crumble,
Slow aeons will crawl by and wipe out all trace
Of the creature who, in a blink of time’s eyelid,
Moved from the caves and reached out into space.
No worldly hint will remain of our presence,
We treated Earth badly, were laid in our place,
But still on the moon, forlorn, weeps one last sign— ’Twas our cleverest trick—footprints on its face.

The vote at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis to support the police force and judicial system of the Northern State is dramatic evidence of the collapse of republican consciousness. Publication the week beforehand of the ombudsman’s report into police collusion with UVF paramilitaries in the murder of Catholic and Protestant workers, and the evidence that this was covered up by senior officers who refused to co-operate with the enquiry, shone an embarrassing spotlight on what was at issue. That, after all this, and the acknowledgement that no one would be held accountable, the Ard Fheis voted by around 95% to support the re-branded RUC and the judicial system that protects it, is proof, if further proof were needed, that Sinn Fein has no progressive role to play in Irish politics.

This is a damning judgement that is both inescapable and yet many who think of themselves as an alternative seem oblivious to the facts. During the series of meetings preceding the Ard Fheis Gerry Adams felt able to say to his critics that ‘he was not the enemy.’ In doing so he called the bluff of many critics, confident he would not be contradicted, or if he was, confident that any affirmative answer would be widely seen as taking opposition too far. In effect his critics were disarmed. Those few inside the hall voting against the leadership motion were keen to assert their loyalty and avowed that they would rally round the leadership after the vote was taken, even if it meant the motion was passed. In effect they were declaring continuing support for a leadership that was declaring support for the PSNI. Their support for the latter is therefore one step removed but nonetheless real for all that.

Among the socialist organisations there are many who have sought a united ‘left’ that includes Sinn Fein. Will this those involved now support the PSNI or will the question simply be ignored? The extent of confusion among those opposed to Sinn Fein’s latest capitulation to imperialism was evident in rumours that republican opponents wanted Eamonn McCann of the SWP to stand as an anti-PSNI candidate. These people are either ignorant of the SWP’s call for unity with Sinn Fein in the South or just don’t get it.

McCann has however made it clear that opposing the PSNI is not something he will emphasise – as open an admission of political bankruptcy as one can imagine. For this sort of left having to pay a couple of hundred pounds in water charges (the issue of privatisation has always been secondary to those demanding non-payment) is more important an issue, more fundamental a political question, than the murder of workers by agents of the State.

These harsh judgements are only a reflection of the harsher reality exposed by the latest report into State collusion with sectarian murder. The objective role of those who seek to minimise its importance is unwittingly to conspire in the cover up.

Before the Ard Fheis

There are four aspects to the collapse of republicanism evident in the ‘debate’ on policing. For many republican supporters the question has been posed in terms of the ability to report petty, and not so petty, crime to the police. In the Inside Politics TV show on the day of the debate Martin McGuinness said he didn’t want to see republicans dancing on the head of a pin explaining why people couldn’t report crimes such as rape to the police.

In fact it has been Sinn Fein who has insisted that political opposition had to entail complete non-cooperation over such matters, an echo of their quasi-religious non-recognition of the State from years ago when they refused to file for permission to march, refused to stand in elections and refused to recognise courts when arrested and charged.

Of course political support for the police is not about reporting ‘ordinary’ crime. Socialists oppose the system of exploitation built around the wages system but this no more stops us accepting wages than opposition to finance capital stops us taking out a mortgage to buy a house. Similarly non-support for the police is not about failing to report burglaries in order to claim insurance (very few people actually believe the PSNI will catch thieves) or seeking to prevent the arrest of rapists. It is about failing to provide political support for the inevitable political role that the police perform as defenders and servants of the State.

This is what Sinn Fein has signed up to. In letters to The Irish News before the Ard Fheis correspondents wrote that Sinn Fein will ‘critically engage’ with the police. What rubbish! The demand from the British, US and Irish governments and the DUP was not for ‘critical engagement’, it was for support for the PSNI. This is what the Ard Fheis motion proposed and this is what the party has promised to deliver. This includes, but is not limited to, participation in the local District Policing Partnerships and the Policing Board. Their role in this will be to legitimise and provide cover for the actions of the PSNI, which will remain under the control of the British.

Supporting the police will mean collaborating in all the activities that the police have always got up to, including repressing dissent and opposition. Day to day actions will be under the ‘operational control of the Chief Constable’ and overall the British government will control strategy. For Martin McGuinness to claim that Sinn Fein will ‘boss’ policing or for Adams to claim that they will put ‘manners’ on them is simply laughable. Even if the Policing Board had any real power to enforce change how would Sinn Fein achieve it with two or three members out of nineteen? The police ombudsman can expose what is already more or less known but the fact that little or nothing happens afterwards only demonstrates that things continue very much as before.

Sinn Fein has claimed that MI5 has now been excluded from ‘civic policing’, thanks to them, but as one wag pointed out, MI5 was never going to be involved in ‘civic policing.’ The idea that MI5 will not continue to run informers and will not also have agents in the PSNI to protect them is too naive to be taken seriously. Sinn Fein even failed to get rid of plastic bullets and despite a ceasefire, decommissioning and virtual disbandment of the IRA is still ‘negotiating’ on ‘on the runs’ – republicans facing charges from the days of armed conflict who are still unable to return home. What was glaringly evident at the Ard Fheis was how little Sinn Fein could claim in order to justify the switch to supporting the PSNI.

The erection of a large building in Co. Down to house MI5 is a much more important indicator of the role MI5 will play than the meaningless separation of policing from MI5 that Sinn Fein has claimed.

Sinn Fein got nothing for its promise to support the PSNI.

Even its deal to receive a DUP promise to enter power sharing with them was withdrawn. Their decision to go ahead regardless was humiliating.

None of this was enough to generate an opposition inside Sinn Fein. The vote against the motion did not even have to be counted.

The journalist covering the Ard Fheis for The Irish Times recorded that it had all the signs of a rubber stamping exercise. Another contrasted it with the 1986 decision to abandon abstentionism, noting that there was never any doubt about the result.

Commentators such as these tend to put this down to a combination of the military style discipline of the Sinn Fein organisation and the political skills of the leadership and its party machine. These are undoubtedly factors of some importance but they cannot be the whole explanation.

There exists a wide layer of republican supporters opposed to or unhappy with the decision. These include people who have risked their lives and could not be accused of lacking physical courage. Unfortunately what they have lacked is a political foundation to their opposition, a positive framework to articulate a principled position that does not rely on wrapping the green flag round oneself and declaring fidelity to the patriot dead. Appealing to the dead generations who did not fight and die to support a rebranded enemy police force is all very well, but it fails one decisive test. If the dead generations would have opposed the current leadership why do the majority of survivors, who could so easily have also been among the dead, now support the Sinn Fein leadership?

Republican martyrs might not have fought for support for the police force of the Northern State but then neither, until relatively recently, did the current leadership. The debate, such as it was, between the Sinn Fein leadership and its opponents was not won by Adams and co. because of their superior political skills. Even a cursory examination of Gerry Adams’ Ard Fheis speech reveals a miserable and sorry platform that only a demoralised organisation could endorse.

Police ombudswoman confirms state collusion with UVF

Speech

His speech was an admission of failure. He gave a significant section of it over to the revelations published by the police ombudsman and then to how he had given Tony Blair a file on collusion ten years ago. So what happened then Gerry? Did Tony stop the collusion?

He rhetorically asked the question – who authorised the killings? – but absolved Blair of all responsibility. In fact he declared that it was Blair’s responsibility to sort things out! Who’s more powerful than the British prime minister he asked, as if Tony just had to show some interest for the terrorising of Irish workers to stop. This and the continual reference to collusion in the past tense amounted to Sinn Fein joining in the cover-up, which has as its main theme that all this collusion is in the past and is now over.

It is absolutely necessary for Adams to claim this because Sinn Fein is now a supporter of the system that has been exposed. It has now hitched its reputation to that of the PSNI and must now claim that it will ensure such things will not happen again. The main responsibility for preventing it however, according to Gerry, apparently lies with the same people – the British State – responsible for it in the first place – I also told Mr Blair that British policy in Ireland has to change.

Oh really? So the centuries old Irish question is to be solved by asking the Brits politely to behave!? Only slightly less fanciful is the idea that the Irish government will also help clean up the mess by acting as ‘equals’ when meeting the British.

Apparently it is Sinn Fein which will help them do this despite Sinn Fein complaining only weeks before the Ard Fheis that Bertie Ahern was hardly speaking to them.

How a tiny State that has already surrendered part of its territory to imperialism is expected to reverse policy and stand up for itself is left unanswered. Adams in his speech criticised previous Irish governments for ignoring murderous attacks by British agents within the State’s jurisdiction, but now expects them to stand up for Irish citizens outside their jurisdiction.

Adams performed the rhetorical trick much used by loyalist spokesmen (who get away with it because of a compliant media) of using the arguments of the opposition but then drawing the contrary conclusion. Only complete confidence in being unchallenged could allow one to use the ombudsman’s report on collusion as material in a speech in support of the PSNI.

It was reported that while Adams appealed to the head (!) Martin McGuinness appealed to the heart of his audience, which must explain his incredible statement that the IRA ‘had fought the British army to a standstill’, which invites the question why the British Army didn’t call a ceasefire, decommission and disband.

To this pathetic performance the opposition could only declare how awful the decision would be – ‘against the ideals and principles of Sinn Fein’ – but then contradict their own claims by saying that they would still support the party regardless! If opposition speakers were in the least bit serious about their arguments then no reconciliation with the Adams leadership or continued membership of the Sinn Fein party would be possible. That they did not say so and did not walk out, as the majority of delegates must have known, meant that no one in the hall could have been convinced of the seriousness of what they had to say. Adams, for them, had to be right to claim that the decision to support the police was only yet another question of tactics.

If support for the PSNI was a betrayal of republican principles then opposition to it must have meant a declaration of opposition to the leadership. Unfortunately the ‘opposition’ fell back on a bedrock principle that ironically lies behind many of those who supported the motion – trust in the leadership. This in itself is a reflection of the fact that the republican movement is a defeated movement and cannot be saved or reclaimed. A vibrant, confident and critical movement would fight for its principles, not surrender them on the demand of its enemies.

Opposition

All this goes some way to explaining the failure of republicans to build an opposition to the policy of the leadership of Sinn Fein. Many have so far failed or refused to accept that opposition to the policy of the leadership means opposition to the leadership itself, and opposition to the Sinn Fein party. Just as those inside the hall performed the role of loyal opposition, many outside have played the role of a loyal public opposition. Even those declaring an intention to stand against Sinn Fein in the elections are doing so, they say, in order to get Sinn Fein to ‘see sense’ and to win them back. In effect their standing is only a form of lobbying which fails to educate Sinn Fein supporters on the enormity of the party’s betrayal and fails to put on the agenda the necessary tasks of creating an alternative.

The confusion of the opposition can be seen by the fact that such opposition includes some who still support the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement despite support for the police being written into this agreement and despite all the subsequent retreats that inevitably flowrd from this capitulation. Indeed the qualitative degeneration of the republican movement from an anti-imperialist one (with all the limitations to it that socialists have argued) to a pro-imperialist one can be dated to the original Ard Fheis decision in to support the Good Friday Agreement. This included acceptance of the unionist veto; the legitimacy of the Northern State and imperialist intervention; deletion of articles two and three of the Southern State’s constitution and pursuit of office inside a Stormont regime. Those for whom supporting the police is a bridge too far have to explain why all this was not.

They need to do this because opposition to the police and opposition to imperialism can only be grounded on opposition to the Good Friday Agreement, and its successor in the St Andrews Agreement. Such opposition requires elaborating a democratic alternative and a means of organising support for it. It means a review of the failure of the republican struggle and a determination not to suffer defeat again, not as a result of any act of will, but because of political lessons learned.

Unfortunately the republican opposition shares many of the basic assumptions that inform Sinn Fein. Ultimately the failure of Sinn Fein is a failure of nationalism and their opposition to seeing politics in class terms. A Marxist analysis tells us that the class interest of the various parties is primary and explains the interests of the British; why its involvement is accurately called imperialist, and why the various parties of the Irish capitalist class have supported it against all democratic opposition. Because class interests are primary the struggle for Irish democracy is primarily a class struggle involving all the issues facing the Irish working class. The old refrain of ‘labour must wait’ has time and time again proved self-defeating for republicans for this very reason. To address this glaring weakness the republican programme would thus have to be much more than simply a republican one, it would have to be socialist. But all the past formulations of socialist republicanism or republican socialism have tried to gloss over this fundamental choice. Left republican have always been just that – republicans with left wing opinions but a republican programme devoid of class content which uses left phrases to promote nationalist priorities.

Sinn Fein has quietly justified each surrender with the perspective of gaining political power in government North and South.

Opponents can argue that they will always be a minority in the North and doubt their ability to ever be a majority in the South, and point out that while pursuing these pipe dreams they meanwhile drop everything that makes them republican, until now there is nothing left. These objections are true but are not fundamental. The fundamental truth about Sinn Fein’s strategy is that the class interests of British imperialism means it doesn’t give a damn about the democratic rights of the Irish people and will no more feel compelled to recognise now an Irish majority in favour of its leaving than it did ninety odd years ago. The Irish capitalist class seeks no more than political stability under the tutelage of the EU and US multinationals and is also opposed to the democratic aspirations and activity of the Irish people. Its State exists to defend their class interests and cannot be used as a weapon against imperialism. Rather it exists to defend the imperialist settlement reached in 1921 and crush its opponents, something it has been doing regularly for a long time.

The truth is that the democratic aspirations once embodied by republicanism have had the context in which they could be achieved transformed by partition, the development of the capitalist economy in Ireland and the international subordination of the whole island to multinational capital. Whoever thinks national liberation means anything outside of socialist revolution at an international level is refusing to acknowledge the profound transformation Irish society has undergone. The confusion and degeneration of republican consciousness displayed in the proceedings of the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis is a result of failure to do what Gerry Adams says republicans must do – think big. Adams has no idea how big that think has to be or the transformation in republican politics that is required.

This is true for the opposition.

Traditional republicanism must change even more fundamentally than that evidenced in the Ard Fheis, but its transformation must be towards socialism, otherwise the failures of republicanism that led to this sorry conference will arise again and again as it has so often in the history of Irish republicanism.

What impresses many sincere, and not so sincere, supporters of Sinn Fein is the growth in their party.

The opposition, they remind themselves, is small and divided.

The alternative however is being prepared and is being prepared by the actions of Sinn Fein themselves. The reason why so many have opposed support for the PSNI is not primarily because these are republicans who oppose the police on principle, but because the PSNI and its actions have created republicans. The PSNI will continue to produce opponents but now with the more and more open support of Sinn Fein. In this way Sinn Fein will demonstrate to more and more nationalist workers that their hopes are not served but obstructed by this party and that if they want to advance they will be compelled to seek an alternative.

The second part of building an alternative will require the intervention of socialists over what sort of alternative this will be. A socialist movement that abstains and treats the question of imperialist domination as a republican one will fail these workers and fail itself.

The future opportunities created by this decision of Sinn Fein will only help move the cause of Irish workers forward if socialists can contribute to combating the collapse of republican consciousness and clarify the fight for an alternative. This involves drawing a clear line between our politics and those of Sinn Fein, and arguing for a democratic, socialist political alternative to this party and opposition to those who either want to remain dissidents, yet remain members of the republican family or seek to repeat the mistakes of the past with the pursuit of yet another disastrous military agenda.

The coming elections North and South present an opportunity to put this alternative. Unfortunately there is no evidence that the left intends to point out that only revolutionary change could possibly prevent future State sponsorship of sectarian murder.

There is no evidence it will present a revolutionary and anti-imperialist platform that addresses all this confusion. Socialist Democracy exists to put forward this political programme and will continue to argue against false and failed reformist conceptions whether peddled by Sinn Fein or their ‘left’ suitors.

The suffragette movement was a bourgeois movement

I’m a Marxist not a feminist, I stand for the liberation of all workers

The socialist movement played no significant role in the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s, which proves the Marxists really do not care about women

Historically, Marxism hasn’t recognised the oppression of women as a sex. It is only concerned with the oppression of women as workers.

I’m a socialist, I believe in equality for all workers. Positive discrimination is just discrimination against men

What is feminism?

Many of the above statements have been made in discussions and debates around socialism, feminism and Marxism. The SSP has been a microcosm of many of these discussions since its conception. There has been a battle regarding ideology around feminism, women’s liberation and oppression but at times the debate appears to lack praxis, the praxis of theory into practice.

No doubt women are changing. We need an appropriate word which will register this fact. The term feminism has been foisted upon us. It will do as well as any other word….It mean’s women’s struggle for freedom.

(New Review, 1914, paper of American Socialist Party)

What do we mean when we call someone a feminist or refer to feminism? Why does it have so many different meanings? And why can it be seen as a positive expression of liberation politics or a term of abuse? And more importantly what is socialism’s relationship to feminism?

Feminism, means many things to many people but perhaps the best way to explain feminism is to see it not as a theory, a practice or ideology but almost as part of anthropology regarding women’s position in society. Feminism is the naming of women’s oppression, women’s rights, the women’s question etc. This was first posed by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1790 in her book The Vindication On the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft named the problem, she described women’s relationship to men and to society as oppression, that women are infantilised, sexualised and ignored, they are denied their full human potential by lack of economic power, the vote or say in their own or anyone’s else’s lives. Many of Wollstonecraft’s ideas and questions were taken up and raised in the French Revolution and many women and men discussed her ideas. Indeed Wollstonecraft moved to Paris during the revolution.She was hailed by many liberals and revolutionaries as a true visionary.

Wollstonecraft brought the vindication of women’s rights into the liberal and utopian socialist movement and since then women’s rights have been discussed and debated as a moral, political, ideological, scientific and social problem.

Feminism is best explained (crudely) as a spectrum between radical and reformist. Feminists of all kinds oscillate on the spectrum between radical and reformist.

Feminists who describe themselves as radical feminists are the feminists who wish to change the system, have a radical approach to the world. However radical feminists rarely agree with one another. They are often diametrically opposed to one another. The two main spectrums are materialist feminists (usually Marxist but may be anarchistic) and the political feminists, who see patriarchy (men) as the problem.

Radical feminists share an understanding that society and even the class system need to be overthrown, however they may differ (greatly) on how to solve the problem. Political feminists are often wrongly described as bourgeois feminists (e.g. Andrea Dworkin etc). Materialist feminists want to defeat the class system with the working class; political feminists want to defeat the domination of men or the patriarchy by feminist action and may see little role for men.

Reformist feminists want to reform society to make it better for women, They can be liberal feminist (sometimes known as bourgeois feminists) who want to compete with men and have what men have within class society. On the other side, are economist feminists (socialist feminists fit into this categorically when calling for reforms), who want economic and legislative reforms to address women’s oppression.

The problem is that rarely does any feminist fit into any one category all of the time but the key issue is how we are influenced by the ideas and solutions in addressing women’s oppression.

A materialist feminist may be involved in an economistic demand for equal pay or a woman managing director (liberal feminist) in supporting a campaign against men’s violence against women (political feminism).

Many comrades dismiss feminism on the basis of coming across feminist ideas and/or practice they disagree with. Instead, the methodology should be – if you have identified that women are oppressed and something has to change that is identifying with feminism. The real dilemma is how do we address this oppression and bring about women’s liberation? Some people, usually men feel more comfortable describing themselves as pro-feminist.

Marxism & Feminism

However to understand politically the ideas of feminism i.e. the acknowledgement of women’s oppression and the need for women’s liberation, we must first understand it historically and materially. Revolutionary Marxists in the past (though not always consistently) have waged an unremitting struggle within the broad working-class movement in order to struggle for women’s liberation. Marxists were not only involved in raising the consciousness of women to recognise their oppression and to demand their liberation but to educate the advanced working class to an understanding of the significance of the struggles by women for full equality, emancipation and for the liberation from the centuries-old degradation of domestic slavery. Throughout the past 160 years the struggle has been more intense than at other times.

At the time of Marx, debates were held about women’s liberation and oppression. In Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848 he stated:

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family based? On capital, on private gain……The bourgeois sees in his wife, a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

Marx identified that women’s oppression was based on her relationship to production but also her relationship to men and to the family. There were many debates with the utopian socialists about this subject before the Communist Manifesto. Fourier and Owen were fervent champions of the emancipation of women but they saw it as a moral question rather than a materialist question. Marx explained that the oppression of women lay in its relationship to their role in the family and the system of production, based on private property and a society divided between a class that owned the wealth and a class that produced it. Marx (and Engels later in The Family, Private Property and the State) identified the role of the family in perpetuating the oppression of women.

Marx and Engels explained how the abolition of private property would provide a material basis from transferring to society, as a whole, all those social responsibilities borne by the individual family – the care of the old and sick, feeding, clothing and educating the young. Relieved of these burdens, Marx pointed out, the masses of women would be able to break the bonds of domestic servitude, and they would exercise their full human potential as creative and productive – not just reproductive – members of society.

Marx gave a solution. Just like Dorothy’s red shoes, the solution was there all the time, the solution being the working class, created by the capitalist system, which could become the force to overcome class society. However the wish wasn’t just for a better society but to begin to organise how to bring it about. In bringing about a communist transformation of society, women would be liberated. However women would only be liberated if they were organised and involved in their own liberation, as part of the liberation of the class.

In the First International there was a debate whether women should be allowed to join. Marx himself presented a motion in 1864 to the General Council that special women’s branches be organised in factories, industries and cities where there were a large concentration of women workers. He made it clear that this should not cut across building mixed branches as well.

However the next year a massive row broke out in the German section of the First International between the Marxists and the non-Marxists. In 1865, and for twenty years following, the German SDP was divided between the followers of Lassalle (the reformists) on one side and the Marxists under Bebel and Liebknecht on the other. There were sharp differences on organisation and ideology but one of the major debates was on women. The Lassalleans were opposed to demanding equal rights for women. Their demand was women should not be forced to work for a wage, that their rightful role was in the home with the family and that a man should have a family wage to support his wife and children. Liebknecht and Bebel argued ferociously that women had the right to be economically independent from men and to be liberated from the family. The SDP’s original demand was for full political rights for adults which left the demand open as to whether women were indeed considered adults or not.

The decisive arguments that won the victory for the demands were published in 1883 in Bebel’s Woman and Socialism and Engels’ The Family, Private Property and State published 1884. In 1891 the SDP demanded political rights for all, regardless of sex, and the abolition of every law which discriminates against women in any way.

The SDP in 1896 organised women into autonomous groups in order women could be educated and organised to concentrate on specific campaigns particularly political equality, insurance for childbirth, protective legislation for women workers, education and security for children. Until 1908 women were banned from joining political organisations in Germany but women could join societies. Women within the SDP had proportional representation from their societies and committees to the National Committee of the SDP.

Whilst the German SDP were debating whether women were adults or not or had the right to be independent both economically and sexually – the debate echoed around the world, particularly in the demand for the vote, the right for women’s franchise. (This article cannot properly address the suffragette movement)

The year before women won the vote (well those with property and over 30) in Britain in 1918, women in Russia went on strike under the demands of Bread for our children, bring home our husbands and sons from the trenches. Indeed it was International Women’s Day of 1917 that was the first day of the Russian Revolution. Women had organised themselves as women, despite being workers and Bolsheviks. Before the revolution, demands such as contraception, the right to abortion and to divorce were not common demands, however by 1918 they had become part of Soviet legislation.

Alexandra Kollontai, the only women on the Bolshevik Central Committee toured throughout the Soviet Union with her comrades Inessa Armand, Emma Goldman, Clara Zetkin and many others, in arguing women were central to the revolution and their own emancipation. Previously in 1913, Kollontai had organised a day long lecture in St Petersburg on the Women’s Question and all the organisers and speakers were arrested for immorality. In Britain, the British Communist Party organised a Kollontai lecture where working class women queued up in their hundreds to hear of the reforms of the Russian Revolution, though many believed they would be told how to practice birth control and be given Russian contraceptives.

In 1921 the Communist International made it obligatory for membership, that communist parties throughout the world had set up women’s bureaus and there had to be at least one full time member of staff to co-ordinate the work. There was an International Women’s Secretariat to oversee the work with six monthly conferences with representation from all sections to discuss the work with women and demands to put forward to support women’s liberation. Unfortunately the rise of Stalinism put an end to the progressive nature of this communist tradition and women were not to organise themselves so radically for another 50 years.

Conclusion

This article is in response to the confusion of whether, as socialists or Marxists, we can identify with feminism. To suggest that we do not is ahistorical. It does not fit the praxis of our theories about class society and human liberation.

Surely it cannot be argued that women, currently, are fully equal to men and even if they were, are they so liberated they can reach their full human potential? No sane socialist or Marxist would suggest such a thing. The debate to reject feminism in the socialist and Marxist movement is a false one, denying uncomfortable truths and realities. Many male socialists do not enjoy the accusation that they may wittingly or unwittingly benefit from women’s oppression and many female socialists do not want special treatment or to be victimised because of their gender, all of which can be addressed in a vibrant socialist organisation with debate, discussion and trying very hard to solve problems when they arise. The debate now needs to be about how do we address the specific issues of women’s oppression and exploitation and more importantly how does a party like the Scottish Socialist Party deal with feminist action and identification as part of the working class movement to change the world.

A statement issued by Hands Off the People of Iran campaign

We recognise that there is an urgent need to establish a principled solidarity campaign with the people of Iran. The contradictions between the interests of the neo-conservatives in power in the USA and the defenders of the rule of capital in the Islamic Republic has entered a dangerous new phase.

US imperialism and its allies are intent on regime change from above and are seriously considering options to impose this – sanctions, diplomatic pressure, limited strikes or perhaps bombing the country back to the stone age. In Iran, the theocracy is using the international outcry against its nuclear weapons programme to divert attention away from the country’s endemic crisis, deflect popular anger onto foreign enemies and thus prolong its reactionary rule.

The pretext of external threats has been cynically used to justify increased internal repression. The regime’s security apparatus has been unleashed on its political opponents, workers, women and youth. The rising tide of daily working class anti-capitalist struggles has been met with arrests, the ratification of new anti-labour laws and sweeping privatisations. Under the new Iranian government, military fascist organisations are gaining political and military strength, posing an ominous threat to the working class and democratic opposition.
Paradoxically, the US/UK invasion of Iraq has actually increased the regional influence of Iran’s rulers – it lead to the election of the pro-Iranian Shia government currently in power in Baghdad.

This means that any support from the anti-war movement for the reactionaries who currently govern Iran and repress its people is in effect indirect support for the occupation government in Iraq.

We recognise that effective resistance to this war can only mean the militant defence of the struggles of the working class in Iran and of the rising social movements in that country. We want regime change – both in Iran and in the imperialist countries.

But we know that change must come from below – from the struggles of the working class and social movements – if it is to lead to genuine liberation.

We call on all anti-capitalist forces, progressive political groups and social organisations to join with the activists of the Iranian left to both oppose the imperialism’s plans and to organise practical solidarity with the growing movement against war and repression in Iran headed by the working class, women, students and youth.

Our campaign demands:

• No to imperialist war! No to the theocratic regime!
• The immediate and unconditional withdrawal of US/
  UK troops from the Gulf region!
• Opposition to Israeli expansionism and aggression!
• Support to all working class and progressive struggles in Iran against the poverty and repression!
• Support for socialism, democracy and workers’ control in Iran!
• For a nuclear free Middle East!

If you support the struggle for an Iran free of the oppressive clerical regime, but oppose the war plans of the imperialists – join us!

Email
Hands Off People of Iran site

Every day the European press and media publishes information about plans for a military attack against Iran. Although many of these articles repeat previous ‘revelations’, there is no doubt that the threat of limited or extensive military action by the US cannot be ruled out. However inside Iran many ordinary people, although weary of the threat of war, seem more concerned with their daily struggles in a religious, capitalist state. The threat of sanctions has already increased the inflation rate to above 15%, while government officials still insist the annual rate of inflation will hover around 13% by the end of the current Iranian year on March 20th.

While supporters of US style regime change who are in exile hail sanctions, Ahmad Zahedi Langaroudi, a young activist/writer summarises the current effects of sanctions:

Sanctions have sunk the country into unprecedented stagnation and depression with direct consequences for Iranian society’s social and moral crises. Iran is today facing total economic devastation and dispersion. While the government is strengthened by the sanctions and gives it an excuse to spend on military exercises, ordinary people face serious economic pressures. The Iranian working class can hardly pay for its most basic needs and one can say with certainty that they just survive on eating plain bread (with nothing else). With no exaggeration this generation of workers must be facing one of the worst times in our country’s history. They are sacked in tens of thousands as factories follow ‘economic adjustment’ policies and the only way the state has found to stop their protests and rebellion is to make them drug addicts.

According to the spokesman for national accounts of Iran, unemployment reached 11% during March-June and 10.2% in June-September 2006. Most economists put the figure nearer to 15-18% amongst male job seekers. All factions of the regime are keen to pursue the ‘new’ interpretation’ of article 44 of the Islamic constitution which will allow further privatisation of what was deemed to be ‘major industries vital to national interests’. Tens of thousands of Iranian workers will loose their jobs and over the last week many left wing bloggers have concentrated on renewed attempts by the regime to precipitate the wholesale privatisation of major industries as well as the consequences of such policies. One young blogger reminds readers that contrary to claims by the supreme clerical leader, Ayatollah Khamneii, that: privatisation will create a national will to generate wealth in reality it will only increase poverty and devastation for the workers and huge fortunes for factory owners who will buy state owned factories, sack the work force and sell the land of privatised industries. The government’s plans to sell off 80% of its stake in a range of state-run industrial companies in the banking, media, transportation and mineral sectors were so far reaching they amounted to a reversal of one of its own economic ‘principles’ as declared in the Iranian constitution.

According to the Islamic government’s own statistics, 7,467,000 Iranians live below the poverty line. The poorest sections of the population are in the countryside where 9.2% lived with incomes well below the poverty line in the Iranian year 1385 (March 2005-6). In the same year the income of the top 10% earners was 17 times that of the bottom 10%.

Despite populist promises, such as the fair distribution of the oil income, the current Iranian president has presided over one of the most pro-capitalist governments Iran has seen since the launch of the era of ‘reconstruction’ in 1988, when Iran first accepted IMF loans. Every spring the IMF sends a commission to Tehran to verify the country’s compliance with global capital’s requirements and every year by mid-summer the Central Bank and the government propose further privatisation in the industrial, banking and service sectors – bringing further misery to tens of thousands of workers, the victims of the subsequent job losses and casualisation. Of course Iranian workers fight daily against these policies, through demonstrations, sit ins and occupations of factories. However the anti war coalition in the UK has paid no attention to their protests and their demands for fear of losing a few Islamists in the UK.

Over the last few weeks, young bloggers in Iran have also addressed the issue of the collapse of ‘morality’ in Iran’s Islamic Republic. Prostitution, drug addiction, export of under aged sex workers to Gulf states are not usually associated with theocratic regimes, yet 28 years after coming to power, the realities of life in Iran contradict the stereotype of such states. Unprecedented corruption means that state officials and at times senior clerics are involved in trafficking of drugs or prostitution. One student blogger refers to unprecedented rise in drug addiction among youth and blames the regime for deliberately encouraging drug addiction as a way to avoid addressing political discontent.

The student groups in Iran are also busy organising a demonstration for International Women’s Day on 8th March. For the last 28 years the Iranian government has tried to force women in Iran to cover their hair. However a recent survey carried out by the paper Etemad Melli in Tehran shows that less than 5.5% of those questioned considered ‘the headscarf or hejab important or very important for the health of society’ . The wearing of the hejab was enforced by Ayatollah Khomeini in March 1979 and the protests planned for 8th March 2007 are likely to be amongst the most important manifestations of the failure of the religious state to influence the generation born since 1979, which today counts as more than 70 % of the population.

According to another blogger, the student movement of the 1990s was influenced by liberal ideology with illusions about Western democracy.

However the total failure of the ‘reformist’ faction of the regime, as well as the disastrous consequences of the US invasion of Iraq, have radicalised sections of the student/youth movement although inevitably it has also lead to forced exile for some student activists.

The Iranian state represses any dissent

The slogans raised at student protests in December 2006 summarise the feeling of the radicalised youth towards the issue of war, US interference and the current regime in Iran. The slogans included: Socialism or Barbarism; Students, Workers, Teachers – Unite and Fight; Freedom for political prisoners and The way to human salvation, annihilation of the Taleban (students often refer to the Iranian regime as the Taleban).

The response of the government to all dissent has been to close down newspapers, arrest activist and ban websites. The latest victim of repression is a website associated with another faction of the Islamic regime. The site Baztab was closed on Feb 19th for posting video footage showing Ahmadinejad watching a female dance performance at the recent Asian Games in Qatar. This is in breach of Iran’s prohibition on women dancing in front of men, exposing once more the hypocrisy of Iran’s Islamic leaders.

The workers movement and the student movement inside Iran inspired us to set up the Hands Off the People of Iran campaign. We have tried to remain faithful to their principle slogan: No to Imperialist war , No to Iran’s Islamic Regime.

We are trying to support the struggles of Iranian workers, students and women against war, against the neo liberal economic policies of the Iranian government and against imposition of medieval religious laws by the theocratic state in Iran. We will be holding regular meetings with direct contact to Iran so that we can hear the genuine anti war movement inside Iran. No doubt any military attack, however limited, will only strengthen the regime and the most reactionary forces inside Iran. We cannot let it happen; we cannot let down Iran’s workers and students.

One year on
after the wind subsided
and the floods disappeared
there was still a scene
reminiscent of some battle zone
with dilapidated houses
piles of debris lying there
upturned and rusting cars
broken boats moored in-land
amid the empty, eerie desolation

One year on
he said New Orleans will be rebuilt
acknowledging that it had not
but it would be a great city again
in some indeterminate world of time

One year on
from all of this I had read
how the empire abroad expanded
how Camp Anaconda, north of Baghdad
occupying fifteen square miles
with two swimming pools
a miniature golf course, mini-theatre
planned to accommodate 20,000 soldiers

One year on
from all of this I had read
of the 234 military golf courses
around the American world
and of the Air Mobility Command
that flies servicemen and their families
in fleets of long-range C-17 Globemasters,
C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, C-19 Nightingales,
KC-135 Stratotankers and KG 10 Extenders
and for the more senior personnel there are
Learjets, Gulfstreams and Cessna Citation
luxury jets

One year on
desperate people in New Orleans
no longer look at the stars
or listen to the sounds of birds

One year on
after this neglect at home
I had heard about Camp Taji
once barracks to Saddam’s Republican Guards
how it has its own Burger King, Subway and Pizza Hut

One year on
after this neglect at home
I heard about the new Embassy Compound
in the heart of Baghdad
ten times bigger than other embassies
with its own sources of power and water

One year on
in New Orleans and several years on in Iraq
there’s still no water or power

One year on
as the poor scavenge in fear
in the rubble of New Orleans
new bases have been and are being
built
in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Kosovo,
Pakistan, India, Australia, Singapore,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam,
Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Senegal,
Ghana, Mali, Sierra Leone, Georgia,
Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan
and only God knows where else

One year on
if you are poor or homeless in America
you should join the military
doing their great job of extending freedom
and get a posting abroad
for that way you will get yourself a house.

Peak Oil & oil depletion

A debate is currently raging among oil professionals, and it splits into two camps. This debate focuses on a day called Peak Oil, the day in the future when oil production reaches an all-time high, but can never again reach that figure.

In one camp in this debate we have a group who predict that the Peak Oil ‘topping point’ will happen quite soon. This group tends to be made up of ex-oil industry professionals such as geologists, senior management, etc., and many belong to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO for short). Some look on them as scaremongers, others see them as whistle blowers.

In the other camp, we have a group who contend that the Peak Oil ‘topping point’ is much further in the future (2030-2040). This group is made up mainly of governments, oil companies, financial analysts, business journalists and the like.

At its most basic, the argument is about the amount of oil that remains to be recovered. The members of ASPO say one trillion barrels, and their opponents in the argument say two trillion. That difference has been described as seismic. If those who predict an early Peak Oil topping point are correct, peak oil will occur by the end of this decade.

The argument is over what is known as the Ultimate Recoverable Reserves, or to put it in the jargon of the oil business, the Ultimate. This figure is the total amount of oil that would ever be produced. It breaks down as oil already recovered plus proven reserves plus new discoveries.

Both sides of the argument are pretty much in agreement about the already recovered part of the equation. So, why are there such differences between the two camps in the amount of oil that is left? One big clue lies in a publication called the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, an annual report prepared by the giant oil company, which is regarded globally as the holy bible of the oil industry. If, however, you look really closely at the very small print which accompanies the review you will find the following:

The reserves figures shown do not necessarily meet the United States Securities and Exchange definitions and guidelines for determining proved reserves, nor necessarily represent BP’s view of proved reserves by country.

So, there you have it! BP don’t believe the figures in their own publication. With all the knowledge accumulated by BP over the company’s long history, they can do no better than come up with a report compiled using other people’s statistics. What has happened that makes one of the world’s major oil companies disown statistics published in their own review?

First, proven reserves! If you were to look at a bar chart detailing year by year the world’s proven oil reserves you would see that between 1985 and 1989 the big Middle East oil producers’ reserves increased by 300 billion barrels. This, not unnaturally, would lead you to believe that there must have been some pretty big oil discoveries during that period.

Not so—during this time span new discoveries amounted to only 10 million barrels.

Here’s what happened. Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia are all members of the oil producing cartel known as OPEC. In OPEC, production is by quota, that is, the more oil a country has the more it can produce, therefore the more they can earn by selling their oil.

All these nations, over this four year period, decided that there was more oil in their reserves than they had previously thought, and began increasing their reserves. It was a paper exercise with no scientific or geological input. They just said it was there and there it was. All this new oil came from already discovered oilfields. There’s a word for this sort of behaviour and the word is fraudulent.

Let’s fast forward now to January 2004, where we can find another clue which may lead us to believe that the amount of oil in the proven reserves may well be overestimated. Imagine the jolt that then chairman of Shell, Sir Philip Watts, delivered to investors when he announced the shock news that the company had over-estimated its reserves by more than 20 per cent, 23 per cent as it turned out. Several members of the then Shell board are currently the subject of lawsuits in the United States.

Now let’s move on to the US Geological Survey, which has a long and shady history concerning the amount of proven reserves and future discoveries. This is an organisation which has come out of the debate without any integrity whatsoever. Here’s why. In 1956, a world famous geologist, M. King Hubbert, polled 25 eminent contemporaries on what the ultimate figure for oil production in the United States would be.

Hubbert decided on 200 billion barrels, and using his own formula he estimated that oil production in the US would peak in 1971. Almost nobody believed him, and the US Geological Survey in particular was extremely virulent in its opposition to him, doing everything in its power to inflate the amount of oil left—by doing so they could make any problem go away. At one point they stated that there were 590 billion barrels in the United States’ ultimate recoverable reserves.

As it was, Hubbert was wrong. He was a whole year out! US oil production peaked in 1970, just one year prior to his prediction. Since then US oil production has steadily declined, as Hubbert predicted it would, despite the best efforts and employment of latest technologies to find new oil. Applying Hubbert’s formula on a wider scale does not make comfortable reading for the oil business.

Moving on to oil that is yet to be discovered leads us into the area in which the two camps have major disagreements. As stated earlier the members of ASPO say that there are one trillion barrels in proven reserves plus new discoveries. Those who opt for a later date for Peak Oil say two trillion. For the latter group there are many awkward questions.

If there are vast new fields to be discovered, where are they? Why is there no major increase in the amount of tankers being built to transport it? Why, if we are entering an era when oil production is on the increase, is there no major programme of refinery building to deal with the annually increasing demand for oil? Tanker capacity, refinery capacity and the global rig count all peaked in 1981, a quarter of a century ago!

For every barrel of oil now discovered, four are being consumed. The definition of a giant oil field is five hundred million barrels. In the year 2000 there were 16 discoveries of this size, in 2001 nine, in 2002 two, and in 2003 there were none.

Oil discovery actually peaked in 1965, the world’s biggest oil fields were discovered over 50 years ago, and the 1970’s excepted, there have been no huge oil provinces discovered since then. The last year in which more oil was discovered than we consumed was over 25 years ago, and since then there has been an overall and ongoing decline.

The planet has been scoured by geologists on foot, satellites have mapped it, and there are, according to the experts in ASPO, no more huge oil fields or provinces to be found. If they were there they would have been found by now. As BP’s former reserves coordinator, Francis Harper, told a conference on oil depletion at the Energy Institute in November 2004:

Worldwide, the frequency of finding giant oil provinces and super-giant oilfields has been declining for decades and will not be reversed. We’ve looked around the world many times. I’d say there is no North Sea out there. There certainly isn’t a Saudi Arabia.

the global number of oil rigs peaked in 1981

By extrapolating the ongoing downward trend of new oil discoveries those who argue for an early Peak Oil topping point estimate that there are only 150 billion barrels of new conventional oil to find, making for an ultimate recoverable reserve of approximately 2 trillion barrels at its highest. This differs significantly from those who favour a late topping point. TheUS Geological Survey, the same institution that rubbished Hubbert’s theory on America’s oil topping point carried out a world petroleum assessment in the year 2000 and came up with an ultimate recoverable reserve which varied between 2,248 billion to 3,986 billion barrels with a mean of 3,003 billion barrels, a difference between the camps of one trillion barrels of oil left to discover.

If the members of ASPO are not mistaken, then the markets are in a state of collective denial with no equivalent in the history of capitalism. As a society we have come to depend totally on oil. All our eggs are in one basket, and that basket could well be precariously The global number oil rigs peaked in 1981 Oil depletion balanced on the tail of an ostrich with its head buried firmly in the sand.

I’d like to take a short look at two dates in the history of oil production, paying particular attention to the years 1973 and 1979, because these two years may give an insight and foretaste of what’s to come when it dawns that the age of oil is in terminal decline. In 1973, following America’s direct involvement in the support of Israel during the Yom Kippur war, the OPEC countries, led by Saudi Arabia, imposed an embargo on oil in retaliation. The oil price subsequently more than doubled, and the effect was remarkable.

The embargo was actually quite short lived because the Saudis saw that there was the very real possibility of them creating a global economic depression that would cripple western economies, and thus damage their own, so out of self-interest they opened the taps again. The embargo, however, did create a severe economic recession. And all of this came to pass with a short-term reduction of only 9 per cent in the world’s oil supply.

The next great oil shock came in 1979, with the Iranian Revolution and the toppling of the Shah. It was prolonged by the outbreak of hostilities between Iran and Iraq in 1980. Again there was a hard economic recession. This crisis ended in 1981, and there were three main reasons for the price falling (it had reached $80 a barrel in today’s terms).

• Reason 1: The Saudis opened up their taps to increase production, helping to bring the price down.
• Reason 2: New oil from giant fields in more stable regions (incl. the North Sea) came on line.
• Reason 3: Large amounts of oil were released from government and corporate stockpiles.

Throughout this crisis, the total reduction in oil production was only 4 per cent, but remember these three reasons, because in any future oil supply crisis, these getout-of-jail cards will not be available because:

• 1: After Saudi oil production peaks, and some say it has already, they will not be able to increase the flow of oil.
• 2: There are no new super-giant oilfields or provinces left to be discovered.
• 3: Large stockpiles are no longer kept, the trend today being towards ‘just in time’ delivery.

Whenever the oil supply to the west is disrupted, or even perceived to be disrupted, something occurs in the stock markets for which there is a two word technical economic term. That term is known as widespread panic, and the real panic will come not with the day when oil production reaches its topping point, but some time after, when a significant number of oil dealers realise that ever-increasing demand is not being matched by ever-increasing production.

When it sinks in that we are now in an era of perpetually decreasing oil production, how the markets react will be crucial. It is quite possible, some say inevitable, that an economic depression could result from the dawning of awareness that the lifeblood of our society is in terminal decline. How bad could it be? Some believe it could be every bit as bad, or worse than, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, during which world trade fell by 62 per cent, millions were laid off, and in the discontent andanger which followed, fascism found a fertile breeding ground, ultimately leading to a war in which over 50 million lives were lost.

Among those at a conference on oil depletion in January 2005 in Edinburgh, sitting, listening and learning were five leading members of the British National Party. Their two great fantasies are the well known one of igniting a race war in this country, and also to take advantage of the chaos that might result in the wake of the day known as Peak Oil. As socialists we ignore the threat of oil depletion at our peril. Socialists must not sleepwalk into oil depletion.

There is one apocalyptic scenario concerning oil depletion, and that is that China, with no significant oil deposits of its own, will become increasingly involved in the Middle East as its economy expands. As one security analyst who preferred to remain anonymous put it.

I am afraid that over the years we will see China become more involved in Middle East politics. And they will want to have access to oil by cutting deals with corrupt dictatorships in the region, and perhaps providing components of weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missiles and other things they have been involved with, and that could definitely put them on a collision course with the United States.

Theoretically, oil depletion could be the spark that sets off WW III.

But what if those in ASPO are wrong? What if, in the face of the evidence, the day called Peak Oil will not occur until the 2030’s or 2040’s? Hallelujah, we’re saved. Sorry, but no. The fact is that the means to extract the oil is not there.

The oil industry has been feasting on the finds of the sixties, with an infrastructure funded in the 70’s.

In 1981, OPEC's Sheikh Yamani recognised the drive for alternatives to oil

Even if the oil is there, the capacity to get it to market is not. It would require investment of 2.4 trillion dollars over the next decade to bring it up to the required standard. In this scenario, I’ll leave you with a quote from Sheik Yamani when he cautioned OPEC about charging too high a price for oil. Though said in a different context, it could just as easily have been said regarding the lack of investment in infrastructure.

The stone age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for the lack of oil.

Energy alternatives

Let’s now consider alternatives to conventional oil. There is a lot more oil in the world, but it is what is known as unconventional oil. This is oil that does not flow easily, therefore drilling for it is not an option. Two of unconventional oil’s main sources are the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and huge deposits of what is known as shale oil in the United States.

Neither will fill the energy gap after peak oil, because the technologies needed to extract the oil at a rate needed to fill that gap do not exist, or are far too costly, both in the financial and environmental sense of the word. To extract bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands requires vast amounts of water, either to wash it in giant washing machines if it is mined on the surface, or to melt it underground as superheated steam. To extract one barrel of oil on the surface would require washing two tons of sand.

Power for the whole operation, it has been proposed, would be provided by purpose-built nuclear reactors, and the whole process would release vast amounts of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, plus all the leftover washed-out, sludgy sand. All in all, an environmental disaster.

With shale oil, the problems are, if anything even greater. After the first great oil shock of 1973, billions were spent trying to make it commercially viable to extract, all to no avail. Francis Harper has said,

I discount shale oil in my or even my children’s lifetimes.

OK, then, what about the current government’s favourite option—nuclear.

The Government’s own advisory body on sustainable development, the Sustainable Energy Commission, in March 2006 came out strongly against the nuclear option on five main points:

• 1. No long-term strategy for dealing with highly toxic nuclear waste.
• 2. Uncertainty over the cost of the new nuclear power stations.
• 3. The danger of taking the nuclear option that the UK would be locked into a centralised distribution system for the next half century.
• 4. By taking the nuclear road efforts to improve energy efficiency would be undermined.
• 5. The threat of terrorist attacks and the danger of radiation exposure if countries with lower safety standards decide to opt for nuclear power.

So, all in all, a pretty damning report from its own advisory body, then.

And then, for a one-two double blow to Blair’s vision of a nuclear Britain, the Environmental Audit Committee in April 2006 came out against nuclear reactors, saying they cannot come on line in time to plug the energy gap. All this without decommissioning costs, currently estimated at 70 billion pounds for the current bunch of reactors. Finally, plans are afoot to privatise British Nuclear Fuels. Just what we need—a nuclear Railtrack.

Gas, like oil, will eventually run out, but later than oil. Gas is more mobile than liquid oil, and when peak production does occur, it quite soon falls off a cliff. The USA and China have huge deposits of coal and the temptation for them to turn to coal will be almost irresistible, but burning coal will also do nothing for the state of the atmosphere. We really must get away from burning all fossil fuels, leaving most of the coal, gas and remaining oil in the ground.

These are only some of the alternatives, most of them unconscionable to use, but there is hope, and that is in the area of renewables. We’ve all heard of solar panels, but there is so much more in the way of alternative, renewable technologies out there.

There’s wind power, wave power, micro-wind turbines, solar panels, for the generation of electricity, hydrogen cells to power cars, all of which are featured in the SSP’s draft manifesto to be voted on at the March conference. However, it appears not to mention oil depletion, though it does stress the need to cut back strongly on the burning of hydrocarbons and coal, as well as promoting a free, efficient public transport system.

For transport, a fraction of the amount the government is willing to spend on nuclear power would surely allow research and development to make possible mass production of hydrogen cells small enough to be fitted into most vehicles at comparable cost to the internal combustion engine.

How often have we heard the mantra that renewables cannot fill the gap? True, there is no one renewable that can provide for all energy needs, but neither does that apply now. There are what are called energy hubs. The nuclear hub generates electricity, the gas hub heating, the oil hub transport, with some interchangeability between the hubs. However, renewables in combination can work on a small scale, and, in fact, there is living proof that they do right here in Britain – in the town of Woking in Surrey. Woking Borough Council has reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 77 per cent since 1990. How has this remarkable reduction occurred?

It has been achieved using a hybrid-energy system which utilises private wires, Combined Heat and Power Plants, solar PV and energy efficiency, plus some absorption chillers and fuel cells. Housing estates have been made into their own little energy worlds.

If the national grid collapsed tomorrow, never to rise again, the inhabitants of Woking would still have an all-year-round electrical supply. In the winter the Combined Heat and Power units generate heating and lots of electricity when the solar cells are not working at their optimum. The solar cells generates lots of electricity in the summer when the heating is not needed, meaning the CHP can’t generate lots of electricity. The systems works in perfect harmony. If it can be done in one small town, why can’t it be done in all of them?

In 1981, Sheik Yamani warned his fellow OPEC oil ministers that the West would, if coerced by high oil prices, be able to find alternative sources of energy within ten years. If it could be done then in ten years, surely with another quarter of a century’s advance in alternative energy technologies it could be done in even less time now!

Summing up

Whatever its future, oil was the commodity that greased the wheels of the twentieth century and was at the centre of much of its wars. At the start of the twenty first century it is still at the centre of its wars, but it will be well in decline by the end of the century. It’s obvious that any sustained interruption to the global oil supply would have tremendously serious social and economic consequences. In a way, however, it doesn’t matter a damn about whether the oil will start to run out tomorrow or 40 years from tomorrow. It will run out. It is finite. While we may ignore climate change at our peril, the end of oil is going to force us to address the problems of burning hydrocarbons.

The society we have built, on an endless supply of cheap oil, will come to an end, and before it does, we in the Scottish Socialist Party should be positioning ourselves as the party of alternative energy. Indeed, I believe that with the possibility of the twin horrors of oil depletion conflating with climate change, that we should be pushing it to the top of our agenda.

Some will say that there has always been climate change, and that is true, and that perhaps the whole greenhouse gas scenario is exaggerated. Okay, suppose for a minute that we are in a natural phase of climate change. Should we be exacerbating its effect by pouring out gases which nearly all scientists agree trap heat in the atmosphere? If you saw a house on fire would you throw water on it or petrol?

We in the SSP should be pushing green alternatives, and I don’t mean sticking £30 a year on the road tax for owners of 4x4s. Let’s leave that sort of tinkering round the edges to the Greens. They will have to learn the hard way that you cannot reform capitalism. If ever there was a time when you had to be red to be green it is now.

We, as socialists, should start now to promote investment on a large scale in alternative sources of energy and development of renewables technology. Think of the benefits of no longer being shackled to the supply of a commodity from politically unstable regions.

Think of no need to invade countries on pretexts to secure the supply of society’s lifeblood, because we could be self sufficient in energy supply. Imagine an end to needless and illegal wars. What if the day called Peak Oil does occur by the end of this decade—then, economic turmoil is unavoidable when the penny drops some time after it that the days of cheap and plentiful oil are over for good.

Should this happen, and I don’t want to sound too cynical here, there would be room for us to advance the cause of socialism.

Great social change and revolution do not spring from wells of contentment, and people neither forget nor easily forgive those who have led them to disaster. We cannot ignore the possibility that capitalism itself may come under severe pressure, but neither can we ignore the possibility that Far Right elements could also make great strides in a world in chaos, feeding on the resultant turmoil and anger.

We could not, and should not, in that scenario, stand by looking on.

Remember this, if you think that all this sounds a bit fantastic—we are not talking about a possibility, we are contemplating a certainty—the day in the future when oil no longer rules the world.

In conclusion, I would like to quote from a lad who was quite brainy – Albert Einstein. The quote from Albert I have in mind is something which I think reflects profoundly on the answer to the problems of oil depletion, climate change and plugging the energy gap, and, to be honest, much else besides, and as socialists we should carry his words in our hearts. What he said was this,

You cannot solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that has created the problem.

Rod Macgregor

For more information on Peak Oil, go to ASPO‘s website

Comment: 2008, July 14

Two sections deleted at request of author due to them being out of date.

Mass actions

In that time, the SSP MSPs have played a tremendous role in being at the forefront of working class and democratic campaigns throughout Scotland. From the nursery nurses fight for better pay, the fight to rid Scotland of nuclear weapons, to campaigning against the war in Iraq, against the G8 at Gleneagles and defending the right to stay of asylum seekers, our MSPs have been at protests, picket lines and demonstrations, participating in mass actions, not embedded behind the brushed metal and the distressed pine of the Scottish parliament building.

The Scottish parliament will never legislate socialism

However, the impact of having six MSPs revealed that the party was, initially not best prepared to deal with the demands placed on them. This criticism is not aimed at our MSPs. Instead the party needs to take responsibility for the accountability and activity of any elected representatives whether they are MSPs, councillors or trade union representatives.

The political situation has changed quite considerably since May 2003. In some ways, conditions have improved for socialists. The Labour Party continues to rule at Westminster, Holyrood and in many local councils. They continue to pursue a mixed agenda of right wing populism and the promotion of corporate interests. These include attacks on civil rights, the criminalisation of large sections of society, the ‘War on terror’, the Iraq war, PFI and privatisation, cash for honours and the cover-up over the BAe corruption enquiry.

In some ways this year’s Holyrood election resembles a replay of the 1997 Westminster election. Then, New Labour was able to win a substantial vote from all those people thoroughly disaffected, after 18 years of Tory rule. Now, the SNP hopes to garner a protest vote from people disillusioned both with Blair’s wretched Westminster government and McConnell’s toadying Scottish Executive. In 1997, New Labour promised us, Things could only get better in the UK; now the SNP is, in effect, promising us, ‘Things can only get better in Scotland’. However, the SNP’s social democratic credentials are also fading fast as its business-friendly, independence-lite policies attracts some of the great and the good of Corporate Scotland.

Electoral gift

Yet, the SNP has been handed an
electoral gift on a plate. In 2003 many people looked to the united SSP to protest against warmongering New Labour. The SNP was weak. Now it is the Left which is divided, and a lot of the protest vote will go to the SNP in 2007.

Therefore, things are far worse for the Left in Scotland than in 2003. The events around the libel trial instigated by Tommy Sheridan in the summer 2006 have had a seriously detrimental effect on the struggle for socialism. His splitting of the SSP with the establishment of ‘Solidarity’ was a serious blow against the principle of socialist unity. (For extensive coverage of these issues see E&L 13 and Frontline Volume 2, Issue 2).

What does this mean for the Scottish parliament and council elections?

The SSP has taken the correct decision to stand candidates in all the Regional Lists. Unfortunately, so has Solidarity. Unless some sort of ‘socialist common sense’ prevails, based on a broader and more mature class perspective, this will ensure that the impact of any socialist vote will be diminished as it will be split between the two organisations. So who does this benefit?

This will serve to reignite the cynicism and defeatism by some sections of what’s the point in voting for any of you when you can’t get your act together to fight the real enemy.

The split by Solidarity has appeared to give added confidence to the BNP, announcing they intend to stand in all regional lists – something they have never attempted before. Surely this is no coincidence.

However, any socialist unity must be on a principled basis. At this time though, progress to any type of unity is extremely difficult. Electoral agreement is impossible while leading Solidarity members continue with their attempts to destroy the SSP. One concrete example of this is evidenced in a document presented to the National Steering Committee of Solidarity in December by Steve Arnott entitled Strategic objectives, priorities and tasks for May 2007. In it he writes:

A good result in the Scottish Parliament in 2007 would be the re-election of Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne as Solidarity MSPs, with the winning of any other regional seats and/or council seats a marvellous bonus. If, however, Solidarity can poll 2-3% elsewhere across the country, that would also give us the added benefit of assuring the wipeout of the SSP at Holyrood.

(emphasis added). Solidarity? More like sectarianism!

Sadly, the elections are likely to heighten the divisions and thereafter there will undoubtedly be recriminations. Despite this, the principled unity of all socialists or communists into a single organisation must still be our goal. Without it, socialism in a real sense is a pipe dream. The SSP is still the vehicle for that unity.

Whatever the outcome of these elections, as socialists we must be clear why we fight in bourgeois elections. Whether it is the Scottish parliament, local councils or Westminster, the principle is the same. Standing in these elections gives us an opportunity to raise the ideas of socialism in a period of heightened political activity. It enables us to win new recruits to the ideas of working class struggle, solidarity and socialism. Parliaments – Scottish, The Scottish parliament will never legislate socialism Westminster or European – could not legislate for socialism. The organised power of the capitalist state would not allow it. Socialism will only come about through the self organised, mass movement of the working class. This is why it is vital that socialist representatives, whether in local councils or at Holyrood, must remember that the cause of socialism is best served by being an organiser in their working class communities and by being a tribune of those communities when in the debating chambers.

(A more detailed analysis of the rise of Scottish nationalism is published on our website at: The SSP, ‘Independence First’ And The Scottish Independence Referendum)