reminder – 26th january forum on ‘resisting the recession’

The first meeting in our new series of ‘uncaptive minds‘ forums on “capitalism and the working class today” will be on the subject of “resisting the recession”, discussing the tactics the workers’ movement needs to use to oppose mass redundancies and hold back the rising cost of living.

It will take place from 7pm on Monday January 26th at the Lucas Arms, Grays’ Inn Road, near King’s Cross, London. Speakers include Steve Hedley (RMT London Transport Regional organiser), Christine Hulme (PCS activist in the Department for Work and Pensions), Chris Ford (The Commune; LRC National Committee) and Gregor Gall (Professor of Industrial Relations, Hertfordshire University).

In further meetings in the series we shall be looking at issues such as the financial climate, globalisation and imperialism, casualisation and the changed shape of the workforce.

Email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for more info. Click here for leaflet. See map of venue below.

hal draper’s “independent socialism: a perspective for the left”

The following pamphlet was published in 1964 as an outline of the ideas of the Independent Socialist Committees in the USA, which involved such figures as Hal Draper who represented the left trend which emerged from the old Workers’ Party.  Along with a group in Chicago led by Kim Moody and comrades in New York they formed a national organisation which later became the International Socialists.  They sought to preserve the idea of the third camp of independent working class politics.

Chris Kane

There are many pamphlets and books explaining the general idea of socialism; this is not another one. For present purposes and for the sake of argument, we are assuming you know what the socialist idea is: the idea that the ability of human beings to live like men should not be dependent on the making of private profit; that the community of men can operate our economic institutions under social control rather than under the autocracy of moneyed overlords; that democracy can apply as much to the way we make a living as to the way we make a government, by putting the factories and plants under collective control.

reminder: january 19th reading group on self-organisation and communism from below

Our series of reading groups kicks off at 6:30pm on Monday January 19th with a discussion on the subject of working class self-organisation and “communism from below”.  Email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to find out more info on the central London venue. The texts for this first meeting are:

The Communist Manifesto (click here)

Arguing against different conceptions of “socialism” prevalent at the time, such as paternalistic “utopian” projects, Marx and Engels’ 1848 Manifesto argues that it is the working class must take power in order to revolutionise society. Tracing the development of Western society through the ages, Marx argues that we must get rid of capitalist ownership and the repressive social order and create a new, free and collectively organised system based on the development achieved by humanity thus far.

The Civil War in France – Engels’ 1891 introduction (click here) and chapter five (click here)

Marx’s thundering eulogy to the Communards – the Parisian workers who seized power in 1871 in the midst of France’s defeat in a war against Prussia – and the new order they established, casting aside the state bureaucracy and standing army and taking control with their democratic working-class “commune”. Introduction by Engels traces French history in the intervening decades and summarises the work.

Communism and Society (click here)

This section of British communist William Paul’s 1922 work argues against conceptions of introducting socialism through Parliament, and like Marx in The Civil War in France denies that the working class can take over the existing state machinery. Paul’s piece focuses on the self-organisation of the class and the manner in which the organisation of struggles against capitalism prefigures the society which will replace it.

Socialism and self-management (click here)

Yugoslav Marxist Mihailo Markovic’s piece looks at different aspects of workers’ self-management, with particular reference to post-war Yugoslavia where organs expressing elements of workers’ democracy were in conflict with the state bureaucracy under Marshal Tito. He argues that the state and party should be replaced by organs of workers’ self management whereby the mass of the population make economic, political and social decisions for themselves.

the “workers’ enquiry” and call centre communism

Jack Staunton reviews Hotlines: Call centre – Inquiry – Communism

When we pick up a left wing paper or magazine and scan its contents we can be fairly sure that its editors will not have failed to offer a piece on shifts in the world’s stock markets, analysis of the businesses felled by the recession, and a take on the latest wheeling and dealing by the world’s statesmen. Whether dry, rational and down-to-earth commentary, or grandiose predictions of the final crisis of capitalism and vast forces of chaos sweeping across the globe, we can be sure enough that developments in the activities of the ruling class will be recounted in some detail.

But ours is not a movement which limits itself to attacking the dominant system: it is a movement for the self-emancipation of the working class. To put that in the language of the current crisis: no-one simply wants capitalism to ‘collapse’ chaotically in a heap of bankruptcies and mass redundancies. Quite obviously, the unravelling of the irrationalities of capitalism will not in itself create a better society. Rather, we have a better, alternative vision for humanity: we want the working class to organise to displace those who control the levers of political and economic power and re-organise society from below on an egalitarian, collectivist and democratic basis.

So surely it should follow that the left ought to privilege understanding the state of the working class – the people and the movement who are actually going to revolutionise society.  This is all the more the case since although no-one would deny the existence of capitalism, for the last two decades it has been a commonplace assertion of much of academia and the media that the working class no longer exists.  For such ‘commentators’, the term ‘working class’ is itself merely a label for a narrow cultural stereotype: for example, in March 2008 the BBC’s White  season featured a documentary ‘Last Orders’, detailing the lives of white working-class pensioners in northern working men’s clubs, proclaiming that a few of this “endangered species”, the working class, do in fact still exist.

obituary of brian pearce

by Terry Brotherstone, from The Guardian

Brian Pearce, who has died aged 93, was one of the most acute scholars of Russian history and British communism never to have held an academic post. Of the historians who broke with the Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB) after the Khrushchev “secret speech” and the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, he was the most insistent on the need for historical analysis of the party’s record.

A prodigious translator from both Russian and French, Pearce won the Scott-Moncrieff prize three times – in 1976 for Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin, in 1980 for Roland Mousnier’s The Institutions of French Monarchy Under Absolutism, and in 1991 for Paul Veyne’s Bread and Circuses. Literary translation was his main source of income after he stopped working for the CPGB, for which he did various journalistic, cultural relations and translation jobs after leaving the civil service in 1950.

Expelled from the party in 1957, he had continued to work as a teacher of English at the Soviet Embassy, but the next year Harry Pollitt, the CPGB’s former general secretary, saw him there. “Soon my pupils … very embarrassed, made excuses for terminating their lessons,” Pearce recalled.

photos of the last of our forums on 1970s class struggle

Last night (Monday 8th December) we held the last of our first series of “uncaptive minds” forums. The subject of the series was the 1970s class struggle, and we held meetings on struggles such as the Grunwick strike, the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders‘ occupation and the Leeds women clothing workers’ strike as well as discussing the organising methods of the time and focussing on debates in the movement such as the issue of workers’ control.

30 people attended the last of our seven fortnightly meetings, which was on the subject matter ‘Where did it all go?’. A few photos are featured below.

Liam comments: “earlier this evening I went along to a meeting organised by The Commune at which John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn very vividly brought to life politics and class struggle in the 1970s. John mentioned an example of a factory in his area in which the management removed the phone from the union office. The shop steward walked to the phone box at the end of the street and brought 250 workers with him. He got his phone back. Jeremy described his time as an organiser for NUPE when he would walk into school kitchens and recruit all the non members into the union. Contrast this to the contemporary situation. The young workers in my local branch of Woolworths yesterday were energetically recreating the 1974 Bulgarian retail experience. It hadn’t crossed their mind to strike, occupy the shop, hold a public meeting. Stoic acceptance that they were losing their jobs and the hope that something else would turn up seemed to be their attitude.”

A new series will begin in the New Year, looking at wider aspects of capitalism and the working class today. More information to follow shortly.

the workers’ councils of 1956 – by tamas krausz

A lecture by Tamas Krausz, a communist based in Budapest, about the 1956 Hungarian revolution, its workers’ councils and forms of workers’ self-management

1. Prehistory[1]

The history of the workers’ councils of 1956 cannot be understood without the history of the Hungarian working class. The intellectual-political and socio-cultural development of the Hungarian working class has been shaped by diverse and complex historical processes in the interwar period. The counter-revolutionary system of Horthy destroyed and criminalized the 1918-1919 revolutionary tradition of the workers’ councils of the Hungarian working class, it banned the communist party and it declared in the name of the sanctity of private property that communal property – which was defined as the essence of socialism from Marx and Lenin till Zsigmond Kunfi, Justus and Lukács – was a sinful idea.

the communist revolution and the necessity of workers’ self-management

by Chris Kane

If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?

Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

The communist revolution is fundamentally different from the process imagined by those who see the capturing of Parliament or a coup d’état by an elitist party as an end in itself.  Marx, as is now well known, emphasised the self-emancipation of the working class: in 1871, amongst the conclusions he drew from the experience of the Paris Commune, he said that:  1. we cannot lay hold of the existing state machinery, 2. the commune was the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of the working class.  Alongside the Paris Commune we now have extensive historical experience of similar forms of workers’ self organisation by which to address its relationship to the communist society latent already in the class struggles within capitalism, whose potential has almost been realised in past efforts to reach the first phase of communism.

thinking through the meaning of communism and socialism in the conditions of today

A document produced by comrades involved in l’Encontre www.alencontre.org) and Carré Rouge (www.carre-rouge.org)

As men and women members of the nuclei which publish A Contre-Courant, Carré Rouge, and L’Émancipation Sociale, and those associated with the Swiss journal-cum-website A l’Encontre, we have joined forces to organise work on the theory and practice of the actuality, the present-day relevance of communism or socialism (which are synonymous in the strong sense of the term socialism). In addition we have decided to link up with those who have similar aims and propose to undertake joint work or maintain detailed exchanges of opinion with them. The document submitted explains what urges us to undertake this task; it emphasises the considerable difficulties involved; it sketches our first attempt to map the very area involved.

hal draper, the state and socialism from below

by David Broder

Recently this site has seen a debate over the question of the state in bourgeois society and after working-class revolution, with comrades from the Trotskyist group ‘Permanent Revolution’ arguing that such a revolution would necessarily have to create a new state which would centrally plan the economy. They call this “socialism”, to be followed by a later classless, stateless era of “communism”. They furthermore argue that state-planned economies such as Cuba’s, despite the lack of working-class power in decision-making, nonetheless represent, in some dilute form, “workers’ states”.

This has little in common with our conception of how working-class power comes about and should be exercised: by the working class itself, democratically, from below and creating its own structures organically. There are no saviours from on high: we do not want a benign régime or enlightened despot to dish out equality of poverty.

With this in mind, we have added three texts to the ‘ideas’ section of our website by the American communist Hal Draper. These argue against state socialist models and for ‘socalism from below’, and see this sentiment as a thread running through the works of Karl Marx.

Click here to read The Death of the State in Marx and Engels; the Two Souls of Socialism; and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Marx and Engels.

report on lrc conference

by Chris Ford

Over two-hundred people attended the conference of the Labour Representation Committee held under the title of ‘The Future of the Left’. On the one hand the LRC conference took some very positive steps and on the other we had a full display of many of the negative traits of the traditional left.

lrc conference: has the traditional left a future?

Saturday 15th November saw the annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee, a body supported both by Labour-affiliated and non-affiliated unions including ASLEF, the Bakers’ Union (BFAWU), CWU, FBU, NUM and RMT.

A packed-out Conway Hall discussed and debated a set of resolutions and elected a new National Committee. Our motion on workers’ self-management won a large majority and our comrades Chris Ford and David Broder were elected to the NC on an openly communist platform favouring workers’ self-management, having been nominated by the BFAWU. Dozens of the trade unionists attending also took the opportunity to buy the first issue of our paper and our pamphlets.

Full report to follow: click here for a pdf of the leaflet we distributed ‘has the traditional left a future?’

issue 1 of the commune published

We are pleased to announce the publication of the first issue of our newspaper The Commune. You can order a printed copy (£1 per copy + postage and packing) by emailing uncaptiveminds@gmail.com or writing to The Commune, 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London EC1V 4PY.

click here for pdf, or see individual articles below

nationalisation is no answer for our class! – Editorial part one

the dual crisis of labour and capital – Editorial part two

civil service dispute on ice? – by Steve Ryan, Wrexham PCS

report of pro-choice demo 20th october

are we really fighting in unison? – by James Caspell, Lambeth UNISON

the crisis of capitalism – interview with Andrew Kliman, author of Reclaiming Marx’s Capital

henry paulson’s bureaucratic collectivist fantasy – by Ernie Haberkern

william morris: against ‘state socialism’ – by Terry Liddle

for institutions of workplace democracy – by Gregor Gall, Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Hertfordshire

the class struggle in iran – by David Broder

platform of the international communists

new pamphlet – “the crisis: an interview with andrew kliman”

For our latest pamphlet, on the subject of the current economic crisis, we interviewed Andrew Kliman (author of Reclaiming Marx’s Capital) on the crisis of global capitalism, prospects and alternatives. The text is reproduced below. Email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com if you would like to order a hard copy of the pamphlet (£1).

Q. Descriptions of today’s crisis have included headlines proclaiming the “collapse” of the system.  How would you characterise the current crisis?

A:  There hasn’t been a collapse yet.  If there were one, you’d know it.  But there’s indeed a danger of collapse-of the financial system, and thus of the capitalist system as a whole. That danger was most acute and severe in mid-to-late September, prior to the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion-plus bailout measures, but it persists even now [November 2].

The crisis is a crisis of “confidence.”  “Confidence” here isn’t some general optimism about the future of capitalism, but lenders’ confidence that the monies owed them will in fact be repaid. When that kind of confidence is shaken, as it has been, lending dries up. But production and trade depend crucially on lending–not only loans to build factories, malls, and offices, and to buy additional equipment–but also loans just to get from today to tomorrow, to pay workers, buy supplies and inventories, etc.  So any “credit crunch” has an effect on the so-called real economy.  If confidence were to be severely shaken, such that there’s outright panic in the credit markets-we were evidently rather close to that point in September, and the threat of such panic persists-there would be almost no new lending to speak of.  The “real” economy would grind to a halt in fairly short order.  That’s a collapse.