Truth and lies / Fête de Lutte Ouvrière / Economically dreaming / Omar Sheikh / Prize Draw

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Truth and lies

It’s all too easy, maybe especially so if you’re not a member of a communist party, to fall prey to a capitalist view of the world.

The things you read, the TV you watch, the conversations you have at a work - so many of the ideas communicated there start life on the keyboards of the capitalists.

So on questions like climate change, cloning, or nanotechnology - it can be hard to work out a what your ‘line’ should be.

You‘re not an expert on most issues, in fact you may know little about the subject. And that makes you reliant on the bosses media for your info. They can deliver this - but they don't just explain, they add their spin as well.

So stem-cell research, what should socialists think and argue? I haven’t a clue, guv. I don’t even really know what it is.

You may think that it will be only be the more esoteric questions where you will flounder. But I think you’d be fooling yourself if you don’t know that there are matters closer to home where your red bullshit detector still won’t be able to keep you on the straight.

Autoprofits

So if someone asked me what I know about the big US carmakers, I’d say that I think that most, if not all of them, are in financial difficulty. Aren’t some of them bust - or maybe at least facing the prospect of same?

And this ‘knowledge’ would colour my view on what would be a wise course for car workers. A strike in a place where the boss may just cut his losses and walk away is always going to be dicier than actions where workers can hit the owners in their pockets.

I probably know these ‘facts’ about the US auto industry from reading the Economist. In fact, I know nothing. I’ve been scammed.

“GM and Delphi made it look like the workers had no option but to take buyouts. They threatened plant closings - so workers would think they had better take the buyout now or they'd get nothing. They managed to chop off about 51,000 workers who used to get $28 per hour (£14/hr) and real benefits. And then a strange thing happened. Only a few of the many threatened plants actually closed. New workers were hired to do the old jobs. But the new workers are paid only $14 or $16 an hour (£7-£8/hr) and NO benefits!

“During 2005 and 2006 (GM) claimed to be ‘losing’ $l0.6bn (£5.3bn) a year and claimed it was near bankruptcy… GM mounted a huge media campaign to convince the workers that giant GM wouldn't last much longer. GM got top union leaders and the federal court to break the workers' contract in mid-term and take a dollar an hour away from active workers, and take health insurance premiums away from retirees”

“This month at the Auto Show, GM Vice President Bob Lutz told reporters that GM was not the kind of company to be satisfied with only a few billion dollars of profits. That's the first truth GM has told: big companies will not be satisfied with any amount of billions of profits…But for now, there are 85,000 or so GM workers swindled out of their full retirements and tricked out of their decent paying jobs because they were misled into thinking that GM was in meltdown.”

It was a similar story too, at DaimlerChrysler, and also at Ford.

“In January this year, Ford said they were in ‘financial meltdown’ too, and had lost a ‘record breaking’ $12.7bn (£6.3bn) in 2006… (Ford) actually has nearly $34bn (£17bn) in ready cash, with $46bn (£23bn) available with their additional line of credit.”

The above quotes are from ‘USA - Car industry scam: GM, Ford and Chrysler cry all the way to the bank’. This article is in the latest edition of ‘Class Struggle’, a publication of ‘Workers' Fight’, the British Section of the International Communist Union (ICU). The ICU's best-known section is ‘Lutte Ouvrière’ in France.

I can’t do justice, in these excerpts above, to this fine insight into how large capitalist firms work. Look at it online.

This high standard of writing is common to many of the ICU’s publications. On their website you’ll find well-researched articles, peppered with salient facts and figures, on issues like ‘Britain - Child poverty and inequality’, or, ‘Mexico - The great migration.’ I'll leave my comments on their politics to another time.

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Fête de Lutte Ouvrière

So I’m rather sad that, yet again, I won’t get to hear these arguments being made, rather that just reading them on a page or screen, as another Fête de Lutte Ouvrière (near Paris 26-28 May) will take place without me being able to attend.

I remember well my trip to a previous Fete. For a group that are very internally focussed; who are, I think ‘inscrutable’ (is the best word that comes to mind) and whose actions to others Lefts can appear sectarian, Lutte Ouvrière have a very open attitude to debate with the rest of the Left at the Fete - and they organise a great event.

In the ‘Political City’ at this year’s Fete, Google Translator, in its fractured way, reports that there will be - ‘Several tens of political groups of France, of Europe, of Africa or the Antilles, hold a stand to with it. All inevitably do not share the whole of our convictions, but this gathering is the occasion for each one to discuss and confront its ideas with those of the other groups.’

I enjoyed meeting comrades from all over when I went to the Fete. Apart from a very few demos abroad, I rarely get to meet non Brit revolutionary socialists save a very few based in London or those in the twilight zone that was the deeply useless London European Social Forum.

It was at the Fete that I met my first American Trotskyists as well as many reds, of all hues, from across Europe and beyond. There’s a lively culture of discourse and discussions about everything under the sun - with lectures and exhibitions on cinema, science, the arts, and more.

And forgetting the politics, for a moment. I found the Fete to be very interesting in a very French way. Different branches of LO made their regional cheeses or local dishes which they sold to raise funds. I remember the dances in the evening with a guy playing an accordion - and many similar type activities.

(There’s a whole book waiting to be written on how French workers have managed to retain [or develop?} a lot better diet than British workers. Possession of Asda sausages with intent will be a capital crime in communist Britain).

The fete felt as though a small selection of France had been assembled for you at a park on the outskirts of Paris and without the usual tourist palaver. Sort of like one of those theme parks that reproduce the Seven Wonders of the World at 1/100000 scale, so that you can do a tour round the globe in twenty minutes.

That weekend wasn’t all fun and games, though. My sleeping bag was stolen. And after attaching an appeal asking for its return to the outside of my tent, I lay awake on my groundsheet inside only to hear comrades reading my notice and laughing at the spelling or, one occasion, waking me up to tell me I had put the accent above the wrong letter.

Someone else I knew didn't just have his sleeping bag stolen, his tent was nicked as well. He spent his remaining nights on an unscheduled astronomy refresher course gazing at the stars.

I recommend a visit to the Fete. I know Worker’s Fight organise transport from Britain to the event.

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Economically dreaming

Whilst Lutte Ouvrière can drop economic data into texts that deal with run of the mill issues - and do this with commendable brevity and panache - some others go for painting a big picture when they should probably stick to rinsing out brushes.

Workers Power are the sort of organisation who constantly solve the major political questions that stump us lesser reds. I've read many a tract by them that lays out ‘The' programme for us Trots or that purports to be the authoritative analysis of an event that was previously thought too complex for homo sapiens to work out.

With this boundless all knowingness they have become the sort of organisation who feel that they're quite capable of writing a Marxist critique about most anything.

I mean, if you have the one true and correct scientific method, it’s only a question of time before you can churn out a Marxist critique of, say, meteorology that you will be able to use to predict the temperature in Torquay on Tuesday three weeks hence. Or maybe you could use these skills to produce some sure fire fundraisers for your party - how about a book called something like ‘Trots at the Slots: how to use Marx to max out Vegas’.

It’s pretty much this sort of thinking that makes them believe that they can also pronounce authoritatively on the future of the world economy. It can't be that hard for them to work out a system to beat the one armed bandits when they can already do that with the two-armed variety from Goldman Sachs.

An article on this issue in their current paper does start out fairly modestly. - ‘While we do not know exactly when it will happen or how severe it will be, America is heading for recession and this will have a major impact on the capitalists and the working class everywhere’

Hmm. Well, yes. America will go into recession. And in the same way, snow will fall again in my garden.

I don’t know when this snow will fall. Snow in April is certainly possible where I live but it may not fall until next winter, or it may next fall in a few winters hence. But whenever it is, snow will fall.

The Workers Power article then takes a leap from the mundane to the breathless. - “When we reach the top of the business cycle, when society stands poised precariously on the brink of a downward cycle of economic contraction and decline, then suddenly there is a proliferation of parasitic activities of every imaginable type, then the "confidence" of consumers becomes a critical indicator capable of tipping the system into recession, then big financiers prepare to shaft thousands of small middle class private investors, then workers' pension schemes bear the brunt.”

Well, my economic understanding is doubtless a lot less than theirs - but even I can see the flaws in the above text.

There isn’t “suddenly...a proliferation of parasitic activities of every imaginable type...big financiers prepare to shaft thousands of small middle class private investors.”

This ‘shafting’ is a day-to-day activity - in any economic conditions. Be it in a boom, or in the depths of a recession, parasitical activities don’t just ‘proliferate’ then but are the very essence of the world of finance - all the time.

In some ways I admire the big appetite of these comrades in reaching for the heavens. It may also be unfair to single out Workers Power. I have commented before on the unfortunate tendency of Alan Woods to search for dialectical patterns in the tea leaves. And the SWP also often major in this sort of work, especially in their theoretical journal, International Socialism.

One of the reasons that I chose this Workers Power article is that it's remarkably brief. If I were going to critique a Chris Harman (SWP) special, I’d need to dedicate myself to reading it all, working out what it means, working out what it really means and then go through various other progressively elaborate stages. That would turn Southpawpunch from a weekly column into a quarterly SOS message. The above method isn't me taking shortcuts, it’s done to preserve my sanity.

And try this 'quick and dirty' way yourself. If you're ever in the SWP's Bookmarks bookshop in central London, have a flick through the mound of unsold copies of International Socialism from a previous year. Note the headlines. And then think - did this ever happen? And then just imagine how the authors will cringe if they ever go back and look at all the reckless findings and unfulfilled headline predictions that they wrote just a few months previously.

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Sheikh - who gave him a break?

There's many an outlandish claim made to sell many an ordinary book. Some of these statements will lead the excerpt that is published in a Sunday paper. A few bits of information will then become widely known without the inconvenience of having to shell out for the volume.

If the ‘revelation’ below saw that light of day like that, it passed me by. It’s an interesting titbit contained in a recent book by the Pakistani President (as he’s always called) - scrub that - by the Pakistani Dictator, Pervez Musharraf.

In In the Line of Fire, Musharraf mentions Omar Sheikh. That guy's currently on death row in Pakistan for his part in the kidnapping and then killing of the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl.

The death of Pearl was an execution that bore more than a hint of vicious anti-Semitism, if the version of events that has been reported is correct (and I’ve no reason to doubt it.).

In a video, sent to the US authorities, the captive was obliged to state that ‘I’m Daniel Pearl, a Jewish-American, the son of a Jewish mother and of a Jewish father. The video ends with his head being cut off.

And in the last week or so, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has made a wide-ranging confession to the Americans saying that he was the mastermind behind 9/11. He’s also been quoted as saying "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl."

It is, of course, impossible for me to know what of the above is true. And that’s also true for Musharraf’s comments about former London public school boy Sheikh.

The dictator says that whilst Sheikh was studying at the LSE in the early 90s, he packed it all in to go and fight for jihad in the Balkans.

Musharraf, who presumably has seen reports from the interrogation (and torture?) of Sheikh, claims that his prisoner did this because he had been recruited and sent there by his employers - MI6.

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Prize Draw

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