WORKERS POLITICS the Ethics OF Socialism. by William Ash Published 2007 Bread Books, Coventry As luck would have it, when Marx Library asked me to review William Ash’s new book Workers’ Politics the ethics of socialism I had only very recently put down Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich and was enthusiastically burning the midnight oil working my way through My Life by Fidel Castro as told to his chosen biographer Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique. Bill Ash’s book is about ethics and philosophy in general and it is divided into four easy to follow sections: Values, Obligations, Rights and Alienation and Political Change. Ethics he shows to be philosophy in practice. Values originate in the production of commodities and derive its conception and meaning in social relations of production. Obligations describe the bonds that exist between social beings in their quest to co-opt nature. Rights, evolve from notions of human equality and are a reflection of the “equalisation of human labour in general which is the source and measure of value”. All practiced through the great panorama of class struggles for ascendancy and against the decomposition that make up the capitalist societies in which we live and struggle to fashion change. All good and easy enough stuff to understand? If only life were so simple! That is why I mention both a history of the Mediterranean and Fidel. All of the four categories Ash so eloquently unravels have their denouement in history or rather, in histories. In the history of the Mediterranean one can come to understand the development of the great civilisations, from Rome to Greece, taking in Byzantium and Venice en route, and the great religions Islam, Judaism and Christianity across hundreds of years, dynasties and social systems: nomadic and primitive communism, feudalism, mercantile capitalism, industrial capitalism and imperialism. To get to grips with the concepts Bill describes, a thousand year history of the crucible of western societies is an excellent tableaux and testing ground. My Life is important for two reasons in relation to Bill’s book. In the first, Castro is workers’ politics and ethics, in practice, in the most difficult of circumstances. A man who, across five decades, has been the object of so many assassination attempts by the USA and her supplicants in Miami is well placed to talk ethics and morality. He still sleeps in a different apartment most nights. My Life involves so many of the issues raised in Ash’s book particularly to do with morality, now so highly politicized. There is collective and individual rights and obligations, the right to life and the death penalty, the freedom to move in and out of a country, the right to exist as a country unhindered by external pressure and much more. In a recent interview in which he explained why he took the opportunity to interview Castro for so many hours over such a sustained period, Ramonet explained that, he thought My Life was important, “because the left has not done theory for thirty years.” An important point and a genuine criticism of many, but I would humbly beg to differ. There have been people “doing theory” for the last thirty years and Bill Ash is among them. Indeed Workers’ Politics is a re working of a book that has seen a number of pressings since the early 1960s with publishers in the UK, USA and India - prestigious publishers such as Routledge and Monthly Review. Bread Books, a new publishing venture, should be commended for keeping this important work, updated, in print and in the public eye. Ash – a one time President of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain - has the advantage of being a writer by occupation [though in his hands it seems like he is a writer by birth] and is able to put across complex theories of social development, the development of knowledge and explain the origin of ‘thought’, in ways which open them up to a much broader audience. And philosophers who also want to change the world rather than obscure it or justify the politics of dismal capitalism are unfortunately in short supply. The first three chapters remain topical and the last one more controversial. For these reasons alone the book is well worth the read. Most importantly, the book allows space for the reader to develop understanding as the proposition is revealed. You will not come out of this book without changing the thinking with which you picked it up. Workers’ Politics shows how vulnerable capitalism is to a critique, which goes much broader than a denunciation of its economics of exploitation. Capitalism is revealed as shoddy. It shortchanges its participants, worker and capitalist alike. It hits us in pocket, but also in heart, mind and soul. Humanity is capable of so much more and so much better. All that is quality in our lives, from education at a local school to the struggle to defeat cancer, is a product of human struggle in the teeth of capitalism. How much better, Ash contends, would human endeavor be, if it were set to gel within a social system whose essence was satisfaction of collective interests. This will not be possible while surplus value, is appropriated by private hands. Capitalism, Ash contends, is vulnerable if it is confronted as a system of values rather than piece-by-piece. He describes a broad front, which is a focus of real struggles of, ideas, culture, language, morality, ethics and philosophy at home and in the workplace. In his hands whole new aspects of Marxism as a critique of capitalism are engaged. Categories like ‘good’; ‘freedom’, ‘ought’, ‘solidarity’, ‘liberation’ and ‘value’ take on new strengths. It is territory any reader of the founders of English socialism such as Ernest Jones, George Harney, William Morris, Ruskin and Robert Owen or Walter Crane would be familiar and comfortable with. Ash has grasped the importance of asserting the positives. Instead of shoddy goods to be foisted on a public given no other option, we are encouraged to insist on new qualities. Human endeavor should be set free so that each can work with others to satisfy human needs. In place of the steady diet of war and aggression he posits international cooperation the better to grapple with global challenges. In place of mock freedoms parading as ‘rights’ as in the abuse of unionism and strike action to throttle Venezuela’s oil industry or truckers subverting elected governments in Chile, freedom of expression and association are enriched by freedom from exploitation. In Bill’s hand, ‘liberation’ is restored as a term of the people opposed to the sham ‘liberal’ democracy, enforced by a World Bank. Solidarity and the right to join a union are asserted over ‘freedom’ not to join. This is a world turned the right way up. Ash leaves few stones unturned. He scrutinises language, ‘truth’, the meaning of ‘value’ which arises as a category in antiquity with the production of goods for human use, normative judgments, what is ‘good’ and the bonds that tie us such as friendship, family, class and fellowship. None of these he contends is absolute. All evolve historically and are determined by the relative strengths of the classes which contend for power in society. But his analysis puts to shame, the current fashion for unthinking labeling using throwaway concepts such as ‘fairness’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘equality’. Ash shows that, at the root of all this dysfunction, lies alienation that arose with the division of labour. Bill returns time and again to Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, two works deserving of much greater prominence and consideration. It was here Marx revealed that, in early commodity production, value and utility became separated as workers were separated and dispossessed of the tools that guaranteed their freedom as producers. So much of modern day thought is anchored early on in the appearance of a division of labour and the appearance of labour power as a commodity. ‘Freedom’ is given to workers in the form of dispossession - i.e. they are free to starve or work. Ash observes, “The social fact of the division of labour implies a separation between productive effort and enjoyed satisfactions.” Much flows from this division. Our thoughts and definitions, our concepts and values are polarised. Ideas of ‘effort’ and ‘sacrifice’, of ‘quality’ and ‘fair’ remuneration are linked to production. Others, such as ‘emotion’, ‘image’ and ‘desire’ are linked to consumption. Production is collective and involves pooling of effort, interests and resource. Consumption is private and individualistic. Try as it might, as a result of the division that sits as its inner core, capitalism cannot put these dynamics together. Instead it makes opposites of what should be unities: thinking and doing, town and country, reality and aspiration. As a result, it is unable to really satisfy human wants and desires. But it can and does sell them things, even when they do not want or need them. And what is foisted on them comes with built in obsolescence. With this goes a whole baggage of thinking and a value system, which Ash encourages us to challenge. He points to the need to go beyond this capitalism to a society based on new sets of beliefs and values. In capitalism there is little joy of work which should be a noble pursuit, the pleasure in fashioning nature into value is pushed aside in the quest only for greater profit, the celebration of skill and collective endeavor at best begrudgingly rewarded. The motif of this new society would mean that, to quote Marx, “labour has become not only a means of life but itself is life’s prime want...” Your reviewer found Chapter 3 the most interesting and topical. It analyses the scope and limits of freedom of choice. Socialism has taken a hiding in the last two decades in the name of freedom. The USSR never recovered from a crusade in the guise of ‘human rights’ launched under President Jimmy Carter in the mid 1970s and pursued under Reagan. Yet, in its early phase, socialism was the “watchword of liberty” and a hope of liberation for mankind. The concept of freedom is loaded with the reality of class. Yet many on the left retreated from class during that period or gave prominence to aspects of class over the essence. It was precisely this retreat, which opened up the space for class rights to be supplanted in the popular mind with ‘human rights’, promoted zealously to this day by imperialism. It has been a hard struggle to regain the once firmly held high ground. According to Bill, workers in eastern Europe were urged to assert a ‘right’ to withdraw their labour, yet when their counterparts sought to assert the same right under capitalism it was, “either at the wrong time, the wrong place or called for wrong reason.” In other words, class and the class struggle, lies at the root of rights and freedom. The struggle over rights is pivotal to the direction of society today. Much of the passing confusion of the 1970s arose as a result of a misunderstanding of the relationship between individual and collective rights. Ash is spellbinding when he discusses this issue. The Marxist way, he reasons, is not to dismiss the rights or realities of individuals but sees individualism linked to consumption and as a destructive force. Instead, Marxists argue that the full flowering of individuals becomes possible when they recognise the collective nature of humanity and work to combine their unique character and talents, to harness nature for the good of all. That way each individual acts as a social agent. Because of the peculiar historical strength of organised labour in Britain, it is mainly the study of the economics of Marx, which has prevailed. Yet Ash makes an excellent case for looking at the issue of philosophy, which dominated Marx’s life. According to Ash, the struggle to free ourselves from exploitation is “the struggle to uncover the true relationships between people and as producers, thereby allowing us to think in new ways as a result of being able to recognise reality for what it really is.” This is the process which Marx called “a class for itself”. In the bibliography there is a treasure trove of books and reading for anyone interested in further exploration. Most are readily available to members of Marx Library. On visiting the library you may well find Bill, at 90 years old, now an elder statesman of the labour movement, working on his next project.
