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Iain MacWhirter of the Sunday Herald has responded to the email I sent him. His response is below, followed by my reply. As of the time of writing I have had no further response.
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From: "Iain MacWhirter" <
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Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:36:57 +0100
To: "David Miller" <
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Dear David,
I've been on holiday so I have only just seen your letter about my article on G8 and African debt. You say that my remarks about your book "Arguments against G8" were "innaccurate" and a "travesty". Well, I quite often look back at my pieces and regret things I have said. But in this case I think I stand by pretty well everything. You principally object to my argument that, on both the neo-liberal Right and the Marxist Left. there is a kind of meeting of minds; a profound scepticism about reformist campaigns like Make Poverty History campaign or the Chancellor's debt-relief programme. Well, that seems to me simply a statement of the obvious. And I put it to you that your suggestion that Karl Marx was NOT a revolutionary is a statement of the ridiculous. You say that "Marx did not believe that revolution was the only answer". Well, I can assure you that he did. Read the Communist Manifesto. To say that there is "a whiff of McCarthyism" in describing Marxists as 'revoutionaries' is simply perverse. Of course there may be different forms of revolution, including - in theory at least - a democratic one. (though, on the whole, Karl Marx favoured the dictatorship of the proletariat). But to abolish the capitalist system, by whatever means is, any way you look at it, a revolutionary act. Bizarrely, you seem to take exception to my suggestion that you see no capitalist solution to the debt/aid problem. Forgive me, but this is the entire thrust of your argument against G8. You even say in your letter: "If capitalism as a social system is not stopped, there will not be much to be around for", and "We only have about two generations to stop capitalism". That doesn't sound much like Adam Smith to me.
Or, David, are you now saying that you agree with market-based proposals for developing sub-Saharan Africa? Are you now saying that you think - broadly speaking - private profit is the way to material prosperity? You accuse me of failing to understand that there are different forms of capitalism. Had you read my article you might have noticed that I said there were "many forms of capitalism from the bandit capitalism of Russia to the relatively benign European social model". I'm sure there are many more, but that wasn't my point.
I was simply noting that, for the foreseeable future, any solutions to Africa's economic problems are likely to be within capitalist parameters - to the extent that they will involve private ownership, foreign investment and the integration of Africa into the global market. This does not mean a capitulation to Neo-Conservative neo-liberalism, or even unqualified support for the Chancellor's International Finance Facility, which sounds rather too much like PFI for my liking. I would love it if Africa could prove us all wrong and find a socialist road to development. But the experience of the nominally Marxist regimes in Africa so far - from Mengistu's in Ethiopia to the MPLA's in Angola - have been so disastrous that revolution - democratic or non - is off the agenda in the continent for the 21st Century. And, by the way, I actually refer to the Latin American popular anti-capitalist movements against “Total Locura Capitalista” in my piece, so I'm not totally ignorant of the political alternatives. But ideological speculation isn't going to feed the starving in Niger. All the best, Iain
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From: David Miller <
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Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:59:24 +0100
To: Iain MacWhirter <
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Dear Iain,
I have just returned from holiday too. Thanks for your response. It is certainly welcome, and unfortunately unusual, to get a considered response from mainstream media these days.
It is clearly that case that we have differing views on the solutions and possibly on the problems facing humanity. My purpose in writing to you was not to convince you of my view but rather to point out what I felt were some inaccuracies in your piece. To argue that there is a 'profound scepticism' about 'reformist campaigns' in the Bush Whitehouse and in the global justice movement might be just about defensible as a description of the fact that both are critical of Brown and Blair. But this is like saying that there is much in common between Bush and radical green groups because they both criticise Kyoto. In your original piece you went further than this saying that our position is that 'there's no point in doing anything because it will be corrupted by capitalism.'. My complaint is that this is inaccurate. This is simply not the position of anyone writing in our book.
You finish by saying that 'ideological speculation isn't going to feed the starving in Niger' Quite so. And this is why the movement as a whole advocates immediate and significant increases in aid. This is quite different to the position of the Bush administration and for that matter of the Blair/Brown government. It seems to me that your piece gives a quite inaccurate and indeed damaging picture of the demands of campaigners.
On revolution, I have to say that the debate on the left for the last hundred years about reform or revolution has been largely about how to abolish capitalism not whether to. My problem with this was that you were making unwarranted assumptions about what must flow from certain sorts of argumentation.
The debate about how to solve the problems of the world currently taking place within the global justice movement is a good deal broader that you seem to be able to acknowledge. There are a very large range of views on how to abolish capitalism and what to replace it with. Many (my guess is most) sections of the movement do not see themselves as revolutionaries and certainly do not believe in revolution. So my complaint was that you were again inaccurately imposing your extrapolations on what people 'must' believe onto a wide ranging debate. This seems to me to have the effect (if not necessarily the intention) of narrowing the debate down and of marginalising what is a wide ranging and diverse movement. I do think that this is a kind of McCarthyism.
Your view appears to be that any solutions to Africa's problems are likely to involve further integration into the global market. Mine is that integration into the global market is not a solution and will make matters worse. It is of course perfectly reasonable for us to have differing views on this, but it is not reasonable to make use of inaccurate statements in the course of such argumentation. Immediate increases in aid and the abolition of debt are not in themselves 'capitalist' and nor are they likely to be holistic solutions as almost everyone in Make Poverty History recognises. But they would begin to make a difference and that is why the movement supports them. It seems only fair that you honestly represent that position.
Best wishes,
David Miller |
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