It was a pity that Bob Purdie should have givin such a facetious report of the working con 'erence on Workers' Control held on the 11tl January. Such snide remarks as *Lubricated with morning coffee... in no way present an accurate picture of the conference. Perhaps Bob Purdie would have preferred not to have had his morning coffee? Or would that have been another reason for complaint about the organisation of the conference? Comrade Purdie says "The seminars were ... arid." How does he know this, since he apparently only attended one of them? As for the question of seminar report-backs, it seems that one can never satisfy some comrades; the organising committee had tried to arrange matters so that seminar reports would be circulated after the conference thus leaving most of the afternoon for discussion from the floor. However, the conference itself decided otherwise, and I entirely agree that this did somewhat limit the number of speakers from the floor.
As for the ramblings of John Cousins, had Bob Purdie stayed at the conference long enough he would have heard me-one of the organisers of the conference-disassociate myself from his speech and tell him to go back and do his homework on the question of productivity John Cousins in the final session of the conference. After his attack on productivity bargaining the whole conference was polarised. Those t the organisers who spoke were forced to state their position vis a vis Cousins' contribution In his final paragraph Purdie explains that the Workers' Control movement will only be able to effectively help the workers if it becomes involved in the real movement. This is unarguably correct. But it does not attempt to answer the question of how it will become involved.
Quite clearly the present academics and Union lefties will attempt to block all such moves. Revolutionaries have to fight to ensure that the undoubted influence that the Workers' Control movement has is not left in the hands of this centrist strata. We must be in there fighting Yours fraternally, John Peters, Socialist Society, Chelsea College of Science and Technology, Manresa Road, London, S.W.6.
Dear Dwarf, On the subject of what should be included in Black Dwarf, I think that you should devote some space to a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the so-called People's Democracies explaining the bureaucratic, counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism. Remember that the British working-class are if anything anti-socialist. There will be I frequently find myself in arguments with fellow revolutionary socialists who state that the City, and all that it stands for, is "too materialistically minded". The truth of the matter is that it is not materialistic enough. Instead of being concerned with production, it is interested in abstraction: instead of being concerned with materials, it is intent on the manipulation of prices. It pursues, in fact, that basic game of juggling with intangibles which is rightly called speculation. The prize for the winners is a stint in the money =power equation.
Nothing proves my point more than the Commodity markets. These function in three main centres, the London Commodity Exchange at Plantation House in Mincing Lane, the Baltic Exchange in St. Mary Axe, and the London Metal Exchange in Whittington Avenue -all deep in the heart of the City.
The Commodity markets deal in almost anything from soya beans to apricot kernels, but the most important markets at Plantation House are cocoa, sugar, coffee, jute and rubber. At the Baltic, it's everything from sunflower One incident that cannot readily be forgotten from this alarmist period proves the point.
The Commodities Section of the Daily Telegraph detailed a journalist to produce a compreensive report on the situation in Ghana right in the middle of the cocoa frenzy. It is kindest to suppose that the writer, who was inexperienced, , was motivated by ignorance. In October an article appeared hinting at secret mounds of cocoa hidden away in Ghanaian stockpiles.
The next day the price of cocoa crashed.
The following day the Telegraph published an apology.
The price of cocoa soared again.
It is not difficult to see that under these circumstances talk of a "free market" is absolutely meaningless. The possibilities for corruption are infinite. Simply by talking about a shortage one can create one: two minute markets, pepper and birdseed, have both been subjected to this treatment in recent months. By giving maximum publicity to minimal fluctuations in supply you can force the price of such commodities up without any difficulty-particularly if you are comtortably sitting on stock, or clutching hypothetical stock in the form of futures In fact, commodity markets are nothing but mirrors reflecting capitalist avarice and greed. The market has become detached from the materials. The average speculator never sees a
and forcing mechanisms on three levels, each of The Black Dwarf 20th February 1970 Page