Sting in the Tail: Ignorance is Bliss (1991)

The Sting in the Tail column from the July 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ignorance is Bliss

A recent news item provided a long list of history exam howlers written by college students in the USA and Canada.

Examples included - 

• Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.
• Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg.
• The Magna Carta provided that no free man could be hanged twice for the same offence.

Comical stuff, but what about the political howlers reported in the media any day of the week? For instance -

We were the first truly democratic party there has ever been in this country

(David Owen on the SDP)

Karl Marx invented Marxism in the British Museum

(historian A.J.P. Taylor)

We would see an end to all world wars if men wore fishnet stockings more often.

(Richard O'Brien, creator of The Rocky Horror Show)

Many workers vote Tory because the Labour Party isn’t left-wing enough.

(any Trotskyist paper)

Still Dreaming

British Telecom's plan to cut another 10,000 jobs despite having declared profits of over £3 billion outraged opposition MPs, trade union leaders and others.

These dreamers think the sackings are not justified when profits are so high, but BT is in business not to provide jobs but maximum profits so that it can keep its shareholders happy and re-invest in order to stay far ahead of its competitors.

BT knows it can only continue to do this by constantly cutting costs and reducing its workforce is an obvious way of doing this.

Karl Marx described how the war which capitalist enterprises wage among themselves must be fought-

this war has the peculiarity that its battles are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of labour. The generals, the capitalists, compete with one another as to who can discharge most soldiers of industry.

That is the logic of capitalism no matter what the dreamers may think.

Charitable Thoughts

In the recent furore about registered charities adopting a political stance and the government's threats to tighten the laws governing charities, an interesting fact about the number of charities emerged.

  The number of charities is growing, totalling 171,434 at the end of the year — against 168,170 the previous year.

The Independent on Sunday (2 June)

The picture of 171,434 organisations beavering away trying to alleviate some of the problems arising from capitalism in 1991 shows how correct, a hundred years ago, Oscar Wilde was in attacking charities in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, when he stated:

  They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

A very clever person saw the futility of charity in 1891. It must be a very foolish one in 1991 who does not see that these 171,434 organisations are powerless to solve the problems of poverty.

Another Fake

Lesley Mahmood is the "Broad Left" candidate in the Walton by-election in Liverpool.

Ms Mahmood, who was recently expelled from the Labour Party, describes herself as a "socialist". The Guardian (11 June) has provided a selection of her recent statements and given us the opportunity to examine her socialist credentials.

No genuine socialist would say as she did "Of course I want a Labour government elected". After all, the Labour Party has supported the production for profit system throughout its inglorious history.

And although she wants to see ". . . socialist ideas being put into practice . . . her comrades in Militant need not panic because she doesn't mean anything really revolutionary like the abolition of the wages system, only ”. . . the council building new homes for people . . . that kind of thing."

Whatever the Labour Party expelled Lesley Mahmood for, it obviously had nothing to do with socialism.

Pin Stripe Penury

The Socialist Party have always clearly stated that there are only two classes in society. We have denied the existence of a "middle class".

This has made us unpopular with trendy left wingers and marketing people who claim that higher paid members of the working class, like managers, lawyers and doctors, are not members of the working class.

The recent increase in unemployment has made it very clear to many of these "middle class" people that there is no security for the working class — whether relatively lowly or highly paid.

Only 3 weeks ago the Department of Employment told the British Institute of Management that 80,000 people claiming unemployment benefit described themselves as managers.

Independent on Sunday (2 June)

Describe yourself how you may — you cannot escape the often unpalatable truth — if you have to work for a wage or a salary, then you are a member of the working class.

What's in a Name

The recent decision to change the name of Leningrad to St. Petersburg excited a great deal of media coverage.

Changing the name from that of a ruthless dictator to that of a megalomaniacal religious freak is just the sort of trivia that does excite the media.

At least it could be said in favour of the change that the working class residents of that city were consulted. That was certainly not the case in another change earlier that month.

  Republics still wanting to be part of the Soviet Union have agreed on a name, dropping "socialist" from the USSR to become the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, Tass reported last night. Leaders of nine of the original 15 Soviet republics, meeting at a government villa in Novo-Ogaievo, outside Moscow, decided on the name in discussions concerning a new Union Treaty.

Daily Telegraph (4 June)

After 84 years of deception the ruling class in the USSR are at least dropping the pretence of calling the country socialist.

The excitement felt by any class conscious worker in the USSR could be likened to that of an inmate of Strangeways on hearing the governor had decided on a new name for the prison.

Hand Outs & Charity

Socialists are always hammering on about people starving while farmers are being paid NOT to produce food. We make no apology for citing the most recent example of this obscenity reported in the Glasgow Herald on 19 June:

 On top of that, Mr Evans said that the Governor of the Bank of England, Mr Robin Leigh Pemberton, as well as being given a £22,000 pay rise, had received £80,000 compensation for NOT growing grain on his 2,000 acre farm.

Now that's what we call a hand out!