Sixties Man (1998)

Book Review from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

1968 Marching in the streets by Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins. Bloomsbury, London 1998. £20.

Hey man, ’68 was so great! Like everything was happening all at once and everyone was groovy. Tarry tells it like it was. There was like Vietnam, man. The Cong versus the US. Sampson versus Goliath like. Ho was the man there man. Like he was never just another nationalist dictator. Yeah right. “Hell no we won’t go.” Unless it’s someone we really dislike like the Nazis. Then there was Che, man. He was like Jesus, man. And like Che had nothing to do with the repressive Cuban regime at all. And there was Czechoslovakia too. Dubcek and “state managed capitalism with a human face”. Or whatever it was. Then there was the students in Paris, man, who were like really radical and didn’t just want bigger beds and bigger grants at all. There was a real revolutionary situation there, man. Although de Gaulle did get a totally massive election victory. We all loved Meow, the Chinese cat, too. After all millions of dead red Chinese can’t be wrong. And then there was Free Love, man. Which didn’t just mean I could get laid more often. And we weren’t like just into getting stoned like today’s kids who smoke dope and do LSD all the time. Everyone was just so radical and everyone was out marching just like Enoch Powell, man. And rioting: “to loot is to liberate”. Unless it’s my shop of course. Then there was like the Blacks thing, man, and Women’s Liberation. Those things changed the world forever, man. Like Blacks aren’t discriminated against at all now and women still don’t get the shitty end of the stick. Now like everyone’s totally sold out, man, they used to be so radical and now they’re like bourgeois. Not Tarry though. Even though he’s got a job on the TV and he’s a rich man, man.

Repeat this mournful, self-indulgent, semi-Trot dirge until bored to death or organise for a real socialist revolution.

Kaz.

The French Non-Revolution (1988)

From the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty years ago this month students were erecting barricades and battling with the police in the streets of Paris. Over nine million workers were on strike. Industry was at a standstill with most factories occupied by strikers.

This social explosion had started at the beginning of May when the government, hoping to stop the student unrest that had been growing over the preceding months from getting out of hand, ordered the police to arrest certain student activists including the most prominent. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, known as Danny-le-Rouge. The result was to provoke the very thing they had been hoping to avoid. Barricades went up in the student quarter on the left bank of the river Seine and fierce street battles took place on the night of 10-11 May as the police tried to reconquer the area, dispensing indiscriminate brutality to all who got in their way.

To protest against this police brutality against the students the trade unions called a one-day general strike for the following Monday 13 May. Many workers — wage and salary earners had their own grievances against the government, which had been treating them in much the same way as Thatcher has been treating workers in Britain since she came to power — did not return to work the next day or came out again later in the week and a full-scale general strike, with factory occupations, which was to last several weeks, spread throughout the country.

Some thought that France was on the brink of a revolution that would sweep away capitalism and usher in workers' control of society. But this was an illusion. In the absence of a socialist-minded working class, the most that could have happened was the collapse of the Gaullist regime and its replacement by some left-of-centre government of capitalism similar to that then in office in Britain under Harold Wilson.

De Gaulle himself had come to power as a result of an army and settlers' revolt that had begun in Algeria ten years previously. In terms of the then existing constitution — that of the Fourth Republic — the way he came to power was perfectly illegal but such changes of regime by extra-parliamentary means have been a frequent feature of French history since the French revolution of 1789. Since that time there have in fact been a number of such changes — France has had five republics, two empires, two monarchies in addition to Vichy France under Marshal Petain — and this is what the term revolution has come to mean in French politics.

Such a "revolution" — resulting in the restoration of the Fourth Republic or in the establishment of a sixth one — was indeed a possibility in May 1968 but would have had nothing in common with what socialists mean by revolution — a change in the basis of society. From a socialist point of view, a change of political regime carried out by action on the streets is no more relevant than a change of government carried out by electoral means. Both are merely ways of rearranging the political administration of capitalism. Both leave the capitalist basis of society unchanged.

In any event the opponents of the Gaullist regime — from the student activists to the left politicians — underestimated the determination of De Gaulle and the solidity of his regime. When at the end of May he disappeared from Paris, opposition politicians thought that he was about to go and began to stake rival claims to the posts they would like to occupy in the new government. De Gaulle had in fact gone to Germany secretly to meet the leaders of the Army. On his return, on 30 May he immediately went on radio and TV to announce that a general election would be held in June in which the issue would be: maintenance of the Gaullist regime or a left-wing government dominated by the French Communist Party (which was at that time indeed much stronger than the non-Communist left). Faced with this choice, in the election which took place on 23 and 30 June, the voters gave De Gaulle a landslide victory. The May events had resulted, not in the overthrow of the Gaullist regime but in its consolidation. Of course they also brought university reform and wage increases and other benefits for the workers but as an attempt to change the political regime in France by extra-parliamentary means May 1968 was a complete flop.

This wasn't evident immediately, at least not to the student and extreme-left activists. They argued that it would have succeeded if only the workers had taken the next step and instead of just occupying the factories had started operating them without the bosses or if only the French Communist Party (PCF) and the trade union centre it controlled (the CGT) had not betrayed the revolution by taking up a moderate, constitutional line. The Trotskyists put on their scratchy old gramophone record about the revolution having failed for want of a vanguard party to lead the workers. More interesting was the attitude of Cohn-Bendit both at the time and later.

In a book written with his brother Gabriel in August 1968. entitled Leftwing Radicalism. Cure for Communism 's Senile Disease (an obvious play on the title of Lenin's pamphlet Left wing Communism. An Infantile Disease which the PCF quoted against him and other "leftists"). Cohn-Bendit argued that the Gaullist regime could have been toppled on the night of 24-25 May if the student demonstrators who had moved over to the right bank of the Seine had stayed there after burning the Stock Exchange (or rather starting a fire inside it since stock exchanges, being built of marble, don't burn easily) and had gone on to capture the ministries of Finance and Justice a few streets away instead of returning to the left bank.

Today, however, he argues that what the opponents of the Gaullist regime should have done in May 1968 was to have called for a general election in mid-May at the height of the factory and university occupations which he reckons they would easily have won. He has even gone on record as saying that the biggest mistake he has ever made was "not to have called for an election sooner in 1968" (The Economist 14 February 1987). In other words, Dany the Red, the student revolutionary, now says that the way to have overthrown De Gaulle was through elections. As a member of the German Green Party he now actively participates in electoral activity and has even been their candidate for the post of mayor of Frankfurt.

As a matter of fact this is not all that much of a U-turn since, even in May 1968, Cohn-Bendit was well aware that the student movement, despite its revolutionary rhetoric, was in practice struggling not to replace capitalism by socialism but to replace Gaullism by some left-wing government. So it is not really a big change, that he should now be saying a better way to have achieved this would have been through the ballot box. When he spoke about "revolutionary action" he did not mean action to overthrow capitalism but merely street demonstrations, seizure of public buildings and strikes to overthrow De Gaulle. This emerges clearly, for instance, from the interview the pretentious philosopher and ex-PCF fellow traveller Jean-Paul Sartre had with him in the middle of the events and before his expulsion from France on 22 May as an "undesirable" alien (his parents came from Germany) and which was published in Le Nouvel Observateur on 20 May. Here he stated clearly that the aim was "the overthrow of the regime". explaining that in his view:

  A radical change in the structure of our society would only be possible, if, for example, a serious economic crisis, the action of a powerful workers' movement, and vigorous student activity suddenly converged. These conditions have not all been realised today. At best we can hope to bring down the government. We must not dream of destroying bourgeois society (translation in The Student Revolt, Panther. 1968).

But to say that all that could be done in the circumstances was to bring down the government without destroying capitalism is tantamount to saying that all that could be done was to replace one government of capitalism by another. Cohn-Bendit did not shrink from this conclusion:

  Suppose the workers hold out too and the regime falls. What will happen then? The left will come to power. Everything will then depend on what it does. If it changes the system — I must admit I doubt if it will — it will have an audience, and all will be well. But if we have a Wilson-style government, with or without the Communists, which only proposes minor reforms and adjustments, then the extreme left will regain its strength and we shall have to go on posing the real problems of social control, workers’ power, and so on.

So Cohn-Bendit was lucid enough to recognise that, in the circumstances obtaining in May-June 1968, the only possible alternative to the Gaullist regime was some left-wing government. In the end this did come but 13 years later, when Mitterrand was elected President and appointed a Wilson-style government with PCF Ministers. As was inevitable, since capitalism can never be made to function in the interest of the wage and salary earners, this government failed miserably to solve working class problems — just as it would have done had it come to power in 1968.

This being so, it is pertinent to ask if raising the issue of a change of regime was not a diversion from the economic objectives of the general strike such as higher wages and better conditions. Actually, the French working class behaved in a remarkably intelligent way: refusing to get themselves killed in an attempt to replace the Gaullist regime by a government of left-wing politicians, which would have brought them no benefit, they profited from the momentary weakness of the regime in place to extract higher wages and a number of other concessions.

Naturally the student and political activists (Trotskyists. Maoists and other assorted followers of Ho Chi Minh. Che Guevara and Castro) found this a rather timid attitude and blamed the trade unions for betraying the workers who, according to them, were waiting for a lead to take action to overthrow both Gaullism and capitalism. But it is clear that it was the unions who were more representative of working-class opinion and had the more realistic if less exciting attitude. Workers are not as stupid as Leninists imply in their contemptuous dictum that ’’left to themselves, workers are only capable of acquiring a trade union consciousness". Trade union consciousness alone is indeed far from socialist consciousness but it is far in advance of Leninism. As one wit has put it, it would be more correct to say that, left to themselves, students are only capable of acquiring a Leninist consciousness.

May '68 was, however, rather more than a general strike for economic ends sparked off by student riots. It also had a deep and lasting effect on social attitudes in France — decline of authoritarianism and paternalism in all fields — and it led everywhere to an interest in radical social ideas. Books by and about Marx as well as Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Paul Mattick and other radical thinkers became readily available (alongside, it is true, less helpful works by Trotsky). All sorts of ideas came to be discussed. Tariq Ali. who saw himself as the British equivalent of Dany-le-Rouge. even declared in June 1968 on a television programme about the student revolt "we believe in the abolition of money". Naturally, with such ideas springing up spontaneously, socialists were able to get our point of view over much more easily than normally. The revival of genuine socialist ideas may prove to be the most lasting historical effect of May 1968. In any event, we are still working to ensure that it is.

Adam Buick

Classic Reprint: To The Workers of France (1988)

A Classic Reprint from the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

  We reprint a manifesto adopted by our Executive Committee in May 1968 which set out our attitudes to the events in France.

We address you not as citizens of one country to citizens of another but as world socialists to fellow members of the world working class.

We reject frontiers as artificial barriers put up by governments. All men are brothers and the world should be theirs. All men should be social equals with free access to the plenty that could be if only the means of living belonged to a socialist world community. We oppose governments everywhere, all nationalism, racism and religion, all censorship, all wars and preparations for war.

Workers! We support your class struggle for better wages and conditions against the employers and the government. But do not be taken in by the ease with which you have occupied the factories. They allowed you to do this because they know that in time you must give in. Political power is always in the hands of those who control the machinery of government, including the armed forces and the sadistic CRS. Do not be misled by those who say that universal suffrage is a fraud. Learn from your masters. You too must organise to win political power if you want a new society. Do not let cunning politicians or the discredited Communist Party return to power on your backs. Ignore those who would be your leaders. Rely on your own understanding and organisation. Turn universal suffrage into an instrument of emancipation.

Students! We share your distaste for the indignities and hypocrisies of the present order. We share your wish for a new society with no exploitation of man by man. But do not underestimate what a task it will be to change society. It will be a hundred times more difficult than changing the government. A democratic world community, based on common ownership with production for use not profit, can only be set up when people want it and are ready to take the steps needed to get it up and keep it going. Democratic political action is the only way to Socialism. There are no short cuts. We must have a majority actively on our side. Do not be misled by student demagogues, those who praise Bakunin, Trotsky, Mao or Che Guevara, who would use you for their own mistaken ends. They think that an elite should use unrest to gain power and then set up a classless society. What dangerous nonsense! Look at state capitalist Russia where a new privileged class rules, with police intimidation and censorship, over an increasingly restless population. Look at state capitalist China where power-hungry bureaucrats cynically manipulate the people in their own sordid squabbles. Learn the lessons of history: elite action leads to elite rule. No Socialism unless by democratic political action, based on socialist understanding.

The task you face in France is the same that we face in Britain and our brothers in Germany, Russia, the United States and other countries: to build up a strong world-wide movement for Socialism. What is needed more than anything else in this period of social unrest is a clear, uncompromising statement of the case for a socialist world community.

If you agree, please write to us. We will be glad to help you ensure that the voice of Socialism is again heard in France.

Workers of the world, Unite!

Blogger's Note:

This statement from the SPGB's Executive Committee appeared in the July 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard.

I was there in '68 (1988)

From the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

I was studying for my finals exams at Hull University when it started to happen. Thousands of students on the streets of Paris — then the workers on strike too. Law and order was breaking down. That's what the newspapers and the radio told us, and we saw bits of it on our black and white TV screens.

Then it came over here. Or sort of. Demonstrations and sit-ins at colleges and universities all over the country. What sparked the one at Hull — if it wasn't just the Paris events — was the authorities dragging their feet over student representation on university committees. Before most of us knew it, general meetings were being called and resolutions passed. The administration building was occupied.

A hundred students sat in. Then two hundred, then five or six hundred. The administration was at a standstill. I was involved too. I'd never been a "militant", but I'd always supported the Labour Party and had a gut feeling for the underdog. What actually drove me in there more than anything else was seeing a silly detestable bugger of a student on my course standing outside the administration block wearing a large badge with the words "I'm backing Brynmor" (Brynmor Jones was the university's vice- chancellor). I called him a rat and walked into the occupation.

Once you were in there, you became more and more convinced your cause was a just one. Student "leaders" addressed meetings. and spoke persuasively. We were determined to see it through. There was an atmosphere of . . . what was it? — freedom? . . . community? that made you heady. It was what the activists called "radicalisation" and you put your case with conviction and enthusiasm to other students you met outside.

How long was it going to last? On campus there were rumours about goings-on in the sit-in. The local press picked it up. Offices were being vandalised, so they said, student records carried away, orgies held. I never saw any of it — and at the time wondered what I'd missed. But I did see people's resolve gradually slipping away and the sitters-in become fewer and fewer until only a few die-hards were left. The University weren't using a heavy hand. They were playing a waiting game, which they knew they would eventually win. And as they played the game, a group of "moderate" students used the students' union constitution to call an emergency general meeting with the proposition that the occupation cease forthwith.

It was the biggest gathering of students I'd ever seen — about 1.200. Those in favour of the motion spoke first and were frankly pathetic. The speakers on our side were cool and logical, and some of them brilliant. If there was any justice, we should have won. But we didn't. The vice-chancellor was allowed to address the students and showed himself, contrary to reputation, to be an extremely clever man. He was conciliatory. He said he sympathised with the demands for change, promised that reforms would be made to give the students more say in the running of the university but that in the meantime, in the name of moderation and responsibility, we should go back to our books so that the reforms could start to be discussed. We filed through division doors. Our side had 400 votes. The opposition had 700 plus. We'd lost. Or had we? For procedural reasons another vote was needed to finalise the matter. The left-wing "agitators" whom many people said had fomented the whole thing in the first place — maybe they had — tried to prolong the debate as much as possible in the hope that enough "moderates" would drift off for the vote to swing the other way. But. though a few people left, when the final vote was taken at six o'clock, there was still a decisive majority against the occupation.

It was the same story up and down the country. The various demonstrations and sit-ins came to an end. It was the same in France too. When the agitators died away. De Gaulle called an election and won hands-down. As for Hull. I left that year so I don't know whether they ever got the reforms.

I never really understood at the time what had gone on — either here or in France. People said that we'd been close to a socialist revolution. I only started to understand two or three years later when I came into contact with The Socialist Party. I asked the members I met what they thought of the events of '68 and was shown a copy of the July 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard with the cover "How close was France to a socialist revolution?". The answer it gave was a revelation to me and. if you can still get hold of a copy, it's just as much worth reading now as it was then.

Howard Moss

The conspiracy trial (1972)

Book Review from the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Conspiracy Trial. Ed. Judy Clavir and John Spitzer. (Jonathan Cape; £5.50).

there is much dramatic material in any trial and that of the Chicago Eight contained more than most. Apart from the unconventional dress and behaviour of the defendants there was the passionate advocacy of their counsel, the binding and gagging of Bobby Seale and such bizarre incidents as the presentation of a birthday cake to him in the courtroom.

A trial transcript bears a formidable appearance and seems to be reading only for the serious researcher. Only when we dip into the transcript does it come alive, with the drama, the humour, the colour and sometimes the simple tragedy leaping out of the cold words of print.

This book is a very hefty piece of work—615 pages, no less, and all in pretty close type. Randomly opening it at first catches the attention, then holds the interest and in the end almost keeps you up half the night. Yet it’s still mainly a reference work, for anyone who has not been tired out by the exposure of this, one of America’s most famous court happenings.

And in between reading it, it makes a useful door stop or flower press.

Ivan

The French Non-Revolution (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

France ten years ago this month. Barricades in the streets of Paris. Ten million workers on strike. Factory occupations. No wonder some people were misled into thinking that a revolutionary situation existed which might have ended in the take-over of power by the working class. But in fact this was never even the remotest possibility. No revolutionary situation existed.

Students and workers were certainly, for different reasons, discontented but mere discontent, however deep, is not the same thing as a positive desire for revolutionary change. A real revolutionary situation will only exist when the great majority of wage and salary earners have come to consciously want and understand the revolutionary change which the establishment of Socialism in place of capitalism will represent, and will express itself as democratic political action via the ballot box and not as barricades and factory occupations. This was not the case in France in May 1968.

The students’ leaders — “Dany le Rouge” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now settled down as a lawyer in Germany), Alain Krivine (still a leading French Trotskyist), Alain Geismar (later a Maoist, for a while), etc.—together with a minority of students proclaimed themselves “revolutionaries” and issued appeals to the workers to take power and overthrow capitalism. They were encouraged in this by the fact that it was undoubtedly their occupation of the Sorbonne and subsequent clashes with the police that had sparked off the general strike. But a majority even of students were only discontented with the archaic French university system and would have been satisfied with reforms in this field—and were in fact to be when the Gaullist government later changed the system.

As for the workers, even though the first factory occupation, that of Sud-Aviation at Nantes, occurred in an area with a strong anarcho-syndicalist tradition, their demands were strictly of a trade-union nature: higher wages and shorter working hours. The trade union leaders, including those of the Communist Party dominated CGT, realised this and used the general strike as a means of extracting improvements in wages and conditions from employers and the government.

Industrial action

From this point of view, that of an industrial action to get the employers to disgorge a little more of the wealth they had taken from the workers, the strike can be rated a success. But even though it was part of the class struggle, and as such had the support of the SPGB (expressed in a leaflet issued by our Executive Committee in French), the general strike had nothing to do with Socialism. The factories had been occupied, not with a view to taking them over and producing for use instead of profit, but simply as a means of bringing pressure to bear on employers to concede some improvements on the industrial field.

The non-revolutionary situation in France was to be confirmed in the elections De Gaulle called in June after the strike was over. His Gaullist party and other openly conservative groupings swept back to power in a landslide victory which gave them 359 of the 487 seats in the National Assembly.

Student leaders

The student leaders accused the Communist Party of “betraying the revolution”. Cohn-Bendit referred to them as “stalinist scum” and they replied by calling him a “foreign anarchist”. But this was an illogical accusation. For you can only betray something if you actually stand for it. But the French Communist Party had long ceased to be the Bolshevik vanguard party the student leaders wanted it to behave like and had become thoroughly reformist, though remaining a dangerously disciplined party dictatorially controlled by its leaders. And if they had seized power the student leaders would not have liked the result: the establishment of a bureaucratic state capitalist regime as in Russia. Or would they? Cohn-Bendit’s position as an anarchist was clear on this point but the others were Trotskyists or Maoists wedded to the idea of a vanguard party seizing power and ruling in the name of the workers—in other words, a Leninist dictatorship over the proletariat. From this point of view the workers were sensible to have ignored the students’ appeals and to have used the strike to pursue industrial ends only.

The May events did however have a profound effect on the thinking of the “extreme left”, and not only in France. For the wildest dreams of students who make up the bulk of the membership of all Trotskyist and Maoist sects — as someone once put it, left to themselves students are capable of acquiring only a Leninist consciousness!—seemed to have been confirmed : they, a student vanguard, had been the catalyst that had set the working class in motion. If this had been done once, they argued, it could be done again, and they changed their tactics to trying to influence the working class directly instead of through “the mass party of the working class”, which in France meant for them the Communist Party and the CGT. Far from appreciating being used as an access to workers for Trotskyists the French CP did not hesitate even to employ physical violence against Trotskyist literature sellers at meetings and outside factories. Not that this shook the Trotskyists’ pigheaded resolve to be where they thought the workers were.

Entryism

The May events thus led to Trotskyists in all countries, including Britain, abandoning the tactic of “entryism” into Communist and Labour parties (though not that of electoral support for them) and to come out into the open as independent groups in their own right. 1968 marked the start of a process which has led in Britain to the appearance on the political scene of a “Socialist Workers Party” and of a “Workers Revolutionary Party”, direct descendants of groups which throughout the fifties and sixties had been accusing us of being “sectarian” and “cut off from the working class” for maintaining a party independent of and opposed to the Labour Party.

We drew a different, indeed opposite, lesson from the May events. The continuation of capitalism in France confirmed that as long as the working class are not conscious socialists capitalism is safe. Socialism can only be established by democratic political action through the ballot box when once the vast majority of wage and salary earners have come to want and understand it. The emancipation of the working class, as Marx had pointed out years ago, must be the work of the working class itself and not of some self- appointed minority.

Adam Buick

Pathfinders: Look down there, and tell me what you see . . . (2008)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics involves, among other things, the art of retrofitting analyses onto past events which were incomprehensible to most people at the time. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the iconic May ’68 student protests in Paris the media will be full of articles, potted histories, personal accounts and think-pieces, all turning over the events of that tempestuous period and asking where it all ended up and whether it really changed anything.

Is there any sense in which the world really is different now? Certainly there have been changes, the fall of the Berlin Wall being the most significant. But whereas politics has for the most part gone round in circles, science has leapt off the starting blocks and disappeared down the track. 1968, it is worth recalling, was before humans landed on the moon. It was before the first microprocessor, the first home computer or the first email. It predated superstring theory, buckyballs and nanotubes. It was before Hubble, or Mars landers or photographs of Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets. It was before biotech, stem cells or Dolly the sheep. It was from an era, incredibly, when we knew – knew – that whatever happened to the dinosaurs would never be discovered. It was before we ever suspected that all the humans on the planet are descended from one female in Africa. In 1968 lodging houses could still display signs reading ‘No Blacks, No Pets, No Irish’, as racism and sexism formed part of the cheap post-war furniture we sat on as we watched Till Death Us Do Part on black and white TVs, just before turning off the boring news reports about strikes, civil rights, and some vague ‘police action’ in a place called Vietnam.

What nobody could really have imagined in 1968 was that scientists might one day hold centre-stage in a political debate that would encompass the interests of the whole of humanity. The 1960’s was the decade of black emancipation, which black people achieved after a fashion, in that flagrant discrimination is now technically illegal. The 1970’s was given over to ‘women’s liberation’, as it was called, something which seemed like a good idea at the time but is arguably not much further forward than it was then. Class politics in the UK seemed to have a little spell in the sun during the 1980’s thanks to the Miners’ Strike and the Poll Tax hoo-ha, though this was short-lived. After that the Wall came down and with it the last Grand Illusion. Then the Greens came, briefly, to the fore in the public consciousness before it was realised that, worthy though they may be, they didn’t possess the collective political wit to punch their way out of an ozone bubble. From then on, and with all sectional interests apparently exhausted leaving some nihilistic post-modernist torpor, some people started listening to the scientists.

All except America, under Bush, to whom scientists were the very worst kind of extremists, the kind you just can’t negotiate with. Elsewhere, and with a decade of freakish droughts, heatwaves, cold snaps, tornadoes, floods and crop failures to reinforce a justifiably growing sense of alarm, the world’s captains of capitalism were forced reluctantly to dine at well-stocked table after table in order to put aside their nationalist differences and ask how in blazes they were going to continue to stay in power when climate change was going to cause anarchy and they were all going to be murdered in their beds by starving rioting populations.

Is it good that politicians are listening to scientists? Yes, because scientists are the only people who cannot plausibly be accused of a political agenda, and who therefore have no incentive to lie or distort facts. But politicians are not really listening to everything scientists say, only that portion of it that they can conveniently do something about. And scientists, of course, like charities, have not been accustomed to addressing questions they considered outside their scope, such as global inequality. But as the weight of evidence mounts, that is changing. Increasingly, some scientists are putting the words ‘carbon’ and ‘capitalism’ together, if the normally reliable New Scientist is anything to go by (April 19), and asking searching questions about the market’s ability to do anything in the face of its own blind refusal to face facts and change its behaviour. The facts of world hunger and preventable disease no longer seem outside the purview of scientific examination either, and although capitalism itself is not yet in the dock, its representative governments are increasingly subject to cross-examination by a body of academics and researchers who have the facts at their fingertips and a disinclination to be put off by rhetoric and flim-flam.

Of course, governments don’t listen to radicals. Even though Nicholas Stern, the World Bank’s former chief economist, calls global warming ‘the greatest market failure the world has ever seen’, it will be dismissed in the corridors of power as mere panic-mongering by a former minion hungry for publicity. But it doesn’t matter. Governments aren’t going to create change in any case. The people who really need to listen to scientists are the people. They need to realise that it is no longer a question of race politics, as it might have seemed on the day, in 1968, when they shot Martin Luther King. It’s not a question of women’s politics, as it might have seemed to some on the publication of The Female Eunuch in 1970. Today’s battle for the Democratic leadership and the presidency of the USA is, after all, between a rich black man and a rich white woman, and no voter with a modest grasp of realities expects either result to change capitalism in any important way. It’s no longer about sectional interests within a given socio-economic framework. Today, it is a question of survival, and the framework itself is being challenged. The real obstacle to change is what it has always been, the same obstacle which blocks any real progress on the impending food or water crisis, on the biofuels controversy, on carbon capping, on the rampant waste of resources, and on global warming. It is class ownership, and the fact that the owning class are raping and destroying the world is increasingly being brought to the headlines by scientists with no axe to grind and no political cards up their sleeve. Workers should have learned by now never to trust a politician. Quite right. But let’s hope people start taking more notice of the back-room boffins, because they are asking questions which, until now, only socialists – and a certain German economist – have ever asked. The progress of scientific thinking along the socialist path has been cautious, but it is built on solid empirical foundations which have come a long way in the last forty years. The case for abolishing capitalism, the socialist case, is increasingly being backed by conservative science as well. And we certainly didn’t see that coming in 1968.

Paddy Shannon

Running Commentary: Book-keeping (1985)

The Running Commentary Column from the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Book-keeping

Although they are not actually on the picket lines, the accountants are in a titanic clash over the coal strike, on the issue of whether the mines are really losing money or not. On one side, arguing that the National Coal Board has got it wrong because it doesn't keep its books properly, are two professors of accounting and financial management (yes, there are such people). The development of the professors' argument is that if the NCB kept its books differently the coal mines would be seen to be making a profit. Then the NCB could stop closing pits, it might even re-open some which it has already closed and the strikers could all go back down the mines.

The argument apparently revolves around something called fixed or central overheads, which have nothing to do with pit props but which are of vital concern to accountants. The Coal Board calculates that these overheads are saved if a pit is shut down but the professors assert that they are merely reallocated among surviving pits. Applying this argument to Cortonwood colliery, where the present dispute began and which the strikers have called their Alamo, would mean that the pit showed a profit of £5.5 a tonne instead of a loss of £6.2 a tonne.

The accountants are in battle over an issue of great significance to capitalism because coal, like all other wealth, is at present turned out with the motive of making a profit. But to anyone whose concern is with human welfare, there is another significance. Whatever the book-keeping system, whether the coal mines are in the accounts as making a profit or a loss, the production of coal has continued, by the human process of applying the miners' working skills to natural materials. This illustrates the true nature of capitalism's need to produce profit and to accumulate capital — an encumbrance on society's productivity which a sane world will not tolerate.

Apathy

Lurking somewhere among the pin-striped ranks of MPs. merchant bankers and stockbrokers there are quite a few people who were once in open revolt against institutions like Parliament and the City. Mostly, they expressed their anger in the student riots of the 1960s, which were written up as the beginning of the end of the acquisitive society — the short, sharp shock to get socialism without the tiresome wait for the working class to understand and want it.

At the time this sounded pretty seductive, especially to youngsters who enjoyed shocking others or being shocked themselves. However, over the years the revolutionary ardour of the rioters has cooled as they have submerged themselves in the daily grind of getting a living or the less arduous business of raking in the dividends.

What about the rioters' heirs, the young people who now populate the universities? Among the ancient stones and the dozing spires there is a similar tranquil acceptance of the priorities of capitalism. The universities, to put it another way, are no longer hot-beds of dissent. All is quiet at Essex; in deepest Sussex they are not stirring. "We are concerned." says one report about the undergraduates of Cambridge, "about current political apathy on the part of students in the presence of numerous national and international problems". In Oxford the students are compliant enough to give the "bulldogs" — who are appointed by the university to police the undergraduates — an unusually easy life.

There are indeed plenty of reasons for the students to protest. They stay quiet, the only noise from them being the industrious scratch of pens, the devoted turning of pages, the gentle hum of labouring brains, because they are disciplined to be like that from the fear of not being able to get a job when they graduate. Unemployment, says the president of the Cambridge students' union, and the fierce competition it brings, concentrates the students' minds on their work.

So were those famous riots no more than futile ephemera? They did not bring capitalism down; they did not change the system's priorities; they did not "raise consciousness". What they did was to divert workers' attentions and energies away from the real work of understanding this iniquitous social system and using that understanding to abolish it.

Shabby

Quite a few Labour Party members would like to see the back of one of their most illustrious recruits, but the person concerned won't go of his own accord. This is not surprising because the Most Illustrious Recruit in question is that famous millionaire and benefactor of the starving Ethiopians, Robert Maxwell, who is not well known for bending to the wishes or the opinions of those around him.

Maxwell, it may be remembered, is the man who was not deterred by his Czechoslovak origins from originating the I'm Backing Britain campaign. He was also the Labour MP for Buckingham and is now owner of the Pergamon Press and the Daily Mirror and, if not the owner at any rate the chairman of, Oxford United Football Club.

None of these interests, however, seem to have bothered the members of Oxford East Labour Party where, we must assume, they pride themselves on their socialist principles or at least on what passes for them. What makes them want to get rid of Maxwell is the fact that he resorted to the courts to evict redundant print workers who were occupying his London plant.

The members are outraged that someone they should be greeting as a fellow socialist should use the provisions of the Tory Employment Act against his workers. The fellow socialist is sure that he didn't need Tory laws; he used some of the legislation which was on the Statute Book under the last Labour government, kept there to protect the property rights of the British ruling class.

The passions of the Oxford East members seem spent to no avail because, according to the Guardian (19 November 1984) Maxwell's place in the Labour Party is safeguarded by his ownership of the Daily Mirror, the one mass-circulation paper to support the party. Who would want to upset so valuable a vote-winner?

Whatever the outcome of this shabby dispute, the members of the Oxford East Labour Party might ask themselves a few questions about the nature of their party, about its capacity to include someone with the political opinions of Robert Maxwell and about why it is reluctant to expel him. Can such a party lay claim to be socialist? As Maxwell's Mirror might put it. the answer is NO!!!

Against capitalism (2019)

Book Review from the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Machine and its Discontents: A Fredy Perlman Anthology’ (Theory and Practice and Active Distribution, 2018). Available from Active Distribution

Fredy Perlman (1934—85) is perhaps best remembered in connection with the publishing cooperative Black & Red. His life story, lovingly told by his wife Lorraine in her memoir Having Little Being Much (1989), is a complex one: born in Czechoslovakia and raised in the US, he lived several years in France and Yugoslavia before settling in the Midwest. Equally complex was his development as a radical thinker, influenced at various periods by anarchism, Marxism, situationism and primitivism. However, he never fully identified with any particular school of thought: the only self-descriptor ending in -ist that he accepted was cellist.

Darren Poynton has brought together, edited and introduced a selection of Perlman’s writings that had become difficult to find. They are organised in five parts under the headings: worker-student uprisings, critique of political economy, critique of leaders, critique of nationalism, critique of ‘progress’. The book is illustrated with several of Perlman’s eloquent photo montages.

The writings in Part One pertain to the social upheavals that took place in France and Yugoslavia in 1968. There is a lengthy excerpt from a text co-authored by Perlman and Roger Gregoire describing and assessing their experiences in Paris in May and June 1968 while members of a ‘worker-student action committee’. The detailed account reveals the sorts of things that really happened – and did not happen – in the course of the ‘Paris Spring’. The authors discuss why a more fruitful interaction did not occur between student protestors and striking workers at the Citroen car factory. The crucial obstacle, they conclude, was the fact that the ideas of most participants in the events, students as well as workers, remained within the confines of capitalist reality. In particular, they aspired at most to turn the factory into the collective or group property of its current workforce rather than into social property.

Part One also includes an account of the student protests that broke out in Yugoslavia in 1968 and the reaction of the Yugoslav authorities to them. Perlman exposes the chasm that existed between the ideological façade of ‘self-managing socialism’ and the real functioning of the power structure.

Part Two consists of two excellent essays that in a clear and vivid style explain key concepts in the Marxian critique of capitalism, with special emphasis on capital, alienation and the ‘commodity fetishism’ that makes relations between people appear as relations between things. The second essay, originally published in 1971 as an introduction to the English translation of I.I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, contrasts Marx with Paul Samuelson, author of the standard economics textbook used in American colleges. Perlman demonstrates that Marx and Samuelson do not give different answers to the same questions; they are concerned with quite different questions. This is because Marx belongs to the old school of ‘political economy’, which studied conflicting class interests, while Samuelson represents the new discipline of ‘economics’ that displaced political economy early in the 20th century. ‘Economics’ focuses on technical issues of resource allocation and is therefore better suited to the justification of capitalism.

In Part Three we find excerpts from a text entitled ‘The Seizure of State Power’. This text, which marshals quotations from Lenin, Mao and Machiavelli, purports to be a guide for would-be ‘revolutionary leaders’ intent upon seizing power. It is really a satire designed to highlight the contrast between the seizure of power by an elite and a genuine popular revolution. Some critics did not realise that it was a satire and took it at face value.

The essay in Part Four exposes the class interests behind movements for ‘national liberation’ and argues that nationalism cannot play a progressive role in the contemporary world. Perlman’s views on this subject fully coincide with those of the World Socialist Movement.

In the last few years of his life Perlman went beyond the Marxian critique of capitalism to assail modern concepts of ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’. Some have accused him of rejecting technology as such – see, for instance, the review of his book Against His-story, Against Leviathan! (1983) in Aufheben. The short article on ‘progress and nuclear power’ that makes up Part Five does not suffice to assess his views at this period.

On the whole, the new Perlman anthology is a very welcome addition to socialist literature.

Stefan

Barcelona conference (1989)

From the January 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late last year there took place in Barcelona an international conference on the future of society. The idea was for a large number of speakers from across the world to take part in a week of discussion and debate on the question of social change. Contributors were to be of diverse political persuasions, so that the outcome would be representative, and conferences would be continued annually in different parts of the world over five years, returning to Barcelona in 1992. This first conference was timed to mark the twentieth anniversary of the events of 1968, and the radical pronouncements in the advance programme appeared promising, speaking enthusiastically of “a change in civilisation", "models for the future" and even the need to "transform society".

Having been offered the opportunity to take part in all of the seminars and debates. and to address one of the sessions, I was quite willing to see of what use this forum could be in the urgent task of propagating socialist ideas. This was in spite of the fact that speakers included certain philosophers of the "New Right”; unlike some political dim-wits of the Left who refuse to debate with those they allegedly disagree with, socialists are prepared to discuss and debate with political opponents of all persuasions. This is a point of principle based on our view that socialist revolution can only come with the winning over of a clear majority to our ideas. We can and must defeat in argument all kinds of antiquated myths which are peddled by many workers on behalf of their employers.

On arrival at the conference, however, all of my worst fears were confirmed. Although originally organised by a small group of ex-Trotskyists based around the University, the event had grown and begun to attract major sponsorship in a way that verged on the sinister and would have been comical had the wasted opportunity not been so obvious. The sponsors, it turned out. included the Sony Corporation, various banks and even government bodies. These financial institutions clearly knew a thing or two about buying off dissent, but with this intellectual mob the process clearly came pretty cheaply. Even the grandiose conference auditorium itself was situated in a bank!

The conference was opened by speeches full of pious waffle from non-entities such as a government minister and the Chairman of the bank in question. Anyone attending, other than the hundred or so invited speakers, had to pay ninety dollars just to take part. Almost all the main participants were senior academics of various disciplines. Lively debate was prevented by methods ranging from restricting to a few minutes at the end of a session, questions from the floor" to the outright censorship of taking points in writing for selection by the platform speakers.

Despite all these and other limitations, I was able to ensure that the genuine expression of socialism was heard loud and clear in several of the sessions, as well as in the text presented at one of the seminars (see separate article). It is, however, worth considering in detail some of the nonsense spoken, as this proved in the end to be a classic example of the chaos which results when capitalism's apologists try to give the system a new lease of life by discussing so-called 'alternatives” within it.

At the outset, the excited auditorium of two hundred or so were warned by an anthropologist called Buxó not to contemplate any return to the structures or values of primitive anthropological forms: far better no doubt to stick with the civilised certainties of the bomb and the dole queue. Lester Ruiz from New York spoke of the "deconstructivist" efforts facing us all, and the need for spiritual transformation. An ex-Communist party member from Paris called Garaudy stated that millions were dying of hunger while wheat is destroyed, but then showed his reluctance to leave the CP behind by singing the praises of Gorbachev and declaring his conversion to Islam. A born-again Christian called for a "mixed economy" with “God at the centre and love at its heart". A Communist Party member and philosopher from Georgia, Merab Mamardashvili, spoke of the need for metaphysical rebirth and mourned the passing of the “pre-revolutionary spirit" of Tsarism, while insisting that as a Marxist and Party member, he knew what he was saying and “allowed" himself to say it. "The capitalist system does not exist", he went on, and “life, in the strict sense of the term, is impossible". Even the simultaneous-translation interpreters were in stitches of laughter at this learned philosopher's ramblings. which culminated with the classic plea (quoted here verbatim) that: "I hope you understand me because I have difficulty in understanding what I’m saying myself". This comment would make a fitting epitaph to much of the pompous event itself. Meanwhile, students and scholars in the aisles scribbled notes furiously and the next philosopher was helped to the stage.

Maximilien Rubel, who has written several times to the Letters column of the Socialist Standard, chided the conference for ignoring the threat of nuclear war and pointed out Marx's recognition that the majority most affected by social problems must act to end their cause — the market system itself. He spoke against the state capitalist Russian Empire and attacked in advance next year's Paris celebration of 1789. adding that rather than “indulge in vanity of inventing new cultures", the speakers should declare themselves against “the insane nihilism of the political barbarians" who own and control the world. Rubel also pointed out that 1968 was a useless starting point unless it was recognised as a complete failure. Like others who spoke some sense or showed tell-tale signs of having ventured beyond their studies during the past year, he was patronised and dismissed by both the organisers and the majority present.

While these enthusiastic “experts" pontificated in a bank, the streets of Barcelona overflowed with some of the worst poverty in Europe. We were surrounded by social problems of which many speakers seemed ignorant, as they shunned as too “political" any talk of the majority repossessing the earth as the necessary prelude to any real social change. An official survey in the old quarter of Barcelona in 1985 found 25 per cent of the children there suffering malnutrition and more than half of the families living in sub-standard housing. Life expectancy was ten times lower than in other districts. These and other statistics were lucidly presented in a television documentary shown late last year (Cities Fit to Live In: Salud. Barcelona, TVE Barcelona/ Channel Four, November 1988), which ended with this refreshing piece of honest commentary:

  In the nineteenth century, Barcelona fought to demolish the stone walls hemming her in. The challenge she faces today is to bring down the invisible walls that divide one citizen from another, and to set all her citizens on an equal footing. Only then will it be possible to talk about health as a state of total physical, mental and social well-being, and not simply an absence of illness.

Clifford Slapper

Running Commentary: Who’s a Beastie Boy, then? (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the July 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who’s a Beastie Boy, then?

Their name was a warning of what to expect but there was still much outraged surprise when the American pop group the Beastie Boys flew into Britain some weeks ago on a jet stream of invective. The fame which preceded them was based on incidents such as their warmly greeting some disabled members of their audience as "fucking cripples". They went on to perform at "concerts" which featured a predictable uproar.

At an event in Brixton there was something akin to a minor riot. In Liverpool some of the audience tore up seating for missiles to add to the cans of beer which were flying backwards and forwards. When the group left the stage tear gas was fired into the crowd. Presumably some music (actually the Beastie Boys specialise in "rapping", or talking to a rhythm) was played at some point in these proceedings.

As a result the leader of the group. Adam Horowitz, was charged with causing grievous bodily harm to a girl in the audience who was said to have been on the receiving end of a can of beer which he threw.

Their leader's court appearance was an ideal opportunity for the group to grab the headlines again in a show of what incorrigible. fearless rebels they are. They might, for example, have described the magistrates as "fucking geriatrics" or something similar. But it was not to be; the case was notable for a distinct absence of reckless defiance. Horowitz's solicitor told the court that he is not an outrageous anarchist but a good boy who is close to his father (who is an eminent film producer); their lives are "intertwined". The group's reputation for madness and mayhem is no more than an image.

It is not uncommon for some entertainers — musicians, comedians, boxers, tennis players among them — to grow fat on the proceeds of a reputation for abusive and disruptive behaviour. Sometimes this is deliberately created by a cynical publicity machine. While in some cases a genuine ability may lurk behind this nonsense, it is not unknown for a talentless void to be covered by such outrageous, publicity-obsessed gimmickry. A lot of people were anxious to pay to watch John McEnroe (who had real talent) play tennis in the hope of seeing Super Brat get his comeuppance. A lot of people buy newspapers to thrill with anger at the latest excesses of groups like the Beastie Boys, whose talents are not yet as apparent as McEnroe's.

It all expresses the appalling decadence of capitalism, where cash is king and whatever makes money, however execrable it may be, has to be good.


Fast food philosophy

The Wimpy burger chain are clinching a deal with Bulgaria to set up trash-food joints in that Russian-bloc country. Wimpy's marketing director, Trevor Barnes, said on BBC Radio Four (Friday 20 March) that he wanted to "put across a philosophy" in the famous buns.

A fascinating example of metaphysics here — the trans-substantiation of hamburgers into philosophy. Better watch it, the next time you tuck into a Wimpy (if you can bear to, that is): strange things may begin to happen inside your stomach and brain.

They already have, obviously, inside Trevor Barnes's. . . .


Nostalgia

The fortyish middle-management people with 1.8 children, a Volvo and a building society to support, yearn for those balmy student days of '68 when they took part every week in the demonstrations intended to revolutionise society. Now, when they read the Sunday heavies, the colour supplements are full of nostalgia — forties furniture, fifties fashion, sixties music. Victorian values, all carefully packaged, sanitised, made desirable. There's money in nostalgia.

Stand in a Post Office queue when the pittance called a pension is being collected by someone whose life has unwittingly been devoted to the continuation of capitalism. Ask them about the good old days. Listen as they recount stories of hardship and poverty. Finally they tell you. with pride, “Everyone was happier then". Through NHS rose-tinted spectacles, they remember balls of whitewash, the sixty-hour week (if you were lucky enough to have a job), fighting for their (?) country and being skint three days after pay-day.

SuperMac said, we'd never had it so good. Did he mean us? As a member of the producing but non-possessing working class, you've never had it at all. Every politician both before and since has endeavoured to con the working class that the capitalist system of society is the only one capable of fulfilling the workers' aspirations. But if these are the good times we'll all back on tomorrow, the future appears quite bleak. Colour television sets, 200 shares in British Telecom and Ford Fiestas are a poor panacea for the ills of the working class.

Poverty, homelessness, wage slavery, making do with second best, are these the things that we want to be nostalgic about? Forget about the past, look to the future. Look to Socialism.


Business as usual

Obviously assuming that no one would object to such an assault on their visual senses, a company called Henderson Administration took advantage of the election furore to publish an advert showing photographs of every prime minister since Ramsay MacDonald in 1934.

It was an uncomforting sight. Baldwin in his bowler hat and wing collar; Chamberlain looking stubborn; Attlee smiling diffidently; Eden earnestly handsome; Callaghan grumpy; Thatcher strong and noble. . . .

"Since our formation in 1934" said the advert. "We've seen 21 general elections and 12 Prime Ministers". Through all that time — bull and beer markets, war and peace. Henderson has succeeded and has grown. Now it describes itself as one of the largest "independent" (whatever that may mean) investment management firms in Great Britain, organising over £7 billion worth of investments.

Now this is very illuminating. A general election is — every one of those 21 was — an opportunity for the capitalist political parties to make extravagant claims about the blissful progress which would follow their return to power and then to warn us about the awful consequences of victory for their opponents. To elect the other side, they have asserted, is to risk a rapid descent into ruin and decay.

Since Ramsay MacDonald's nominally National administration the people of this country have experienced Conservative, Coalition and Labour government. They have tried them all. While all this has been happening, through all the changes, amid the parties' promises and threats, the normal, essential business of capitalism has carried on. Money has been invested; workers have been exploited; fortunes have been amassed; a small class of social parasites has kept its privileged, secure, opulent position.

The small segment of British history contained in that advert told us that anyone who voted on the assumption that they were making a choice about society was wrong. They were wasting their time and their vote. Whatever the parties called it — the Tories with their people's capitalism, the Labour party with their "socialism" — the social system remained the same. Whoever was prime minister capitalism continued with all its problems of repression, war, poverty, famine, disease.. . .

Come the next election the same advert could well reappear, with another photograph as the only difference. The smug message, on behalf of the ruling class to the working class voters, will be the same. We're doing very nicely, thanks for keeping it that way.

Art Under Capitalism (1968)

Party News from the July 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of May students of the Hornsey College of Art (which is the responsibility of the Haringey Borough Council) occupied the college buildings and declared a “Student’s Republic” with the aim of reforming the administration and art education generally. Their action has sparked off similar ones in other art colleges. Haringey branch gave out the following leaflet:

To the students of Hornsey College of Art.

We hope that your efforts to improve your working conditions, to raise the quality of your training and to obtain a more effective voice in college affairs will succeed.

The problems against which you contend are symptoms of a society which cannot effectively serve human needs based as it is upon the class monopoly of the means of production, and the profit motive.

This system has little time for the arts and the humanities. It is primarily concerned to employ the talents and energies of artists, sociologists, writers and their fellows, either directly in commerce and advertising, or in the control and manipulation of wage and salary earners — the working class. 

Even where good design is an integral part of the productive process it is often employed as a weapon in the struggles of companies and nations to capture markets.

Art is the Cinderella of capitalism. The capitalist class, as a class, have no use for it unless the work of the artist serves the needs of capital The value of Art as an authentic expression of human feeling and enjoyment, its evocation and communication of emotion and experience, past and present — all these functions of art fail to ring the bells on the cash registers of the bourgeoisie.

Only in a socialist society will the artist be free from domination by the values and pressures of a profit-seeking society. In a socialist society there will be no officials to set limits to what may be done in the sphere of artistic activity.

Today there is no Socialism anywhere. Nowhere is there full freedom of expression.

We in The Socialist Party aim at building a world community — without frontiers, based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production where things will be produced for use. A world without war, world hunger or racialism. A world that has no need of money and has abolished rent, interest, profits, wages and prices. A world fit for human beings in which the way of life would be:

From each according to his ability —
       to each according to his needs

We think such a society can be brought into being only when it is technically possible for abundance to be produced (as it is now) and when a majority of the population understands the implications of such a socialist reorganisation, desire it and take the necessary democratic action to establish it

We insist that any attempt to make such a revolutionary change, except by organised democratic political action will never succeed. We are opposed to the efforts of anarchists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists and other elitist groups which set out to disrupt the democratic process or to seize power following deliberate provocative actions aimed at manipulating masses of students and workers in the interests of the self-appointed ‘revolutionary' vanguards. Fortunately, although they do not share our revolutionary socialist view, most students and workers have sufficient political insight to reject the roles intended for them by these would-be leaders.

When your immediate difficulties have been overcome we look forward to hearing from students who might have found our views to be of interest. If you would like to have a speaker from our branch address you, we would be very pleased to make the necessary arrangements.

Yours for Socialism, 

Haringey Branch

Student Unrest (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

An LSE student comments on recent unrest there

In America, France, Czechoslovakia, Japan — practically wherever you care to look in the world you can find evidence of student unrest.

The universal nature of student complaint is not surprising in view of the increasingly rapid development of international capitalism which confronts students all over the world with basically the same problems.

But it is not only the student who recognises the situation. As Sir Eric Ashby has said:

The paradigm for a graduate 40 years ago was the conventional man, ready to take responsibility for preserving a set of values which he felt no need to question, deferring to his elders because they were older, not because they were wiser; obedient to principles, constitutions, traditions. That sort of young man cannot cope with the flux of the modem world. The contemporary paradigm is a man educated for insecurity, who can innovate, improvise, solve problems with no precedent. [1]     

This is the core of the student problem. The education system does not provide an adequate preparation for life in the late twentieth century. Students, having no power to change the situation, agitate for representation on various committee and boards to participate in the organisation of education.

Into this pool of unrest others delve, using the dissatisfaction within the colleges to promote causes other than internal re-organisation. The recent developments at the London School of Economics illustrate this point.

General dissatisfaction at the LSE led to the appointment of a Committee on the Machinery of Government of the School in March 1967. In July 1967 five students joined the Committee. No action resulted from the two reports which emanated and in consequence student unrest and agitation continued, to obtain greater student participation in the government of the LSE. Now any group within the school seeking support has only to tie its action with the fight for internal democracy to obtain considerable backing.

The occupation of the LSE over the week end of 24-27 October aimed to support the pro-NLF march and demonstration of 27 October by providing opportunity for discussion and as a first aid base. The student organisers were under some pressure to connect occupation with Vietnam. Their answer fully substantiates the argument above about how to win support.

  If the Director's position is accepted, free speech, free assembly, and staff-student control of their community go right out of the window. We cannot accept this.
 A few days ago the student left was accused of being unable to make the connection between Vietnam and the occupation. By now, it is clear to all that the Director has drawn the connection for us. [2]

In fact the conflict in Vietnam is between rival capitalist groups for control of an area which is strategically important and of potentially economic significance as a source of production and a market for commodities. Not one drop of working class blood should be shed for either side.

The conflict in the colleges and universities is a totally different situation. Forty years ago the graduate was largely recruited from the capitalist class and could easily accept the situation outlined by Sir Eric Ashby. To-day in Britain the majority of graduates are working class. For many students, of all shades of political opinion, education is totally unrelated to their needs. The student left, for example, complains of the limitation of discussion within the classroom and lecture hall of the major issues of the day. [3] It recognises that the governors of the colleges are people with industrial, commercial and political interest in maintaining society as it is. [2] It shouts for student and workers control. [4] The occupation is seen in the light of a factory take-over. It merely needs time to gain strength and such take-overs will cease to be temporary and become permanent.

History has shown us the fallacy of this argument and action. In the political sense the police are the muscles of the government, When workers heads are cracked by truncheons it is the echo of their vote for the continuation of capitalism. Any occupation of college or factory will be permitted grudgingly as long as it is not destructive or restrictive of other capitalist activities. If removal of the occupiers becomes necessary to the capitalist class, and dividing the workers by offers such as differential wage awards is not possible, then workers, including students, will be ejected by force. The muscle men, that is the police and if necessary the armed forces, will physically evict occupiers on government orders.

The majority of students fail to recognise that the class division of society is reflected in the class organisation of education. It cannot be otherwise in capitalist society. No society educates for its own destruction. Capitalist education can only aim to promote its own development—to produce managers, scientists, technologists, skilled and unskilled workers who are complacent and pliable. Capitalist education cannot be critical of the wage-labour and capital relationship. It must concern itself with the preservation of private property and the promotion of commodity production, the basis of capitalist society.

If students want full and free participation in education it can only be obtained in one way: by removing the class basis of society and establishing Socialism. But they must recognise that Socialism cannot be established piecemeal by isolated attacks, which never succeed, on aspects of capitalism; or by occupying colleges and factories. Demonstrations against war or for lower rents or the occupation of buildings, do not advance the spread of socialist knowledge one iota. In fact they confuse the issue by suggesting that there are solutions within capitalism to its own endemic diseases. War, Want, and Insecurity in all their facets.

Ken Knight

 

Notes

[1] L.S.E. Magazine No. 35, June 1968, quoting The Illustrated London News 16.3.68.

[2] L.S.E. Ad-Hoc Occupation Committee leaflet: OCCUPATION: THE BROADER ISSUES 25.10.68.

[3] L.S.E. Ad-Hoc Committee for Occupation leaflet: THE OCCUPATION - WHY? about 23 or 24.10.68.

[4] L.S.E. Socialist Society leaflet: WHERE NOW FOR THE STUDENT MOVEMENT? about 28 or 29.10.68.

The New Narodniki (1968)

From the July 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

On June 15 a “Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation” was founded by students representing groups all over England. As might be expected at a meeting in which trotskyists (of various hues) were prominent the air was thick with such words as mobilise, orientate, perspective, programmatic, transitional and, of course, vanguard. The programme adopted in fact declared:

"Revolutionary students can play a vanguard role by detonating a wider social conflict in which the working-class becomes decisive. Students must seek to ally themselves with working-class struggles: they have also shown that they may anticipate and instigate them.”

So yet another group has appeared to liberate the working class ignoring the long-established Socialist principle that the workers must free themselves.

In Russia in the second half of the 19th century many privileged young men and women decided to “go to the people”, by working and living among the peasants whom they believed to be a revolutionary force. They were thus known as Populists or Narodniks. A similar theme dominated the meeting: only the workers could overthrow capitalism, so students should go to them by leafleting, and perhaps working, in, the factories. As one (Widgery) put it “the talk about the new Narodniki going to the factories is right”. A small minority, from the South Coast, were still in favour of “working within the Labour Party” (as they all were two years ago), but their views were not well-received.

Prominent were members of the alleged “International Socialism” Group. Also, frequently to be seen hovering in the background was Pat Jordan, the trotskyist who runs the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. The anarchists and another trotskyist group (the SLL) did not seem to be present.

The RSSF programme commits it to Student Power, Anti-Capitalist Alliance with Workers and Struggle Against Imperialism. These aims are to be achieved by so-called direct action (that is, occupying college buildings, fighting the police, preventing exams taking place, shouting down speakers). As one (Fishman) frankly put it: they are out to “seize the leadership of students as a group”.

At a meeting the previous evening a member of the Socialist Party was prevented from continuing his speech after he had criticised talk about “parliamentary rubbish” and support for the nationalist and state capitalist Vietcong. For his troubles he was called a “fascist” (“Against fascists there is only one weapon: physical force", one LSE student leader, Harman, has written). This is perhaps the shape of things to come for any who dare to stand up to this self-appointed vanguard.

Spectacle out of focus (1975)

Book Review from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leaving the 20th Century : The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International. Translated and edited by Christopher Gray. Free Fall Publications, 80p.

Of the 167 pages in this book, 148 are extracts from Situationist pamphlets and articles. Christopher Gray adds only short linkages: the Situationists’ history and antecedents, their breaking-up, and some brief final comments. Was there more, or is that all?

From inside an exclusive, fanatical group the view is inevitably distorted. Gray was himself a Situationist, and attributes a far greater resonance to the members and activities than they actually had. He uses the word “famous” repeatedly, and in no instance is it applicable. There are unsupported presumptions of a wide influence, and a claim that: “The censorship of the Situationist International has probably been the most blatant case of cultural repression since before the war.” Really?

The aim of the Situationists is said to have been “a new revolutionary critique of society”. More accurately, they tried to make artistic-cum-political doctrines from a collection of phenomena—new technology, the spread of dropping-out, the vogue for condemning “consumer-orientated society”. They added one phrase to the vocabulary of social criticism: “the society of the spectacle” for the mass culture of alienation.

In art and politics, Situationist practice was simply the making of rude or violent gestures against the rest of society. Their centre remained in Paris, and according to Gray they faded out after the student revolts of 1968. One version is that they went underground. However, their name remains as a synonym for intellectualized subversion, and small groups of people in that frame of mind have tried—and no doubt will try again—to revive it. It has been considered, and Gray hints, that Situationists either assisted or egged-on the Angry Brigade; certainly the Angry Brigade communiques incorporated the Situationist language.

Christopher Gray thinks the Situationists “made the same mistake as all left-wing intellectuals: they thought that everyone else was plain thick.” The book has, despite its perfunctoriness, a good deal of interest. The message which comes through clearly is that to try to stand outside society, and try to justify it from a rag-bag of political and sociological half-ideas, means being pernicious or futile or both.

The ending tells it all: the author feels in a mess, divided between the needs for social analysis and for self-analysis. So it was not society at all that the Situationists viewed, but a model made of matchboxes on somebody’s shelf.

Robert Barltrop