Political Notes: King or Queen? (1981)

The Political Notes Column from the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

King or Queen?

What progress to report in the historic (well it started in 1918) Labour Party struggle to abolish the British monarchy? Currently in the vanguard is Michael English, MP for Nottingham West, who greeted the news that the Princess of Wales will next June add to the clutch of regal parasites with the threat to draft a parliamentary Bill.

A Bill, the royals might tremblingly ask, to dispossess the House of Windsor, demolish the royal palaces, dismiss the regiments of flunkeys? Well actually, no; what English has in mind is a Bill to give women of the blood royal equal rights of succession to men of that same blood. “We should declare,” said this heroic revolutionary from the Nottinghamshire coalfields, “that the eldest child, irrespective of sex, inherits the throne, not merely the eldest son.”

If this ever becomes law. Princess Anne will be second in line for the throne, after Prince Charles. This is likely to lose English votes among scarred newshounds who have been abused by the gentle princess, usually after she has fallen off a horse.

English has yet to explain why British workers, whose struggle for existence under capitalism grows daily harsher, should be concerned about who is entitled to wear the biggest crown on their heads and about whether, under the longest robe, there is a female or a male body.

The royal family — apart from the fact that in their own right they are exceedingly rich members of the British capitalist class — are figureheads of the class society of capitalism. In their very persons they represent the privilege and superiority of one class in imposing exploitation and degradation on the other.

People who set out to modify this particular aspect of property society — or even to abolish it while retaining capitalism with its class privileges — are wasting their energies. Of course Labour MPs would not agree. All too often, after a lifetime of bolstering the class divided, privilege ridden, inhumane social system of capitalism they get their reward and end up in the House of Lords where, at selected times of the year, they can ape the royalty they once swore to abolish.

Words, words, words . . .

One year ago the unemployment figure stood at 2¼ million and Margaret Thatcher made a statement. “We knew it would be a long, hard slog,” she wrote in the January 1981 issue of Conservative News, “What can we look forward to in 1981? It will be another hard year.”

Well that is one promise the Tories have kept, although it was not very difficult for them since every year under capitalism is hard for the working class. Then what about the problem in communication there seemed to be at the time, between Thatcher and her Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, who assured all the viewers on independent television that the recession would end in 1981?

With unemployment now above 3 million, and still rising, here is Thatcher making another statement:

  This government has created conditions in which out of recession can come renewed confidence. It is in the coming year that our confidence will be rewarded.

Tory constituency workers, who have the job of persuading voters that unemployment is really prosperity, that falling living standards are really progress, might well wonder if the Prime Minister is quite well. Are we to look forward, at every year’s end, to a parcel of Thatcher fantasy, gift wrapped? To further promises to make yet more promises? Will it ever end?

No great power is needed to perceive that words do not solve the crises of capitalism; that as the words flow the prospects for the working class, who vote to keep the system in being, do not improve. The evidence has never been clearer, or more compelling; the interests of the working class demand that they reject the threats and the promises (often they are the same thing) of political leaders and instead, in conscious action, take their future into their own hands.

Until they do, we can look forward more words. And enough, as Harold Macmillan once said, is enough.

I spy, you spy . . .

The exposure of yet another spy for the Russians in high places adds fuel to the fears of those people who see the British Intelligence Service as being as full of holes as a piece of Gruyère cheese. The latest in the line, Leo Long, admits that there were many others, as yet unrevealed, also at it, all recruited by Anthony Blunt during their time as pretentious, self-deluded Cambridge undergraduates.

Long left the university a thoroughly convinced supporter of the Communist Party — which meant that this self-styled intellectual would support any atrocity, tell any lie, suppress any fact, if he thought it was in the interests of the Russian ruling class to do so.

It was while he was at the War Office that Long actually began passing secret information, through Blunt, to the Russians. This was largely taken from the reports of Allied spies in German-occupied Europe and included details of troop movements.

All this was happening during the war, when Russia and Britain — or rather the ruling class of those countries — were allies. This raises the question of why one ally needs to spy on another — why one ally needs to keep secrets from another. Why weren’t they both helping each other as much as possible — with men, materials, intelligence — in the common struggle for what, we were told, was democracy?

Of course it was not like that. The war was not about freedom. The unity of the Allies was fragile and temporary, against the greater, more immediate threat of German capitalism. All of them knew that when that had been settled the conflict of interests which always operates between capitalism’s states would re-emerge between them. During the war, that conflict was kept under wraps but it was still there and was still carried on.

So there is no need for surprise in the affair of Leo Long. It is more evidence to expose the fact that capitalism cannot be a society of united interests, that it can only exist deep in its own divisive cynicism.

Anthony Blunt: no sort of traitor (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Did Anthony Blunt —that frail, effeminate, learned man — ever dream that we would be responsible for so much confusion?

Consider, first, the sorry plight of the left wing. Blunt might have been one of their heroes, for he turned his back on his past — the public school, one of the more exclusive Cambridge colleges — to become an agent for Russia, which has nourished so many left wing false hopes and delusions. Yet Blunt also enraged the left because the personified the cohesive protectiveness of their arch provocator — the Establishment. And worse, Labour ministers, including Wilson and Callaghan, connived in this apparent exercise of the Establishment looking after its own. No wonder Willie Hamilton fumed in the House of Commons: " . . . feelings of outrage . . . I have never felt so sick, angry and frustrated . . . squalid conspiracy in high places . . ."

Then there are the Tories, who work most comfortably on the assumption that the best of all possible property societies is one run by an indulgent elite from the best families, schools, clubs, regiments  . . . This elite pretend that they hold their privileges as an act of kindness to the rest of us; they don't really own those thousands of acres, stately homes, works of art, stocks and shares. They merely hold them in trust for the less fortunately born majority in society. If this theory is to be at all presentable, it is essential that no member of the elite should let the side down. When one of them does — and, in the case of Blunt, in the worst possible way, by spying — the Tories too are thrown into confusion, aggravated by the knowledge that their ministers also knew about, and protected, the spy.

Brilliant Young Men

And out of all the confusion emerges a picture of British capitalism which does not meet the demands of modern, thrusting, super-competitive capitalism. The Blunt affair, like its predecessors in the Great Whitehall Spy Drama, was taken by many people as evidence that Britain is run by a bunch of effete, disreputable upper class twits who all went to the same school, and who are too stupid, or too corrupt, to recognise a spy even if he was delivered to their In Tray in manacles. Well, there is nothing to be gained by discussing the accuracy of that caricature; it is more useful to point out some of the lessons to be learned from the infamous scandal of Anthony Blunt.

We have already said that Blunt is a very learned man — although it is another matter whether his talents would ever have seen the light of day had he been born into a working class family, who rely on selling their labour power to live. There is little demand among employers for experts in the works of Nicolas Poussin. But then the other spies Blunt was associated with — Philby, Maclean, Burgess — were also very clever. Burgess, said Blunt, was " . . . one of the most remarkable, brilliant, and one of the most intelligent people I've ever known". (He might also have used words like 'drunken' and 'abusive' except that such minor faults can be overlooked in one of such rare gifts.) Philby too was once highly thought of, the rising star in the Secret Service, described by Hugh Trevor Roper (The Philby Affair) as " favoured by society, liberally educated, regarded by all who knew him as intelligent, sensitive, transparently sincere".

Stalinist Murders

Now the working class are depressingly willing to pay their respects to people who are described as 'intellectuals' even when, like this bunch, they are blind to some obvious facts of reality. Blunt has told us their version of reality in the Thirties:

. . . in October 1934 I found that  . . . almost all the intelligent and bright undergraduates who had come up to Cambridge had suddenly become Marxist [sic] . . . and there was this very powerful group, very remarkable group of Communist intellectuals in Cambridge . . . 

(This provoked a doctor to write, irritably, to the Daily Telegraph from Moreton-in-theMarsh: "I was up at Cambridge in 1935 and many of my circle were bright. But had any of them expressed Marxist views he would have been debagged and thrown into the Cam")

But what was happening in Russia at that time to impress all those incredibly brainy undergraduates? In 1934 the 17th Party Congress was held, with perhaps many of the participants being as brainy as those bright young men in Cambridge. Unfortunately, their leader Stalin was not favourably impressed with them, and soon afterwards he had over half of them shot, along with nearly three-quarters of the Central Committee they had elected. This was a comparatively minor incident in the horrifying story of imprisonment, torture and murder which characterised Stalin's rule over Russia. One estimate of the total casualties during these years appeared in Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror. Conquest used a variety of sources — participants' accounts, official statistics and the 1959 Census — and he came to the conservative estimate of 20 million dead.

Forgetful Politicians

Much of the information about this was available at the time, but it did not impress those brilliant students at Cambridge. Some of them were even prepared to justify the August 1939 pact between Russia and Nazi Germany. "We argued", said Blunt, "that it was simply a tactical necessity . . . " In fact he carried his enthusiasm a bit too far, continuing to pass British secrets to Russia after the two staters were in the war on the same side. This illustrates not only his blind devotion to the blood-soaked dictatorship but also the actual fragility of the unity between capitalist powers, even when they call themselves the Allies.

But it was not only Blunt and his fellow geniuses who have been confused, because several prominent politicians said they had quite forgotten being told that a senior member of the royal household was a Russian spy. One of these politicians is Lord Brooke, who could never be accused of being an intellectual and who 'forgot' quite a few things during his time as Home Secretary. So how much more do the leaders of capitalism 'forget'? Do they 'forget' the realities of capitalism — its power cliques, its privileges for the few, its international conflicts, its cynicism and deceit? Do they 'forget' that the whole rotten mess is kept in being by the very people who suffer under it — the working class — the people who get excited about the Blunt Affair because they have been induced into a trance of patriotism? And who will help them 'remember'?

One thing to remember is that international conflict is ineradicable under capitalism. Those conflicts are fought out by all appropriate means and not just in the military sense; all sides have an elaborate machinery of espionage. Those who operate that machinery develop an especially cynical devotion to the interests of the master class they serve. The schemes they hatch often have an arithmetic a lot more intricate than that of a simple double cross.

Concepts in Privilege

If one side uncovers another's spies they usually give vent to a great blast of innocent indignation, which is designed to obscure the fact they they have their own agents busily at work. Thus Burgess, Maclean and the rest had their counterparts — Volkov, Petrov, Dolynytsin and, arguably the significant of them all, Penkovsky, who passed to the Western powers thousands of items of secret information, including some on Russian rocketry, notably at the time of the Cuban crisis.

Nobody needed Anthony Blunt to tell us that capitalism is a society in which a small minority are privileged a long way above the rest of us. But he throws an interesting light on the extent of that privilege. His job in the royal household, for example, consisted of looking after the Queen's pictures, rehanging them and redecorating the rooms where they hang (or at any rate ordering other people to do the actual hanging and decorating). As a flunkey to a super-parasite, he lived in a different world to the rest of us, with concepts and expectations quite foreign to those of the majority. He described his interrogations between 1951 and 1964 as 'mainly comfortable conversations'. This is in stark contrast to the treatment habitually handed out to workers who 'help the police with their inquiries' over some offence against capitalism's laws. On the very day of Blunt's press conference, a fatal 'accident' inquiry in Glasgow was told by a former policeman of how sickened he had been at the violence meted out by the police there to a man who later died from his injuries.There are few 'comfortable conversations; between the police and the workers they arrest in places like Glasgow.

A great deal of indignation has been spilled out over Anthony Blunt, but outraged workers would do better to direct their feelings against this social system itself. Capitalism is a society in which one class, although numerically insignificant, owns the means whereby the rest of us live. That fact is central to all privilege — the aristocrats, the clubs, the old boy network, the cover-ups in high places. It is also a society in which a lot of effort goes into persuading us that we should devote ourselves to the work of keeping capitalism going on the orders if some super-intellectual beings. Anthony Blunt has provided the latest piece of evidence to show what a myth that is. Workers should not trust leaders, no matter how allegedly brainy or evidently stupid they are; they should organise their own confidence to run society on a different basis, in their own interests.

The sordid story of Blunt and his clever friends is but a minor episode in the horrendous, cynical passage of a society which can operate in no other way. Blunt betrayed his own ruling class, but to capitalism itself he was no sort of traitor; he was, and remains, its most devoted, if devious, servant.

Ivan