Which Way to Socialism: Militant Tendency or SPGB? (1982)

Party News from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

This debate took place at Ruskin House, Croydon, on 24 February. Bill Sheppard represented the Militant Tendency and Steve Coleman the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Pressure of space has prevented us publishing the debate in full but we welcome comments on this shortened account.

SPGB: According to the press, my opponent is a militant. This is very good. It is important that we should be militant about our political principles. According to the media, my opponent is a Marxist. I have read Marx and I agree with his analysis of capitalism. I agree with Marx that capitalism is based on the legalised exploitation of the wealth producers by those who own and control the means of wealth production and distribution. I agree with Marx that the state only exists to protect the power and privilege of the exploiting class. I agree with Marx when he urged workers to abolish the wages system and establish a classless, moneyless society.

The newspapers tell me that my opponent is nothing less than a social revolutionary who wants to destroy civilisation as the Daily Express has always known it. Well, so do socialists. We want to destroy the “civilisation” of the H-Bomb. We want to destroy a “civilisation” where millions die of starvation while food rots. We want to destroy the “civilisation” which compels the mass of humanity to accept wage slavery. So if the media is accurate—if my opponent and his friends are a bunch of militant, Marxist, social revolutionaries who are committed to getting rid of capitalism and establishing socialism—then my opponent is not my opponent but my friend.

But when we ask where to join this new revolutionary crusade, my opponent points me in the direction of a broad church called the Labour Party and says, “There it is. This is where the revolution’s starting . . .” At election time he will be canvassing for the Labour Party—he will be recruiting workers to join it. More than that: my opponent will be feeding workers with the illusion that by supporting the Labour Party they are contributing to the establishment of socialism. The SPGB argues that if you are a socialist you must oppose all anti-socialist parties; that the policies which the Militant Tendency wants Labour to adopt are inimical to the class interest of the workers; that the place for socialists is in a party which is united by a scientific analysis of capitalism and an obtainable vision of socialism.

Marxists stand in opposition to capitalism, a system of minority power where the productive machinery is possessed by a minority class: 10 per cent of the British population own more than half the accumulated wealth. Under capitalism the vast majority of people own no major stake in the productive machinery—they only own their mental and physical energies which they must sell to capitalists. The working class is in a position of compulsory exploitation, and are only permitted to produce wealth if it can be sold on the market. And it will only be sold on the market if it is profitable for the capitalists. In other words, wealth is produced under capitalism for profit and not for use. If there is no profit there are devastating consequences: food is dumped in the sea while people starve; cars are left standing in fields; homes remain unoccupied; workers are actually paid not to produce wealth.

If you claim to be a Marxist—as my opponent does—you see that these problems are all a necessary part of the system. Unemployment is not caused by wicked Tory governments or Labour leaders who are not carrying out Left wing policies. Marxists seek to end the system, not to re-arrange the furniture within it. The Labour Party is not, and never has been, a Marxist party. At the beginning of the century it decided to work within capitalism and pick up whatever crumbs were available.

The Labour Party has spent the last three quarters of a century showing workers what can be done within capitalism. It has used troops to smash strikes, initiated the production of the Atom bomb, passed racist immigration legislation, acted as recruiting sergeant in two world wars. It can do all of these things and more because it is a party which decided from the beginning that it must work within the narrow limitations of the profit system. At the beginning of the century there were socialists who rejected this narrow, “possibilist” strategy of the Labour Party. They were the militants, the Marxists, the social revolutionaries; they were the men and women who formed the SPGB and its Companion parties in other countries.

But my opponent wants it both ways. He wants to be in the Labour Party. He wants to be part of this great movement which has grown popular by basing itself upon workers’ lack of political understanding . . . but at the same time he wants the Labour Party to act like a Socialist party. It is a nonsensical strategy. The manipulators who imagine that you can spring socialism on to the working class by surprise-that all you have to do is manoeuvre a few Trotskyists into key posts in the Labour bureaucracy and the workers will reward you with their votes—are learning a hard lesson: you cannot have socialism without socialists.

Militant Tendency has the same political problem as Ramsey MacDonald and Lenin (whom they much admire): they do not believe that workers are capable of becoming conscious socialists. They do not accept the Marxist principle that “the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself”. They think that we need leaders. They think that we need a Leninist vanguard-a workers’ state presided over by a bureaucracy. This always leads to state capitalist dictatorship.

Socialists do not have contempt for the working class. Our message is quite clear: abandon the broad church; reject the high priests of the Labour Party and their self-appointed vanguards; dismiss the archaic dogma of reformism. When workers understand socialism they will consciously and democratically organise their own emancipation.

MILITANT TENDENCY: No socialist —certainly no supporter of the Militant—would deny for a second that a socialist order is a world order that knows no national boundaries and in which commodity production has been superseded by a system of free access to material wealth produced popularly and communally. That was the programme of Marx and it is the programme of the Militant Tendency.

However, it is an essential point that you don’t get a mass movement to establish a socialist society simply by counter-posing—in a necessarily vague and abstract way—the political economy of capitalism to the possibilities inherent in a world socialist order. It is necessary to win workers to a “transitional programme”. It is necessary to fight for such a policy in the mass organisations of the movement. And these organisations aren’t all that we’d like them to be. You have to accept them because they reflect the existing level of consciousness of the working class.

The Labour Party was created by the trade unions. It’s also necessary for Marxists to intervene in the bread and butter issues of the working class . . .  It’s necessary to be involved in the way that the class struggle plays itself out on a day-to-day basis, because it’s precisely out of that struggle that socialist consciousness will develop. Up and down the country you’ll find Militant supporters at the forefront of the struggle to defend jobs, to defend the social services against the vicious cut-backs that we’ve seen at the present time.

The point of the transitional approach is to be active in the Labour Party and call upon a Labour Government to implement Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution which calls for the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Any attempt to implement Clause Four will be met by the utmost fierce resistance of the capitalist class themselves. They will use economic sabotage and furthermore they’ll try to use the House of Lords, the Monarchy and, in the last resort, they’ll try to use the army—as Chile so recently showed—to crush any attempt by a socialist government to introduce a socialist order.

For Militant, the struggle in parliament is an essential part of the struggle, but the immediate need is to establish a workers’ state. The SPGB has no concept of a workers’ state at all. But a workers’ state is simply where the revolutionary majority still has a need for a certain amount of coercion, a certain amount of repression, in order to defend the gains of the revolution against the counter — revolutionary forces. To imagine that they will simply disappear is totally naive.

The SPGB mistakenly believes that all countries are following the classic path of the establishment of “bourgeois democracy”. In the developing countries the working class, with the support of the peasantry, have to carry out the historic tasks which were once the preserves of the bourgeois in Britain, Germany and France. The role of the Bolsheviks was to carry out this mission. It’s absolutely ludicrous to characterise Eastern Europe and the developments in China and Cuba and other nations in Africa as state capitalist regimes. They should be characterised as degenerate workers’ states. State planning of production on an international basis must be the immediate aim. What nationalism shows is how rotten ripe the world is for genuine socialism.

DISCUSSION PERIOD

QUESTION: Does the SPGB propose to achieve social change by using the means which are available within the system?

SPGB: You cannot get social change in the interest of the majority of the people unless the majority of the people want it. If the state is not used by the working class it is going to be used against the working class. So a socialist majority must gain control of the state machine. The socialist majority will elect delegates to do what the workers want, not leaders to act on our behalf.

QUESTION: The Generals, judges and other defenders of capitalism are all drawn from a small net of public school people. Powerful Tories will not be loyal to a democratic socialist majority. A new state is needed to replace the capitalist state. The Militant tendency is not elitist, but the SPGB is because it will only allow socialists to join. SPGB is never present on mass demonstrations. The capitalist press does not attack the SPGB, but it does attack the Militant Tendency. Therefore, Militant represents a real threat to capitalism.

SPGB: The ruling class cannot rule without the acquiescence of the working class. Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the socialist revolution will be unlike all previous revolutions because it will be a revolution of the majority. It is true that SPGB does not support demonstrations demanding capitalist reform. Unlike Militant, we do not kid workers that the system can be humanised. The capitalist press might attack the Militant Tendency, but what does this prove? Since when has the capitalist press even been correct about its political analysis?

QUESTION: How does a socialist revolution come about through using the State? Or do they advocate the destruction of the State?

MILITANT: The working class constitutes a minority in most of the globe. We cannot wait for a unified capitalist order to be established. Every workers’ revolution has shown that workers must establish Soviets that they must establish their own state. Thousands of workers have died in Chile, Spain, in the liberation movements in Africa and Latin America, fighting against the military police state. No, the state cannot be used.

SPGB: The fact is that the mass of the people are in the working class. We run society from top to bottom; workers produce all the wealth. It is the working class which possesses the power to determine the future. Any attempt to establish socialism which left power in the hands of a parliament committed to the running of capitalism and armed forces committed to the defence of capitalism would be bound to fail. The present system survives because of minority power. Any conception of revolution or social change which is based on working class followers placing their faith in an enlightened vanguard is fundamentally anti-socialist. Where access to the state does not exist, workers must establish political democracy. The SPGB wants socialism without leaders or followers. We don’t need shepherds because we’re not sheep.

QUESTION: How many of the candidates of both parties in the next election will be women?

MILITANT: None.

SPGB: It depends on how many women are available and able to do it. The SPGB is not interested in the sex of the candidate, but their political principles.

QUESTION: This discussion has been too intellectual and too bookish. The average worker in a trade union would not understand what we are talking about. The trouble with the SPGB is that it concentrates on theory. Everyone present should read Marx’s Communist Manifesto which states that socialists should be involved in the class struggle, leading the way. The SPGB spends time talking about socialism to foreign workers in Hyde Park. At an anti-cuts demonstration in Hyde Park a few years ago—under the Callaghan government—an SPGB speaker said that the demonstration was a complete waste of time. The biggest barrier to socialism is the current leadership of the labour movement. If you oppose all leadership it means that you refuse to struggle against the leadership of Callaghan, Healey and Murray. If you don’t work for a socialist leadership you turn your back on socialism.

SPGB: It is claimed that the average worker cannot understand a debate which he and everyone else here has understood. He says that we are too bookish and then in his next breath he recommends us to read a book by Marx. It is elitism to imagine that workers cannot understand what we can understand. The SPGB relates theory to experience in all our propaganda: we talk about and analyse capitalism and socialism. Yes, the SPGB does say that anti-cuts demonstrations are a waste of time. But, unlike the Militant Tendency, the SPGB did not tell workers to vote for that Labour government which introduced those cuts. Unlike Militant, the SPGB did not urge workers to re-elect a Callaghan government in 1979. Socialists will not participate in struggles to appoint new leaders because we are not followers.

SUMMING UP

MILITANT: I learnt many of the ideas of Marx from the SPGB, but when I went along to a strike in Manchester and told the convenor to abolish the wages system he told me that that was what his boss was trying to do—abolish his wages. The very fact that people have to sign a piece of paper to get into the SPGB illustrates that it is an elitist party. How elitist it is to sneer at anti-cuts demonstrators for voting Labour. It is out of these contradictions that working class consciousness will come. All leaders of the labour movement should be immediately recalled if they do not carry out the wishes of the workers. The election of Scargill as President of the NUM was an important part of the class struggle. When workers see the limitations of Scargill and Benn a seizure of power will be possible.

SPGB: This debate is not about tactics, but about where we are heading. The SPGB has a clear analysis of capitalism and our case against what exists is based on a clear idea of the future socialist system. Militant admires Lenin, but Lenin’s idea of a new system was state capitalism. He wrote that if state capitalism could be established in Russia, socialism would not be far off.

Because Militant puts forward unprincipled, undemocratic tactics it has to defend all kinds of absurdities, such as state capitalist regimes and Labour governments. The way ahead does not depend on the Labour Party or the Militant Tendency. It does not depend on the SPGB either. The difference is that the Militant Tendency claims that it must provide the revolutionary leadership; the SPGB says that it all depends on the ideas of the working class which must emancipate itself.

" . . . boundless rationality . . . " (1982)

Quote from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The same boundless rationality, which is so much in accord with the revolutionary quality of the scientific method and the new philosophy, certainly as Bacon and the founders of the Royal Society saw it, belonged, more than to any other thinker, to Karl Marx. His conviction was that scientific socialism would extend the logic and universality of science into man’s social relations, not only learning the laws of social development, but deliberately aiding them. He makes this point most clearly in the Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, uniting Science, Technology and Society

Steven Rose: Science and Society, page 256.

Letter From Europe: "Produce French": who benefits? (1982)

The Letter From Europe column from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

   This month we translate a leaflet issued last year by a group of workers in Mayenne, a town in the West of France, attacking the slogan “Produce French”. This is a slogan which the French Communist Party and the trade union grouping it controls, the CGT, have made great play of. During the presidential election campaign last year it shouted from hoardings; it can still be seen daubed on walls. In fact the PCF Minister of Health, Jack Ralite, has been trying to put it into practice by ordering only “French-made” hospital equipment (not equipment made entirely from French products of course, but hypocritically only equipment whose final stage of manufacture took place on French territory).
   The slogan is of course quite anti-socialist. It is mistaken—even from a simple trade union point of view—for the reasons explained in the leaflet. We can endorse the views expressed in the leaflet as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. The authors don’t explain that, while it is necessary to wage the defensive trade union struggle as long as capitalism lasts, the only solution to our problems is the abolition of the wages system. We reproduce the leaflet however as it is a good answer to those who in Britain stand for “Backing Britain” and “Buying British”—even though we know that comparatively few workers practise what is preached here.

“Produce French”?

“Produce French, Consume French, Repatriate French Factories from Abroad”, is a slogan taken up by the Left as well as the Right and put forward as a remedy for the crisis and unemployment.

“Produce French” would imply to begin with French raw materials. Take for instance a household electrical appliance: the whole framework is plastic, a material which comes from Germany, Holland, and is made from oil bought in the Middle East; for the motor, it’s copper coming from South Africa, South America, and which passes by way of England for processing; not to mention the machine-tools, some of which are made in Switzerland and elsewhere. The example of the manufacture of a car would have been even more blatant. And what about uranium, oil and certain food products? In fact there is no purely national economy, but an economy that is more and more international: no country can be self-sufficient.

“Produce French” would also mean producing with French capital and closing foreign factories in France. The workers for instance at Sobio (a firm recently taken over by the English trust Beecham) in Mayenne know what that would mean for their employment.

Defending the slogan “Produce French” means being in agreement with closing French factories abroad, choosing for instance that Moulinex should make thousands of Spanish or American workers unemployed, or that the textile and electronics industrialists should throw thousands of Hong Kong, Korean and Moroccan workers onto the streets. It means that we French workers should choose who should be made unemployed; it means that we would be prepared to let workers who already live in atrocious conditions die of starvation: in Brazil, Morocco, Vietnam and elsewhere, 6-year-old children work; a worker has to work 12 to 14 hours a day to be able to afford a kilo of rice; there is no social coverage.

They want to make us believe that the trouble comes from workers abroad, as if they were not victims—just as much if not more than us—of the exploitation of the employers. It is exactly the same when immigrant workers are accused of causing unemployment in France, and it is advocated that they should be sent back to their country of origin. Continuing this line of argument means telling Corsican workers to go back to their island, Breton workers to stay in Brittany, workers from Laval not to leave their town and so on. and why not say “Everyone at home and God for all” . . .  Thus the employers have a free hand, division reigns.

So defending the slogan “Produce French” is to divide workers by countries, by regions, by towns, by wards; it’s forcing them to defend the factory where they are and so “their” employer; in other words, the interests of the rich and powerful who exploit us.

Logically, if we workers were to defend French cars against Japanese, or Renault against Fiat, we should have to go further because that wouldn’t be enough: we should have to support Moulinex against Seb, Jouve against Floch, Leclerk against La Motte, and so on.

Further, they want to make us believe that if all Frenchmen, employers and workers, close ranks and make an effort then things will get better, we’ll get out of the crisis. As if the exploiters and the exploited suffer from the crisis in the same way.

If French employers exploit workers in the Third World to such an extent, this is to maximise their profits. In France it’s the same; in the name of the national economy, of defending the company and its competitiveness, the employers force workers to tighten their belts more and more: our situation here gets worse from year to year: restructuring, automation bringing redundancies, speed-up, increased recourse to the modern slavery that is temporary work, wages which don’t follow the rise in prices (many workers in Mayenne are forced to survive on the minimum wage).

What the employers want is to sell more commodities than competing firms from France and elsewhere. And for this they exploit us as much as possible. This is in fact the best proof that we have no common interest with these exploiters.

Poverty, accidents, exhaustion, that’s for us. Profits, that’s for them. That’s the situation, whether you are a worker in Mayenne or in Ireland, in Argentina or Japan. Everywhere our condition is the same: increased exploitation.

That’s why the workers’ movements in the various countries of the world put forward the same demands, whether it’s Polish workers, Brazilian engineering workers, or workers in Western Europe or Japan:

• increases in wages 
• reduction in hours of work 
• organisations to defend their interests, independent of employers and the State.

The slogan “Produce French” plays to people’s nationalist and patriotic feelings. We mustn’t be taken in, the employers want to divide us in this way so as to weaken us. And tomorrow, for identical reasons, they will be able to push workers of all countries to kill each other in a new war.

We reject division by nationalities and categories:
The worker in Hong Kong like the worker in Mayenne,
The unemployed like the employed,
The old like the youngest.
All workers have the same needs.

Political Notes: Any Advance? (1982)

The Political Notes column from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Any advance?
There are certain promises without which no political manifesto is complete. For example there is the housing problem: not so long ago there was a kind of auction going on between the Labour and Conservative parties, with each trying to outbid the other in the numbers of working class homes they were going to throw up 300,000; half a million . . . Where would it have ended?

Well of course for the working class there is still a problem of housing, but this now is to some extent overshadowed by another—the issue of unemployment. This is particularly susceptible to an auction, in which the promised figures are always falling.

The first bid comes from Peter Shore, who is likely to be Chancellor of the Exchequer if there is another Labour government in the near future. Shore has easily forgotten his time in the last Labour administration—how they were quite unable to control the economy and were reduced to watching helplessly while unemployment rose. “The task,” he now says with the confidence of a born auctioneer, “. . . is to cut unemployment to below the million mark . . .  we shall need over the lifetime of the next five-year Parliament to create at least 2½ million jobs.”

Next to raise a finger is Roy Jenkins who, by the time these notes appear, will know what the voters of Hillhead think of his bid. In fact it is a pretty cautious one; Jenkins promises to create only 600,000 jobs and to cut unemployment by only one million, although this within two years. Perhaps Jenkins is cautious because he is still smarting over the memory of his own failure to control unemployment when he was Labour’s Chancellor.

There is no reason to believe that this auction has any sounder basis that that over housing. If it were that easy to abolish unemployment, of course Shore and Jenkins would have seen to it when they were in office. They were unable to do so because the economy of capitalism can’t be controlled: its problems can't be abolished or even, very often, moderated. It is not possible to “create” jobs, to conjure away unemployment.

The vital question is, how long will the working class encourage the auction to continue?

Whom did Butler serve?

When the Tories twice turned down the chance of making R. A. Butler their leader—and so Prime Minister—it seems we had a narrow escape from being governed by one of the greatest men in the entire history of the human race.

Just look at some of the tributes paid to Butler, when he died last month.

". . . great intellectual qualities . .  .” (Lord Home)
“. . . one of the finest politicians of his generation.’’ (Ted Heath)
". . . one of the outstanding minds in politics in this century." (Enoch Powell)
“. . . always had it in him to be Prime Minister. . ." (Harold Wilson)

Butler will be remembered for his work on the 1944 Education Act, which the working class were very grateful for because it contrived a more efficient way of schooling them for their life of wage slavery.

Another of his notable achievements was to regroup the Conservative Party after their crushing defeat in 1945, to push through a reassessment of their programmes and to recast their image. In some ways this was a curious business; workers strolling out of a Saturday evening were often startled to find one of these new look Tories speaking up for capitalism on a platform at a street corner. Some things, they might have reflected, can be taken too far.

But Butler’s schemes worked and when the Tories came back to power in 1951 it was to be for a very long time. It was then that Butler illustrated so well the basic affinity between the two big parties of capitalism. His policies as Chancellor were so alike those of his Labour predecessor, Hugh Gaitskell, that The Economist coined a new word for them—Butskellism.

Butler’s place in the history of politics will be that of a man who worked with surpassing skill and devious imagination to persuade the workers that capitalism does not have to be the degrading, insecure, murderous society that it is. He stood to gain much by this, as he was himself a very rich member of the ruling class.

No worker should mourn his end; their task is urgently to organise the death of the society of class privilege which Butler so slyly represented.

Golden anniversary

In the days when Macmillan’s wind of change was sweeping across Africa, the new state of Ghana was widely admired as the finest example of the alleged benefits of alleged freedom from colonial rule.

Ghana, which had been called the Gold Coast, had a lot going for it; apart from anything else there were rich natural resources in gold, bauxite, timber and cocoa. It was ruled by Kwame Nkrumah, the supposedly incorruptible hero of supposed freedom fighters everywhere.

And then things began to go wrong. Nkrumah’s life style was anything but that of a humble voice of the world’s oppressed peoples. He lived, remotely, in a castle which stood as a derided symbol of the deposed colonial power. Symbolically too, one of his ministers raised a storm by buying himself a massive gold-plated bed.

It was not long before Nkrumah’s personality cult developed into a dictatorship, corrupt and—as many dictatorships are—ramshackle. Prestige projects collapsed into disarray; factories stuttered along on a trickle of raw materials. Food and other essentials were in desperately short supply. Ghana was in chaos.

In 1966 a military coup overthrew Nkrumah but this did nothing to lessen the corruption until, 13 years and several other coups later, there was touch of farce—a coup led, not by a general but by a lowly Flight Lieutenant with the demotic name of Jerry Rawlings.

Last month Ghana celebrated—if that is the word—25 years of independence (again, if that is the word). As an embryo capitalist state it is bankrupt and exhausted. Rawlings has a classical remedy; only “hard work” (by which he means more intensive exploitation of the Ghanaian workers) can save the country (by which he means the ruling class there).

It has been a quarter century of corruption, terror and confusion an object lesson to those who mistakenly believe that there is anything for a country’s people to gain from changing one set of oppressive exploiters for another.

Capitalism in Zimbabwe (1982)

From the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The following article was first published on 4 October 1981 under the title “Capitalism Stands in the Way of Social Advance” in the “Talking Point” column of the Sunday Mail of Salisbury, Zimbabwe, where the Prime Minister Mugabe has just announced that his Party will rule for ever. Ian Smith was more modest; he merely spoke of ruling for a thousand years. It is up to the working class, armed with the ideas expressed in this article, to bring Mugabe’s ambitions to nought.

* * *

Important changes are taking place now in this part of Africa we live in, changes in human attitudes and the material conditions by which production continues, briefly, in how human beings spend their time. We must try to understand the society we live in.

The dominant society, worldwide, is capitalism. It is international and it is existing now in Zimbabwe, in a less developed form than in, say, Europe or America or Russia. Capitalism is only a name for a type of society characterised by the way people living together under it have certain dealings or relations with each other in the everyday affairs of life.

It is called by this name, capitalism, because the means of production and distribution of commodities under it, the land, factories, railways, etc., are owned by capitalists, that is, by people possessing large amounts of money that they have invested so as to acquire ownership of these means of production and distribution.

They may be landlords with their money invested in land and buildings, and draw their income in the form of rent. They may be owners of factories or trading concerns, or they may have shares in a large number of companies and receive their income in the form of profits.

Lastly, they may have invested their money by making loans to manufacturing or trading capitalists, or by lending it to the Government or councils. They then received “interest” on the loan. All these groups are alike in that they live by receiving income from their investments, a private property income.

The working class, by applying their energies to nature-given material, produce all of the necessities and luxuries which the whole of the population consume; but as employees they receive a wage or salary which provides them only with the means of subsistence for their maintenance and their families.

The workers in, say, three days’ work a week, produce an amount equal to what they receive as wages: the rest of the week their work produces a “surplus value" out of which are derived the rent, interest and profit of the propertied class, their private property.

Here is the root cause of working class poverty. The workers are carrying the propertied class on their backs, the workers are an exploited class under capitalism.

It has been necessary to describe briefly capitalism to begin understanding in what direction Zimbabwe is going.

The old regime was restraining capitalism under the banner of privilege. So for capitalism to develop, it had to be removed. The capitalist knows that black workers can be trained to be as skilled as any white worker, so racial privilege had to go; and further sees in the black workers a vast, expanding market for commodities.

Also, it is essential for the development of capitalism that the small-scale production and natural economy of the self-sufficient peasant be ended, and so steps are being taken to draw the producers in communal lands into the “money economy”.

Town or city workers who lay claim to rural land will be denied this land in the interest of developing capitalism, since workers to be trained for capitalism must be “stable” and compelled to work for wages only.

The growth of the market, the accumulation of capital, the modification of the social position of the classes, a large number of persons being deprived of alternative sources of income other than wages—all these are historical pre-conditions for the expansion of capitalism.

It is against this reality that capitalists and their sycophants issue their appeal to the workers to “forget class”, “forget exploitation”, “work harder” and enter into harmonious co-operation with their employer in the interest of the company, or with the Government in the interest of “the nation”.

However, there can be no sound basis for reconciliation between exploited and exploiting classes.

Exploitation will cease only when the means of production and distribution cease to be owned by a small class of capitalists and become the common property of society as a whole.

Production will be democratically controlled solely and directly for the use of the whole population with no buying and selling, no price system. Rent, interest and profit, and the wages system will be abolished. Production and distribution will be on the socialist principle: “From each according to ability: to each according to need”. All will have free access to society’s products.

There will be no class division, no working class or owning class and no trade unions; there can be no trade unions because there will be no wages to bargain over and no employers to bargain with. Socialist society can only be worldwide, humanity will not be segregated behind national frontiers or coerced by the armed forces of governments.

The question that needs to be put to all political parties is, therefore, whether or not they stand for the immediate abolition of capitalism, substituting socialism. If they do not, then they are standing in the way of social advance, even though, without any justification, they choose to call their policies socialism.

Loss of the Titanic (1982)

From the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

For over seventy years the Titanic has lain there, more than two miles down in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. During a few days in April 1912 it was the greatest ship in the world—the unsinkable. And then, on its maiden voyage in a clear night and on a calm sea, the Titanic foundered and over 1500 people died.

This liner was the pride of the White Star Line—built like two ships in one, with an inner steel skin divided into compartments which could be scaled off by a switch on the bridge. The Titanic's 46,000 tons were driven at over 22 knots by the steam power from 29 massive boilers, heated by coal fed to them by scores of sweating stokers. Well above the noisy drudgery of the engine rooms there was a riotous luxury for those who could afford it; “For the payment or £870 per voyage,” said one account, “the richest man on earth would not lack a single comfort that his wealth might buy”.

When the Titanic left Queenstown on its first, and only, voyage seventy years ago this month its passengers included capitalists whose ownership of wealth totalled over £120 million. There was J. J. Astor, the banker Washington Dodge, “smelter king” Benjamin Guggenheim; men like Charles Hays and J. B. Thayer, rich through the ownership of American railroads. They were attended by maids, valets, nurses and governesses, apart from hundreds of stewards and stewardesses. Many of these people were making the crossing for no more pressing reason than to take part in a glamorous, historic event—a celebration of their position and power as members of the ruling class. There were other passengers whose motives were rather different; the Third Class accommodation carried hundreds of emigrating workers, many of them Irish, who were hoping to find a more rewarding style of exploitation on the other side of the Atlantic. When the Titanic sank their plight, appropriate to their inferior station, was particularly desperate.

Confidence
As it drew out of Queenstown the Titanic, with its size and power and exclusive luxury, represented the confidence of contemporary capitalism that no problems were beyond its power to solve. There had been no major war in Europe for 40 years, although it needed a conscious effort to blot out the signs which in 1912 were clearly showing that peace was not to last much longer. On all sides there were technological advances which could be comfortingly misconstrued as evidence of a human triumph over natural forces and social problems. The commander of the Titanic, Captain Smith, had contributed his own evidence: “I cannot imagine,” he had said six years before, “any condition which would cause a ship to founder . . . Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that”. This was supposed to be an orderly society in which everyone knew their place and happily kept to it. There could be no doubt that it worked; after all there was the Titanic to prove it . . .

Near midnight on April 14, three days out, the Titanic collided with an iceberg and by a process as inexorable as a mathematical equation filled up with water and sank. The iceberg, made of snow accumulated over 3,000 years, had broken loose about two years before the collision and had been drifting in the Labrador Current. It tore a massive hole beneath the water line in five of the Titanic's compartments; as the sea poured in the vessel dipped bow first, which eventually sent the water over the top of each supposedly watertight bulkhead into the next compartment, which filled up and pushed the bow further down, and so on.

It took nearly three hours for the Titanic to sink, amid a deafening roar from its boilers, leaving some seven hundred terrified survivors in the boats or clinging to pieces of wreckage. By then it was clear that in one respect it was not a luxurious ship; there had been 2,201 people on board but there were lifeboats for only 1,178. Confidence had overruled caution—why have a lot of life-saving equipment on a ship which couldn’t be sunk?

A quick reaction to the disaster was a flood of nonsense about the behaviour of the crew and passengers, as if capitalism was seeking some consolation for this blow to its arrogance. A contemporary publication—The Deathless Story of the Titanic by Philip Gibbs—was sickeningly lyrical:

   All the great virtues of the soul were here displayed upon “that dim dark sea, so like unto death” —courage, self- forgetfulness, self-sacrifice, love, devotion to those highest ideals which are the guiding stars of life, beyond the common reach.

Reality was less noble. There were many brave acts that night but there was also some predictable panic. Some passengers tried to rush the boats, one officer fired his pistol to control a panic, another berated the Managing Director of the White Star Line, Bruce Ismay, for his disruptive influence while the seamen were trying to get a lifeboat away. One of the boats which had places for 40 people was launched with only 12; it was dominated by Sir Cosmos Duff Gordon, who prevented it returning to the scene to pick up more survivors.

Then there was the matter of the numbers saved from each class of passenger. Gibbs claimed: “Women and children first—the old law of the sea—was obeyed. The old tradition of chivalry was upheld, as splendidly as ever in the story of the sea”. The truth is that a greater proportion of men in the First (Mass (33 per cent) were saved than of male children in the Third Class (27 per cent). Only four First Class women passengers died out of a total of 144 but in the Third Class 89 out of a total of 165—or 54 per cent—were lost.

The official British report on the disaster denied that this was due to any discrimination, saying that it was “. . . due to various causes, among which the difference in the position of their quarters and the fact that many of the third-class passengers were foreigners, are perhaps the most important”. In fact the position of the accommodation was vital; the First Class was much nearer the boat deck and was sealed from the rest of the ship by barriers many of which were kept locked even as the Titanic was filling with water. Some were guarded by a seaman doing his duty to stop people having access to something they couldn't afford, while fellow members of his class pleaded for their lives to be let through. And even if some steerage passengers did get through the barriers there was nothing and nobody to guide them through the maze of unfamiliar corridors and stairways up to the boats. Pathetically, many died because they went back for their luggage; its loss would have been a major catastrophe for them. The report's conclusion that there had been no discrimination by class should be taken in the context that no Third Class passengers testified to the Inquiry. The press might have aired their story but they were not interested; when the survivors arrived at New York the attention was focused on the likes of Mrs. Astor. who was met by two limousines carrying two doctors and a trained nurse and of Mrs. Widener and Mrs. Hays, who each had a private train waiting for them. The ruling class survived, as they lived, in the best parasitic style.

Record time

There was a simple reason for the sinking of the Titanic but it docs not tell the whole story. The master's sailing orders instructed him:

   You are to dismiss all idea of competitive passages with other vessels and to concentrate your attention upon a cautious, prudent, and ever-watchful system of navigation, which shall lose time or suffer any other temporary inconvenience rather than incur the slightest risk which can be avoided.

Smith's response to this was to take his ship on a course which, he knew, lay through seas where there would be icebergs. He was specifically warned that icebergs lay ahead but he drove into the danger zone at too high a speed with inadequate lookout. If the iceberg had been seen sooner, or the ship had been travelling slower, there might well have been a different story.

Was this, then, an isolated case of experienced seamen (Smith was White Star's senior captain and had 38 years of work for them behind him) suddenly taking leave of their senses? In reality, Smith's sailing orders were little better than fantasy. Those were the days of fierce competition on the trans-Atlantic crossing; the mighty ocean liners were the Concordes of their time and they travelled amid a similar ballyhoo and displayed ostentation. On the Atlantic crossing it was common practice, whatever the orders said, to sacrifice safety for schedules because ships which did not arrive on time lost business for their companies. For the Titanic, on its maiden voyage, it was particularly important to make a crossing in record time; there were all those wealthy and influential members of the ruling class to impress.

For all those privileged people, to cross the Atlantic in the greatest of all ships was an affirmation of their superior position in society. (When the survivors got to New York in the Carpathia the Social Register could hardly face the disgrace of rich people travelling on such a low class vessel; it listed them as “Arrived Titan-Carpath. April 18. 1912”.) During the voyage the Titanic’s Marconigraph operators were buried in an avalanche of private messages and congratulatory telegrams, so that they refused the first ice warning because they were too busy; for the same reason, another warning lay unheeded beneath a paper weight. Another warning was, incredibly, given by Captain Smith to Bruce Ismay, who kept it for five hours, showing it to his friends as a reminder of his exalted position at the head of the company which owned this fabulous ship.

So it was not just a case, as the Inquiry had it, of a ship going too fast in dangerous conditions. For the excessive speed, and much of the circumstances in the tragedy of the Titanic, was a response to a festival of capitalist privilege. It was gruesomely appropriate, that it should turn out to be an exposure of a social system, which still lives seventy years on, as dominated and distorted by the reckless greed of the profit motive.

Ivan

Letters: Who are the culprits? (1982)

Letters to the Editors from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who are the culprits?

Dear Editors

In an article in the February, 1982 Socialist Standard (“A Better World To Die In”) our society is depicted as “wasteful" and "destructive” and at the centre of this dirty world is a brutal capitalist. You forget that many of these capitalists are responsible for establishing charities and research centres aimed at improving the quality of life. Furthermore, it is the surplus value created by capitalism that allows these institutions to flourish. The proletariat are made to appear the victims of this vile society. However, they are not forced to commit slow suicide by smoking cigarettes, nor are they forced down mines like cattle to a slaughter-house. Yet the writer urges us to follow him into a fantasy world which he imagines will eradicate problems manifested by capitalism. What makes him so certain that this society with no blueprint will be any better? It is further puzzling that some socialists, ready to put the world to rights, also invest in government stocks and hold debentures. These people are probably laughing all the way to the bank. Perhaps the crocodile tears shed on behalf of the proletariat are wasted on a group who demand not a different world, but more of the existing one, i.e. more booze, more fags and more entertainment. Thus, one question still remains in my mind: who are the victims and who are the culprits?

R Katan, 

Wembley

Reply:
Ours is not a moral case; we are not in the business of blaming people for capitalism. This system is part of a long, historical process; the socialist argument is that it is now time to move on to a new social system which will be in line with the productive potentialities of our modern world.

It is quite true that some capitalists indulge in gestures of benevolence towards the class which they legally rob. So what? The essential point is that the capitalist's power and affluence are based on exploiting the working class. Within capitalism the capitalist cannot act as anything but an exploiter and the worker cannot act as anything but a wage slave.

It is rather naive to say that workers want things the way they are. Workers are constantly campaigning and protesting against the evils of capitalism. How many workers want to be blown up in a war? Although capitalist propaganda tries to persuade workers that their problems can be solved under capitalism, their experience under capitalism is on the side of socialists.

Socialism is not a fantasy world any more than any other untried idea is a fantasy. Socialists cannot draw up detailed blueprints for a society which will have to be democratically organised by the men and women who establish it. However we can—and do—examine the possibilities which a socialist world will allow humanity to bring about and we are certain that a society where production is for need will be far better than one where production is for profit.

We have not encountered many socialists who are "laughing all the way to the bank”; most of those we know keep well away from the bank in case the manager catches them. Socialism has to be brought about by workers. If any capitalists want to join us they may. but socialism does not rely on the aid of such people for its establishment.

Instead of looking for mythical culprits on whom the the problems of capitalism can be blamed. Miss Katan is urged to examine the objective laws of capitalism and to discover that the system—and not individuals within it is responsible for what is happening.

Editors 

Freedom

Dear Editors

In the article “Marxism, Materialism and Morality" (December, 1981), we are given a Marxist materialist explanation of man’s whole natural and historical existence from the dawn of human consciousness to the present time without once mentioning the word “freedom”. The writer is a determinist, determined to fit Man into his Marxist philosophical straightjacket. telling us that humans have a capacity to think in three ways, none of which includes freedom. Yet without some kind of thoughts about freedom there would be no desire for the moral development of Man in society. A socialist consciousness presupposes a consciousness of freedom in Man, for without this consciousness of freedom Man cannot be regarded as a human, responsible being with a personality which distinguishes us from robots.

R Smith, 

Dundee

Reply:
It was Engels who wrote that historical freedom is simply "an insight into necessity". To be historically free is not to be in a position to do anything, but to recognise what can be done. R. Smith's fancy idealistic talk about humans being free is reminiscent of the early capitalists who were philosophically obsessed by the belief that capitalism equals freedom. In one sense it does: workers are free to be exploited. Socialists do not accept the vulgar economic determinism which is sometimes presented as Marxism. Of course, humans have the capacity to make history; human thought is extremely important. But thought is never free. We are bound by our historical conditions, our language and our experience. Socialism is not about “moral development", but about developing society by ourselves for ourselves.

Editors

Elections and Revolution (1982)

Editorial from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

At local election time voters are asked to pay the price for their political gullibility. “Vote for us" cry the defenders of the profit system: “Send us to the council chamber and we will make the district a pleasant place to live in". Most workers don't bother to vote in local elections. Hand-outs are thrown away by the pestered electorate as casually as the promises within them will be case aside by the winning party. Workers are right to be cynical about the parties of capitalism: what have they ever done for us?

The real issue in this election, as in all others, is not which leader to choose or which policies to enact. The workings of capitalism are not susceptible to the manipulation of local government. Whoever gets in, profits still come before human needs.

The real issue is which social system we want to live under: capitalism or socialism? None of the manifestos will say anything about the system. The politicians will not make speeches saying “Vote for us so that we can run capitalism—we stand firmly for a system of class division and legalised exploitation a vote for us is a vote to continue the same old problems". Well, they wouldn’t say that, would they? But in effect, that is precisely what they mean.

Elections are never about the real issue. Petty, reformist trivialities are presented as if they're what it's all about. Grown up people get excited about rates, rents and rosettes while tinny loudspeaker vans amplify rusty policies from the mouths of shady politicians. Nobody mentions The System—but that is what the whole performance is about.

When socialists arrive on the election scene and talk about the real issue—real socialists, not reformist Labourites—the defenders of capitalism become terribly embarrassed: Labourites go red in the face, Tories go blue in the face and SDPers break their moulds. But there is no escaping it—the real electoral issue is whether we are to live in a competitive, class-divided society or whether we are
commonly to own and democratically control the resources of the world. The choice is yours.

We agree: it is easier said than done. Making a social revolution takes a bit more than “breaking the mould". How, then, are we to enact this great change? The first step is to want it. There can be no socialism unless people want it. Do you want a society where food is produced solely to be eaten, houses solely to live in, clothes solely to wear? Do you want to get rid of the buying and selling system where we can only obtain what we want if there is a profit in it for the capitalists?

The Left often argues among itself but claims a fundamentally different outlook on life and way of running society from the Right. However, if we look at the opposing teams of Left and Right in action, we find that:

•  Labour and Conservative governments always promise sweeping improvements, but both break their promises and practise virtually identical policies leading to wage “restraint”, job insecurity, unemployment and general dissatisfaction.
• The Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Revolutionary Party are bitterly hostile to the National Front. Yet, like the extreme Right, they go in for physical violence to muzzle opponents with “unacceptable” views and often support regimes abroad which deny opponents freedom of speech. Both sides have contempt for democracy. Both sides want to set themselves up as leaders.
• The state capitalism of Russia and China is basically the same as the private capitalism of Chile and South Africa. In all these countries political opposition is regarded as deviance and liable to punishment in prison, psychiatric hospital or concentration camp. In all of them a small elite holds power of life and death over the vast majority.

So we see that in reality the policies of Right and Left are often strikingly similar. The difference is the way these policies are dressed up.

There are quite a few people who prefer the idea of production for need to the idea of production for profit. We want socialism: but wishful thinking will not make a revolution. Capitalism survives because of mass consent. So what would happen if there was mass dissent—if a majority of the working class (which is itself a majority of humanity) withdrew its support from capitalism? The system cannot continue without our acquiescence.

Mass dissent or majority socialist consciousness—call it what you like—does not appear by magic. Most people accept the capitalist system because they are used to it. Workers believe that capitalism has always existed and always will. The job of socialists is to show that capitalism is just a temporary stage in human evolution. There is an alternative.

Once a majority understand and want socialism, what must they do? They must do the opposite of what they do to support capitalism. Instead of electing leaders to run capitalism they must elect socialist delegates who will carry out their political will. Once socialists get into the council chambers and the parliaments of the world they will have one act to perform: the expropriation of the capitalist class and the transfer of the means of wealth production and distribution to the whole community. That is the sole aim of socialists; that is the real electoral issue.

If you vote Labour, Tory, SDP, Liberal or for any of the other pro-capitalist parties in the May elections you are acting as an opponent of socialism. Any political promise or demand less than socialist revolution is worthy of the hostility of the working class. If you are a socialist, write “WORLD SOCIALISM—SPGB” on your ballot paper. At election time, this is the revolutionary socialist message.

50 Years Ago: Polish Troops Against Strikers (1982)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Early in February there were rumours in Eastern Europe of various governments massing troops for war. One of the rumours said that Poland was mobilising troops on the German frontier in Upper Silesia. This, to the newspapers, was a “disturbing" rumour. But re-assurance soon came. The troops were not for the purpose of threatening German capitalism. but for the purpose of dealing with a strike which was likely to break out. (News Chronicle, February 6th.)

Needless to say. the Polish Government was not sending troops to intimidate the employers, but to keep the workers in subjection.

(From the Socialist Standard. April 1932.)

Running Commentary: Resourceful Destruction (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Resourceful Destruction
The contradictions of the profit system become more stark and bizarre. While millions starve and go without even basic accommodation food is destroyed or simply not produced, factories are closed down and millions of people are made redundant and forced into idleness.

Making the picture even more grotesque is the fact that while our means of production are being deliberately underused to protect the profits of the owners, “our” means of destruction are being developed to a degree where death and damage can be caused as efficiently as possible.

Straining with potential for the satisfaction of human needs and production, the world is in fact seething with unmet need and on the brink of large-scale destruction. The government finances research and development into many areas including medicine, the environment, science, engineering, agriculture and methods of destruction (otherwise known as “Defence”).

A recent report of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Science and Technology for the 1980s, provides a breakdown of the proportions of the general research fund which each of these areas receives, and is a good indication of the priorities which all governments need to adopt in order to “properly” administer capitalism. The report shows that more than half of the funds which the government allocates to research and development is devoted to the Destruction Industry.

The grants which will be received this year by the Medical Research Council, the National Environmental Research Council, the Science and Engineering Research Council and other such bodies will amount in total to less than the £1,750,000,000 earmarked this year for research into better ways of destroying things and killing people.


Bradford Wall game
On March 7, the Sunday Times carried an article about the Labour Party candidate for Bradford North, Pat Wall, who is also a member of Militant Tendency. The article quoted some comments made by Wall at a meeting of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). These remarks were regarded as being so wildly revolutionary and, that most feared of all things in the Labour Party, “Marxist”, that Labour’s organisation committee ordered the Bradford North Constituency Labour Party to hold a re-run of the selection conference for its parliamentary candidate.

What had Wall said, to cause all the ballyhoo? Well, he said that a Marxist Labour Government (evidently not the strike-breaking, wage-freeze, arms-dealing variety we know so well) would have to deal with the capitalist state machine as soon as it took office. It would “deal with capitalism”, he argued, by "abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords and sacking senior civil servants, and military and police chiefs, and judges”. These vacant posts would then be filled by elections!

Two points need to be made. First it says a lot about the current condition of the Labour Party, when mild reforms like abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords repeatedly and proudly espoused by Keir Hardie are greeted by them with such widespread and astonished horror. Second, it is worth observing the rather limited notion of socialism held by people like Pat Wall: for what is it about modern republics, that we should be so eager to attain? We get rid of the military and police chiefs and retain the military and police forces, but against whom will these forces be used? Then there is the sacking of members of the judiciary, only for their offices to be filled by “People’s Judges”. In all of Wall’s fiery rhetoric there was no mention of abolishing the property relations of capitalism, only of changing faces and prejudices of its high- ranking personnel.


Peking order
In this society, which places profits above people, wars, starvation, insanitary water supplies, hypothermia, terrorism and pollution are some of the ways in which life is endangered. But the human cost of capitalism is also extended in other more concealed ways.

Last month the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party directed that couples living in cities shall be permitted to have only one child, with peasants restricted to only two children. The directive indicates that some local authorities have already provided incentives and favourable treatment for families with only one child, including priority in entering kindergartens and better prospects in jobs and housing. It warns: “For those who do not follow family planning, appropriate economic restrictions must be enforced”. That is, the cost of a life for the unfortunate parents of a second or third child will be a fine.

The reason for this policy, which comes about as close as you can, along with insurance policies, to putting a price on a life, is that an increase in the birth rate has threatened the ability of the Chinese economy to maintain the already desperately impoverished living standards of most of its one billion people. This is the latest in a series of “coping-with-capitalism” policy changes which have been introduced by the Chinese government over the last two years and which have included the adoption of an American tax code system, the official recognition of a rising unemployment problem, and a switch in many industries to piece-rate work payments.

Another change of a more sweeping sort is a move to de-collectivise much of the land worked by the peasants and farm it out to family groups in the hope that a more rigorous competitive system will boost productivity. This U-turn from a pretended commitment to common ownership and equality to a boastful praising of the “merits” of private property is summed up in a New Year couplet pinned on the wall of a couple in Kao-cheng reported in the Guardian, (15/3/82):

Better live among men than in a paradise dream
Better farm my own patch than work in a team

An argument, no doubt, which the most ruthless defenders of private property will gladly applaud.


Second coming
In the search for solutions to our social problems in 1982, the theological dispute between catholics and protestants is about as meaningful as debating how many SDP political principles can be fitted on the point of a needle. The latest episode in this anachronistic religious battle centres around the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain.

On one side of this dispute catholics are excitedly awaiting the arrival of John Paul mark 2. For them, one glimpse of the visitor from Italy in the flesh and the sound of his words of divine wisdom will have a magically refreshing effect—although, if he were defrocked of his fancy costume, most of his ardent fans would walk past him on the street, unaffected.

On the other side of the dispute are assorted fanatical protestant revivalists who see the Pope’s visit as part of a conspiracy to subvert the dusty teachings of the Church of England. One of the organisers of the opposition to the Pope’s visit is the Reverend George Ashdown who recently proclaimed, brushing the cobwebs from his script, “Britain has always been the bastion of the Protestant religion. That is why Rome knows the Pope’s visit is so important. If they can seduce the House of Windsor, if they can repeal our Bill of Rights, then the Antichrist is home and dry. But God may yet intervene to stop him coming. He may send us a man, another Cromwell, a Wesley, to lead a great revival” (Guardian, 13/3/82).

Religious beliefs are superstitious and a positive hindrance to self-confident political action to solve social problems. Holding out hope and faith in men like Karol Wojtyla (currently employed in Rome as Supreme Pontiff) to help you through the various difficulties of poverty is a lost cause. In fact the conservative stand of the Church on political and industrial issues has been made quite explicit by Karol himself in his recent picas to members of Solidarity in Poland to be "moderate” in their demands and not to ask for too much, Establishing socialism cannot proceed if we are taken in by the humbug of horoscopes or of clerics telling of a future which is pre-ordained.

Korearists

Under Giscard d'Estaing the French bosses agreed, with government backing, to supply the South Korean regime with nuclear power stations and nuclear fuels. The French "socialists” were horrified to find Giscard "comforting a regime of terror”, and strongly condemned “a government which lends support to a dictatorial regime for purely financial ends” (Le Monde, 23/2/82).

Now that those in France calling themselves "socialists" have gained power, what has become of the trade with South Korea? Was the recent visit of the South Korean Foreign Minister to France (as an honoured guest at comrade Mitterand’s Élysée Palace) a summons to be told that socialists do not support any governments let alone the repressive excesses of the dictatorship in South Korea?

Not quite. Since coming to power the "socialists” seem to have changed their view about the desirability of the nuclear supplies contracts with South Korea (worth 6,000,000,000 frs.) and the possibility of further deals involving a subway system and a tidal power station, and comrade Mitterand has raised his champagne glass to the successful fulfilment of the contract.

Fighting for "socialism” alongside Mitterand, French Prime Minister Mauroy recently took himself on a visit to a nationalised People's Factory where he ate roast beef and chips in the self-service canteen and actually mingled with the workers. "Nice to see you smiling when you're under new management”, was one of his caustic remarks (Guardian, 27/2/82).

Of course, selling your life for a wage or a salary in order to produce profits for a minority to enjoy keeps you in poverty whether your employer is a private enterprise or the state; but in his stroll around the factory Mauroy met one worker who seemed very pleased with the new arrangements now that her factory had been nationalised. "Now I come in at 8.12am instead of 8.00am”, she proudly informed the Prime Minister. “It's a start.”

Now that these workers have this extra 12 minutes to enjoy in the mornings we wonder whether any of them will choose to stay out later at night and make use of any of the amenities available to people in “socialist” France? A night at the Nova-Park Élysées Hotel in Paris, perhaps? A single night here in the Royal suite, for instance, costs £3,500 with VAT on top, at £616 a night (Sunday Times, 28/2/82) Breakfast is not included in this bill but then you may not have the opportunity to try it if you have to be a work by 8.12am.

Spacious middle grounds

Brian Magee was once a Labour MP. Now he has joined the SDP. Writing last month in the Observer, Magee said that both the Labour and Conservative Parties "maddened by persistent failure, have moved to extremes leaving nearly half the population of Britain unrepresented in the gap between”. The SDP is now supposed to be filling that gap but Magee unwittingly makes a very apposite point: that when both Labour and Conservative parties did persistently attempt to deal with capitalism's problems with policies that were "moderate” (whatever that is supposed to mean) they became frustrated, “maddened by persistent failure". Yet it is now the SDP which is trying to persuade us that what we need is “moderation”.

One group of people who seem to realise that the SDP would continue to run capitalism in a satisfactory' way for the ruling class are those who openly support the system of minority privilege. Two recent SDP recruits illustrate this point. In a letter last month to the Devonshire Times, Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, let it be known that he intends to join the Moderates. "Old Yellow Socks", as he is known for his colourful taste in dress, owns 38,000 acres in Derbyshire, 30,000 acres in Yorkshire, a priceless estate of 1,200 acres in Eastbourne, a small country place in county Waterford (as he modestly describes Lismore Castle) and a few more “bits and pieces”.

A fellow recruit of Andrew’s is Roger Rosewell, who was industrial organiser for the SWP (1970-73) but who has now become an open defender of ruling class privilege, joined the SDP and published an anti-Marxist manual for employers—Dealing with the Marxist Threat to Industry. Who will be the next fighter for equality and great thinker to join the SDP? Prince Philip?

Gary Jay

What shall it profit a man? (1982)

From the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, recently had to suffer the indignity of abuse and the interruption of his sermons by chanting and slow handclaps. The reason for this antagonism? His support for the visit of the Pope to this country in May, to bless his own faithful and further the cause of Christian unity. This vociferous minority obviously have long memories. They resent the visit of the successor of the man who refused the Defender of the Faith permission to divorce his wife and marry Anne Boleyn, thus forcing Henry VIII to proclaim himself Head of the Church of England in order to achieve his ends.

However, many religious people interested in such matters—certainly the majority of Roman Catholics in the country—are looking forward to the Pope’s visit. If precedent is anything to go by, they will trek long distances to see him or be among the tens of thousands attending one of the open air masses which will put Billy Graham’s crusade meetings in the shade. The visit will be costly, and there is even talk of a levy of £9 or £10 on every Roman Catholic adult in the country to pay for it. Obviously the Vicar of Rome, astride one of the greatest collections of wealth in the world, cannot be asked to help to defray the costs. (One wonders who paid for his visit to Poland—and why.)

On the other hand, there are some who will gain financially from the visit. One souvenir factory, instead of going broke now that royal anniversaries and weddings are over for a while, is taking on extra staff to produce plastic busts of the Pope, and Catholic headquarters are giving official approval to other selected souvenirs of “good taste’’. Although we are not sure that this description holds good in one particular case, it certainly shows ingenuity. The Daily Telegraph (4/3/82) called it “Credit Card to Heaven”—a Plastic Pope! A simulated credit card “in glorious colour”, with a picture of the Pope on the front and the usual signature panel on the reverse. It is, according to the advertisements, “manufactured to the same high specifications as the bank card in your wallet or purse”, which is probably not a vain boast as the originator, Barry Collins, learned his trade working on Barclaycards. This card is, of course, useless for earthly purchases, but it is pointed out that for £1.25 “it may open the gates of heaven’’—surely an offence under the Trades Description Act?

The cards are to be sold through parish priests and teachers, using children as the salesforce. The brochure sent out to schools says: “Get your pupils to sell to families and friends” (a novel interpretation of “suffer ye little children to come unto me”); “sell 1,000 cards and buy a colour TV or video. Use the cards as admission tickets to dances and functions”. The brochure sent to parish priests states: “Get your parish organisation involved . . . and watch your profits grow”. Special deals are offered for bulk orders from large business organisations. Collins, who is himself a good catholic, says he wants to make the Pope’s visit a success . . . “obviously I’m also in it for the money” he adds.

Church headquarters are not happy with his selling methods. “We certainly agree that this material is way over the top. It is not the type of material we would have approved.” But to an organisation which has sold “indulgences” and masses for the dead, there is nothing amiss in principle in selling heavenly credit cards.

Eva Goodman

Pipes of peace? (1982)

From the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern industry and transport and the daily lives of people are wholly dependent on sources of energy. It used to be coal and coal gas and their use for the generation of electricity; then oil took the lead and now it is a combination of many sources including nuclear energy, solar energy and natural gas. If the world operated on the basis of co-operation to meet human needs it would be a problem of selection, with due regard to suitability, local availability and safety. But capitalism, which at present dominates the whole world, is not like that at all.

The world is divided into some 150 nations, each with its armed forces, grouped in a number of alliances, each pursuing policies designed to further the interests of the dominant section which for the time being controls each government. And inside each nation there are rival capitalist groups. The result is that schemes to transport energy materials from places where they are abundant to places where they are needed become over-ridden by national rivalries and military considerations. But for capitalism, these would be simple economic and technical problems.

A case in point is the planned pipeline to take Siberian gas to Western Europe and Japan. Inter-governmental discussions of the pipe-lines are ranging over the dictatorship in Poland, Russia and Afghanistan ; American foreign policy towards Europe; disarmament and the continued existence of Nato.

The Russian government, which already supplies considerable natural gas to Europe, now plans to build a 3,600 mile pipe-line system from Western Siberia to European borders from which gas will be pumped to West Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. According to the Financial Times (18 December 1981) it is estimated to cost 15 billion dollars to build and “is the biggest East-West trade deal ever”. Big orders for the steel pipes and compressor stations are to go to German and French companies though, for these latter components, some companies were relying on General Electric of USA.

Critics of the scheme, among them the American government, argue that it will make Europe dangerously dependent on Russia, thus weakening Nato. The argument came to a head when Reagan announced his policy of putting pressure on Russia (over Poland) by banning “high technology” exports and calling on support from European governments. (This would include the compressor parts from American General Electric.) The German and French governments denied the danger of “too great reliance”, pointing out that Europe will also have access to gas supplies from Algeria (which already has a gas pipe line to Italy) and Nigeria. Both governments affirmed their intention to go ahead with the agreement with Russia. The Russian interest is said to be that, with declining oil production and exports, “hard currency” revenue from the gas exports is desperately needed to finance the huge imports of grain needed because of the deficiencies of Russian agriculture and a series of harvest failures.

Japan is also involved, through negotiations to help develop oil, gas and coal resources in Eastern Siberia, to be financed by Japan, with repayment in the form of Russian delivery of the energy materials. But, according to an article in the Observer (21 February) the continuation of this scheme is now in doubt because, among other difficulties, there is conflict inside Russia between supporters and opponents.

There is evidence of a battle of bureaucrats in Moscow, with Gosplan, the supreme planning authority, and some ministries doubting whether Siberian development is worth while . . . it is said that the rate of return on inputs in Siberia is not high and very long-term. These arguments are challenged by a Siberian lobby.

To add to the complications for Japan, “China insists that the development of Siberia threatens its security”. In the meantime Japanese companies are contracting to supply pipes and pipe-laying equipment for the other project, the pipeline from Western Siberia to Europe.

While NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) is under strain over conflict of interests about the Russia-Europe pipeline, it is also faced with the other possible aim of American policy, the withholding of food supplies to put pressure on Russia. The British, French, German and other governments have reaffirmed their support of NATO but some of them, particularly Germany, are complaining that the Reagan government pays too little regard to the interests of European capitalism. The British Labour Party, while supposedly committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament, also recently declared its continual support for NATO. It was of course the Attlee Labour Government which, with a complete U-turn of foreign policy, took British capitalism into NATO and embarked on massive re-armament, designed, as they said, to ward off a threatened Russian invasion of Western Europe.

The Times in a leading article “Food is Peace” (26 February) urged Reagan to disregard the lobbying of American farmers and his election pledge not to use a grain embargo against Russia, and to go all out to use food as a weapon to force the Russian government to change its policies. “Raw materials are vital strategical weapons. No raw material is as vital as food . . . The Soviet Union knows perfectly well that its dependence on our food production is a major and constant source of weakness. We should show them that we know that too”.

This is the way the capitalism of America, Europe, Russia and the rest of the powers bedevils the meeting of human needs and turns every issue into one of potential military conflict.

Edgar Hardcastle

El Salvador (1982)

From the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present crisis in El Salvador must be seen against its historical background. Not just the “local oligarchy” of fourteen families like the Duenas and the Hills, who own most of the country’s coffee exporting and other industries. Not just the particular American corporations, such as Exxon, Texaco and Westinghouse Electric, who have capital invested in El Salvador. But the market system of production for profit, which has come to dominate the entire world in the twentieth century.

The present Salvadorean capitalists arose with the integration of Central America into world trade at the end of the last century. Land which had been farmed in common by villages was transferred by the government into large private holdings for the cultivation of coffee for export. Some capitalists from other countries also joined the venture, and by the early twentieth century the increasingly powerful land-owners began to complement their activities will the creation of financial institutions, such as a central bank. The depression of world capitalism in the ’thirties brought diversification into other industries, in response to falling coffee prices. It also brought the peasant uprising led by Farabundo Marti, the massacre of thirty thousand people by the troops of Martinez, and the beginning of fifty years of military dictatorship.

The imperialist efforts of the Russian dictatorship have generally not been too subtle. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Poland . . .  to control the profitable resources of these countries is naturally of strategic advantage to any capitalist power, including Russia. The American empire, on the other hand, is rather sophisticated. Capital is invested, puppet regimes are installed, arms provided, complete with “technical advisors”, and the dividend freely drawn. If a few peasants are shot, if a few workers starve, it will be in the name of “freedom”, and the investors are certainly “free”.

The American ruling class has long had particularly lucrative and strategic interests in the Caribbean basin. In 1964, the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense produced a document entitled Winning the Cold War The US Ideological Offensive. The unfortunately named USAID Deputy Administrator, Mr. Coffin, is quoted as saying:

Our basic, broadest goal is a long range political one. It is not development for the sake of sheer development . . .  An important objective is to open up the maximum opportunity for domestic private initiative and to insure that foreign private investment, particularly from the United States, is welcomed and well treated.

American “military and economic aid” to the Caribbean area this year will total almost one billion dollars, of which more than a third is directed at El Salvador. A request for an additional $100 million military aid for the Duarte regime was included in the foreign aid bill sent to Capitol Hill by the White House. The US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, has tried to rouse his fellow American capitalists with suggestions that the opposition movements in El Salvador and similar Central American countries are secretly being sponsored by the Russian government. The fact is, when you are living under a regime where the state forces can kill 30,000 in two years, and where one in fifty people possess three-fifths of the land, you don’t need Tsar Brezhnev to tell you of the need for change. But despite Haig’s hysteria, American capitalists seem to have learnt some caution since Vietnam. One hundred and four members of Congress have signed a statement urging Reagan to support negotiations between El Salvador’s government and what they call “left-wing insurgents":

The escalating crises in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua are reaching a critical juncture and run the risk of involving the United States in a major regional conflagration.

Haig responded to this by insisting on the importance of “investment in foreign assistance" for future American security:

The overwhelming portion of our aid programme will go to nations which share our strategic concerns. (The Guardian, 4 March, 1982.)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

As with every other military conflict in the world, what is at stake is the profits of minorities. Guatemala, for example, another US-backed dictatorship, contains much oil and other minerals, and has a vital strategic position near the huge oil fields of Southern Mexico. Many ports in the region are heavily used for US trade.

In El Salvador, then, there is a civil war. Those who oppose the maintenance of the Duarte regime and the particular interests it protects are now represented by the joint Revolutionary Democratic Front and its military wing, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. Many thousands have died in this war. The United States government has supplied arms and “advisers” to the army and has claimed that the uprising is part of a “Communist" plant to take over the region. In their campaign the FMLN-FDR has publicised information about El Salvador. By 1961, for example, six families owned as much land as eighty per cent of all landowners, and nearly three-quarters of young children are still malnourished. But the workers and peasants in El Salvador must look at the backcloth of world capitalism against which they have suffered so much, and question carefully the FMLN-FDR leaders who are now offering to lead them to “national liberation" and “independence”. Mario Sandoval Alarcon, who is reported to control about three thousand armed civilians in a number of “anti-Left" death squads, has long been the leader of a “National Liberation Movement” in Guatemala, and the hated Christian Democrat President Duarte of El Salvador himself was exiled in 1972 for his “subversion”. Social revolution has not taken place if one dictator is simply replaced by another, the system of society remaining the same.

Liberation from capitalism cannot be achieved on a national scale. Socialism will not be introduced by yet another set of military leaders acting “on behalf of the people", whatever their slogans or proclaimed allegiances. This was unwittingly admitted by Luis de Sebastian, European representative of the FDR-FMLN, speaking at their anniversary meeting in London:

The economic model proposed for El Salvador will be a mixed economy. By this we mean that along with a state-owned sector, there will be a private sector . . . We will not yet be socialist . The people‘s views are very much present in the FMLN-FDR’s leadership of the process. We sincerely hope that we will never become detached from the masses, that we will never become an empty bureaucracy dictating to the masses what to do. (Quoted in El Salvador News Bulletin, 13.)

All of the indications are that this “sincere hope” will not be fulfilled. The US government backed the March elections in an attempt to legitimise the process of exploitation without the expense of sending in troops. But any party standing had to present a list of twenty thousand members—not the sort of information any opposition party would want to hand over to the government forces, with their incarceration and torture of political opponents. Taking part in the elections was made potentially so dangerous that the Electoral Council advised candidates to campaign through “paid advertisements in the press, radio and TV, and remain outside the country” (El Diario de Hoy, 16 July, 1981). In the midst of a civil war, and organised by a particularly vicious dictatorship desperate to retain its power, the elections were a travesty of democracy. In solidarity with workers throughout the world, the subjects of that dictatorship would do well to challenge the world capitalist system which cannot tolerate genuine socialist democracy, in the spirit of their anonymous folk poem:

What I'm telling you is true. The rich
   will never lift a finger to help us,
that would be like trying to cover the
   sun with a five-penny piece.
The big merchants, the money lenders
The factory owners, the landowners
The bank owners, the Military Mr. President
Don't wash our shirts stained
   with sweat after our day’s toil,
Don’t fetch us water from the river
Don't build our shacks
Nor will they set the factory machines in motion
Nor till the soil
Nor sow or harvest the seed
All this we do
and it's the same with everything.
If we, with that same fervour with
which we plough the earth,
don't organise and keep fighting
no one will do it for us 

                                    (Poesia Rebelde) 

Clifford Slapper