50 Years Ago: Unemployed offer to sell their toes (1985)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

In that popular rag, The People, under date of January 27th, it is stated that there are scores of men and women in Britain who would be willing to sell their toes — for hard cash. The prospective purchaser is a young Frenchwoman who lost her little toe in a motor car accident. She states that she is willing to pay handsomely for a suitable toe, which her surgeon is confident that he will be able to graft on to his patient's foot. According to the same paper, scores of men and women in Britain have signified their willingness to sell their toes in exchange for cash. Such are the facts, and many other similar cases will at once arise in the minds of our readers.

Thus we have, on the one hand, workers who cannot find a master, living in a state of such dire poverty that many have been driven to commit suicide, ready to be transported to foreign soil, to be placed under an anaesthetic, and to have their toe cut off. in order to supply this necessary missing link to a charming young Frenchwoman.

In attendance upon the lady will be the surgeon, the anaesthetist, the nurses, together with the necessary quorum of male and female servants.

Why, it may be asked, should not the roles be reversed? Why, supposing a worker loses a hand or an arm when attending dangerous machinery, should not a member of the capitalist class be operated upon and have the necessary portion of his anatomy removed and grafted on to that of the useful worker?

(From an article "British Workers Ready to Sell their Toes to a French Capitalist", Socialist Standard, April 1935.)

The Birth of Reformism (1985)

From the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human society has reached a point where the conflict between profit and human needs is condemning the vast majority of people to lives of relative poverty, despite all the technological advances of the twentieth century. The rapid growth in the productive forces of society, including both machinery and workers themselves has, during the past couple of centuries, turned capitalist social relationships into fetters against further development, rather than a vehicle of progress.

The appalling conditions of life suffered by workers in nineteenth-century Britain spawned two parallel tendencies. On the one hand, there were those more “enlightened" bosses who were anxious to prevent revolt or revolution, and to improve efficiency, by taking the edge off the almost absolute degradation which brutalised workers in the slums of Victorian times. In 1912, for example, writing in the journal. The Nineteenth Century and After R.C.K. Ensor defended the idea of a legal minimum wage as follows:

A working class, the poorest members of whom can get from newspapers and cinematographs a vivid idea of the country's wealth and how it is at present spent, must be less and less content with what contented its forefathers. The only question is whether in its strivings upward it is better on the whole to be cool in temper, clear in vision and constructive in method, or hot. blind and destructive.

On the other hand, there had developed a growing consciousness among workers of the fact that the interests of the buyer and the seller of labour power, the interests of boss and worker, could never be reconciled. The capitalist system of society could not satisfy the needs of humanity, ever.

Throughout the various stages of private property society over the last few thousand years, there has been no time or place without some clear expression of opposition to the ruling class. From the slave revolt of Spartacus, to the underground trade unions in the Russian empire today, the dispossessed have been forced by material necessity to take some action to defend themselves.

The history of the political development of the modem working class follows several stages. At first, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the main form taken by our resistance was that of individual acts of crime and sabotage. Riot, arson and the destruction of machinery in the age of Luddism, were resorted to in a desperate attempt to fight against the growing power of the employing class. Such action was isolated, unorganised and easily crushed.

The aims of the earliest trade unions were to establish uniform wage rates, and to reduce pressure on wages by limiting apprenticeships and opposing the introduction of machinery. Financial assistance was also offered to card bearers. Most importantly, though, the association of workers through organisation was seen to increase the strength and power of working-class resistance to the employers. It was commonly agreed that only by removing competition within the working class could unity, strength and therefore liberation be achieved. Such unity was found to be of use, however, only if it took a political form. The Chartist attempt to gain some kind of democratic access to the capitalist state made clear the political nature of the class struggle. This rising confidence felt by workers about their potential power was summed up by Engels, writing in the Labour Standard in June 1881, when he said that

 "There is no power in the world which could for a day resist the British working class organised as a body".

The response of capitalist employers and landlords to this growing working class consciousness was violent and brutal. At Peterloo in 1819, the magistrates had been horrified by the orderly, well-disciplined way in which thousands of workers had assembled together, to listen to speeches for democracy. Eleven of those workers were killed by the licensed agents of the state, and the Six Acts were passed to prevent workers from organising.

Sixty-eight years later, not a great deal had changed in the way society was run. as shown by this report of Bloody Sunday. 13 November 1887:

I noticed the banners of the East Finsbury Radical Club and of the Clerkenwell Branch of the Social Democratic Federation. The banner of the latter association bore the words "Educate. Agitate. Organise" . . .  the police, mounted and on foot, charged in among the people, striking indiscriminately in all directions.

(Reynolds Newspaper, 20 November 1887.)

There had. however, developed a definite movement among some sections of the ruling class and their advisers, in favour of reform to palliate workers' grievances, as opposed to outright oppression of them. This movement for reforming, rather than getting rid of capitalism, with its inbuilt class division between owners and non-owners of industry, was developed by capitalists trying to save their system. Their fears were summed up, for example, by G. Sims in How the Poor Live (1889): "This mighty mob of famished, diseased and filthy helots is getting dangerous, physically, morally, politically dangerous", and Lord Milner, in his speech at Wolverhampton on 17 December 1906. stated quite openly that "The attempt to raise the well-being and efficiency of the more backward of our people . . .  is not philanthropy: it is business".

What was the reaction in the working class to this idea of reforming and patching up the profit system, rather than replacing it with a new order of society devoted to satisfying needs? Capitalism meets needs merely as a by-product of serving the needs of profit and capital accumulation through the market. At the turn of the century there was quite a debate among workers as to whether this policy of reform, or "palliatives" as it was called, could be of any real value to the working class as a means of liberation.

The Manifesto of the English Socialists, signed on 1 May 1893 by members of the Fabian Society, the Hammersmith Socialist Society and the Social Democratic Federation, proclaimed that they supported:

the collective ownership of the great means and instruments of the creation and distribution of wealth . . . thus we look to put an end for ever to the wage system, to sweep away all distinctions of class.

But at the same time, there was a different approach to the problem beginning to take shape. This involved workers joining hands with the enlightened capitalists quoted above, to work for a humane capitalism rather than for a socialist society. One of the early representatives of reformism was Ramsay MacDonald, later leader of the Labour Party. Writing in the journal Today in March 1887, he explained his elitist and ultimately conservative view of social change:

The coming revolution is to be directed from the study . . .  to be, in fact, a revolution of the comparatively well-to-do . When we are strong in the strength of intellectual faith, the discontented will still be at our command, and as explosive as ever. We may have to use them, or we may not; but should the worse befall, their destructive power will be skilfully directed; it will not cause ruin, but will clear a way — it will be the tool, but not the designer.

In the seventy-nine years since its formation, the Labour Party has stood unswervingly for capitalism. The famous Clause Four adopted in 1918 was a blueprint for nationalisation, not socialism. Its reference to the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange is a contradiction in terms: if the means of production were really in the hands of us all, there would be no need to buy articles which were ours already, so there would be no need for a means of exchange. The pragmatism and compromise of reformism over the past century has proved a miserable failure, pointing the way towards adopting a genuine socialist policy as the only solution now.

The Liberal government in the years before the First World War. 1906-1914. introduced several reforms which have been seen as the foundations of the modem "welfare state". The discussion entered into at the time by capitalists and politicians responsible for implementing these reforms shows clearly what their concerns were. The Sheffield Chamber of Commerce voted in favour of compulsory training after a 1908 speech by Lord Newton stating that this would "increase a man's efficiency as a wealth-producing machine'. The Birmingham Chamber of Commerce Journal supported in 1905 the introduction of Labour Exchanges for workers, who were described as "assets of the nation”. They also urged "the sternest measures for the wastrel and the loafer". When introducing the National Unemployment Insurance scheme in 1909. Churchill reassured employers that "the whole system will prove to be nothing more than wages spreading" (quoted in J. Harris, Unemployment and Politics. 1972).

Individual reforms of capitalism will sometimes succeed in improving the conditions of some workers, although often at the expense of certain other workers, as implied in the above statement by Churchill. There is a pressing and practical alternative to the maze of legislation, campaigning and lobbying which capitalism has thrown up. Some reforms may be of benefit, but what socialists are implacably opposed to is the policy of reformism, which sometimes claims that emancipation can be won through a gradual accumulation of petty changes in the mechanics of exploitation. This is a cruel myth which, as we have shown here, has its roots to a large extent in the squalid attempts of capitalists to seduce us away from the socialist alternative and into futile compromise. In fact, if we wanted concessions from the capitalist class, the best way of winning them would, in any case, be to start building a strong socialist movement.

In many ways, the physical confrontation which has often figured in the class struggle has now become above all an internalised conflict, a battle of ideas. The nineteenth-century repression by mounted police has now been joined by the Sun headline as a weapon against workers in the class struggle between employers and employees. Capitalism is the most universal and adaptable system of oppression. As the last class society, it has had to make a fine art out of inculcating submission. Placing a policeman inside every worker's head can prove more efficient, and even cheaper, than having a policeman on every street comer. This is why it is essential for us to look critically at the forms of change which are offered to us.

For over a century we have had reform campaigns, aiming to solve the housing problem, the problems of poverty, unemployment and so on. Not one of these campaigns can be said to have succeeded, as all of these problems remain after decades of campaigning and. in some cases, enormous support. Some of the absurd contradictions in society between what is technologically possible and what is socially available have even got worse. Where some apparently useful reform has been achieved, this has often been dismantled later under the pressure of the market system, with its inevitable cycle of boom followed by recession. As a strategy for real social change, reformism has failed because it leaves intact the real cause of the problems: the fact that production is still carried out for profitable sales in the market, on the basis of minority ownership, rather than for free use on the basis of common ownership.

Next time you are approached by someone on the Left who argues that socialism must be deferred in favour of some minor re-arrangement in the social furniture of capitalism, bear in mind in whose interests such a deferral would be. In a study of American capitalism in the early twentieth century, one employer was quoted as saying in 1922 that "with labour crying for democracy, capital must go part way or face revolution" (S.D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism); and in the Chicago Daily News of 16 June 1906, another kind boss reassured some of his fellow bosses who were worried about some benefits he had granted his workers: 

When I keep a horse and I find him a clean stable and good food I am not doing anything philanthropic for my horse.

Clifford Slapper

Commodity production and its abolition (1985)

From the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July 1979 we published extracts from a pamphlet published in France Un monde sans argent: le communisme ("A World Without Money. Communism") — as evidence that the spread of socialist ideas does not depend exclusively on our own efforts since capitalism itself generates the idea of socialism as a classless, stateless, moneyless society. We publish below a chapter from another pamphlet published in France last year, entitled Communisme: éléments de reflexion, as a further confirmation of this view (though in this case, as certain references in the text show, the authors were clearly aware of our existence). As in 1979, we are once again compelled to record our difference with the views expressed elsewhere in the pamphlet as to how communism (or socialism, the same thing) should be achieved.

In traditional societies, whatever the status of their members, the hierarchy, rules and norms which divided human beings into rulers and ruled were counterbalanced by a whole collection of rights and duties and were regularly transgressed by social practices (festivals, etc.). Further, the relationships of dependence and authority which bound people together were essentially personal relationships. Oppression was real but it was transparent. On the other hand, from the moment that commodity relations became widespread and extended to the buying and selling of labour power through the wages system (an extension which both allowed and accompanied the establishment of capitalist relations of production) it was no longer the relationships between persons that was decisive but the production of commodities.

With the domination of capitalism, human relationships seem no longer to depend on men and women, but are realised and determined by a symbol: money. As all human activities can be represented and transformed by money they become a collection of objects subject to laws independent of the human will. Relationships between people take place through produced things and through the relations between these commodities.

In capitalist society all goods are produced for sale, for profit. They can therefore only exist as commodities, defined by their value. Thus the millions of different kinds of objects produced by human activity are reduced to a common denominator — their commercial value — measured by a common standard: money. This allows them to be compared and exchanged, to be entirely dominated by the market.

Money becomes the universal abstraction through which everything must pass so that people are most often led to see themselves as potential competitors whose absence of relationships finds compensation in the fetishism they have towards commodities. By a proliferation of objects which have no other use than to bring in money, and which are at the same time substitutes replacing human activity, the commodity and the desire to own present themselves as expressions of a person s individuality. Capital responds to human needs by a profusion of artificial satisfactions: to individuals who want to "rediscover" nature capital offers it to them functional and mechanised; to individuals stifling under the weight of constraints capital provides leisure; the individuals seeking love as a refuge for their emptiness are submerged by capital under a cheap eroticism. Never has any society so united, so linked human beings to each other, to the extent of making their activities depend on those of others; yet never has any society made people so indifferent to other people, and more hostile to them too since the links which join them the market. competition — also divide them.

The logic of commodity domination is also a system of widespread waste and destruction: goods are made not to last and to lead to other sales, natural resources are plundered, food is no longer natural, the "surplus" agricultural products of one part of the globe are destroyed while the other part is kept in a state of shortage, the war economy becomes general, etc.

The internal logic of capitalism is such that the goods it produces cannot be considered independently of the commodity process. Commodities are not "neutral" goods (use value) which it suffices to rid of their subjection to money (exchange value). Commodity exchange and use are only two aspects of the same social relation. Capitalism has fused production, sale and use into a coherent whole. People prefer to deprive themselves of what might logically appear to be essential rather than deprive themselves of the latest gadget which makes them be "in fashion". Through consumption a process of distinction takes place with regard to those who do not buy such and such a product, and a process of identification with the group of those who have bought the same product, whose use is supposed to let us live the moments we don’t live and to allow us the relationships we don’t have. The important thing is that the advantage should be apparent and it matters little that it is only apparent.

The point has been reached where the necessary degradation of objects is calculated and decided. The market must not be clogged with products that last too long. These represent money that is tied up. The faster capital turns over — the faster it resumes the form of money to lose it once again in becoming a concrete commodity again — the more it brings in. It is reinvested increased by a profit. Everything must circulate quickly.

For this, the commodities offered on the market form an extremely hierarchised whole. There is not one or several commodities for a given need but a whole multitude of them of the same or of competing marks. This diversity claims to respond to the variety of people's needs: "the customer must have a choice!" In fact, customers only have the choice allowed by their financial means and social roles. Many commodities respond to the same need but are differentiated by their quality and price. Different products may correspond to different uses, but these different uses are not available to the same individuals. Like production these uses are socially determined.

In order to disguise the alienation of the human being, reduced to the role of producer and then of consumer, capitalism has to maintain the illusion of a separation between production and consumption. The separation between production and consumption thus appears as a natural division between two quite distinct spheres of social life. Nothing is less true. First, the frontier between what is called production time and what is called consumption time is moving. Into which category come cooking and a number of other activities? Secondly, every act of production is also necessarily an act of consumption. It is only matter that is being transformed in a certain way and for a certain purpose. In destroying, or if you want in consuming certain things, other things are at the same time obtained, or if you want produced. Consumption involves production; production involves consumption.

The concepts of production and consumption are not neutral. The capitalist use of the concept of production obscures the fact that the human being is a part of his milieu and of the whole of nature. A chicken becomes an egg-making factory. Everything is then interpreted in terms of domination and use. Man the producer—supposedly conscious and master of himself—sets out to conquer nature: he wishes to be his own master just as he is the master of the object he fashions, but in fact he does not cease to be an object himself, his own object.

As communism is the creation of new social relationships between people which would bring about a quite different human activity, it must be understood that production would not be what it is today without money. If we can, for want of a better term, still speak of production to express the process by which a part of human activity would be devoted to reproducing existence and in which would be expressed the human ability to create, to innovate and to transform, the disappearance of exploitation and the abolition of money would mean that this production would not involve the subjection of people to it since it would be they who would decide its aims, its means and its conditions. It would therefore be an expression of their humanity and would not strip them of their other dimensions (love, play, dreaming, etc.). Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers would not exchange their products, just as little would the labour employed on the products appear as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them. These goods, not having the quality of value, would not be able to be hoarded nor exchanged (in accordance with this value, whatever its method of measurement), nor, even less so, sold. They would have no other role than to satisfy human needs and desires as these would be felt in a given period.

With the elimination of commodity production would disappear the domination of the product over the producer. People would rediscover the links with what they make. With the disappearance of money goods would be freely available and free of charge. It would no longer be a question of having to have a certain amount of money in order to have the right to obtain such and such a thing. But communist society would not be an extension of our "consumer" society. It would not be an immense supermarket in which passive human beings would only have to help themselves. There would no longer be a scramble for exploitable resources without concern for the future, nor a rush for useless gadgets which give the illusion of inventiveness and newness. If it was decided to save one or two well-made articles from this pile of rubbish, human activity would be both simpler and richer. Thus would be eliminated a number of the consequences of production linked to the "necessity" of profitability and competitiveness: the decrease in the importance of human activity in the production of things, waste, pollution, the international division of labour, etc.

Communism is not an appropriation of value by the producers but its negation. The fact that a product had been produced by such and such a person would not at all imply the persistence of the principle of property, not even "decentralised ”. Productive activity would no longer be linked to the idea of ownership, but to individual and collective creativity, to the consciousness that human needs, individual and communal, have to be provided for.

With the substitution of common ownership for exchange, goods would cease to have an economic value and would simply become physical objects which human beings would be able to use to satisfy some need or other. In this respect these objects would be fundamentally different from those (even those of the same appearance) which capitalism has created and developed. It would not be a question of simply taking over the goods of the past, but of rethinking them, sometimes replacing them, according to the criterion of enjoyment rather than that of profit. To this change of aim would correspond just as profound a change in the productive process and thus a rethinking of technology involving in addition to the use of the "achievements" left by capitalism, the rediscovery of technologies previously abandoned as unprofitable, and innovation which does not subject human beings to machines.

This new organisation of productive activity would not eliminate the need to estimate the needs and possibilities of the community at a given time. But these would no longer be reduced to a common denominator measured by a common unit. It would be as physical quantities that they would be counted and would interest people. But once again communism must not be reduced to problems of calculation. If this were to be done, this would be to substitute a technocratic ideal for the perspective of a human community, to perpetuate work as a social activity external to men and women.

In the past communists have put forward the idea that the distribution of products could be settled by the introduction of labour vouchers corresponding, after making certain deductions for the common funds, to the average social labour-time undertaken by the individual. In fact, the existence of a common standard to measure products and work cannot amount to a real abolition of the wages system and exchange. and so not of value. Further — to be "fair" — variations (which, besides, would be quite arbitrary) would have to be introduced in respect of the difficulty of the work, its degree of interest, etc. So there would be a return to an "economic calculation", requiring a “unit of value" whether this was expressed in money or directly in labour-time. Communism, as a moneyless society, would, on the contrary, not need any universal unit of measurement but would be able to calculate in kind. The attraction of such and such an object would then come from the object itself and no longer from a value attributed to it more or less arbitrarily. Its production and use would be determined according to what they implied for human beings and nature.

Along with the disappearance of commercial value would disappear the division of the human being into a producer and a consumer. In communist society, consumption would not be opposed to production since there would be no contradiction between being concerned with oneself and concerning oneself with someone else. The group or the individual would express themselves through what they did. Unless this was imposed by the very nature of a product, people would no longer need to hurry all the time as they would no longer be constrained by the necessity to produce commodities. The "consumer'’ would not be able to blame the "producer" for what he or she did by invoking the money that had been paid since none would be given in exchange, but simply to criticise from the inside. not from the outside. What would be at issue would be their common effort.

Who dares loses (1985)

TV Review from the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The programme TV Eye (31 January) "exposed" newspaper bingo games as little more than a con- trick. The formula used by the newspapers ensures that its readers who "dare" won't win a million. The 'game of chance" is one in which the overwhelming majority have no chance of winning.

Bingo has proved a stimulus for newspaper proprietors' ambitions to increase sales. They can manipulate the game in a number of ways, for example ensuring that a winning number only appears at the end of the week so that players have to buy a whole week's newspapers in order to follow the game. In fact, as Jack Lake on TV Eye showed, they have no chance of winning anyway because certain numbers appear on bingo cards but are never called; the card is invalid before the game has even begun.

The "bingo con" had previously been exposed in a local West Country free newspaper which revealed some numbers in advance. The response to this was that at least one old age pensioner phoned the newspaper begging to be told that it wasn't true, that she really did have a chance of winning the million pound jackpot because she'd been buying three or four newspapers every day.

When a newspaper decides to create a winner, all the other players have their hopes deliberately prolonged until the very last moment, when they are only waiting on perhaps one or two numbers. This is done purposely so that they are champing at the bit for the next game of bingo having been fed the belief that they have only narrowly missed the jackpot this time.

The firm which produces cards in batches of 50,000 sells the game to all of the Fleet Street rivals, only printing winning cards to order. When one newspaper recently accidentally printed one of these numbers its office was besieged by hopeful bingo addicts claiming their jackpot. One woman told of a man who had resigned from his job that morning as soon as he had crossed off the last number His hopes (and those of all the others) were dashed when it was announced that he and thousands of other bingo battlers had won £26.10.

The programme merely pointed out that it was members of the working class who played bingo but did not deal with the reasons for this. It cannot simply be that we all enjoy the "challenge" of crossing out numbers on a printed card, each number representing a hoped-for nail in the coffin of our working-class lifestyle. Most workers' dreams of wealth are pathetically unambitious — a new car. a new home, a piece of furniture, freedom from worrying about how to afford to heat their home adequately throughout the winter and a two-week package tour during their annual summer break from wage slavery. Workers are, simply, driven on to play newspaper bingo by the thought that they may no longer have to depend on a wage or salary in order to live.

TV Eye described bingo as a working class "birthright" — which just about says all that is needed about their poverty, the cynicism of the press — and about the need to organise our escape from it all.

Cathy Gillespie

Between the Lines: Miner distortions (1985)

The Between the Lines column from the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Miner distortions

Most people these days find out what is happening by watching the news on television. As is usually the case when there is a conflict between wage labour and capital, the TV news about the miners' strike has struck a fair balance between lies and omission. Recently the letters column of the Guardian contained several letters from outraged media-watchers who are appalled by the way in which facts were distorted and events presented in a one-sided manner. What do such people expect from TV news? Can you imagine a newscaster coming on the screen and announcing that a strike has occurred because the employers broke a written agreement with a trade union? Is it likely that TV news editors are going to go out of their way to ensure that the propaganda of the bosses is not swallowed by the gullible public? The fact is that the function of the so-called news is to inform workers in accordance with the general requirements of the system.

For readers wanting an example of the fairness of the TV news in relation to the miners' strike, here is one to be getting along with: In November of last year a certain strike-breaker (sorry, rebel) by the name of Barry Newton became famous in the North East because he was trying to lead a back-to-work campaign in the Durham area. Newton alleged that he was attacked by three men in balaclavas who threw ammonia in his face. A disgusting and unjustifiable crime, without doubt. The TV news programme in the region lost no time in showing the alleged tactics being used by supporters of the strike and exhibiting Newton as a hero. In February this year Newton was taken to court for wasting police time. It turns out that police investigations showed that the allegations were without foundation. But did the TV news presenters and the journalists on the regional newspapers carry equally big stories in February as they had run in November? Of course not; and. needless to say. the news editors who have deceived people by omission, will not be charged with wasting workers' time. How many striking miners will learn as a result of seeing television's distortions of their strike that you can never trust what the bosses' media tells you?

Who invented JR?

What exactly are the characters in Dallas up to? I mean, what are they actually doing in life? Every week millions of us stare at the images of J. R. Ewing and his self-righteous brother. Bobby, swivelling on their big leather chairs on the top floor of the office block which they own — but what do they go into the office to do? Whenever we see them they are engaging in Big Deals with gullible Texan oil magnates or else tricking their best friends into bankruptcy, bed or both. But what is the function of the Ewings?

Now, we all know that Betty Turpin in Coronation Street is there to sell beer and that Benny Hawkins in Crossroads is employed to mow Mr Hunter s lawn. The Ewings of Dallas seem never to do anything of the slightest social use. There is a reason for this. The characters being portrayed are businessmen: in fact, the Ewings are into Big Business. And being a family of capitalist millionaires (the brothers inherited the oil company when Jock Ewing's contract ran out and he was killed in a mysterious plane crash), the function of the Ewings is not to make anything or care for anyone or organise anything — they just sit there in a perpetual state of parasitical idleness, tricking and gossiping and screwing. And we, the workers who don't swivel about on leather chairs all day nor have Mexican waiters running in with classy cocktails every time we fancy a drink, are expected to admire the Ewings, to identify with them and even to feel sorry for them when business is not going too well

In the first programme of the interesting ITV series Television we saw a group of South American peasants huddled around a television set (the only luxury in their slum home) and getting excited about the privileged happenings in Dallas. Such entertainment is a powerful opium offered by our bosses to keep the minds of the workers away from the reality of our own social problems. What they are saying to us through offerings like Dallas is "If you want luxury you can't have it, because it's only obtainable for the few. but as a compensation prize we'll show you snippets of other people living in affluence and you can switch into such a fantasy for an hour every week".

Some time ago somebody attempted to shoot and kill J. R. Needless to say, the boring old millionaire lived to sign a new contract and make a new series and so we are still receiving our weekly ration of boring tales of the Texan scroungers. They are not the only capitalists put on show for us to watch: on another night of the week we can try to identify with the bores of Dynasty and a few years ago, for those who like to be the passive observers of home-grown parasites, there was Brideshead Revisited. Instead of escaping into the fantasy worlds of other people's luxury the millions of workers who regularly switch on to such programmes would do better to consider the possibility of a society in which we can all live life to the full.

Socialist comment

On 4 February Brian Montague, a member of the Belfast branch of the World Socialist Party (Ireland) appeared on the Channel Four Comment programme and stated as cogent a case for socialism as could be fitted in to the few minutes available. Which goes to prove that British television is balanced and democratic: after all. what more can we ask for than four minutes to put the argument for socialism against the countless hours each week devoted to putting the daft political, religious and cultural ideas and values of world capitalism?

Steve Coleman

Whose castle? (1985)

TV Review from the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

World in Action, ITV, 11 February.

Mrs Thatcher's proud boast that she is turning the country into a "property owning democracy" is well known, but the question this programme asked was "owned by whom?" It looked at three families who have been forced to give up their homes by Court Order because they can no longer afford the mortgage payments. Fourthly, there was the man who had possession of his house only because he exists on £9 a week. His staple diet is dumplings, teabags are used twice and sometimes three times, and one gallon of paraffin is used in one heater which is carried from room to room. When his arrears are paid off he will be left with the princely sum of £16 a week for everyday needs, but he is determined to hold on so as not to lose the benefit of years of mortgage payments.

At the other end of the scale was the man used to a salary of £24,000 to £30,000 a year as a construction engineer. Made redundant in middle life, he set up his own small business but failed. The bailiffs evicted him and his family and he now lives with his mother, his wife and children staying with her parents. They are faced with a legal separation they do not want so that the wife might qualify for council accommodation. The young couple with two children who moved back into council property and lost two-and-a-half years' mortgage repayments when the building society repossessed their house were "lucky' compared with others in the programme. At least they are still together and have a roof over their heads. Not so in the last of the four case histories — the widow of a young man who committed suicide when they lost their house was still too upset to be interviewed. The common thread running through all cases was that, when the mortgage commitment was made, the people concerned were in full-time employment and the repayments were well within their capabilities. Since then they have either become unemployed or put on short hours due to the demands of the profit system.

We learnt that in some of the major cities one-third of council tenants — seduced by the rosy picture of home ownership — decided to buy their houses and are now seriously in arrears with payments. In the whole country during 1984, 30,000 were months in arrears, owing the building societies some £18 million, and 11,000 houses were repossessed. Building societies who, two-and-a-half years ago, were offering 100 per cent mortgages with few questions asked, now tell us that defaulting has not been so bad since the Depression of the 1930s.

Housing Minister Ian Gow was unperturbed because only about one per cent of those with mortgages were in trouble. (There are, of course, no figures for the many thousands in similar straits to the man existing on £9 a week.) "Everyone knows that when they decide to buy a house they're taking on responsibility", he said. What he omitted to mention was that security is an illusion under a system which puts profit before basic human needs, as those workers who formerly "owned" their homes now know.

Eva Goodman

Sex and socialism (1985)

From the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

A tangled web of myths and double standards still enmeshes the subject of sex and sex roles in our “liberated” and developed form of capitalism. For centuries, there has been a peculiar tendency to assign to women one of two equally extreme and repellent roles, that of either a solely sexual being — “whore” — in her relationship with men (whether this has ever been an enjoyable sexuality is doubtful) or a de-sexed and “decent” wife and mother, glorified and put on a pedestal. This division of women into prostitutes and madonnas has been surprisingly persistent. Agony columns still contain letters from men finding it difficult to enjoy sex with their wives/cohabitees after the arrival of a baby, because they feel the woman is now on a higher plane of sanctified motherhood and should not be debased by primaeval lust. The notion that sex is sinful and that women are to blame when men succumb to “sinful” practices runs through the three religions originating in the Middle East: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Until recently it was only prostitutes who committed a punishable offence, not the men using them. Rape victims are still told they were “leading a man on” if they were not “appropriately dressed” at the time; it would seem that only a full purdah is good enough for our courts of law.

First, for most women sex is still a means to power. Achieving the conventional standards of beauty, for example, still holds the greatest promise of power available to most women, and so we cultivate and package our individual attractiveness in order to trade it for economic gain, advances in status, and love. This is true even in radical and even feminist circles.) Heterosexual relationships, no matter how “equal” in bed, still represent contact between members of a dominant and a subordinate group. Most women are still dependent on male favour for their economic survival, whether at home or work.

(The Politics of Sexual Freedom, Peace News, 25 March 1978.)

It would be misleading to put all men in the “dominant” group, if this dominant economic group is understood to be the capitalist class (which consists of men and women). However, a lot of men are dominant in a domestic situation in as much as they hold the purse strings and the women depending on them can be properly characterised as “slaves of slaves”. In preparation for eventually trading their attractiveness for economic “security”, girls are strongly encouraged to take an interest in clothes and make-up from an early age. Their faces, their bodies and their hair are never quite good enough to measure up to the stereotyped, eighteen-year-old, Page Three girl, so chemists and department stores are crammed full with remedies from chemical and cosmetic companies which make enormous profits.

Several myths concerning women’s sexuality persist. Women are supposed to need to be “in love” with a man to enjoy sex. This is a complete fallacy; women are as capable as men of separating sexual enjoyment from any deeper feelings. Another prevalent myth is that women are supposed to find sex repugnant during pregnancy and after giving birth. This may show individual variation, of course, according to how the pregnancy affects the woman and the difficulty of the birth. But largely this is another superstition tied in with the “purity of motherhood” myth.

As for men, another set of sex roles are inculcated by society and another set of myths hold sway. As the capitalist class relies mostly on men to kill and torture for them in war and to compete for the top jobs in the labour market, we would expect the myths to be of a kind that encourage the belief that men are inherently brutal, cruel and domineering. Robert Briffault, for instance, argues as follows in an otherwise interesting chapter on love in his book Sin and Sex:

Every expert in matters erotic knows that tenderness, affection, and even respect are sentiments opposed to the full biological operation of the predatory and pugnacious masculine sexual urges. Their fulfilment requires, in whatever measure, a reversion to the brutal, dominating attitude of the animal male. It requires in some degree the elimination of love.

Although there is no doubt about humans being part of the animal world, it is naive to think that animals capable of writing the sonnets of Shakespeare and developing the scientific theories of Einstein will not show more sophistication and nuances in their sexual play than two ferrets mating in a subterranean tunnel. In the case of ferrets, rough treatment of the female is necessary for ovulation; the biology of humans is completely different.

Although 40 per cent of the workforce are now women, who are making inroads into education and jobs that were formerly reserved for men, it is still men who are expected to “succeed” financially. Under capitalism, their whole self-esteem is so closely tied in with their earning capacity and their jobs that unemployment or failure to get promoted can result in serious depression or even suicide. Stresses and strains at work find their outlet in violence in the home; if a man can’t be the boss at work, he can at least increase his efforts at being the boss at home. In a relationship, men are expected to take the first step; sexually, they are expected to “perform” and emotionally they are expected to be severely deficient, not to show fear, to be brave, not to cry; in short, to avoid too much display of sensitivity.

Another explanation for the strange myths surrounding women’s sexuality was put forward by Garrett Hardin in an article in the Ecologist of January 1974, entitled “Parenthood: Right or Privilege?” The effect of prostitution on the one side and “decent” women remaining virgins until marriage would be reduced fertility. Apparently, large families of between 8—16 children were only common in America at the time of the settlers and in Europe in the 19th century. Before that, families of four children were more common than those of twelve:

Delayed marriage, lifetime celibacy, prostitution, venereal disease, and sanctions against bastards and the mothers of bastards constituted a powerful system of population control at the family level. To mitigate any one element in such a system was to diminish its effectiveness in keeping population under control.

The shift of opinion regarding sex outside marriage (as well as women’s “right” to sexual fulfilment on an equal level with men) which has taken place in the West over the last few decades has been revolutionary. It is worth remembering that only about 20 years ago, many doctors still would not give unmarried women the contraceptive pill for moral reasons. Being able to easily control their fertility has undoubtedly been a significant step for women although the real "sexual liberation” will not take place until we have a society where neither men nor women will be dependent on a dominant class for their survival.

The way “sexual liberation” has been exploited and to some degree created by capitalist society is explained in the following two quotes from The Politics of Sexual Freedom, by Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich:

      Obsession with sex can only be understood in the context of the extreme privatisation of people’s lives. Very few people have meaningful work-lives and many people have never experienced a supportive community or sense of collectivity in any realm. Unfulfilled needs for social relatedness, and for creativity, are chanelled into the zone of "private life”, where they can’t do any harm. (Just try demanding more creativity or richer social relations in most jobs.) The less the collectivity or social satisfaction experienced by people in the public realms of work and community, the greater the pressure on the sexual relationship to provide life with meaning.
. . . This new emphasis on sex can be seen as part of an attempt to shore up the monogamous marriage, or to free it up slightly, to save the family. What all this adds up to is that the human need for sex is made to bear the burden of all our bodily starvation for contact and sensations, all our creative starvation, all our need for social contact, and even our need to find a meaning in our lives. In the face of overwhelming alienation, the emphasis on sex is used to encourage people to individualise and trivialise their problems — looking for the cause of their unhappiness in their sex-life, rather than in the world around them. Of course, the dominant culture would like us to believe that we can achieve happiness through personal, sexual satisfaction. This is what it will strive to provide if it will keep us quiet. For women . . . especially, every effort will be made to channel our demands away from the social and political realm (where they cannot be satisfied without thorough-going social and economic changes) and back towards some version of a "liberated” private life. This is a trap.

In capitalism, sexuality is for sale, exaggerated in importance and manipulated in the interest of the state and capital. Europeans today are three times as likely to get divorced and twice as likely to have illegitimate children as they were a generation ago. Most divorce suits are now filed by women and it seems more than a coincidence that literature concerned with the sexual fulfilment in marriage has been on the increase at the same time. If marriages are breaking up, more marriage counsellors and sex therapists can be employed to encourage workers to get their sex lives in order, accept monogamy and stay together.

Humans need to satisfy their basic need for adequate food, clothing and shelter; for a happy and well-balanced emotional life they must also form deep and lasting relationships with other people. These need not be of a sexual nature (if sex is narrowly defined as sexual intercourse only), although at the earliest stage in our life a close, physical relationship with a grown-up is absolutely essential.

Today, a lot of misery is caused by people having to live together for economic reasons when they would rather not. Some people spend a lifetime wearing each other down mentally and emotionally, wasting their lives away in an undignified relationship. The worst irony is when some claim it to be an unconditional success that two people have stayed together for forty years; the quantity is praised, the quality is not questioned.

It is difficult to envisage the complete liberation of human relationships which socialism will bring about. Free access to everything that is produced will mean economic security for all members of society; independence of men and women from employers; economic independence of children from parents and of women from men. Nobody will have to accept an intolerable situation for the sake of satisfying their basic needs. Men and women in socialism will be able to enjoy their lives as full, not fragmented, human beings; satisfying not only their sexual, but all kinds of affectionate and other needs as they occur, not the least being the need to spend our time doing useful work in the companionship of friends.

In socialism, the stereotyped sex roles imposed on men and women under capitalism will disappear. These are equally damaging to both sexes as the similarities between them are far greater than the differences. Both have the same need for companionship with others, for expressing and receiving affection and for feeling secure, both have the same capacity for getting upset and hurt.

Socialism will probably not distinguish between heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual relationships. Everybody will be free to adopt the life style and sexual preference of their choice; the attitude to sex will be relaxed and in proportion to all the other things that make life pleasurable. Perhaps the designations “homosexual”, “heterosexual” and “bisexual” themselves will even disappear, as people will find it superfluous to distinguish between various kinds of loving relationships.

Relationships will be entered into freely, nobody will regard another human being as his or her property. It will be generally understood that when one partner does not want a relationship to carry on any more, the relationship has in fact ceased to exist and any feelings of jealousy are futile. The total shift of attitudes this involves, will be taking place while the ideas of socialism are growing and will make the acceptance of these ideas as well as others a gradual one before socialism is introduced. There is no reason to expect that people in socialism will be more "promiscuous” than they are today although this would not incite moral condemnation. On the other hand, because of our complicated mental make up, we are much more likely to form lasting relationships.

Torgun Bullen

Whose side are you on? (1985)

Editorial from the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The World Socialist Movement membership is a tiny minority who think in terms of a social upheaval to establish a different order of human relationships. In socialist society the attitudes which people have to each other — how they relate to one another — will be fundamentally different from those which operate today Some things which now have to be taken for granted, because life under capitalism would otherwise be impossible, will be inconceivable in socialism. Nothing, for example, will be produced for sale; there will be no presumption that society is operated in the interests of a parasitic minority. On the other hand the presumptions of socialism, such as free participation in society’s work and unfettered access to the common wealth, is totally at odds with everything which characterises capitalism.

We might put this in another way: socialism will change, among other things, how people think, in much the same way that the development of industrial capitalism changed ideas from those of mediaeval society. Clearly, we of the socialist minority have taken on an enormous task — to encourage and stimulate a world-wide change of attitudes to the extent that a majority of the world's thousands of millions of people consciously opt to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. How then do socialists — getting their living as wage slaves, struggling for the socialist revolution — think?

Socialism is a matter of class interests. It is the only political objective in the interests of the class who depend on the sale of their labour power for their living. The parties of the World Socialist Movement are the only political organisations worthy of working class support. But can capitalists also join a socialist party? And what happens if a worker in a socialist party becomes miraculously elevated into the capitalist class? Would they then reverse their political opinions, attacking the ideas they once supported and vice versa? Would those lucky workers have to abandon their membership of the party?

The first thing to be said in reply to these questions is that all people should be expected to act in their class interests. It may be that a few individual capitalists, for motives perhaps of altruism or because they cannot stomach a society of universal repression, murder and disease, decide to join the struggle for socialism in the knowledge that they are working to deprive themselves of their privileged standing in society. But as a class the capitalists cannot and do not act in this way. As a class, internationally united whatever their national disputes, they protect their position as owners and rulers. For one thing, they ensure that every effort is made to persuade the useful, productive majority that capitalism's deprivation and exploitation represent the ultimate in rational, beneficent social organisation.

It is rather different with the workers. In their case only a small minority act fully in their class interests, by joining the struggle for socialism. The overwhelming majority are on the other side. Whatever reservations they may have about the system's effects, workers in the mass agree that capitalism is the sanest and the best of all possible societies and they dismiss the idea of a classless, moneyless, leaderless, war-free system as at best a crackpot utopian dream. At elections, in their tens of millions, they affirm this attitude in their overwhelming and consistent support for the parties which stand for the continuation of capitalism.

That is to view the situation across a fairly wide, historical and social spectrum. What happens when we take a narrower view of the day-to-day and immediate events of capitalism? When we do this we can see that workers are often compelled to act in accordance with their class interests, whatever misconceptions they may have about their social standing and whatever their view on the issue of capitalism as against socialism. An obvious example of this is when workers combine to resist an attack by the employers on their living standards, or try to enforce an improvement in those standards. In such cases, where the workers are genuinely acting in a cooperative assertion of their united class interests, they have the support of socialists.

In giving this support, socialists apply a rigorous, unbending judgement of working class interests. For one thing, we look beyond those side issues which so often absorb so much attention during a strike. In the case of the coal strike, for example, there were many such side issues, which stimulated some powerful emotional responses. There was the fact that many thousands of working class people suffered extremes of impoverishment in face of the resolve of the employers and the Tory government to crush and starve them into defeat. Then there was the courageous, poignant reaction of the strikers — the communal self-help which did so much to feed and clothe the miners and their families, to keep them warm and to uplift their morale. There is evidence here of the power and efficiency of human co-operation and mutual support. And then there were the sights and sounds of the police, provoking, insulting and beating the miners.

An immediate, emotional response to this was to support the miners because we are of the same class. But not all workers' actions, no matter how courageous and inspiring they may be, are in their own interests. It is, to put it at its most tentative, debatable that the interests of the working class — as a class, internationally — were ever at stake in the coal strike. The miners may argue that some national, short-term interests were involved, which in turn raises the question of whether even those interests are served by a strike which dragged on for so long and which cost the strikers so much. Then there is the fact that those ugly, sneering, brutal policemen are themselves members of the working class, holding a job which is by definition opposed to their class interests. Miners, along with some other traditionally militant sections of the workers, are not untainted by such criticisms. Just after the war there was an organised resistance in the coalfields to the employment of Polish and Italian workers, just as there now is to the import of coal from abroad. And it was, of course, the London dockers who marched in support of Enoch Powell just after his "rivers of blood" exercise in racist demagoguery.

Workers should not, then, take up the attitude “this is my class and I stand with them through thick and thin". The class struggle is not a game. It is a deadly war between two sections of society whose interests are opposed — immediately over the division of wealth under capitalism and ultimately over the ownership and control of the means and instruments to produce that wealth.

Socialism will be a classless society of communal ownership, free access and human co-operation. To bring it to reality needs a conscious, united act by the world working class. Consciousness is not developed or raised through mental confusion; it is only hampered and diverted. Socialists struggle for the next social order through our uncompromising, searching analysis of capitalism. It is a commentary on the present state of political awareness, that this analysis brings us more often to oppose working class actions than to support them because we know which side we are on and where the workers must stand.

The Salient (1985)

From the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the bus from Roulers draws near to Ypres it runs along a wide street of rather expensive houses. Strung along the top of a low ridge, it is a village, but like so many others in this motorcar age it has become a detached suburb of Ypres. A quiet ordinary scene; children cycle home to lunch, people stand at bus stops or potter in front gardens while the usual mid-day traffic passes through. Away to the right the land drops downhill, revealing green fields and woods, with the spire of Ypres in the distance. A scene that would look just right on the cover of a glossy magazine. Hazy autumn sunshine completes the picture. So it is with a shock that one reads the road sign—Passchendaele. This was the village pounded by heavy shells to the point that it could no longer be called rubble but dust. This was the prize for which tens of thousands of men died. This was the place that was to give its name to one of the most squalid bouts of butchery in the history of warfare. In those pleasant fields for four months men were shot, gassed, blown to pieces or drowned in water-filled shell holes. This is the edge of the Ypres salient. It is ringed by huge cemeteries, but that whole area is one great graveyard. Under those fields lie the remains of at least 40,000 people. The full casualties are not known but even today the ploughs and ditching machines still bring up bones and skulls.

As it proceeds the bus comes to the main road, where once to stand up straight meant instant death. Then through the terrible Menin Gate, a huge building that runs the width of the ramparts. Juggernaut lorries pass through it with ease. It is faced with white stone, and every inch has a name, 55,000 in all. These are men whose bodies disappeared in the Ypres salient in the period up to June 1917; near Passchendaele there is another memorial with 34,000 names of men who disappeared from June 1917 onwards. These are only British Empire troops and do not include French, Belgian or German. Then on to the end of the ride in the main square of Ypres.

Ypres (today usually called by its Flemish name of Ieper) is a bustling town dominated by its great Cloth Hall and Cathedral. The impression is of an ancient town, somewhat heavily restored; but this is all a reconstruction for the town was painstakingly rebuilt in the early 1920s. Again, a pleasant scene. Buses and coaches stand in the main square disgorging their tourists while the shops and bars are full. People fish in the moat or go off to play some game or other. It is only when you visit the Salient Exhibition under the Cloth Hall that you realise what a shambles Ypres was.

Ypres was the greatest of the medieval Cloth Towns and dominated the Flemish Plain. Once more important even than Bruges or Ghent, it slowly lost its prominence and sank into obscurity. Pre-1914 photographs show it as somewhat run down. The war was to give it a grim immortality.

The war on the Western Front opened with the German invasion of Belgium and Luxembourg as well as France. Militarily and economically the invasion of Belgium was beneficial to Germany because it gave its army greater room to manoeuvre and placed the coal mines and factories of Belgium at their disposal. But politically it had the disadvantage of bringing Britain into the war. It was touch and go as to whether Britain should enter the war on the side of the Allies or stay in a state of armed neutrality. The British ruling class had for a century largely kept out of European conflicts, preferring to use diplomacy to maintain the Balance of Power—in other words to keep their rivals divided. Thus they had supported Prussian aggression, being in favour of a united Germany. They had sympathised with Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war and applauded the formation of the German Empire.

It was not until the end of the last century that British capitalists began to wake up to the fact that Germany was developing into their major rival—flooding world markets with cheap, mass produced goods and beginning to muscle in on the colonial scene in Africa and elsewhere. The German programme of naval expansion was also seen as a threat to British naval supremacy. France had always been the traditional enemy; the Entente Cordiale had been signed only in 1904. Throughout the Edwardian period large sections of British public opinion remained anti-French, anti-Russian and pro-German. The invasion of Belgium tipped the balance. Much was made of Britain's obligations under the Treaty of Neutrality and Germany's violation of it, but the real cause for concern was control of the Channel ports. It had long been a cornerstone of British foreign policy that the Channel ports facing London should not be controlled by a great power. This was seen as a major threat to the Port of London, and, of course, "gallant little Belgium" made an excellent propaganda ploy.

So Britain was in the war and soon British troops, alongside French and Belgians, found themselves in headlong retreat. Germany opened the war on the Western Front with a massive attack aimed at encircling Paris and knocking France out of the war. The Germans had massed 12 armies—about a million and a half men—on their frontiers. When they attacked the sheer weight of numbers, aided by French miscalculations, brought them to the outskirts of Paris, where they were held in the battle of the Marne. Unable to break through in France, the German army began a push through Flanders with the intention of outflanking their opponents and seizing the Channel Ports of Dunkirk and Calais. In this they were nearly successful but were held in the vicinity of Ypres; the Belgians had managed to flood low-lying land between the city and the sea. This stopped the German advance to the North of Ypres, and there ensued a period of heavy confused fighting that lasted from 12 October until 11 November. This had been called the first battle of Ypres, although battle is hardly an appropriate description of what was in fact a campaign lasting a month. It was the last time that any kid of movement or manoeuvring was possible on the Western Front. In November the Germans dug in on the ridges that surrounded Ypres. The line of trenches extended from Switzerland to the sea but there was a bulge at Ypres, with the city in its midst, only a few miles deep and a few miles wide. This was the Ypres salient, the most exposed and dangerous patch of land in the world. For four years the fighting never stopped. It was the worst killing ground of all.

The second battle of Ypres opened on 22 April 1915. It began with the bombardment of the city which sent the civilian population streaming out along the roads. In the late afternoon a new horror was added to the scene—chlorine gas. "A strange green vapour" was seen drifting down onto the Algerian troops who were holding this part of the line. This was the first time that this foul weapon had been used, but the next four years were to see even nastier forms unleashed. Everybody is familiar with photographs of blinded men queuing up for treatment; 60,000 men died in the second Ypres. At the end the Allies withdrew to a mere two miles from the ramparts of Ypres. The salient was now small, and for the next two years was pounded by shells almost without interruption. The sane thing for the British to have done would have been to withdraw behind Ypres and straighten the line, but this was no longer just a military matter. The workers at home had been fed a never-ending stream of propaganda about the importance of the Ypres salient and its "glory", so that to have abandoned it would have hit morale. In the popular press this was Britain's own battlefield, ignoring the fact that thousands of Belgians and Frenchmen had also died there. It was to break out of this death-trap that the Third Battle of Ypres was launched. This was its official title, but the world knows it as Passchendaele.

This century has been called "a century of horror", and there has been no shortage of it: Hiroshima, Dresden, Viet Nam, and now Ethiopia to name just a few of the worst, but even among these Passchendaele can still shock. Even by the cruel standards of warfare, in which the loss of human life is acceptable and human beings are measured against territorial gain, it was inexcusable. The declared aim of the offensive, which the British Commander in Chief Haig and the High Command used to convince the government that the plan was reasonable, was to punch a hole in the German defences, pour through into the land beyond and capture Ostend and Zeebrugge to stop the U boat attacks in Allied shipping, and to capture Roulers, the great railway junction through which men and materials passed to the line. This was a complete pipedream because, even if they had succeeded in making a complete breakthrough—something that nobody had managed to do in more than two years—Ostend and Roulers were 40 miles apart. A more realistic aim was to capture the ridges that surrounded Ypres and extend the salient.

The prelude to the attack was the capture of the Messines ridge on the southern rim of the salient. It began by the explosion of 19 mines under the German positions, followed by a barrage of 2266 guns and howitzers and an attack by 80,000 troops. This was a "success" as "only" 1,700 men were killed and the attack achieved its aim. This was one of the factors that bolstered up the illusions of the High Command in the months to come.

In the continuous saga of mindless slaughter that ran from 1914 to 1918, three highlights stand out: the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele. But of these the one that arouses the revulsion—because of the massive loss of life and the unbelievable conditions under which it was fought—was Passchendaele. The area had been reclaimed from marshlands over many generations. Most of it was too wet for cultivation and was used as pasture. Farmers were required by law to keep their ditches clear. This delicate balance was shattered by the unprecedented bombardment in which nearly 4,000 guns pounded the German lines for ten days. Four and a quarter million shells, or 4¾ tons to every yard of the front, were fired. This resulted in the complete destruction of the drainage system. The attack began on the 31 July in torrential rain, and it poured with rain during most of the following three months. On 4 November Canadian troops captured the mass of shell holes that had been the village of Passchendaele. The line had been extended by five miles. The cost? Nobody really knows but the most often quoted figure is 300,000 Allied casualties and 200,000 German.

However, it is the conditions that the armies endured which made this campaign so horrific. A vast area of foul-smelling mud that sucked everything down into it, and water-filled shell holes in which not only men and horses but guns and even tanks sank. Every new shell threw up rotting corpses that had sunk, only to sink again. Overall drifted a new weapon being tried for the first time—mustard gas. Six months later, in April 1918, the big German spring offensive recaptured all the ground which had been gained. In Britain war weariness was spreading. Gone was the wild enthusiasm of 1914; the never ending casualty lists, the ever receding hopes of victory were taking their toll. The old regular army was destroyed in the first few months of the war. Kitchener's Army, the volunteers who had flocked to the recruiting offices in the early days of the war. had been destroyed on the Somme. The British army was scraping the bottom of the barrel, the very, the old and the unfit were dragged in.

The final collapse of Germany in 1918 rolled back the battle lines from the salient. It left behind a scene of utter destruction, a land in which everything was unrecognisable; a place where every landmark had been wiped out. Shattered tree stumps began to throw out leaves again, and the ground was covered with the poppies that became the trade mark of the new "Remembrance" industry. The poppy is a plant that flourishes wherever soil is disturbed, so it would naturally take root in such a place. Incredible as it may seem, within a few months of the Armistice, Ypres became a tourist centre. While the town was still in ruins and teams were still searching for bodies in the area, trains were bringing visitors to the battlefields and tours were being organised in Britain.

Nearly seventy years have passed since the end of that war, and there are few people remaining who took part in it. The landscape has been restored, the trees and hedges have grown again and the fields have been out back. Apart from the cemeteries, one could walk through this place and not know what had happened. But in those seventy years other landscapes have been shattered and millions more have died. Only twenty years after peace came to this area, another, even bloodier, war broke out and in forty years of "peace", so-called local wars like Viet Nam and Cambodia have claimed yet more lives.

Les Dale

Socialism and rock music (1985)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

In many ways the music business is a prime example of all the workings of the capitalist system: the exploitation of talented, sincere musicians for the profit of the record company shareholders - even if they wouldn't know the difference between a crotchet and a quaver - along with the enormous waste involved in the socially useless task of selling people something that left to their own devices, they would probably want anyway (or - even worse - in some cases would never buy if it wasn't for the thinly-disguised associations of the product with "social success").

Rock music is an extremely attractive means of social control for the ruling class. For besides being hugely profitable (and better still, free of industrial strife - when did you last hear of Paul McCartney downing guitars in support of a pay claim?) it serves as an effective mechanism whereby youth rebellion may be channelled away from establishment targets and in on itself. Just as sexism and racism divert ordinary people from the real source of their problems, so it is that the rivalry in youth sub-culture between Punks and Teds and Mods and Rockers, is merely a smoke-screen obscuring the one real issue that faces young people - the choice between capitalism and socialism.

We would, then, hardly expect rock music to play an important role in the propagation of socialist views. This, I contend, is not true. Most readers will know of at least one artist/group that were marketed as anti-establishment rebels, only to become part of the establishment themselves at a later point and, in so doing, make a fortune.

The Clash- one of the most prominent political punk bands - have often poured scorn on the hypocrisy of those who betray their class in such a way: songs such as Death or Glory ("He who fucks nuns will later join the church") and White Man in Hammersmith Palais ("You think it's funny, turning rebellion into money") spring readily to the mind. The Clash are obviously not alone in this and there are many examples of musicians condemning, through their music, the business within which they work.

But what of critiques of capitalist society as a whole? Again, one thinks of The Clash who, in their early stages of their career, were known for their sympathies with the Red Brigade and other violent left-wing factions. The Clash, however, while frequently and virulently condemning the more obscene endemic ills of capitalism, never really escaped the mill-stone of their marketing image of pseudo Rolling Stones rock'n'roll rebels and as a consequence were never able to proffer a socialist society as a solution to the evils they had identified. For all that, it is probable that The Clash did at least awaken some young people to the insanity of the society within which they lived and for that reason should not be condemned too harshly. It is important to note that The Clash were successful mainly because their songs were relevant and comprehensible.

Compare the down-to-earth approach of The Clash with the intellectual ramblings of Green of Scritti Politti. Whereas The Clash expressed themselves in the language of ordinary workers. Scritti Politti's lyrics were incomprehensible to all but a student of politics and those fortunate (?) enough to know one. The capability of rock music to put over socialist ideas to a mass audience is, however, being realised by a growing number of artists, and we shall look at two of these.

The first is Paul Weller, formerly of The Jam and now of The Style Council. Over the years Weller's political attitude has matured from "rebel without a cause", prevalent among many punk bands, through a reformist stage before eventually settling into the full-blooded "socialism" of his current writings. The fact that for the past seven years he has remained a major figure on the British rock scene is evidence that he is able to influence many young people. Songs like When You're Young ("It's so hard to understand, why the worlds your oyster but your future's a clam") and Going Underground ("It's the kidney machines that pay for rockets and guns") set out a case against capitalism. More importantly, recent releases such as Money-Go-Round (the sleeve-notes for which state: " . . . was God an astronaut or a socialist? . . . For the potential beauty and goodness he has given us, I would have to insist the latter") and The Whole Point Of No Return ("The laws made for and by the rich") outline a case for socialism. The latter song was taken from the album Cafe Bleu, whose extensive sleeve-notes outline socialist ideas of production for the use of the community rather than the profit of a few.

Another major socialist rock musician/songwriter to emerge along with punk was Elvis Costello. Possibly an even more incisive critic of capitalist society than Weller, one of his most recent albums - Punch The Clock - contained two very important socialist songs. the first, Shipbuilding, Costello introduced on a recent concert tour as "a Falklands lament". A poignant ballad, it points out the tragic irony of parents constructing the means of their children's destruction with lines such as: "Somebody said that someone got filled in, for saying that people get killed in, the result of this shipbuilding". Further, in the line: "With all the will in the world, diving for dear life, when we could be diving for pearls", he highlights the pathetic situation where people like the Cammell-Laird shipworkers and the miners waste valuable energy in desperate fights for the dubious "right" to be exploited when, if only they could see the true nature of their problem, a socialist society could be theirs.

The other song of note was released on the eve of the June 1983 election. This track, the vitriolic Pills and Soap, presents a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of the capitalist press, using lyrics such as these to illustrate the point: "Four and twenty crowbars jemmy your desire, out of the frying pan into the fire. The King is in his counting house, some folk have all the luck. And all we get is pictures of Lord and Lady Muck. That come from lovely people with a hard line in hypocrisy, there are ashtrays of emotion for the fag-ends of the aristocracy".

Weller and Costello are not alone in their use of music to spread socialist ideas. It should be plain that the medium of rock music must not be ignored by socialists in their struggle to enhance the workers' political awareness.

Stuart Harrad (Norwich)

Reply

Stuart Harrad makes some interesting observations about popular music and the profit-system. All of the evidence around us suggests that the potential creativity and social enjoyment of music are stunted and restricted by the way society is presently organised. Capitalism is a social system based on buying and selling, where almost everything we experience from the cradle to the coffin has a price on it. The majority of us - members of the working class - sell (or try to) our working abilities by the week or month to an employer. Under such a social system the inspirational and imaginative possibilities of music are imprisoned by economic laws.

Referring to the way that some of the Beatles' songs were appropriated for profit by 'entrepreneurs' in the music industry, Paul McCartney said recently, "It was a funny thing, but to begin with we hadn't realised that someone could actually own a song". Although some music artists become quite wealthy, most do not. The tycoons of this industry (the owners of large companies like RCA, EMI, CBS and so forth) acquire their great wealth through the combined labours of the thousands of people needed to produce a record and distribute it. Consider the number of people who work in the recording studios as technicians and engineers; the people who work in the factories producing records, compact discs and cassettes; the people who transport these, once they are made, all over the world and the people who work in record shops. Then there are all the workers involved in the organisation and presentation of concerts. All of these workers are in a condition of relative poverty. Although the results of all of this work involve thousands of people, most remain faceless and anonymous because the music industry reflects the elitist culture of capitalism, a society based on the minority ownership of the means of life. This economic basis of society has produced an ideology consistent with the view that the people "at the top" are there through merit, which is of course a fallacy. Those who have the largest stakes in the music industry are no more magnates on account of their musical knowledge or proficiency than the great landowners are in their positions by virtue of their abilities as farm workers or gardeners.

As Stuart Harrad observes, the ant--establishment theme of much modern music is often useless because it channels dissatisfaction into cults of rebellion which offer no alternative to the social system which has produced their misery. During the 1960s Bob Dylan wrote many poetic and piquant indictments of aspects of the capitalist system. The argument for socialism, however, was never explicitly advocated, with the result that many of Dylan's appreciators became cynically acquiescent in the profit system. Poverty, degradation and war would have to continue while the answer was "blowing in the wind". Many of those who excitedly sang that "the order is rapidly fading" were to find that this sort of protest movement would not dismantle capitalism and that the times they weren't a-changin'. In the 1970s, with rising unemployment, especially among young people, Punk rock stuck two fingers up at some "traditional values" and snarled at the glossy glamour enjoyed by a minority. But as with the protest movement of the sixties there was despair and rebellion without a constructive solution. In a spirit of nihilism, Johnny Rotten and The Sex Pistols sneered that there was "no future in England's dreamland". In one sense they were right but by telling only part of the story they were probably responsible for producing more cynicism about political change.

Like television companies and major newspapers, the large record companies are owned and controlled by people from that small minority of the population whose privileged economic position puts them in the ruling class. There is, therefore, a degree of reluctance for promotion to be given to anyone wishing to make serious and sustained criticism of class-divided society. As Elvis Costello noted:

You either shut up or get cut up

They don't wanna hear about it.

It's only inches on the reel to reel

And the radio is in the hands of

Such a lot of fools tryin' to

Anaesthetise they way you feel . . .

(Radio, Radio. 1980)

The Specials made a similar criticism when they sang:

And catch 22 says if I sing the truth

They won't make me an overnight star . . . 

(Gangsters. 1979) 

In a world straining with so many grotesque and unnecessary social problems it is conspicuous that so much popular chart music is void of social comment. Amongst the myriad of bland ballads and instantly forgettable fandangos there are, of course, songs which are enjoyable although they have no political comment. Socialists do not have common views as to what constitutes "good music". However, it is worth considering why commercial success is so widely enjoyed by songs which do not question the bleakness of present society. This must be partly because they are meant to be lighthearted—an area of fun completely divorced from the everyday problems we are plagued with—and partly because we are socially conditioned to develop certain sorts of taste.

That workers are basically stupid is an erroneous and arrogant assumption often made by various left wing political parties. Workers, the argument runs, should not be approached directly with the case for a classless, moneyless society because they will properly understand it. Instead they need to be baited with isolated issues and by unsuccessfully wrestling with these problems for long enough they will eventually become socialists. There is no evidence to support this contention; in fact all the evidence suggests that the subjects of this sort of political engineering usually become disillusioned and cynical or fall for some other dead-end pursuit like fascism. Workers are not stupid but sometimes stupefied. But this state is very open to change, as is testified by the great efforts that the ruling class put into the continuing process of conditioning people to accept the status quo. But the con trick is becoming difficult to sustain. As a recent letter to a music paper explained,

. . . As long as the majority of the world's population put their trust in leaders to build a fairer capitalist society we will be in the same position of degradation and poverty. Because capitalism is a system out of control of even the minority who own and reap the benefits, it is a system which is by its very nature must produce periodic crises, of which the present world recession is but one. The only sensible solution to this anarchy of production is for a class-conscious working class to take away the ownership and control of the world's resources and to democratically run it in their own interest. Until we have this majority we shall have to exist on the crumbs thrown to us by the parasitic minority.

(Gary Cornwell, New Musical Express, 23 February 1985.)

Culture Club can sing that "war is stupid" and Frankie Goes to Hollywood lament that "when two tribes go to war, a point is all that you can score", but this sort of thing will not shake the ideology of capitalism. The ruling class would agree: from their point of view war is a costly and damaging interruption to their parasitic way of life. Warfare is an endemic feature of a system which periodically produces conflict when economic rivalries cannot be settled around the summit table. Again, look at some of the songs about money. While Abba's Money, Money, Money probably did not have anyone breaking out in a nervous sweat at the Stock Exchange as the record rose in the charts, Pretty Green by The Jam and Money by Pink Floyd were more direct in their questioning of the need for a property society and its means of exchange. But even then it is probably the case that the lyrics of these songs struck a chord mainly with workers who had already considered the case for the abolition of private property. Without further comment lyrics can easily be misinterpreted and it is always possible, of course, that the rare songs that socialists often cite as significant were really written for an entirely different reason.

It is true that no popular song has had lyrics expressing the ideas contained in the Declaration of Principles of The Socialist Party. "But", an observer could suggest, "there are some songs which, because of their message, must serve to raise the social consciousness of the tens of thousands of workers familiar with the lyrics." In a chart song called The Lunatics, The Fun Boy Three sang,

I see the faces of starvation

But just cannot see the point

'Cos there's so much food here today

That no one wants to take away . . . 

The recent Band Aid single, Feed the World, made a comparable, if more vague, point. Mass malnutrition and starvation co-existing with our potential to produce enough food for everybody is an inherent contradiction of a social system which operates on the basis of profit of the few rather than social need. Feed the World, however, was more of a moral imperative than an urge to social revolution. In this sense Band Aid was an appropriate name for a group whose solution to famine within the profit system is comparable with advocating sticking plasters as a remedy for malaria.

Some of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism are doubtlessly made clearer by this sort of song; it is certainly more likely to provoke serious thought about social change than ditties about walks in the park or inquiries such as "Do you think I'm sexy?". The danger is that where a response to social problems is presented, it is given obtusely by vague hint or innuendo and if workers are ever inspired to formulate political ideas as a result many different sorts of conclusions may be drawn. If no coherent argument is being advocated by the artists (and really it cannot be, given the idiom in which they work) then no purposeful group of socialists can be produced by the music. At best, commentators like Paul Weller (who would, as an SWP supporter, presumably vote for the Labour Party and another dose of the profit system at an election) and Elvis Costello give occasional inspiration to socialists with some of the emotive poetry they write about capitalism. On the subjects of militarism and sexuality, for example, Costello  has written some poignant material about the way behaviour and aspirations are affected by the profit system.

Popular songs with a political slant are always open to misinterpretation. The playwright David Hare once stated that you can produce a play to highlight the atrocities of fascism and always have a certain number of people leave the theatre thinking that the Nazis had the right idea. The same subtleties of song lyrics carry the same susceptibility to misunderstanding. It is difficult to compress the argument for socialism on to a single track, so get the 12 inch version—The Socialist Standard!

Gary Jay