The Case for Socialism (1991)

From the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a system based on the ownership and control of the means for producing and distributing goods and services (the land, mines, industries, and communications) by a section, only, of society which thus forms a privileged class who have economic interests in common. The rest of us, in exchange for wages or salaries, produce and distribute wealth in the form of commodities for sale with a view to profit on the markets of the world. We are properly termed the "working class”. Our function and reason for existence under capitalism is to work to produce surplus value (the difference between the value of the wealth we produce and the value of our wages or salaries). We, also, have economic interests in common, which are inevitably in conflict with those of the capitalist class.

How does capitalism work?

In modern capitalist countries, such as Britain, less than 5 per cent of the population make up the owning, capitalist class. These people have no need to work for a wage or salary in order to live.

Most people, the rest of us who work — or seek work — in offices as well as in industry, are in the working class, whether we admit it or not. Our work produces all the wealth of capitalist society, some of which we receive in the form of our pay-packets and social services, to maintain us as a work-force and to reproduce and replace us in the future. The rest of the wealth we produce goes to the owners of the means of living as profits for the maintenance and expansion of capital and the payment of rent and interest — and for their consumption as a privileged class.

From the struggle to maximise profits, nationally and internationally, arises the horror of mass starvation amidst potential abundance, war and the threat of war, as well as ecological disasters never before envisaged.

What is socialism?

Socialism is a proposed world commonwealth based on the possession in common of the means for producing the things necessary for the existence of us all. This will abolish exploitation and oppression of all kind. Goods and services will be produced and made available solely for the satisfaction of human needs; not for exchange nor for sale for profit. This means the end of buying, selling, money, prices, wages, and banks.

What about state ownership?

There will be no state or government-controlled businesses in socialism, because there will be no state or government — or businesses. State ownership (nationalisation) is simply another form of capitalism. When the state takes over (as with the railways and other industries in Britain and elsewhere) it does so in the interests of some or all of the minority capitalist class; certainly not to benefit us, the working class.

Russia, Cuba, China and Albania are all examples of state capitalism, where the political elite determines the allocation of the wealth produced for profit by the wage working majority, most of which, as in all the capitalist world, goes to capital accumulation.

State ownership leaves the class-ownership basis of capitalism unchanged, benefiting some capitalists (and political bureaucrats) at the expense of some others. Class-ownership, the profit motive and the wage-slavery system will all go into the Museum of History when we in our majority decide, democratically and politically, to replace capitalism with socialism.

So you want a world without money, borders, governments and armies?

Yes, why not?

We have to pay for the things we need to live and enjoy life because they do not belong to us. These can be freely available for people to take according to their own self-defined needs when the means of life are owned by all.

The world is divided by frontiers into well over a hundred different states, all competing against each other, and all armed with the most destructive weapons of war they can afford while the basic needs of millions go unmet. We could have a world community without frontiers in which all that is in and on the Earth has become the common heritage of all humanity, irrespective of language, culture or place of origin.

Governments always represent the interests of the rich and powerful and have armies to enforce law and order at home and to pursue commercial and business interests abroad. We could have a real democracy in which everyone has an equal say in the ways things are run and co-operates to carry out what has been decided.

How can this socialist society be brought about?

Socialism can only be established by the conscious democratic political action of the majority; which means by the working class since we are the overwhelming majority. We gain the least from capitalism and would gain the most from socialism.

As a society in which all goods and services are produced and made available freely by voluntary, co-operative work, socialism has to be established by the actions of a motivated majority, fully aware of what is involved and their responsibilities in the matter. It cannot be imposed by dictatorship nor legislated into being by some enlightened minority.

But can't capitalism be reformed?

Yes, but not so as to work in the interests of the majority, the working class. It is a system which can operate only for the benefit of the owning, capitalist class. Every party, no matter if Left, Right or Centre, which tries to run capitalism is inevitably brought into conflict with the working class. In the conflict of interests inseparable from capitalism governments cannot represent working class interests.

What about improvements which benefit the working class?

We are not opposed to improvements within capitalism. We support working class trade union action to get what can be got out of the system, while making clear that no concessions can change the working class position as the under-class. We also stress the importance of the institutions of political democracy, since it is by gaining control of these that socialism, which alone can solve working class problems, may be achieved.

Not all reforms are of benefit to the working class. Those that are adopted by governments are aimed at maintaining the economic existence, political stability, and domination of the capitalist class. As a party whose only aim is socialism, we cannot advocate reforms. We are not concerned with patching up capitalism, but with its abolition.

Why aren't you in the Labour Party?

Given the ideas we hold about the nature of society, its problems and their solution, how could we? The Labour Party has never stood for socialism and today openly proclaims its aim to be to try to manage capitalism better than the Tories.

People who belong to the Labour Party do so because they accept and wish to further that aim.

To support or belong to the Labour Party would mean the abandonment of our principles, and ultimately the abandonment of the struggle for socialism in favour of futile attempts to patch up capitalism and make it work in the interest of die exploited majority.

If you have any other questions about socialism you are welcome to write to us at: 

The Socialist Party 

52 Clapham High Street 

London SW4 7UN 

We will be delighted to hear from you and can assure you of a prompt reply.

Caught In The Act: Chequered career (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chequered career
All things considered, there must have been some sense of relief in Ribble Valley that their new MP managed to find his way to the Houses of Parliament and make his maiden speech. There should remain, however, some anxiety about whether he will sit on the right benches, and vote as he is supposed to. We mention this because Mike Carr, the Liberal Democrat winner in that famous by-election, has had what can politely be called a chequered career — so chequered, in fact, that a little confusion over his political whereabouts is only to be expected. And let us hope the confusion is not so extensive that he will have problems finding his way home when the House has risen, for during the election his party made much of his being the local candidate (it was reported that one leaflet mentioned this 20 times) when in fact he lives outside the constituency.

It was no accident, that where Carr lives became inflated into a major issue in the election, for local Tories were unhappy about the fact that their candidate comes from Wales. Of course the Liberal Democrats know that such matters are irrelevant and they know that no party could be expected to put up only candidates who are native to the constituency where they are standing. They harped on about Carr’s origins because they are willing to exploit any false argument and stimulate any bigotry if it will win votes. There have been many examples of them trying such disreputable tactics and while it is true that all capitalist parties play this cynical game it should be remembered that the Liberal Democrats have always claimed to be above it. They have asserted that they are the party of moderation, the one which faces all issues honestly and does not play the party game. Their tactics in Ribble Valley expose these claims as shown and encourage us to wonder what trickery they would stoop to if they ever thought they had a real prospect of power.

Confusion
Carr’s campaign as the local man was largely based on his four years as a councillor on the District Council — not, however, as a Liberal but a Conservative. In the early 1980s he decided to put his mis-spent political youth behind him and changed to the SDP, widely regarded as the thinking person's Tory Party. When David Owen announced the abandonment of his great crusade to break the mould of British politics Carr switched sides again, to the Liberal Democrats and contested two elections for them before his recent triumph.

Of course some of his opponents — not to mention his supporters — might be amused by Carr’s apparent inability in sorting out what he thinks and where he stands (according to The Guardian he had to admit at one press conference that he didn’t know what the Liberal Democrat industrial policy is) but there is another way of looking at it. As there is no fundamental difference between the. Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties — and precious little superficial difference as well — there is bound to be some confusion over which one to support. With a bit of luck, and having tried some of the others, a political punter can settle on a party whose star is in the ascendant — like the Liberal Democrats in Ribblc Valley — but whichever one is chosen makes no difference. Elections at present offer no real choice, only a list of people all standing for the same thing. So there is a kind of gruesome logic about swopping, as Mike Carr has, from one ideologically bankrupt party to another.

But what, you might ask, about the voters? Well if they were ever to cotton on to the reality of this desception they would begin to vote for the kind of mould breaking so authentic as not be dreamed of by the likes of confused, tenacious, victorious Mike Carr.

Words, Words, Words . . .
In war the first casually is the dictionary, as words are abused and distorted and invented, or eliminated with the ferocity of a cruise missile. One of this column's favourite characters during the Gulf War was the official US military spokesman there, whose cropped hair, crazy eyes and innovative vocabulary said more about how the war was fought — and why — than any learned analysis. Day after day this man in his camouflage suit told us about "assets" (Allied forces, weapons and so on); "hostile elements" (hostile forces like the Iraqis); "target rich environment" (Iraq); "collateral" — as in damage or casualties (buildings destroyed and civilians killed off target) and so on.

Encouraged, the media came up with a word of their own for the way the news was being handed to them — to sanitise. Although apparently intended to expose monstrous euphemisms, the word was itself a euphemism fit to blank out all the others. What really happened was a massive, organised, official operation to suppress the truth and replace it with lies. This was a cruel war, fought to establish control over an area for its mineral resources and its strategic position. It was sanitised to persuade workers once again to participate in slaughtering each other in the interests of their exploiters.

In this the Labour Party played its disreputable part with enthusiasm. With only a few minor reservations Kinnock gave the government his whole-hearted support: ". . . outstanding speeches . . . a statesman in opposition . . . " was how Labour MP Jack Ashley grovellingly described his leader’s grovelling to the government. The official Labour Party statement called for the war to achieve "the ending of regional superpower status for Iraq and for every other country in the region".

This was the reason for the war — to assert control over the area by the superpowers of world capitalism. The Labour Party supported the war because they support capitalism and because they knew that to oppose it would seriously damage their chances of winning the next election.

Verbal Missile
So Kinnock, forgetting those days of his annual photo-opportunity at CND's Easter March, fired off verbal missiles against Iraq from the comfort and safety of the House of Commons. He should not be proud of the part he played to sanitise the war, to persuade the workers of Britain that it was all — the incinerated Iraqi soldiers, the battered cities, the terrified children of Baghdad — in the good cause of the triumph of British capitalism and the election of Neil Kinnock to occupancy of Number Ten.

Ivan

After the Slaughter . . . (1991)

From the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A terrible pall of acrid smoke hangs over the city. Noise! Nowhere to shelter from the noise; the noise of the explosions in the air, the noise of the 2000 kilogramme missiles. The voice of the reporter had said they were so accurately aimed that they could hit a garage door. There would be few garage doors left—and few people alive within a quarter mile of each exploding door.

Noise! Buildings crumbling, crushing human bodies; men, women and children. The small sounds of screams and sobbing—the noises we humans make in terror—blotted out by the exploding anti-aircraft shells and the screech of the multi-billion dollar technology that has been scrupulously devised to destroy lives and property. Mothers' boys, trained with the precision of surgeons, fly these things and will be called heroes—but not by their victims.

Fire, adding its terrible consuming roar to the awful cacophony of terror, laps at homes, at the unpaid-for paraphernalia of living that brings joy and sorrow even to these we are told are our enemies—our enemies deserving of this. Here is hell! Hell where human flesh adds its stench to the untreated sewage that the fantastic flying technology spreads on the streets. Hell, where people who look like us, feel like us, weep like us and die like us, are marginal counters in this orgy of absolute desolation that is happening because people in power have clashed over interests that have no bearing on the lives of those who are dying—or, even, on the lives of those who are killing them.

Who is visiting this terror on these people? Who is responsible for the war—murder of all these innocent men, women and children? Well . . . actually . . . all this, we are told, is the work of the world’s peace-keeping body, the United Nations Organisation!

Throughout the world we watch. Television has created a grand amphitheatre in which this drama of destruction can be played out before an audience that must be even greater, surely, than that which watched last year’s World Cup. My daughter’s child says "turn if off, Grandad”. As I flick the remote control she says, with precocious discernment, "I wouldn't love my daddy if he was killing people!” Channel Three is telling us that the clergy are organising prayers for those involved in the killing. Over to Channel One where the local news tells us that some IRA idiot had put a parcel bomb on a bridge and had been roundly condemned by both the clergy and a government Minister.

How do you tell a child?

The child is too wise to be given excuses. How do you tell a child that in the world where, hopefully, she will become an adult there are things called fighting forces which exist to kill people and destroy property. In every country, as surely as there is a piece of coloured cloth to represent the way the people are supposed to be different, there are fighting forces—men and women trained to kill and destroy. The very young could not understand that: only after we have been "educated", trained and conditioned in the values of capitalism and its divisive nationalism, does the notion that it is reasonable to train to kill one another become acceptable.

But this fighting force transcends those of a nation; this, we are told, is the greatest force ever assembled. Its weaponry is staggering and, had its cost been applied to the things that human beings really need, every country in the world would have first-rate hospitals and no one would be denied, or have to wait for, treatment; in addition, the housing problems of all the nation-states that make up this force, could have been solved, their infrastructural problems removed and the 15 million children who die worldwide every year, because their parents cannot afford to buy them nourishment, need not have died.

Truly, what it has cost to create this greatest of fighting forces is staggering beyond the imagination, and its capacity for killing and maiming human beings and its power to destroy wealth is so great that it beggars the sick minds of its creators.

What was it all about? Was it about the fact that millions of people in our world are dying from lack of food? That even more millions have their lives made utterly miserable by poverty? No, no! of course not! Wouldn’t it be silly to cause such upset over trivialities like the suffering of ordinary mortals?

Unnecessary poverty may afflict the greater part of the world’s population; millions may die of hunger and more millions may be homeless. Millions of children may go blind every year because the few pence needed for the treatment of each is not available and because those who own the world’s wealth are under an inexorable compulsion to use it for further capital accumulation. But these are not the sort of things that moves the United Nations or causes world mobilisation.

Rambo image

The UN was stirred by the fact that a tyrannical regime in Iraq, a state created by the oldest of the imperial powers, Britain and France, and nurtured politically and militarily by all the so-called “Great Powers", had over-run another tyrannical slate, similarly created on its borders. George Bush, the Texan oilman, whose oil interests temporarily reside with his son while he acts for his class as President of the USA, along with Baker, his colleague in politics and business, were both outraged. Economically, America was alarmed by the threat to their Middle East oil supplies and, politically, there were those in the Bush administration, including Bush himself, who saw the opportunity of beating the Iraqi dictator as a means of restoring the Rambo image which is the cultural fare in much of the United States and which had been shattered by the killing proficiency and endurance of the ill-equipped Viet Cong in Vietnam.

Since state capitalism in eastern Europe broke down under the weight of an inefficient, parasitical bureaucracy and a monumentally expensive military machine, those innocents who think wars are caused by conflicts between good and evil were hopeful that a new era of peace was dawning. Ironically, it was the threat of peace, or more specifically the lack of a threat from the Soviet Union, that allowed Bush and his war-mongering cohorts to railroad the UN into taking a stand against the Iraqi ruling class. Had the Cold War still been in operation Bush might have blustered but there would have been no Operation Desert Storm. Equally, had the US not marshalled support for action against Iraq, no other nation would, or could, have initiated the slaughter which has just ended in the Gulf.

Hi—jacked

Effectively, America, followed obediently by Britain, hi-jacked the United Nations. Like pouring petrol on a fire, they enhanced the prospects for the next round of Middle East conflict by using massive bribes of sophisticated military weaponry to Arab states, such as the dictator Assad’s Syria and Egypt, and, of course, the ruthlessly belligerent Zionist state of Israel. With Russia neutralized and the countries of western Europe anxious not to accentuate differences on the run-up to negotiations for greater Common Market political unity, the UN Security Council was in the political pocket of the US.

Wise and sincere people have put great store by the UN. Unfortunately for their theories, it was taken hostage by bribery and corruption and had its proclaimed role of a peace-keeping body reversed into that of one of the most ruthless destructive machines the world has ever known.

After more than a month of bombing and killing, the lying thug Saddam Hussein indicated that he was prepared to accept a Russian peace proposal that urged him to comply with the principal UN Resolution demanding the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Bush broke off entertaining his rich friends at his week-end retreat to give a demonstration of viciousness on television: as self-appointed commander of the UN forces, he decreed that there would be no let-up. and his military commanders responded by a frenetic upgrading of bombing raids on Baghdad and Basra.

Within forty-eight hours even the ruthless Saddam Hussein was forced to admit defeat. Up to this time the number of Iraqi casualties was unknown: what is known is that as the Iraqis retreated in disorder out of Kuwait and across southern Iraq, throwing away their arms and seizing any form of transport they could get their hands on. The American commanders of the world's "peace-keeping" force released the most brutal and unnecessary attacks that accounted for the slaughter of thousands of fleeing Iraqis.

The cost

The cost of the slaughter, seen predictably in financial accounting terms, is provisionally put at up to $100 billion plus a roughly equivalent amount for the destruction in Kuwait and unknown billions for the massive destruction of the industrial and commercial infrastructure of Iraq. Additionally, there is the $20 billion's worth of arms that it is admitted America, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait used to bribe Middle Eastern Arab states into supporting their cause in the UN and in the killing itself.

In defeating Iraq the Anglo-American military caucus lost some 50 personnel from all causes, mostly accidents. Current estimates of Iraqi casualties are provisionally estimated at between 75,000 and 85,000. Peace-keeping, it seems, is not economical with human lives.

Such fantastic wealth; such vile slaughter of human beings; such utterly appalling destruction! Such a compelling argument in favour of abolishing an obscene social organisation that, in the words of one of its most disgusting upholders, George Bush, "requires each generation to pay a price for freedom”.

Richard Montague

Ecology and revolution (1991)

From the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world ecological crisis is on such a scale that many workers believe environmentalism has superceded the need for class struggle. “A genuine redistribution of power", says Jonathan Porritt, “can no longer be simplistically interpreted in terms of setting class against class . . .  the need to serve the general interest of humanity now transcends any such old-world divisiveness" (Seeing Green). Given the seriousness of the crisis it is hardly surprising that such a view has a widespread appeal in the Green movement. Nevertheless it is a naive analysis which socialists totally reject. Why?

The most common argument used to hack up the claim that human beings have overstretched the Earth’s ability to sustain us is that there are simply too many people. David Icke’s view is typical. ”Humankind has a choice to make. We can be sensible and limit our numbers voluntarily or we can go on until nature does it for us with disease and hunger and the time isn't too far off’ (It Doesn't Have To Be Like This).

There is nothing new in this. Parson Malthus was spouting his own brand of naturalistic determinism nearly two hundred years ago. In his Essay on the Principle of Population Malthus argued that food production increases over fixed periods in proportion to the arithmetic series 1. 2. 3. 4. 5, . . . while population increases over fixed periods by the geometric scries 1, 2. 4. 8. 16 . . .

Fortunately for us. Malthus’s apocalyptic vision had not an iota of scientific validity. His theory, like those of his modern-day followers, is completely arbitrary. The facts refute it. Since Malthus’s time food production has grown considerably faster than population and there is more than enough to go round. The figures bear this out. The surplus world grain stockpile in 1988 was 360 million tonnes—36 greater than the estimated 10 million tonne grain shortfall for all of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1987-88 crop year. To feed the 15 million children who starve each year would require just 3.6 million tonnes of grain, a mere 1 percent of the world’s stockpile (Susan George, Ill Fares the Land).

Famine remains of course, but its causes are social, not ecological. People do not starve for lack of food under capitalism, they starve for lack of money to buy it.

Benefits of technology

A close second to population growth in the Greens' litany of fear is industrialisation. “The Industrial Revolution”, says Icke. “was a change in human activity unprecedented in history and it has brought about an equally unprecedented threat to life on Earth”. There is no doubt that the development of the factory system has blighted the lives of millions. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels chronicled the living hell of workers in the mid-nineteenth century industrial towns. And today the smog masks worn in Tokyo and Mexico City are symbols of the stinking and poisonous reality that is modern industry.

But there is another side of the story. Industry has brought many of the things that we now take for granted in the home: electric light and cooking and warmth, telephones, washing machines, fridges and vacuum cleaners. Modern transport and telecommunications have widened the experiences of millions, rescuing men and women from "the idiocy of rural life". New printing processes, radio and television make accessible books, music and art that were once the privilege of a few.

All these things and more are the products of "industrialism” and are not to be despised for it. The crux of the matter is this. Just as no-one should have to go hungry today when we have the ability to produce more than enough food, so has capitalism by developing industry and technology brought us to the point where we have the potential to solve the age-old needs for warmth and shelter.

Yet the Greens oppose large-scale industry and argue instead for the dismantling of the world economy, replacing it with small, localised, self-sufficient output. In naive disregard for the economic necessities of capitalism, Icke wants to see “a change to smaller companies and an end to the present trend of a few giants swallowing up the rest and controlling local markets". He fails to see that the concentration of production under capitalism is not an optional extra; it is part of the very dynamic of the system. As Marx pointed out that:

 The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities . . . depends on the productivity of labour, and this depends upon the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller. (Capital, Vol I. Chapter 25. section 2).

From their “forest clearing" called Europe, many Greens would deny the benefits of technology to others. Their smug Eurocentric argument is that Third world countries “must find ways of gradually delinking their economics from those of the developed world” (Jonathan Porritt). In reality the current level of world production depends on there being a world division of labour. It is this ever-increasing socialisation of labour that makes the world socialisation of ownership— socialism—an ever more realisable goal. It is only with this social ownership and control of the means of production that we can start talking about employing materials and methods of production that are ecologically acceptable. Until then, production will be governed by blind economic laws which impose their own priorities.

But the Greens oppose socialism with their utopian dreams of de-industrialization under capitalism. They want to cut down the size of the means of production while leaving the relations of production intact.

Mysticism versus Marxism

By considering ecological problems in isolation from the basic contradictions of capitalism, the Greens fall inevitably into the trap of presenting them as above classes and independent of the society we live in. Humanity itself gets the blame, not the social system. Relief is sought in anthropological solutions: the need to change people, their beliefs, morals, education and the like. Theodore Roszak expresses this view in his book Person/Planet The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society, saying that “a militant class-consciousness would politicise the personality out of existence". He adds later that “a new human identity requires a politics that has outgrown the modern infatuation with science and industrial necessity”. He does not explain what he means and refers only to the need for a “spiritual dimension of life".

This concern with an inner world of personality marks a failure to understand the indissoluble links between the individual and society, and the fact that only social revolution is the key to real individual freedom through liberation from economic coercion.

Roszak's “adventure of self-discovery through to its planet-saving purposes" may have a romantic appeal to the Greens. But as Marx pointed out:

  It is ridiculous to long for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that the present complete emptiness must be permanent. The bourgeois view has never been more than the opposite of that Romantic view, and so the romantic view will accompany it as a justified opposite till its blessed end. (Grundrisse, Notebook 1).

We do not have to kneel down before nature like the sun-worshippers of old or the Gaia mystics of today. Action can and must be taken to save the planet. The requirements are familiar enough and embrace, amongst others, the following: use of renewable energy sources and the conservation of non-renewable ones, agricultural practices that preserve the fertility of the soil, emission controls combined with tree-planting to take up the carbon gases, use of non-polluting technology to transform materials, and the manufacture of solid goods without built-in obsolescence. Sufficient technical knowledge and scientific understanding of the laws of nature exist now to make these things, and more, a real possibility. What we lack is the social framework which would allow them to be carried out.

The Greens fail to understand that it is the economic necessities of capitalism that make it impossible to establish a sustainable relationship between human society and the rest of nature.

Theirs is essentially a static and superficial vision of the universe. They see no further than the surface appearance of things. Famine to the Greens means simply too many people. Pollution comes from industrial processes so they conclude that industrialism is the enemy. They fail to locate the real problem in the blind economic laws of a social system that is driving us on to the edge of irreversible ecological disaster. No wonder all they have to offer is a futile programme of reforms.

The socialist vision is not static. Engels’s observation that “motion is the mode of existence of all matter” is a major tenet of the Marxist guide to action. Human activity has always changed the environment and will continue to do so. There is no going back to some pre-industrial golden- age.

Looming ecological catastrophe makes more urgent the necessity of socialism. Workers have no choice but to expropriate the capitalist class and plan production for need not profit. Only then can we start to organise production in an ecologically acceptable way. Only then will we manage nature and control changes in our relationships to it through an understanding of its laws and the unfettered ability to apply them.

John Dunn

Engels on Ecology (1991)

From the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region: they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons

. . .

Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.

And, in fact, with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly, and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances of natural science in the present century, we are more and more getting to know, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences at least of our more ordinary productive activities. But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and anti-natural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose in Europe after the decline of classic antiquity and which obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity.

But if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions . . . But even in this sphere, by long and often cruel experience, and by collecting and analysing the historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote, social effects of our productive activity, and so the possibility is afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well.

To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it our whole contemporary social order."

Frederick Engels: The Dialectics of Nature (First English Edition. 1940. pp 291-294)

Renegade socialist (1991)

Book Review from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Politics of James Connolly. By Kieran Allen. Pluto Press, £9.95.

James Connolly has always been an enigma. How did someone who at the time was the General Secretary of the ITGWU, Ireland’s leading trade union, and who a few years previously had been a revolutionary socialist who had participated in the so-called “impossibilist (anti-reformist) revolt” in the SDF in Britain that led to the formation of the SLP in 1903 (which he joined) and the SPGB in 1904—how did such a person end up being shot by the British state for being one of the leaders of an armed uprising to establish a capitalist Republic in Ireland, so entering into the pantheon of Irish “national heroes”?

This book by a leading Socialist Worker member in Ireland does not provide the answer, but it does show the extent to which the SWP’s position on Ireland ("critical support for the IRA”) is mistaken.

According to Allen, Connolly was right to have participated in the Easter 1916 “rising” alongside the Irish Republicans; his mistake was to have done so as a republican rather than as a socialist, which wouldn’t have happened had he concentrated in the pre-war years on “building a party” rather than a trying to build a syndicalist trade union and a broad-church, reformist Labour Party in Ireland. This, of course, is the usual Trotskyist line of explaining why things went wrong by the absence of a vanguard party.

In so far as Connolly was still a socialist in 1916 (which is very much open to doubt), by taking part in an insurrection aimed at establishing an independent capitalist government in Ireland he betrayed the cause of international socialism. To the extent that the Irish Republicans had any views on how society should be organised they endorsed those of Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, who argued in favour of protection for nascent Irish capitalist industry and for the establishment of an Irish merchant marine and an Irish stock exchange. All these were eventually achieved either under Griffith himself or later under one of Connolly’s fellow putschists De Valera—without the working class in Ireland benefitting in any way.

Adam Buick

Between the Lines: The Art Attack (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have come to the end of a sickeningly stage-managed war. It was all a performance of ghastly hypocrisy and what is worst about it is that the TV war was but a dress rehearsal for a bigger military production yet to come.

The Labour Party spent the war seeking to appear patriotic. Kinnock went into a permanent Cenotaph mode: solemn voice and pseudo-Thatcher Britishness. Labour loyalists, whose long-term duty is to pretend to themselves and others that their leader stands for something decent, must have turned their sets off throughout The Gulf War Show in which the Kinnockite puppets danced to the dirge of the national anthem.

This disgusting Labourite Toryism is but the culmination of a decade in which the British Left has virtually collapsed. Their claim to stand for an alternative, which was never genuine when it was stated with vigour, is now hardly stated at all. The British Left is an unburied corpse. Kinnock is a Bob Hawke in waiting, the CP is full of Stalinist geriatrics and Young Liberal types, the SWP is full of anachronistic insurrectionists preaching a Leninist dogma which is not worth the paper on which it is written. Apart from the Socialist Party, it is hard to think of any claimants to the role of a genuine political opposition to capitalism. That, it seems, is pretty well beyond dispute.

But the 1980s has not been a period of complete quiescence from those who dissent from the pernicious priorities of the profit system. If so-called Thatcherism was the shrill cry of apparently victorious money men. the vitality of the dissenting arts has been the lively chorus of discontentment that things have gone as they have.

The Late Show (BBC2, 11.15pm, 11 March) took a look at what it called "Culture in the Eighties". It served as a reminder that amid all the sell-outs of the political radicals who caved in under the pressure of a packaged Iron Lady, there have been some quite remarkable writers who have shown the way. The programme showed excerpts from such great works as Boys From The Black Stuff and Pravda. It interviewed David Lodge, whose Nice Work showed the prostitution of academic minds to business agendas.

Also interviewed were Trevor Griffiths (perhaps one of the finest British playwrights of the last twenty years) whose Comedians can be seen as the definite text out of which Ben Elton and Harry "Loadsamoney" Enfield have emerged as serious social critics; Griffiths' Bill Brand, which ought to be repeated every two years in case Labour voters should forget its message, was a series about the futile reformism of Labour MPs that was more piercing than most Marxist lectures could hope to be.

The writers of the Eighties were a significant force in the struggle against Capital's intensification of its exploitative assault on Wage Labour. The likes of Griffiths, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, David Hare, Caryl Churchill and David Leland did more to point out the contradictions of capitalism than the pathetic Westminster leftist lobby fodder could ever do.

What was interesting is that most of these plays started out on television. Great though theatrical attacks on the system such as Brenton's The Churchill Play or Brenton and Ali's Moscow Gold have been, these were seen by but a few people, most of whom agreed with the writers before they went to see the plays. It might be the case that in Moscow or Leningrad a great critic of the system like Mikhail Shatrov can have queues forming outside the theatres to see his latest offering, but in Britain the medium for the art attack must be the TV screen — or, perhaps these days, cinema and video releases.

The days of lefty worker-actors performing The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in trade-union halls and expecting the world to change are over. (I read recently Ewan MacColl's historical account of the Workers' Theatre Movement of the 1930s and was really depressed by the artistic emptiness and woodenness of what was evidently a very enthusiastic and inspired enterprise. Putting on bad plays does not make socialists).

Of course, socialists are not under illusions about the artistic militancy of the last ten years. Yes, there has been some fine writing, but it is noticeable that most of it was in the early Eighties. As the decade went on demoralisation set in. TV companies (increasingly independent, commercial ones) became more nervous and, as The Late Show pointed out, the earlier attacking drama gave way to rather hysterical works about the fear of the nuclear state — Edge of Darkness is one of the better examples of this rather defeatist genre.

Another reason not to have illusions is that most of the plays which comprise this Eighties' artistic resistance were only attacking aspects of capitalism. That is all a play can do; it is a revolutionary party which must grasp both the bull and the horns. Sometimes the radical writers of the Eighties did not quite understand what this system is that they were attacking. The rather supercilious literary critic, D.J. Taylor, was interviewed on the programme and seemed to be dismissive of the extent to which socially critical plays have made any difference. In his book, A Vain Conceit, Taylor suggests that the failure of the radical writers to have as much literary power as they would like is "that writers have lost the ability to describe and define the society of which they are part". (P. 33)

This is where the need for socialist writers becomes clear: we need to be able to shine the spotlight on the capitalist stage on which this whole social farce is being played out.

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: Bernard Shaw on Socialism (1991)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Emrys Hughes, editor of Forward. . . . for years has told the workers that nationalisation or State capitalism is Socialism. Indeed, it is highly probable that Mr. Hughes is one of those in the Labour Party who told Churchill that he was supporting Socialism just after the last war. when Churchill was reported to have spoken in favour of nationalisation of the railways Mr. Hughes is certainly a bad guide and Shaw is even worse. Writing in the Sunday Despatch (March 9th, 1941), under the head "The Amazing Winston Churchill”, Shaw discovers that Ramsay MacDonald was at one time a "revolutionary Socialist”, and praises Mussolini and Hitler (along with Lenin and the ex- Kaiser) for their contempt of the Parliamentary system and for the "revolutionary socialist changes" they brought about.

The truth is that Shaw, whatever merit he possesses in other directions, and in spite of much pertinent criticism of capitalism, is a most untrustworthy guide to Socialism. Before Mr. Hughes again advises anyone to take Shaw's advice on Socialism, or on Hitler, he should take to heart the following statement made by Shaw in an interview given to the Sunday Referee (October 2nd. 1938):-

  You know what I think of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini—two highly capable revolutionary and proletarian leaders, who are giving their people as big a dose of Socialism as they can stand.

It looks as if Shaw's answer to the question “Is Hitler a Socialist?" would be: "Yes he is, he is a Socialist like Churchill, Lenin, the Kaiser, and Ramsay MacDonald".

(From an article "Is Bernard Shaw a Judge of Socialism?". Socialist Standard, April 1941.)

Sting in the Tail: Competition Humbug (1991)

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

Competition Humbug
Every Chairman and Director of every company will insist that competition is essential, indeed, is a sacred principle of capitalism.

But look at this: several top companies in the concrete business, Tarmac, Redland and RMC among them, have just been convicted of having 65 secret deals to keep concrete prices high.

The same situation exists in every industry. During the last few years 60 glass companies, including the largest, Pilkington, operated a price-fixing racket; 66 private bus operators colluded to avoid competing with one another, while ICI, BP and Shell did likewise in plastics. The list is endless.

Yes, they will all agree that competition is essential — for everyone else, but not for them.


Spare a Tear
Yet another left-wing firebrand has mellowed somewhat. Eric Heffer MP, recalls that when he first entered parliament he thought it was like "a great church which practised ancestor worship". (The Guardian, 20 February).

Now that he may be forced to retire through ill-health, he will "miss the place", especially "the friends . . . from all sides of the House". Tories too? Certainly, indeed he even admired Enoch Powell who could whip-up a bit of racial hatred.

Above all, he will miss "the great debates", or, put another way, those bawling sessions which often degenerate into near-riots, and is

  ". . . glad that Churchill insisted that the Chamber be restored exactly as it was . . . with the seats facing each other, like choir stalls. It gives an intimacy . . ."

Isn't that touching?

So remember, the next time some Labour MPs follow Heffer’s example by singing "The Red Flag" in parliament or mucking around with the mace, it doesn’t follow that they don't fondly embrace the hoary Institutions of what has been called "the best private club in the world".


Opportunism Knocks
Gorby's attempt to boost his waning status through his Gulf "peace" initiative had Labour leader Neil Kinnock worried.

Delaying the ground attack, he fretted, might encourage Saddam to regroup his forces and

  he feared a hold-up in military action could give Iraq a wrong signal, possibly prolong the war and causing more loss of life.

ITV's Oracle (22 February)

Once he was Kinnock the left-wing firebrand, then he became a "Statesman", now he's a military strategist.

The opportunist tradition set by all previous Labour leaders is obviously safe in Kinnock's hands.


War for Freedom?
After the cessation of hostilities in the Gulf many newspapers went well over the top with claims such as "Kuwait City is freed". Anything approaching freedom in that city has a long way to go, whether ruled by an Iraqi or Kuwaiti dictator.

The Anti-Slavery International recently reported a case of how the Kuwaiti ruling clique treated their workers in London, never mind Kuwait City.

  Alice, a Filipino domestic who said she worked for Kuwait's ruling al-Sabah family, said: "I was forced to sleep on the floor between the bedroom and the bathroom. I had to wear a bell so they could call for me at any time.
  I worked from 6am to 2am each day. They fed me their left-overs and used to kick me at night, on their way to the bathroom.
  They kept my passport".
  The 29-year-old woman, who was too frightened to give her full name, said she ran away after an attempt to rape her. At the time she was so thin from lack of food she escaped by crawling through a cat flap.

The Independent (7 March)

Super Sports Event?
One of the less publicised aspects of the Gulf War was the way hundreds of US companies poured their products free of charge into the area for the US troops. Behind this apparent generosity there is a sordid economic reality.

  The ferocious soft-drink war is the sub-text of the larger better known conflict. "Anyone who helps someone out there is making a friend for life" according to Coke, and no doubt the same logic is driving the other US companies sponsoring the war effort — 1,127 had signed up before a shot was fired.

The Independent (17 February)

The view of the marketing people on war is worth noting:

  "One tries to associate a product with an experience", says David Stewart, a US marketing expert. "War is a particularly intensive experience. War alone is not attractive, but there are aspects which are. There are heroes. There’s style, magnanimity . . . It's like a super sport event".

This view of war contrasts sharply with what actually happens in these hellish conflicts as reported in the same newspaper on 28 February 1991:

  "Don't be surprised", the man said, "I had two neighbours who the Iraqis thought were in the resistance. So they pushed them into drains, closed the grill, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. Their families buried them later — you can't leave bodies in drains."

War as a super sports event is typical of the sick morality of the capitalist system.


Praise me Blame them
It is an old political ploy for politicians to claim the praise if anything ever works out well in capitalism (a rare event); and it is equally part of the strategy that if anything goes wrong ( a not unknown occurrence) to blame someone else. But Kenneth Clarke, Secretary of State for Education and Science, has probably overplayed that much used ruse.

On the same day he was pointing the finger of blame in two different directions as reported in The Independent on 7 March.

  Politicians often have louder voices than scientists, Sir David Phillips, chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils (ABRC) told the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology. Kenneth Clarke, Secretary of State for Education and Science, has insisted that scientists cannot blame him for the current financial crisis. He says he is acting on the advice of the ABRC.
   Leaks suggest that the ABRC this year recommended spending at least £50m more on science than was allocated.

Brought to task on declining reading standards at primary schools he was equally blameless according to him:

  He startled members of the Commons Select Committee on Education who are investigating claims of a decline in reading in English primary schools by telling them: "I won’t take responsibility for things that are utterly beyond my control." Mr Clarke Insisted:"Today's schools are the best resourced we have ever had", and went on to criticise some local education authorities for "extravagance and incompetence".

It will be interesting to see if at the next General Election Clarke is talking about "things that are utterly beyond my control" or has resorted to the usual arrogant electioneering pose of all his kind.

Money-worship (1991)

Book Review from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hayek and the Market. By Jim Tomlinson, Pluto Press, £24.95.

Hayek has been a notorious life-long opponent of socialism, and not just of socialism but even of relatively mild reformist and trade union attempts to improve working class conditions within capitalism.

After the publication of his book The Road to Serfdom in 1944 nothing much more was heard of him until he re-emerged in the 1970s to provide intellectual ammunition for the Thatcherite wing of the Tory party. So Tomlinson’s short, readable but expensive book can serve a purpose on the principle of “know thine enemy".

An Austrian by birth. Hayek began his political life as a member of that country’s school of anti-socialism associated with the name of Ludwig Von Mises. Mises argued, that without buying and selling, money and prices it would be impossible to make rational decisions about what to produce and how to produce it; production solely for use and without monetary calculation was thus a mere pipe- dream. This was the argument against socialism. But the Mises school went on to argue that, even if buying and selling, money and prices exist, rational economic decisions would still not be able to be made unless prices were fixed by the free play of market forces. This was the argument against state capitalism and reformism (but which they also, either mistakenly or lyingly, called socialism).

Hayek’s main argument was directed at state capitalism and the concept of the central planning of all economic activity. He convincingly showed that the modern productive system was so complicated that it could not be planned from a single centre and that therefore some decentralization and autonomy for producers was a necessity. He went on to argue, however, that this made the market economically inevitable, an argument that is now accepted not only by open champions of capitalism like Thatcher but also by the likes of Kinnock and Gorbachev.

But this conclusion by no means follows, since why is it impossible to conceive of a system in which groups of producers would be responding not to market demand but to real demand as indicated by what people took under conditions of free access? Why could a system of production solely for use not be able to function on the same sort of self-regulating basis as the market is supposed to?

Hayek, however, ruled out this option in advance, arguing that there were only two choices: either free market capitalism or some form of statism. As he wrote in The Road to Serfdom:

The only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.

We deny this. The choice is not between the dictatorship of the market and the dictatorship of some state bureaucracy. A free, socialist society without either the market or the state is possible.

Adam Buick

The coming election (1991)

Editorial from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The politicians are at it again. Over the next few months, urged on by the media, they will bombard us with promises, polemics and their own puffed-up personalities. We are supposed to be impressed and to vote for one or other of the parties on offer. Yet experience of past elections and past governments shows that it doesn’t really matter who wins.

Whichever party forms the government things go on as before. Inequalities of wealth and income survive; poverty, bad housing and hospital queues persist; unemployment goes up or down in accordance with the business cycle; those in work still have to struggle to keep earnings in line with inflation; pollution continues; international tensions and threat of war remain.

Despite the competing candidates, there will be no real choice in the election.The three main parties all stand for the same thing. They all support the minority ownership of the means of production, whether through stocks and shares or through state control. They all agree that the aim of production should be sale with a view to profit. They all insist that the majority of us should get a living by working for an employer and that we should have to buy rather than have access as of right to the things we need to live. In short, they all stand for capitalism.

Such differences as exist between them are merely superficial details over how this system should be run. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats may favour private enterprise capitalism slightly more than Labour, and Labour state intervention slightly more than them, but on basics they are agreed. For them there is no alternative to the present system of minority ownership and production for profit. They accept its framework and agree to work within it.

This is why their record in office is one of miserable failure to honour their promises. It is not because they are dishonest or uncaring or incompetent or self-seeking—though they may be these things too— that the politicians fail but because in seeking to make capitalism work to serve human interests they are trying to do something that just cannot be done. They are trying to make a leopard change its spots.

Capitalism is a profit-seeking system that can only work as that. It is a system governed by blind economic laws which no government can control or alter and which decree that profit-making must be given priority over all other considerations including meeting needs. All governments, whatever their original intentions, inevitably end up—Labour governments included—administering the system on its terms, giving priority to profits, restraining wages and salaries and cutting benefits and services, and generally presiding over the economy as it staggers through its boom-slump cycle. Governments dance to the tune of capitalism, not the other way round.

We in the Socialist Party decisively reject this approach to politics. An election in which the issue is which particular gang of politicians is to preside over the operation of capitalism is a meaningless irrelevancy. What is required is a fundamental change in the basis of society. Private and state ownership must give way to common ownership and democratic control. On this basis, class privilege is abolished and we all have an equal say in the way things are run. Production is directly geared to meeting needs and we all have free access to what we need. This—production for profit or production for needs—is the real issue.

Barbarians at the gate (1991)

From the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the United States and to a lesser extent in Britain, university departments in the Humanities (Classics, Literature, Languages, History, Philosophy, etc.) are emptying of both students and teachers. Education is giving way to what is in effect vocational training: Business Studies, Law, and Medicine. Scientists are disappearing down tunnels of specialisation, unable to communicate even with each other. Twenty percent of all American students are choosing economics since this is seen as the way to make the most money. The best-paid jobs for scientists are in armaments or patent medicine. The barbarians are at the gate.

None of this is new. Alarm at the state of scholarship has been voiced for most of the century. The extension of higher education to members of the working class has been blamed for the trend by some—“More Means Worse"—particularly in Britain after the 1944 Education Act. In the United States such critics blame the upheavals of the Sixties and positive discrimination in favour of women and blacks.

The majority view has been that the malaise goes deeper and has been around a lot longer than these phenomena. "The World's Classics Compressed Into A Few Chapters” was satirised by the Canadian Stephen Leacock in the thirties. Others winced at Readers' Digest, The Five Foot Shelf Of Books (specify your colours), potted literature, “crackerbarrel philosophy", homogenized culture, pasteurised art. Great Thoughts of Great Men, etc.

In England the novelist Richard Aldington had complained that the best poets had gone into advertising. “Phyllo-san fortifies the over forties!" was a better piece of alliteration than could be found in any literary review and "My Goodness, My Guinness!" was nearly as good.

Whine of muzak

We should not be surprised at this, nor at the fact that most artistic and musical creativity is being put to the task of selling soap powder and toilet paper, chocolate bars and preparations to make your armpits charmpits. Talented men and women are discovering fulfilment in drawing Noddy characters and training articulate monkeys to urge us that life will not be complete without this or that product. The whine of muzak from some twentieth century Mozart follows us round the supermarket and the pop-music industry goes through its weekly production cycle.

A third of the American population is said to be functionally illiterate. In Britain Peter Morgan, director general of the Institute of Directors, has complained that 60 percent of British children leave school at sixteen—and two-thirds of them without any academic qualifications. We could add that the only literature any of them are likely to have come into contact with is advertising jingles. It does not seem to occur to him either that a market-dominated world is unlikely to produce a different result. He refers to continental Europe where a marginally happier situation reigns, but we should expect similar economic conditions to produce similar results in the long run. Cultural traditions there have put drag chains on the slide to barbarism—as they have in Scotland—but one would have to be a real optimist to hope for the future of education.

The problem lies in the collision between human values and the scientific market-directed machine which is colonising every aspect of our private worlds, cultural, intellectual, and emotional. The application of cost-benefit analysis to tastes like plaster-ducks-on-the-wall versus Michaelangelo’s David, or Gandhi versus Heinrich Himmler, or the Good Samaritan versus Ariel Sharon can only lead to the conclusion that a little of what you fancy does you good. Eating people is not wrong, just a matter of taste.

Market madhouse

Since the 1920s the Frankfurt School in Germany—Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, Lukács, Habermas—and, more recently, the post-war Paris thinkers like Castoriadis and André Gorz have tried to deal with the crisis this has created in philosophy. The spreading application of the criteria of the physical sciences to non-physical things, like taste and goodness, has cut the ground from under the philosophers. If they can't be measured, the argument goes, they are nonsense at worst, and a mere grunt of pleasure or squeal of pain at best.

One conservative critic, the American professor Allan Bloom in his The Closing of the American Mind, has written of the fate of those condemned to trying "to find their way through the technical smorgasbord of the current school system, with its utter inability to distinguish between the important and unimportant in any way other than by the demands of the market".

If he thinks deeply about that last clause, he might be able to add his bit to the efforts of those of us who are trying to find our way not only through the crisis-ridden school system but out of the market-dominated madhouse we inhabit as well.

Ken Smith

Do you like your work? (1991)

From the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Work is a very important part of our lives, but only a fortunate few find satisfaction in it. We know that we have to work, otherwise there would be no food, no houses, and no furniture to put in them. But that is not the reason we work today. We do it in order to get money to buy food, a house, furniture.

It may seem obvious, but we are not ants or bees; we are human beings with the capacity for enjoyment, for experiencing pleasure, but rarely do we do so in work. This, considering how much of our lives is spent working, must be a condemnation of the economic system we live under. Part of the problem is that we neither expect, nor are expected to enjoy work— we are expected to get it done as quickly and cheaply as possible. It is for this that we are hired and paid. We have to fulfil orders, production quotas, sales quotas. These have nothing to do with work, but work has everything to do with them. Work today is characterised by an intense pressure which is destructive of work as a creative activity. This is because it is not the work itself that is the objective but rather its result.

This is our present work culture, the work culture of capitalist society into which we are born. We may not like it, but see nothing strange, no contradiction in it; this is just how things are. But things can be different. Otto Klineberg in the UNESCO pamphlet Race And Psychology gives some interesting examples of how behaviour is determined by culture which illustrate this. In a performance test, he gave to a group of Yakima Indians the task of placing pieces of wood of various shapes into a wooden frame. The subjects were told to put the pieces in their correct place “as quickly as possible”:

These children . . . never hurried. They saw no reason to work quickly. Our culture places a premium on speed, on getting things done in as short a time as possible; the Indian children had not acquired this attitude. They went at their task slowly and deliberately, with none of the scrambling impatience . . . found among American children.

Klineberg also noted they made fewer errors. The point is that for them the doing was more important than its completion. This is not how we view work. Our whole view of life is infected with the “scrambling impatience” to succeed. Speed has become a neurosis, a disease. Watch people in the street, buses, trains; they can do nothing slowly or considered. Rushing in most cases for its own sake without thinking. Dashing across a road to beat a car; not because there is a need, but because they have to. People play as they work. Going on holiday is an enervating experience from which we often need time to recover.

In terms of human needs and welfare—from the vantage-point of a sane society—most of the work we do is useless anyway. What, for instance, have banking, insurance, law, and government, got to do with human need? They have everything to do with capitalism, because the bureaucratic superstructure of a society based on property constantly expands as the activities required to run it become more and more complex. Think of all that effort going into running this system of extravagant waste. Effort that few enjoy and many find tolerable only until they succumb to the increasing incidence of physical or mental breakdown, which the health service struggles to cope with.

How stupid to have intelligent, talented people driven by an economic system that is served first, and them last. The only reason and justification for taking this critical view of work today is the confidence that we have it within our power to arrange for people to come first, always. Would it not be more sensible—and better for us—if we were to organise work for the benefit of people, rather than people for the benefit of work?

Ian Jones

Obituary: Stan Law (1991)

Obituary from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Somewhat belatedly we regret to report the death of our Comrade Stan Law after a long period of illness.

Whilst serving in the RAF during the Second World War, Stan heard of the Socialist idea. Such was the strength of his conviction that, still in uniform, he rang our then General Secretary to say he was deserting. He was talked out of this extreme step, and advised to work his ticket. This he successfully did, the authorities pleased to rid themselves of what they called 'a bloody nuisance'. He was the British counterpart of the good soldier Schweik.

Stan was a member of St Pancras Branch for many years before ending up in Central Branch. A quiet unassuming chap (one of a very close group of young members) all of whom could inject their Socialist propaganda with humour and enjoyment. In the latter years of his life, illness prevented him from taking an active role. Although he was always glad to attend meetings of transport could be arranged.

Relative values (1991)

From the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The family is under pressure. The 1990 edition of Social Trends details how over a quarter of marriages end in divorce before their fifth year, and how a quarter of all divorces involved at least one partner divorcing for a second time. In 1987 14 percent of dependent children lived in lone parent families.

Trends like these perplex the apologists for capitalism. Politicians and church leaders perceive "family values" to be, like the various other institutions of capitalism, eternally right and natural. They blame a lack of such values for a host of social ills—homelessness, drug abuse, vandalism, crime—instead of adding the broken family to their list as just another victim of capitalism's destructiveness.

Change, however, does not surprised Marxists. Once present-day society is recognised as historical, then the delusion of regarding it as natural vanishes. It was with just such a belief that Engels set out to rock accepted prejudices about the family in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884.

He showed that the monogamous family values of today were determined, in the final analysis, by economic developments and not by factors concerned with individual love, eternal morality and religious values. What Marx did for our understanding of the state, Engels did for the family. Early in his revolutionary career, Marx discovered that "the state is determined by civil society . . . and not civil society by the state". The political constitution is "the constitution of private property" (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law). Engels showed that the present form of the family also is determined by civil society, property-owning society.

"Capitalist production", Engels wrote, "by transforming everything into commodities",

dissolved feudal relations and historical rights, replacing them with purchase and sale, 'free' contract . . . But the closing of contracts presupposes people who can freely dispose of their persons, actions and possessions, and who meet each other on equal terms. To create such a 'free' and 'equal' people was precisely one of the chief tasks of capitalist production.

Which is a continuing process, most recently demonstrated in eastern Europe and South Africa.

Free contract
Marriage, "a contract, a legal affair", feels the same economic effects. The arranged marriage gave way to "freedom of choice"—a freedom often still conflicting with the traditional values of Asian migrants to the developed West. "And on paper, in moral theory as in poetic description, nothing was more unshakably established than that every marriage not based on mutual sex love and on the really free agreement of man and wife was immoral."

Of course, Engels was not  naive enough to think that the old relative freedom of sexual intercourse disappeared with monogamy. Prostitution and adultery provide the safety valves to maintain the monogamous relation intact. "Prostitution", he wrote, "is as much a social institution as any other."

Nevertheless, it is the institution of marriage that is sanctioned by the Christian churches, with the additional civil moral sanction that love marriage is an "inalienable human right". Such hypocrisy demonstrates how morality, taken for granted by many as something quite natural, has, in reality, an economic foundation.

Even though the capitalist ideology of free choice has undermined the churches' teaching that marriage is for life, the monogamous relationship, whether marriage or cohabitation, still dominates the family group. Just over 77 per cent of people living in private households in Great Britain in 1987 lived in families headed by a married couple, a proportion which has fallen only slightly since 1961.

In many ways, it seems that the monogamous family becomes more entrenched as the dual income becomes the only way to service the family debt. Increasingly it takes two breadwinners to provide a home and an acceptable standard of living in which to raise a family. This is emphasised by the way divorcees rush back into marriage, accounting for thirty-six per cent of all marriages in 1988, adding to a shifting state of serial monogamy that is reflected in the growth of the dating agency industry.

At the same time, capitalism's growing demand for more and more women to join the workforce, made more urgent by the need to combat the demographic time-bomb, has made women less dependent on a male breadwinner. In fact, of all the petitions for divorce in 1988, over seventy-three per cent were filed by the wife. Engels predicted something like this, arguing that "the first premise for the emancipation of women is the re-introduction of the female sex into public (as opposed to private domestic) industry".

This is not to say that the freedom to choose a partner or the freedom to divorce under capitalism are wrong. Far from it, but these are limited freedoms. "Full freedom in marriage", Engels stressed, "can only become generally operative when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property relations created by it, has removed all those secondary economic considerations which exert so powerful an influence on the choice of a partner. Then no other motive remains than mutual affection."

Here, in microcosm, we have the goal of socialism in its widest sense, a society in which all our choices will be freed from "secondary economic considerations", where we have achieved, as Engels said elsewhere, an "ascent from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom".

John Dunn