Letter: ". . . a helluva lot of grey in between" (1982)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

The sentiments of Mike Scott (Letters. June) are broadly mine. Your reply shows that we differ only about means. You support my trade union efforts to improve my position as a wage earner but not my efforts to (say) improve local housing and health care for my neighbours at the expense of (say) bigger and better bombs.

Maybe the only consistent action for socialism is work to persuade fellow workers to agree with us about our final goal but in the meantime, for some of us, there is an obligation to house the homeless, feed the hungry and care for the sick.

I am not advocating a form of modified capitalism by trying to alleviate some of its effects on me and my fellows. Politics is like religion — black and white at the ends and a helluva lot of grey in between.

Having read your excellent journal for some time now I feel the SPGB is about as effective as "Captain Anarchy”, whose story was ironically on the same page as the letter referred to above.

Reg Holmes 

Hounslow, Middlesex

Reply:

Many of the Socialist Party’s permanent sympathisers believe that working for "something now" is the only course of action for politically committed workers since socialism, desirable as it is. remains a distant prospect. While they get stuck into feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, fighting for jobs, banning the bomb, expanding health services and improving everything else in sight socialists, it is said, spend their time merely talking about social change. When we get up front our armchairs, knock on the table and ask "Is anybody there?", thousands of voices reply: "Yes, Reg Holmes. I'm with you in spirit but tied up in the day-to-day struggle".

In reality, of course, these people generally display about as much understanding of the workings of capitalism as does Mr. Holmes. Far from differing with us only about means, they singularly fail to grasp the essence of our case: that any real diminution of the worst effects of capitalism cannot be achieved while the system itself remains intact. They prefer to believe, in face of their experience and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that resources set aside for destruction can somehow be channelled into areas of human need and major social problems successfully tackled piecemeal.

Socialists are not impervious to the sufferings of workers under capitalism or dismissive of their attempts to alleviate it by individual action. We simply point out that this will leave the cause of the problems untouched and socialism no nearer. The irony of Mr. Holmes’ letter is that it is precisely because so many workers share his approach to politics that capitalism continues and socialist propaganda is comparatively ineffective. If, at the end of his life. Mr. Holmes looks back at his endeavours and sees that nothing much has changed it will be no comfort to us. We will still have to convince workers of the urgent need to deal now with causes rather than effects.

Editors.

SPGB Meetings (1986)

Party News from the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

• First mention of the SPGB Canterbury Group on the blog. 
• As there's an advert for issue 6 of the World Socialist journal included, here's a link to its contents that are currently on the blog. At the time of writing, the issue is only partially uploaded on the blog. Another thing to add to my to-do list.
• Conservative Families Campaign speaker, Graham Webster-Gardiner, was linked to the notorious Monday Club. He was the Conservative Party's parliamentary candidate in Newport East at the 1987 General Election.

The Pleasure Tendency

Their name piqued my interest so I asked about the group, the Pleasure Tendency, over at Urban75. Someone was good enough to provide the following reply:

"I'd known one them slightly when they lived in London. I dimly recall encountering the group in the context of the ill-fated Intercom project.

Don't remember a journal (although it was a long time ago). Just some pamphlets/leaflets. Think I may still have some stuff by them but not confidant I could easily put my hands on it. One text was called "Theses Against Cynicism". There's a blog post here 'adapted from it' whatever that means. Their pamphlet 'The Subversive Past' is online here. There's a leaflet by them at archive.org.

I understand some of them became involved in producing the journal 'Here and Now' (first produced in Glasgow and also involved in Intercom). (Libcom archive). There are articles by them (issue 2 for example) and issues were produced in Leeds.

ETA: at the Sparrows Nest archive there are also online copies of three more pamphlets:

- 'Life and it's replacement with a dull reflection of itself'

- 'Desire-value and the Pleasure Tendency'

- 'Return of the moral subject'

So that's all of the pamphlets that I remember seeing."

SPGB Meetings (1986)

Party News from the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

So many meetings and, sadly, not enough space in the label section to list all the speakers featured. I even had to omit the branches from the label section this time around. Just not enough *cough* characters.

Despite all the meetings listed, it looks like only one of them is featured on the audio page of the SPGB website. The debate in Newcastle with Bill Etherington of the NUM — later a Labour MP — is available at the following link:

The crisis in Capitalism - What is the next step? 

Debate between Clifford Slapper (SPGB) and Bill Etherington (Gen. Sec. of Durham Mechanics, N.U.M.)

Venue: The Printers Pie, Newcastle upon Tyne 1986

I wonder if Harry Young's meeting in Chiswick under the title of 'A Socialist's trip to Siberia' covered the same ground as his article, 'Escape to Happiness (or drama on the Trans-Siberian Railway)', which appeared in the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard, and which generated some controversy at the time.

SPGB Meetings (1978)

Party News from the November 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1984)

Party News from the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

There's an audio recording of the debate with the Communist Workers' Organisation at the following link.

Update:

Just realised that there's also an audio recording of the 12th October 1984 Islington Branch meeting, The Miners' Strike — a Marxist analysis. The speaker was Steve Coleman.

On the buses (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Confronted with some socialist literature and an SPGB candidate at the last GLC election, one local newspaper responded in amazement that, while everyone else was worrying about problems like urban decay, unemployment, rubbish in the streets, high rates, inflation and the lousy bus service, our only solution was the prospect of a classless, moneyless world community. A candidacy like that, said our local rag, was eccentric to say the least.

As long as there are so few socialists then what we do is bound to seem eccentric to the rest; so let’s give the local newspaper their conventional point. But from our side of the fence the policies promised by the other political parties as solutions to the problems of the day are not just eccentric, they are laughable; and when workers keep their wits about them they agree with us. During the GLC campaign some members of the Labour party toured the constituency of Islington in an ancient, open-topped, double-decker bus, all festooned with balloons. Two women were talking on the pavement as it passed. They looked up and one remarked, “that must be the extra bus they promised in their election leaflet!”

Better than the most comprehensive set of facts and figures, heartfelt graffiti on the bus shelters reflect the situation; “They don’t bury people in Finsbury: they just stand them at bus stops”. All of the other political parties had promised to do something about the bus service in London it’s the one truly inexhaustible political concern. Voters can forget the bomb, but never the number nine bus.

A Dose of Capitalism

In the 1930s congestion, lateness and dropped services were blamed upon the trams, which were considered to be noisy, uncomfortable, expensive to run, inflexible and the cause of traffic jams at junctions. So they were phased out. In the 1950s the blame was put upon the trolley buses, which were considered expensive to run, inflexible and the cause of delays when their pantographs slipped off the overhead wires. So they too were phased out. Since the 1930s too we have seen the end of private enterprise when London and General were bought out by the London Passenger Transport Board in a partial nationalisation scheme; followed later by the London Transport Executive. Since those days when big was considered beautiful, London Country Services have been bought out by the omnivorous National Bus Company (which grew big by snapping up corporation bus systems that could not meet their financial deficits out of the rates) and the National Bus Company itself has become as famous as Beeching for cutting services.

The range of this history takes in what the politicians are offering today. With the rise in the price of oil since 1973 all concede that electric trolley buses would now be cheaper to run than diesel buses; but nobody can afford the outlay on a new overhead system. Others favour high subsidies from the rates, while their opponents insist that local industry is being crippled by the existing rate burden and that private enterprise buses are the only answer. So it’s back to trolleys, the London and General and square one perhaps. Meanwhile the buses suffer from a really bad dose of capitalism.

Runners and Chokers

Why does reality so rarely match the promise? What stops public transport from being a public service? The bus industry provides a set of jobs that display perfect symbolic parodies of the capitalist and worker relationship; so that, even without the administrative and technical problems above, it is unreasonable to expect anything except what you get.

The job routine can turn workers into mechanical beings, jack-in-the-boxes who pop up when the alarm clock triggers them off. Who better to observe this than the bus driver on an early turn?

There was I, driving along without a care in the world, I turned a corner and runners came at me from all directions. They seemed to come up out of the very drains, running, shouting and waving their arms. In two stops we were chock-a-block, I got three bells from my clippie and the old RT groaned along on sagging springs, steering like a pregnant camel. Four stops later they all poured off at the factory area and we were empty. Rape must feel like that.

A London Country driver 

This is not an essay in cynicism. To the bus company accountants there is no difference between hauling coal by road and hauling people, except that on the buses the load gets on and off of its own accord at each stop. The attitude of the bus crews to the passenger-commodities is a measure of the dualism that goes with production for sale. Passengers are both mere bundles of exchange value and living characters who kick when they are treated like cattle. What can a poor conductor do? If he takes the passengers’ side that buses should be a public service based upon need, then he would run the bus as the users desire, collect no fares, make detours from the schedule and get sacked when an inspector found out. If he takes the company side then he has to dawdle and pick up the maximum number of passengers, yet keep to the timetable within an accuracy of one minute, collect all fares on his fully loaded bus by every third stop, while helping mothers with push chairs, children and the disabled on and off the bus. Telling all and sundry the time and how long the next bus will be (time you bought a watch and twenty-seven feet).

Them Versus Us

It used to be worse of course. During the blitz in the last war the employers forced the crews to suspend the rule of five only standing downstairs (in the interests of national production) and for a time the throughput of passengers on London Transport approached that delight of first world war infantry, the French cattle truck, with its plate bearing the legend “cheveaux 8, hommes 40”.

Then, after years of austerity, in 1949 the bus crews flexed their trade union muscles and tried a half-day strike to wipe out a long-standing anomaly and achieve time-and-a-half for Saturday afternoon work and double-time for Sundays. The employers promptly invoked an agreement forced through during the war and threatened legal action against the strikers (this in a nationalised concern and under a Labour government). Fortunately the bus crews faced down the employers and got what they wanted.

But, as if to show that trade union action unlinked to a movement for socialism is futile, in 1971, when the crews were desperate for a pay rise, the employers faced them down over a strike and offered them half of what they wanted, on condition that they worked Saturday and Sunday at flat rate. The crews accepted and things got worse again.

There may exist a more tricky bunch of accountants than those employed by London Transport, but you'll never convince the crews that this is so. It is legendary at all garages that just before a pay claim goes in the fleet of cars that are held for the use of the managers at administrative centres like Chiswick, Crawley and Marylebone are all renewed. So, whatever the true trading position, the accountants can demonstrate to any tribunal that the board cannot possibly afford any wage increase.

These board members cannot be got at by the crews, but there are surrogates—the inspectors or jumpers, who jump the buses and have to get the crews to sign their cards so many times a day. An index of industrial friction at any shed is the number of crews who refuse to sign the inspectors’ cards, or do so only “under protest”.

Jumpers and cash

The bus crews and the jumpers are at war with each other, either openly or concealed, and the result is occasionally an absurd farce that can only be appreciated long after the event.

You’d never believe what we used to get up to. There was a rota with a dead journey from Luton back to Hitchin at 3.15 every Wednesday (dead because nobody ever travelled on it). My conductor at the time wanted to build a garden shed, but couldn’t afford new wood. So 1 rushed the bus out to a builder’s scrap yard in Luton at 3.15. In pissing rain we loaded the lower deck with half a ton of old timber and dashed back to his house at Hitchin. Halfway, I came over Offley Hill and there was a bleeding jumper with his arm out at a stop. If I picked him up we’d have both got the bullet. So I sailed past to his pitiful cries and covered the bleeder with spray. But the bastard saw the wood as we passed and there was hell to pay when we finished the rota that night. We stuck to the story that we didn’t see him in the rainstorm and as he couldn’t prove anything got away with it. But they came down on us all like a ton of bricks over the tiniest fault for months afterwards.

A London Country inspector (ex-driver) 

But most of the aggro between jumpers and crews centres on fiddling of fares. A wise conductor will be tardy over collecting upstairs fares on a bus where the passengers alight at a terminus. As they come down the stairs he'll run off a string of tickets at the lowest fare and pocket the difference between them and the real fares handed to him. Cunning ones will not dump the scroll run off this way in the used ticket box, because equally cunning inspectors search the boxes for them as the first pointer to a fiddler. The cash clerks at the shed, who receive and inspect the take at the end of a rota, here link up with the roving jumpers. Every journey has to be logged by the conductor and the take broken down into the number of tickets of each denomination run off; in this way the cash clerks build up the history of all such journeys. So when the take on a regular rota falls below the average and the number of low value tickets rises above the average, the word gets around and the jumpers start hiding behind cars and lurking in doorways at strategic points to catch the culprit.

It puzzles some people why services with a fare-box facility beside the driver are not supposed to provide change. Most drivers will oblige of course as it provides a fiddle that is impossible to trace. You give the driver fifty pence for a twenty pence fare, he gives you thirty pence change and as you move away he drops two coins in the box. They may be pennies, tuppences or fivepences, depending on how far the driver is pushing it. The only answer the company has to this is to police the buses with a large plain-clothed inspectorate.

The Political Terminus

Work on the buses is not unique, but it provides a caricature of the shifts and subterfuges, the collisions and the wrangles that go on wherever workers handle the revenue that keeps an institution going. Over the years the characteristically cynical attitudes of the bus crews to the passengers has been formed by their experience in the “public service vehicle industry” and any politician who fancies the chances of cutting through the omnibus jungle, uniting the employers, crews and passengers in a real public service is indulging in self-deception.

Even the abolition of fares would have little overall effect. To be sure the bus companies would save on fare machinery, the wages of conductors and cash clerks; while the omnibus jungle would be thinned out as each bus journey ceased to be a transaction between the public and the company. But another jungle of political wrangling would spring up around the problem of who pays for the service. Should the burden be equally loaded on the rate bills of shops, offices, factories and householders; or should the money come from central government? Such questions are the perennial concern of governments, whose battles are fought in the capitalist jungles of council meetings and offices, parliaments and civil services. You get ideological glimpses of these battles at elections and ultimately you may be called upon to do a government’s international battling when the fighting becomes real in war time.

There you are, just one industry, just one problem that all politicians promised to reform at the last GLC election. Yet it proved to be as tangled as the whole capitalist world.

Who are the eccentrics now? The socialists, who want production for use and free access—or the politicians who promise the earth for nothing?

B.K. McNeeney

Letters: Pendulums & Dynamos (1975)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Standard welcomes letters for
 publication, putting questions about the Socialist case
or commenting on articles.

Pendulums & Dynamos

For many years now I’ve heard the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s case, but it is still hard to determine whether the Socialist pendulum swings on the importance of the economic factor or on the political factor in society.

To hear one Socialist speaker, one begins to think that the dynamo of the socialist case is the understanding of the wage-labour, value, price and profit relation, while one can think the dynamo of the Socialist case is its object—namely Socialism (common ownership, production for use etc.) (idealism).

One minute we are told that capitalism exists because people vote for some respective party, i.e. Labour. Liberal or Conservative while the next minute we are told capitalism exists because the majority of people support the institutions of capitalism—money, buying, selling, wages and profit-making, by actively taking part in actions associated with such institutions on the domestic and industrial front.

I await your reply.

R. Ramshaw

Manchester.

Reply:

Without the development of a potential for adequately meeting the needs of a world community Socialism could not be possible. This might be called the economic factor, and is, in our opinion, already here.

What has not yet developed is the Socialist majority, understanding their class position under capitalism, and ready and willing to undertake the transformation of society from capitalism to Socialism. This is the political factor. In its absence capitalism will continue to exist because workers, lacking the necessary Socialist knowledge, will continue to support political parties dedicated to the continuance of present day society.

Both factors are equally important for in the absence of either Socialism is not possible.

Editors.

Progress and Leadership

I admire and support the beliefs and objectives of the SPGB to a great extent, but I remain unconvinced about certain points.

Firstly the practicality of achieving Socialism. The Party has existed for 70 years but has made little progress in that time, and it is rare to meet anyone who has even heard of you. The capitalist media will always be unwilling to give airing to your views, and I cannot believe that a handful of members will be able to spread the Socialist word to any significant extent in a society dominated by capitalist education and culture. How can you break this situation and persuade a majority to vote for you?

Secondly, you seem to spend a great deal of time criticising the so-called Communist countries of the world, but surely you must admit that the standard of life for the vast majority of people in Russia, Eastern Europe, and China has been made infinitely better since the respective Revolutions, compared with their conditions previously. Despite the shortcomings of Communist regimes, their planned economies have enabled the basic needs of the working class to be rationally met, their material standard of life successfully improved, and social services provided on a large scale. How many generations more would these people have had to live in misery if these revolutions had not occurred?

All this leads to the question: is it not better in practice that an enlightened minority take action on behalf of the majority of oppressed people, rather than face the almost insuperable, and extremely lengthy, task of persuading the majority to vote for Socialism?

F. Ansell, 

Leeds.

Reply:

We are only too well aware that progress towards the establishment of Socialism is slow. Nevertheless progress is being made. We know of no short-cut around the necessary task of agitation and education for Socialism.

Capitalist propaganda cannot remove the problems suffered by the working class; neither can it solve the basic contradictions within society. In their efforts to solve the problems and contradictions the workers must eventually turn to Socialism as the only solution. Since the SPGB was formed we have seen a seemingly endless array of attempts at alleviating the problems thrown up by capitalism, and we have seen them fail as they must. If all those who in the past said, as you do, that they “admire and support” our objectives had joined with us in our task of making Socialists that task would have been made easier. Unfortunately such workers still persist in futile reformism, or in advocating minority action by “enlightened” leaders.

We are opposed to this. The outcome of minority-led revolutions, even if ostensibly to establish Socialism, must inevitably lead to some form of capitalism. In the absence of a Socialist majority consciously understanding the implications involved in the establishment of Socialism there is nothing the leadership (no matter how enlightened) can do other than administer capitalism.

The Russian and other state-capitalist revolutions (e.g. China, Cuba etc.) have set back the Socialist movement by at least fifty years, by side-tracking workers. Only now is the realization that they have nothing to do with Socialism—something we said at the time.

The fact that living standards have improved in these countries is no reason whatsoever for advocating that system of government. Indeed the same claim could be made for avowedly capitalist governments—is this a reason for workers continuing to support them? Of course not.

Your contention that they “have enabled the basic needs of the working class to be rationally met” is unfounded. Workers in state-capitalist countries suffer from the same problems as workers here. Poverty, inadequate housing, inflation and a constant struggle to make ends meet while a privileged minority live in luxury and comfort are features of Russia and East Europe as much as Britain. The waste of armaments, the rape of the world’s resources and pollution of the environment exist in “rationally planned” Russia. Look at the facts!

State plans come unstuck with the same monotonous regularity as do private enterprise ones. The Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1961) promised Russian workers that government plans would increase agricultural production by 150 per cent in ten years. This would mean that “In the first decade the Soviet Union will outstrip the United States in output of the key agricultural products per head of population.” The intervening period has seen Russians entering the world markets in order to purchase massive amounts of grain (mainly American) to feed her people. Eastern Europe has been no more successful in this respect. Food shortages are common and what is available is costing more. Indeed many East European countries are relying more and more on what is left of the private sector in agriculture by giving cash grants to stimulate production.

State capitalism retains class divisions and solves no working class problems. The only escape from exploitation and subjugation remains Socialism.

Editors.

Art & the Ruling Class

The article “Art and Civilization” claims that only the social and economic environment explain how man acquires certain aesthetic tastes and conceptions. I certainly cannot agree with this view all the way. Some people have very little taste for art at all. The vast majority of workers would be bored stiff if they were made to go into an art gallery. You just cannot explain all art through economics.

Economic phenomena and intellectual phenomena are just not one and the same thing. The ruling ideas of any age may be the ideas of the ruling class of the time, but the ruling class did not paint the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo did. Certainly he had to have the material to work with, but it was his creation. A poet must have something to work with as well, but to say Schiller would never have written Laura am Klavier if no piano and no Laura existed would be nonsense.

A windmill cannot make meal unless it is fed with grain, but it is not the grain that runs the mill, but the wind. Some people could study aesthetics from now to doomsday and never produce a work of art. Beethovens and Wagners do not grow on trees; and did they get their ideas on how to compose their music from the ruling class? Burns’ “Tam O’Shanter” could be enjoyed and appreciated in a Socialist society as well as a capitalist society.

Ron Smith,

Dundee

Reply:

You are confused as to what is meant by "the social and economic environment”. Of course large numbers of workers do not care for classical arts: the ruling class does not pay to have them educated for that.

“Aesthetic tastes” generally require some leisure and comfort, both to be formed and to be pursued. That is why they are traditionally upper-class enjoyments and are held to be the “higher” ones. On the other hand, nearly all workers use taste and discrimination in their gardens, in appreciating sports, and when possible in their work. It is also true that working-class products and enjoyments are often despised but later appropriated by “the higher culture”; for example, folk art and the silent film.

Your historical examples do not support your argument. Michelangelo, like the other artists of his time, did religious paintings because a section of the ruling class — the church — paid him to. When patronage shifted from the church to the new commercial class, artists painted them instead. The impetus to musical composition has come most strongly from technical innovation, and in that respect composers are obviously dependent on social and economic change. Your windmill analogy in fact illustrates our point; the wind is still there, but windmills are no longer required.

If the ideas embodied in Beethoven’s music — or Shakespeare’s plays or Burns’s poems — did not come from society, where did they come from? The belief that the capacity to create and appreciate art is a thing apart from social development fails to explain why Beethoven is a row to Indians and Chinese, and their music to us. Only historical materialism gives an adequate explanation of these phenomena; without it people can, as you say, “study aesthetics from now to doomsday”.

Editors.

Getting round the world 

I have been an advocate of Socialism for many years now, in pre-war days I enjoyed listening to Harry Martin on Tower Hill. There is one point on which I would like some information. How is Socialism going to be established throughout the world at the same time? Seeing that one of the fundamental aims is the abolition of money. I cannot see that it is possible to establish it in one country at a time. I should be very grateful if you could put me right on this.

R. Phillips

Reply:

We agree with your view that Socialism cannot be established in one country at a time. As capitalism is the dominant form of society today, the problem created by it are also apparent throughout the world. Members of the working class internationally are therefore having similar problems to one another. However they are constantly misled by non-revolutionary political organisations that capitalism will, at some time, begin to work in their interests.

We can see no fundamental differences in the problems facing the working class in, say, the United States, Russia or Australia, but assuming that large numbers of workers in one part of the globe began to reject the false arguments of the capitalist parties and recognised the need for Socialism ahead of other workers, there is every reason to believe that interest in their ideas would be generated in a very short space of time among members of the working class in different parts of the globe.

One of the techniques which capitalism has developed to a tremendous degree is the facility of high-speed global communications. Socialist-conscious workers would use such facilities to the full in order to propagate their ideas to workers in other countries. They will do so recognising that Socialism can only be introduced by a united international working class. They will also do so in the knowledge that the solution to capitalism’s problems is the same for themselves as for fellow workers throughout the world.

Editors.

GLC Election (1981)

Party News from the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Elsewhere in this issue there are details of public meetings and activities for the Party’s GLC election campaign in Islington South and Finsbury. Since last month’s column, which announced that Barry McNeeney will be the Socialist candidate for the election, there has been a significant change in the state of affairs in our constituency: Douglas Eden, the “leader” of the Social Democratic Alliance, has announced that he will be standing in Islington South and Finsbury "to appeal to Labour voters who remember the Labour Party in the mould of Lord George Brown’’. (We presume that he will be trying to find them in the local pubs.) Lord George "will be campaigning for him in Islington’’ (Islington Gazette, 13/3/81). Combined with a proposed electoral pact with the Liberals, we suspect that this might be the kiss of death for the so-called social democrats. Eden is to be challenged to come and defend his views on April 16th when a public meeting at the Prince Albert pub, Wharfdale Road will be asking “Who Are The Social Democrats?" The Islington Gazette has published a letter from a Party member which made clear the SPGB's principled opposition to all other parties. We are hoping that the correspondence will continue (there has already been one letter in response from a "social democrat"). The campaign is going to cost us more money than is readily available and so we once again appeal to you to dip into your pockets and send us whatever you can afford towards the greatest cause facing humanity today.

Current Jargon (1982)

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Arguing with left-wing groups is not always a useful way for socialists to spend their time, but it’s difficult to resist when they are so willing to take up the role of fall-guys to the socialist case. One such group which often attends on the SPGB is the International Communist Current; our opponents in several recent debates.

Outwardly their talk and publications are forbidding, unless you have a political appetite that relishes jargon. “Bourgeoisie”, “decadent” and “reactionary” are the ICC’s favourite words. Trade union leaders are always “derailing the workers”, politicians are always uttering “verbiage” and the proletariat are always being exhorted to “generalise their struggles”. Not bad sentiments really, except that they lose their descriptive power when you read them ten times in a single journal. Nevertheless, some do adjust to this form of political communication because it always gives the impression of familiarity, like a collage of well-known newspaper headlines gummed onto a canvas. Those members of the ICC with whom I have argued are among the most committed political people I know. Perhaps the jargon and the commitment are linked. For if you exchange the power of creative expression for a set of ready-made phrases, that only make sense when bolted together in particular ways, then you cease to be able to describe the world if you change your political position. And if you do, you must suffer a period of communicative incoherence.

Strangely, the case of the ICC is quite unlike their mechanical language. They delight in and glorify spontaneous action by the working class. Whenever some workers down tools or typewriters and strike or occupy their workplaces, this fills the ICC with hope for the revolution. Their publications are full of details about strike committee meetings around the world and they devote much space to encouraging attempts to seize control of an industry by councils of workers.

It is here that the ICC display an amiable, if childlike, character. Their sensitivity to the economic and social difficulties of the workers makes them lionise those who express militant discontent. An ICC member in an occupied factory would count him or herself as one among the potential key actors at a possible turning-point in history.

So great is their respect for spontaneous expression in the economic class struggle, that they build their programme of action around an international expansion of strike committees or workers councils. Themselves they see as providing the missing link between anarcho-syndicalism and the vision of socialism carried by the SPGB, repeated in their principles:

   Socialism, the mode of social reproduction initiated by the workers’ councils, is not ‘workers’ self-management’ or ‘nationalisations’. Socialism requires the conscious abolition by the working class of capitalist social relations based on the law of value, such as wage labour, commodity production, national frontiers, and the construction of a world human community. (International Review, May 1976, back page)

Urge the workers’ councils on, they say, and these will spontaneously throw up political institutions able to dictate the will of the workers, overcoming the capitalist class and their governments. From this exercise of power by the workers will arise full socialist consciousness in an international workers’ councils movement, that can then be used as an untainted vehicle for a complete revolution; in much the way that the SPGB says the parliaments of the world could be.

The fragmentary and local nature of workers’ councils means that their solidarity is easily broken by very ordinary propaganda from the employers. While the massive effort required to create and co-ordinate a world-wide council movement is likely to trigger invasions, or wars, in the countries so disturbed.

Anyway, the existence of the SPGB is a standing refutation of the ICC claim that all who advocate “revolutionary parliamentarism” become corrupted and absorbed into capitalism.

B. K. McNeeney

Art and Civilization (1975)

From the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Art Historians apply their knowledge of the lives of great men from the past; kings, artists, sculptors, writers and so on, and assess the worth of past ages on the basis of work done during the period. Socialists have a better approach. They apply the materialist conception of history. Only the social and economic environment explains how man acquires certain aesthetic tastes and conceptions. Above the level of barbarism, that environment is determined as much by the mechanics of the class struggle as by nature, while the majority of the population—slaves, serfs and the like— have remained passive for long periods. So we may say that the ruling ideas of any age, are the ideas of the ruling class of the time. The history of art is one continuous proof of this statement.

EGYPT. What’s left after an empire lasting 3000 years? Little more than the tombs and monuments of the pharaohs. The size of the pyramids makes them the epitome of slave-state architecture. Long since looted of their wealth, but inside there are the frescoes: the paintings on the walls—all with one subject. The dead pharaoh. The compositions are all about his life; how many slaves, wives, subjects he had. The battles he won with his armies. There are even illustrations of his favourite sports, hawking and fishing. Strikingly, the pharaoh is always portrayed larger than his subjects. Women smaller than men. Slaves a different colour altogether. All of this gives one a picture of the social hierarchy in Ancient Egypt. It was a neo-romantic civilization. The dead were worshipped.

More, the pharaoh was expected to rise from the dead. The pictures are, therefore, subordinated to the one end of informing him, when he woke up, of his past history, his greatness and the shape his body should reassume out of his embalmed tissue. This is the key to an understanding of Egyptian life-painting. All the figures are portrayed in one general pose, displaying the most typical views of their separate limbs. Heads in profile, to show the cranial curve, facial features, chin and neck. Torso and hips in a front view, showing the triangulation between the shoulders and waist and the shape of the pelvic bone. Both arms extended left and right, one palm outermost, the other innermost. The legs were both in profile, each foot pointing the same way, showing the inside and outside of foot, leg and knee. No painting survives from Egypt which did not assume this form. Therefore the ideas and needs of the ruling class, determined the artist’s and the public’s conception of beauty.

CLASSICAL GREECE. Athens was one of the first places in Europe where the old system of tribal councils gave way to government by the city-state. The social structure for them was: - patrician, plebian, slave. History for them ran from the battle of the Gods and the Titans, to the interlocking of heavenly spheres. From the Heraclitean fire to the eternal flux and slow change. The ruling class needed to promote this idea of harmony; their civilization was top-heavy with slaves. Twenty slaves for every free man! And great restrictions on employment for poor freemen. The art and architecture of the time was the ruling class’s propaganda against social unrest.

Have a look at the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. Notice how geometrically harmonic are the bodies of these heroic men and women. The sculptor built up the proportion of his figures from one basic dimension: the distance between the elbow and the wrist. The perfect man or woman was one whose body, when stood with feet that much apart, formed a series of equilateral triangles. Most humans are not good enough to model for a Greek statue. Neither were the Greeks! It was just a false theory, a ruling idea imposed upon nature. This is how you account for the ridiculously small heads on the statues by Praxiteles; the continuous line between their foreheads and noses: there was a secondary system of triangulation for the face as well!

ROME. Much that is true of Greece applies to Rome also. This can be illustrated from one Roman building: the Pantheon. The temple of all the gods. The Roman empire had continuous trouble on its borders. The marauding tribes of well-organized barbarians had to be placated. One way of doing this was to find a place in your temple for a statue of the enemy’s god, then invite the enemy chief to Rome to worship it. The Greek temple plan wasn’t much good for this. The barbarian shrines were a circle of tree-trunks with a conical thatch, an altar in the centre and a hole in the roof to let out the smoke. So the Romans built their enormous Pantheon on just these lines.

From within it is a ring of pillars supporting a celestory, with blind niches holding statues of the minor gods; below and between the pillars, are the shrines of the major gods. In the centre was an altar, while, the roof was a spherical web of arches. An arch needs a keystone to hold it up. But the Romans calculated that if they cross-vaulted arches to build up a dome, they could take out the large centre-stone and the whole structure would stand confined by its own stress. The building would then be lit directly from above. It worked. The barbarians were duly impressed and the Roman civilization lasted for another 350 years. This form of Architecture was admired as much for its political usefulness to the ruling class, as for anything else. Beauty, once again, born out of expediency.

MEDIEVAL EUROPE. The Cathedral Church. Here the decorative artist, architect and sculptor had but one patron—the church. The basis of Catholicism is mystery. No revealed religion can stand up to open enquiry. So the huge gothic churches they built had to be full of mystery. The large congregation was shut off from the sacrament by a tall choir-screen. Daylight had to be the tinted light of a religious vision. The wall hardly exists in a gothic church; just holes between piers and arches—all filled with lead - framed painted glass. The statuary carved on these piers and arches shows how closely art is connected with the ruling class’s ideas. Despite the tradition of free-standing statues from Greece and Rome; these are completely tied to the structure of the church and reflect the artist’s dependence. They are slim vertical figures and are mirrored in the dress of the time; with its tall hats and slender costumes, perhaps for people who went through narrow pointed doorways. Architecture and fashion for the ruling class were connected for the first time.

CAPITALISM. The Industrial Revolution. Once the first stage of the movement towards enclosing the land was completed in the 18th century and great capital accumulation had enriched the aristocracy; they began to improve their lands, have their parks landscaped and country palaces built. In literature this period sees the beginning of the romantic revival. In art the sudden renewal of landscape painting, by Gainsborough, Constable, Turner and others. The popular conception of a good landscape painting still survives.

Among civilized people the technique of production more rarely shows direct influence upon art. This fact, to the superficial observer a contradiction to the materialist conception of history, in reality, when considered in the profound manner of a sociologist gives it brilliant support.

We can now develop upon this conclusion to Plechanov’s essay Materialism and Art. He wrote this at the end of the 19th century. Perhaps he was too close to the machine-made decorations of the time to see that they would be known as art. Some of the wrought-iron stair bannisters of the period were very beautiful. The Eiffel Tower and the early iron bridges were new ideas in three-dimensional form. The difficulty with even the best industrial products under capitalism, is that they are built for profit. Who has ever looked at one of the latest engineering “triumphs” and not felt that it could have been improved with a little more art and a little less profit? wasted sentiment, of course; capitalism will not work that way. But sometimes, by chance, it makes half-art.

The best example of techniques of production influencing art is that of the painter Seurat and “pointilism”. This style being a reflection of camera technology and research into the nature of light and colour, which produced the chemical pigments needed for the fast-dyeing of fibres. All the colours of the rainbow produce white light. Seurat found that by clustering a multitude of points of pure colour he could suggest lightness or darkness more after the manner of nature.

Since Plechanov’s time we have seen prefabricated “component art”, “chrome-plated art”, “collage”, and art formed from ready-made industrial products—all perfect examples of how the business of capitalism is beautified by art. Civilization remains the attempt on the part of the ruling class to impose order and permanence upon the wealth they possess.

What will be the conception of beauty under Socialism? Without a ruling class, will we have a unified art? It will be socialized, not civilized art. Human life shows infinite variety and for the first time, the people in an industrialized world will create an art which is a reflection of their own lives. We can’t use life under capitalism as a guide to Socialism. A few tribal peoples hold to conceptions of beauty which are attractive to people dissatisfied with capitalism, but that is not the answer.

Socialism will produce something other than the vicarious satisfactions of capitalism. Fewer people will want passively to look at works of art; many will want to create socially. One can imagine artists, artisans and craftsmen swarming over large-scale projects; but instead of being slaves toiling over pyramids, they will be free men and women creating their own kinds of beauty by their own conceiving.

B. K. McNeeney

The Social Revolution (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

An immediate and fundamental change in the basis of society. Perhaps, when younger and struck with some glaring contradiction of capitalism, you felt the need for a reorganization in human affairs. Eliminating such superfluous stuff as money, you went on to build a model of this new, perfect world inside your head. Its characteristics were peace, harmony, plenty and so on. As you filled in the details the picture grew clearer and more insistent. You began to question your friends upon their views. Finally, you put forward your ready-made utopia and asked them to follow you.

Suddenly it seemed as if everybody had been rehearsing a hundred objections to your scheme beforehand. It won’t work! You can’t change human nature! Who’ll do the dirty work? There’ll be no incentive to produce! What about the lazy people? Overwhelmed by this tremendous opposition, you had to concede the impracticalities in a few bits of your new scheme. Whereupon the completed system became a patchwork of ideas and one of your friends, who was taking O-level Economics, quoted a passage from the Old Testament, proving conclusively that capitalism had always existed as the natural state of mankind.

This onslaught beat your dream world to the back of your consciousness; parts of it to be resurrected only when sardonic comment upon the world was called for. But even a suggestion of your old utopia received so much stick from your friends that it made your position untenable. A year later, upon hearing something reminiscent of your old view from a stranger, you caught yourself saying — “Yes, I wanted to change the world too when I was younger. It’s part of the process of growing up. You’ll learn!’’ — You’d come full circle and disowned your brainchild! What went wrong?

The source of your error lies in history. You stopped short at Fourier, Owen and Proudhon. Though you may never have heard of these people, yet you were tracing, in your mind and conversation, the practical steps which these men and their followers took to remodel a bit of society upon different lines. Like your theoretical notion, they all came to grief.

If you followed the steps exactly you will have dived straight into trade unionism after abandoning Utopias. Owen did. The Grand National Trade Union which he helped to found, grew to a million members and then petered out. The General Strike of 1926 and the ease with which it was crushed makes plain what is the result of trade unions essaying confrontation with the State.

You may have begun your encounter with the union by advocating protracted strikes — “Bring the capitalists to their knees!” Which advice foundered upon the objections of the plodders, who said; “The masters will just starve us out, they can live off their fat in the Bahamas — we can’t. We never get back from a strike what we lose in pay.” Just like the New Model Unions of the 1850s!

Now if you are an archetype you will have remembered that your uncle was once the lord mayor of Louth. After a long talk with him you joined the local Labour Party. Talked to all and sundry about “Keeping our feet upon the floor of the House of Commons. Doing something practical NOW!” It had all the charm of your early utopian illusions — with none of the drawbacks. You could still foment about wicket capitalists, while at the opposite pole, you dealt in wage-price indices and the regulation of “mixed economies”.

Here is where we found you. On a wet Saturday in September, back where you started, an individual member of the working class. Your mind having reached the peak of its political evolution in society; you bought from the SPGB a copy of the Socialist Standard. The solution is now staring you in the face.

At first it seems like a refrain from the past. Common ownership? Abolition of the wages system? Classless, moneyless society? Production for use — not profit? Free access! Only, the details are missing. The SPGB does not paint a picture of the future society. In this journal there is no blueprint for Socialism. We only say to the mass of the population who, whether they know it or not, are in the working class: pursue your class interest.

Human life is essentially practical. Never mind what men say, think or write — in practice they must prove the truth. Can Socialism be established by the Labour Party? No matter how many workers say or think that it can, how do they act? When the Labour Party is running capitalism, do the workers abandon the economic struggle? Do they give up their trade union organizations? Of course not. Thus, their theory is at variance with their practice.

Similarly regarding life under capitalism. Do wage increases cause inflation? Is the “vicious spiral” all the fault of greedy workers? Never mind what economists and governments say, what do they do? Governments, when they have to, can end the inflation which they began by expanding an inconvertible currency. This action will prove all of their post pronouncements on inflation to have been nonsense. A glance at history, however, will show it makes no difference to capitalism and the working class: with or without inflation things are just the same.

Underlying all government propaganda on inflation is their basic need to sustain the interests of their capitalist class. Wage increases reduce profits. Capitalism’s apologists may deny that the class struggle exists. But on the annual balance sheets of trading and industrial concerns, evidence of the class war is written. In other words — at the highest level of practicality that capitalism assumes, in its budgetary affairs, the age-old conflict between classes is taken for granted.

Recognize the type of historical process by which changes in society are brought about. To introduce Socialism you must get yourself into an organization with that single purpose. Then help convince other workers that Socialism will be in their interest. But before you can introduce the fundamental change from private to common ownership, you must capture political power; to ensure that the state forces of coercion cannot be used against you. Your numerical superiority must be demonstrated, that means the ballot and the representative institutions must be yours also. This plan of action has been the programme of the SPGB for 71 years. We are the only political party which has succeeded in remaining a revolutionary party. Showing that the centuries-long evolution of political parties has not been in vain. And in practice, that is how you prove the truth in politics.

That viewpoint survives which is best fitted to survive. It must be capable of comprehending the world of the past, present and future. The object and declaration of principles of the SPGB express the working-class viewpoint. Against all comers they have never been found wanting. This organization has adhered to them without compromise or expedient. We urge you to make them your own.

B.K. McNeeney

Why Socialists are contesting Islington South and Finsbury (1981)

Party News from the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1922, after Mallory had turned back from the north face of Everest at 27,000 feet, he gave lectures on climbing beyond the height of human survival. Baffled listeners could not understand the point of such a man-versus-mountain contest. Why did he still want to go back and climb it? “Because it’s there” said Mallory.

Socialists are contesting Islington South and Finsbury in this month's GLC elections because it’s there. Were our resources and members greater we would contest everything that's going. For elections are capitalism's weak spot, they are the time when the social system is up for grabs.

What could a Tory or other politician do with Islington South and Finsbury if they won a seat? Little more than sit down in the council chair provided, give and receive congratulations, then get swept away by the blizzard of capitalism. What can the councillors of Greater London do about the bomb and the dole queue, urban decay, shrinking allocations of money from the central government and wages that don’t match prices for the workers? Hardly more than shake hands and commiserate with those who suffer. Who can plan activity in any large city, when practically everything that goes on involves the chaos of buying and selling commodities? Who can guarantee that goods and services will be there for all, in the face of the laws of this society; no cash, no sale; no profit, no production?

Yet socialists are contesting Islington South and Finsbury. In our campaign there will be no shaking hands all round, no kissing of babies and no election promises. The job of the candidate will not cease when his bottom hits the council chair. We are after this constituency as the first step in the working class conquest of the powers of government.

Put your own, your parents and your grandparents experience together for once. A society with a labour market where people are bought and sold like, goods cannot be governed in your interest. Because of this we do not stand as governors of the GLC. Socialists stand only as potential representatives of those workers who want to capture the powers of government. Once a majority of such seats ate gained locally and nationally, then the government and employers of the world will be paralysed, unable to oppose the reorganisation of society into a harmonious commonwealth.

Workers of Islington South and Finsbury: In the past most of you have not bothered to vote in the GLC elections. Implicitly, you may have felt that, whoever gets elected, they will do nothing for the workers. And you were right! Whichever party you put into government, still the same social system continues, grinding out problems for you and riches for your employers. What then have you got to lose by becoming supporters of the SPGB? Capitalist society will tick over in the same way under Labour, Tory or whatever. Withdraw your consent and support from this society and the way to peaceful revolution is open. You can help to get socialism.

The meaning of socialism is simple to grasp, and grasp it you must, if you wish to support it. Socialism describes the future world that socialists think you ought to desire as the creators of wealth. It will be one world of common ownership, democratic control and free access to the products of labour. A social system like that is yours for the taking. It will be a struggle to get. but there will be a new world waiting for all at the end.

B. K. McNeeney

Shape of things to come (1981)

Book Review from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee? Langley Technical Services, 1980.

This is a tantalizing, awkward but informative little book. The question that Cooley does not answer is whether and in what way a socialist society could use the new technology—that is, automation, chips, computer aided design, computer-linked robotic production and so on. But he skirts around it and answers a hundred other related questions, so that all may find something useful here.

Cooley was a design engineer with Lucas Aerospace (he was sacked quite recently for taking time off work to propagandise the views in this book). His own attitude to modern technology shows an interesting evolution; he began by assuming that technology was neutral—that computers were inherently useful but that their use was perverted by what capitalist society demanded; he now thinks that the technology of any society is an integral part of its politics. The last point is worth labouring. Cooley holds that with a change in the politics of capitalism the uses of technology could change. Correspondingly, he holds that with a change in society the shape of technology must change. Consecutively, he holds that the drive to change society is linked with the drive to find socially harmonious uses for the new technology. For him these sum up the human/technology relationship. Such a position has led him to champion the Lucas Aerospace Corporate plan—a trade union-backed series of alternative production projects that are offered to industry, like vehicles for spina bifida cases in place of nuclear weapons.

Cooley thinks that something has been lacking in the socialist analysis of science and technology. We concentrate too much on the contradictions of distribution (poverty amid plenty) and neglect the contradictions of production (technological systems that produce an abundance of products by degrading skilled work). As a corrective he suggests that we should question the assumptions embodied in science and technology and find out whether the ideology of capitalism has helped to determine the experimental designs and theories upon which they are based. This balanced analysis would help us to determine the types of technology that would be compatible with a socialist society.

Computer aids to production have become very sophisticated over the last decade and a wide range of engineering components can be produced, inspected and delivered under continuous data processing control—including the design and planning of the product. It is important not to miss the last point. Gone are the days when a master craftsman suggested a new idea to a draughtsman and worked in conjunction with him to develop its design, materials, process treatments, properties and conditions of use. With data processing engineering there is only the draughtsman who draws the original design on a digitally coordinated board, translates this spatial information into numerical terms and types it into a central processor; the computer then specifies the entire sequence of movements required by all the machines under its control that are used in the making of the product. The other point not to miss is that this system works only for the range of product types and production operations that are given in the control programme, innovation outside this range is impossible; for that the system has to be re-programined, rebuilt or even replaced. The outcome is not merely that creative and co-operative work among craftsmen and designers is redundant, but that in factories with engineering data processing it becomes impossible.

The problem for a socialist society using this equipment would be to recognise when the process was destroying the potential for creative labour, or impeding technological innovation, or both. On this matter there can be no other guide than the tacit knowledge, skills and expertise of individuals; but on the face of it these may not be acceptable, because when this computer-controlled equipment produces a design for a component at the limit of its control programme, a craftsman may see it and only be able to say “it doesn’t look right to me”. Whereas the writer of the control programme and the system designers can produce masses of technical argument to prove that it will work, just by pressing the read-out buttons. Moreover the new components may function for several years before they fail and justify the craftsman’s intuition. The problem resolves into a social question—how much influence respectively do you allow the technical expert and the practical craftsman over production decisions when they are in dispute? In simple terms—who has the power to decide and how? If socialist society were to use present technology then its democracy could be tested by controversies about technics versus skill.

Computer aided design presents more problems still. There are now systems where a designer works with a light pen directly onto a video display unit, linked to a computer programmed with a design package. The designer has a basic idea for a building, he draws the rough outline on the screen and then gets the computer to manipulate this basic material with the set of subroutines in the programme. Effectively the computer can turn a few lines into a fully drawn Greek temple, or turn the basic specification for a tower block into a picture and project it on the screen in dramatic perspective. It can construct and display a picture of a non-existent structure in an architectural setting so that you can judge whether the proposed building will harmonise with the environment and will even give you a picture of what the outside world would look like from inside a building that was only an idea in your head a few minutes before.

“Terrific!” may be your first response to all this. Cooley suggests that “ugh!” may be your second. It hardly needs saying that the use of this equipment to capitalist society is to reduce reliance upon a range of architectural, draughting and civil engineering workers; resulting in redundancies, cutting of costs, increasing output and so on; bringing the design process under the “scientific management” of capital.

But what use would this equipment be to a socialist society? Once again there could be clashes between those who felt that architectural aesthetics were being obliterated in computer simulations and, however good it seemed on the screen, it wouldn’t be right to build a Centre Point on the Acropolis—or a Centre Point anywhere for that matter. Such disputes might be the stuff of life for a socialist society. Imagine two sets of protagonists flinging themselves into such architectural discussions with the zeal of William Morris in his crusade against industrial architecture, and the propagandist power of the Futurists for modern architecture. When they had exhausted themselves, a socialist society could count heads and do what the majority wanted.

But would the battle over ideas in such cases be an equal one if computer aided design takes over? It’s an interesting question and provides the core of Cooley’s book, although he doesn’t answer it.

The trouble with computer aided design is that on a large scale it will replace intuition, creativity and the sheer tactility that goes with the craftsman’s approach to the physical nature of production. As it does so the popular notion of good design becomes just a completed decision sequence in machine code. In one way computer aided designs can always be justified, because the programmes work with a simplified model of reality that raises no decision problems. While in the sophisticated reality of the craftsman all decisions arc reached in the face of bewildering complexity. The craftsman can rarely explain how he is able to identify and locate faults in a complicated machine just by listening to it running. But the programmer can explain in a million steps how his impoverished model of reality will yet deliver the goods. As victories for computer aided design go up, says Cooley, so does our hold on reality go down and with it the direct interaction between production systems and the real world. If this technology is utilised unchanged in a socialist society then the development of production will be out of control in fact, even with the purest form of democratic control being exercised over it.

Information and understanding are the obvious keys in solving this problem. Provided that the population of a socialist world are aware of the situation then that society can provide self-adjustment processes and if they don’t work then it must abandon the technology. We must take the craftsman’s approach—suck it and see!

Cooley takes the leftist approach and strives to construct a theory of socialist development based upon current popular reactions against unemployment, nuclear power, the degradation of the natural environment and so on. The Lucas Aerospace Corporate Plan above mentioned is an example. Socialist society, says Cooley, becomes possible as the workers can conceive of an entire range of socially useful products to replace the destructive garbage that capitalism turns out. This would be an interesting point to discuss, but Cooley ruins it by describing the Russian revolution as a socialist transformation that went wrong, because Lenin introduced F. W. Taylor’s work measurement and control techniques after 1920; socialist production was thus supposed to have been converted back into capitalist toil. Howlers like this make you doubt whether he’s been talking about the same things as you all along. Particularly when he says that other countries are striving towards socialism.

How useful would computers be to a socialist world? The current crop of machines and programmes are laughably inadequate to represent even the noddy view of the capitalist system professed by bourgeois theorists. The original simulation of capitalism on a computer programme, written by Forrester in the late 1960s, was developed by Meadows, et al, in their doom-laden prophecy called Limits to Growth. Even in later sophisticated forms—Mesarovic and Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point—it still does little other than predict that what is happening now is going to continue.

Cooley may well be right in a way he doesn’t realise. Computers are electronic aids in the production of surplus value. The design and languages of electronic processors stem from and are geared to quantitative assessments of production in units of currency-business languages. Can the current range of machines be used with programmes designed to sense human needs? Can the current-programming skills of computer personnel encompass the idea of production for use and free access? Let’s all become socialists and find out.

B. K. McNeeney

Captain Anarchy (1982)

A Short Story from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Skip was squatting on a bedroll amid the wellingtons, tweed jackets, tractors and mud of a farm auction; bearded, longhaired and wearing a floppy hat, like a relic from the hippy revolution. He was on a sponsored walk from Land’s End to John O’ Groats and had come to the auction in passing. So I invited him home for tea.

You don’t often meet round the world sailors on top of a Somerset down, particularly not one with a badge on his hat that read “One World for One People”. 1 asked him how we could get such a world and shyly he put his case.

He was an anarchist down to his toenails, with a butterfly mind that flitted from hatred of the rich to contempt for the law he’d served seventeen months for vagrancy and theft. “I’ll be hitching at a roundabout”, he said, “and every police car will stop and tell me to move. They even tell me where I ought to stand on this earth! That’s really bad news! We’ve got to do away with those pigs and all their rules. We don’t need them. Everyone knows right from wrong. The law doesn’t help you in a force seven gale on the Atlantic.”

Incongruously he was a trained boat designer and builder who, as well as refitting yachts for capitalists (the bastards!), had planned and made his own dory and a junk-rigged yacht that was destroyed at anchorage in a storm. Now unemployed, his dream was to get enough money out of penny-a-mile sponsors to build a new yacht for a circumnavigation; proclaiming pacifism by example, against all the talk of politicians, with a crew of fourteen, in a boat called World Peace.

“We’ve got to destroy the concept of war” he said, warming up. I pounced: “No good, they’ll invent a new one. Even if you get rid of the rockets, tanks and guns, the armies, navies and air forces of all the nations of the world, it wouldn’t destroy war. It’s the competition between nations for markets, materials and spheres of influence that brings armies into being and drives each towards war". It was a bit too concentrated for him and he returned to the topic of his voyage.

The springs of anarchist thought are truly amazing. His boat was going to be designed and launched according to the principles of the Cabbala or Talmud! The most magical of all numbers is seven. So his boat had to be seventy-seven feet long, seven times longer than its beam, with a seven-sail schooner rig. His last boat had been launched at 7 minutes past 7, on 7 July 1977! Pressed for a reason, he twinkled and said, “it just happened that way”.

The idea of promoting an alternative way of living by high adventure is not new. In the 1930s the lone climber Maurice Wilson hoped to encourage his own brand of asceticism, fasting and peace, by conquering Everest. John Harlin, who died on the North Face of the Eiger in 1965, was a more modern example:

He was convinced that through the gospel of climbing, which he would preach in his International School, a panacea for the world’s sickness would emerge. Differences of race, colour and creed would disappear in the collective search for the truth and beauty of life as revealed by the climbing of mountains. (D. Whillans and A. Ormerod, Don Whillans, Penguin, 1976, p. 266.)

Internationally mixed expeditions are often commercially promoted using a weaker form of this sentiment, as with the Thor Heyerdal raft and boat journeys. Anyone who has read the literature of the attempts on the South Pole before the First World War must be impressed by the incredible idealism which drove men to trek across a thousand miles of ice. Yet all this heroism means nothing as far as creating a new world goes. Scott was a leader who inspires followers and patriotic death or glory boys. Harlin was a climber of incredible strength, reach and drive. Skip is a phenomenal sailor, who ran the teak-built Virtue class yacht Jan Guilder from Britain to the Azores and back in a race. Each in their own way prove only what exceptional people can do in extraordinary fields.

But the new world that Skip wants must be one which the majority can form and take full part in; what then is the use of example? The attempt to change from competitive capitalism to co-operative socialism, has nothing to do with the heroic striving after impossible goals by supermen and superwomen. It is a task for ordinary people, and must fall within the scope of ordinary lives and experience.

The romantic impulse, wherein a hero dares to do something against all the odds, while it may have spurred the early socialists to press their analysis of capitalism past the awful point where state power was challenged, has little relevance for a democratic social revolution. Socialism requires that men and women, safe in their terraces and semis, should dare, against all the heroes of capitalism who failed, to change the world, using only the ballot box.

Still, Skip and his crew might achieve something worthwhile. An anarchistic circumnavigation would knock a great big hole in the myth of the essential captain on the high seas, the capitalist of sailors ruling the waves.

Good luck Skip. I hope you get round the world. On a cold assessment your example will confuse and divert workers from the simple democratic and political solution of abolishing capitalism. Yet unreliable and quixotic as you are, I feel you will be with us on the day of revolution.

B. K. McNeeney