Che and Violence (2012)

Theatre Review from the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dirty Market are a theatre collective based in South-east London who have adopted bricolage techniques for their productions, and their most recent Be Good Revolutionaries took place at the Oval House Theatre in Kennington, London. The sources for Be Good Revolutionaries are the last letter of Che Guevara to his children, Crime on Goat Island by Ugo Betti, and  Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children.

Be Good Revolutionaries is set in the claustrophobic world of a jungle hideaway in Latin America in 1967 where a rebel leader's wife Anna (a formidable performance by Juliet Prague), and her two daughters and one son live. Into this world comes a stranger who appears to know the long-lost leader. The stranger is a ‘Martin Guerre’ character who intrudes like in the Betti novel, but his presence is disastrous like in a Roman Polanski film.

Be Good Revolutionaries is reminiscent of Brecht’s Mother Courage where the devastating effects of war are portrayed, and Brecht points out the utter blindness and futility of those hoping to profit by it. Dirty Market have adopted Brechtian techniques for this production, demonstrating the ‘estrangement’ effect by using singing and music to interrupt or comment on the action. This is memorably performed by musician-singer Rebecca Thorn.

The production is noteworthy for the design by Susan Sowerby of the Mexican ‘los dias de los muertos’ artwork, ‘ofrenda’ shrines, skeletons and ‘calavera catrinas’ which give the performance the necessary ‘latin’ American ambience. This is augmented by the choreographed movements of the children, a soundtrack of flutes, Rebecca Thorn’s accordion, gunfire and helicopter rotors which bring to mind Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Christopher Bruce’s modern ballet Ghost Dances which featured the Chilean folk of Inti Illimani. Be Good Revolutionaries is evocative of the music of songs like the Cuban ‘Guantanamera’ and Victor Jara’s Chilean anthem ‘Venceremos’.

Che Guevara’s last letter to his children contained fatherly advice in the shape of “Grow up into good revolutionaries”, “Remember that it is the Revolution which is important” and a reminder that he was “a man who acted as he thought best and who has been absolutely faithful to his convictions”. Since the 1960’s, the famous Che image has been thoroughly ‘marketed’ and exploited by western capitalism. Che was captured and executed in 1967 in Bolivia where he was attempting to export the Cuban revolution, and conduct a Maoist “protracted peoples war”. This play includes the line “People have to die for change” and a glorification of “revolution”. Such romanticising of violent insurrection, and armed struggle is fundamental to Trotskyists and Leninists but all minority violent revolutions devour their own children.

Although Cuba is very popular with the Left, it is a one-party state, there are political prisoners, no freedom of the press,  no right to strike, price controls, goods rationing, a constitution based on the USSR,  a planned economy in the USSR ‘state capitalist’ mode, and essentially there  is ‘commodity nature of production’, and therefore is not a socialist society.

Steve Clayton

Mocking Hitlerism (2012)

Theatre Review from the December 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, written in 1941 and first staged in 1958 was recently revived at the Chichester Theatre with a mesmerising performance by Henry Goodman as Ui.

Brecht’s play is an extended metaphor for the rise to power of Hitler with the aim that ‘the great political criminals must be completely stripped bare and exposed to ridicule,’ and to show that it was ‘resistible’. The crisis in capitalism, the support of industrial capitalism, and the failure of bourgeois liberal democracy contributed to the rise to power of the Nazis.

Brecht recasts Hitler’s rise in terms of a small-time gangster’s takeover of the greengrocery trade in Chicago (Germany), and all the major figures are featured: Dogsborough (President Hindenburg) and Hitler’s henchmen Giri, Givola, and Roma (Goering, Goebbels, and Roehm). The Warehouse Fire of scene 7 is the Reichstag Fire; a St Valentine’s Day Massacre in scene 11 is the 1934 ‘Night of the Long Knives’; and the Dock Aid Scandal of scenes 1-4 is the real-life ‘Osthilfeskandal’ (East Aid scandal).

East Aid was the ‘Weimar’ Republic’s financial support programme to heavily mortgaged Junker estates in East Prussia. This was at the same time as stringent economic and deflationary policies, 30% unemployment, and the DANAT bank collapse.  The East Aid became a major scandal in January 1933 when it was discovered the Junkers had spent the money on luxuries and weakened the position of President Hindenburg, which in turn led to pressure from the capitalist class to appoint Hitler as Chancellor.

In 1927, Baron Von Oldenburg-Januschau, a friend and neighbour of Hindenburg, got up a subscription from industrial capitalists to buy the President the highly indebted former family estate of Neudeck (the country house of Dogsborough in scene 4).  To avoid inheritance taxes, the estate was put in the name of son and heir, Colonel Oskar Von Hindenburg.  This scandal came to light at the same time as East Aid.

These scandals prompt Ui in scene 4 to declaim: ‘Say, that’s corrupt!’

Brecht shows the capitalist class helping Hitler come to power (‘in den sattle heben’ – lifting Hitler into the saddle).  Hitler courted the capitalists in his 1932 speech to the Industry Club in Düsseldorf.  The Nazis offered the capitalist class reforms to capitalism by crushing organised trade unions and ‘Bolshevism’, developing economic autarky, and rearmament as a prelude to the search for ‘lebensraum’ and markets and raw materials for the capitalist class.  

Brecht’s aesthetics and Epic Theatre were influenced by Karl Korsch who emphasised Marxism as heir to Hegel. Brecht referred to Korsch as ‘my Marxist Teacher’.

There is a powerful speech in scene 9 directed at the Nazis: ‘Help! Help! Don’t run away. Who’ll testify? They gun us down like rabbits. Won’t anybody help? You murderers! Fiend! Monster! Shit! You’d make an honest piece of shit cry out…’

In the epilogue Brecht warns: ‘though the bastard is dead, the bitch that bore him is again in heat.’

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: Life of Galileo (2013)

The Mixed Media Column from the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht

The RSC recently staged Bertolt Brecht’s 1947 play Life of Galileo at the Swan Theatre in Stratford upon Avon with Ian McDiarmid in the title role. Galileo substantiated Copernican theories of the heliocentric nature of the universe (‘the light of science shone as Galileo set out to prove that the sun is fixed and the earth is on the move’), which was counter to the Roman Catholic Church teaching of Aristotelian geocentric ‘crystal spheres’.

Galileo is part of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution when science emerged (‘the old age has passed, this is a new age’) to meet the material needs of the rising capitalist class. In physics there are the fixed laws of Newton, and in the philosophy of Cartesian Dualism the body is a machine, and Descartes ‘sees with the eyes of the manufacturing period.’ In Scene 11 Vanni, the Iron Foundry owner says to Galileo ‘we manufacturers are on your side’, and in Scene 1 the university curator states ‘how greatly is the science of physics indebted to the call for better looms.’ Scientist JD Bernal describes the period as one in which ‘religion, superstition and fear are replaced by reason and knowledge.’

Galileo is a sensualist for knowledge but also a financial opportunist who is ignorant of ‘Realpolitik’ in the Florentine world of Machiavellian ideals. Brecht believes Galileo is a ‘social criminal’. After his recantation before the Inquisition, Galileo becomes a servant of authority rather than asserting the right of science to transform the world for the benefit of the whole of humanity. For Brecht, science stood at the barricades with Galileo, but scientists betrayed their calling by neglecting their wider social and political responsibilities. Life of Galileo is really about the atomic bomb, the concept of science for the people and the responsibility of science to society. Brecht was dismissive of Einstein who suggested that atomic technology be withheld from the Soviet Union and of Oppenheimer when he had a change of heart after the H-bomb. Brecht’s Galileo can be usefully compared to the 1962 play The Physicists by Durrenmatt.

The scientific nature of Marxism was very important for Brecht. He valued doubt, criticism and free enquiry and believed the most important line in Galileo was ‘my task is not to prove that I have been right up till now, but to find out whether I have been right.’

In Scene 10 the people sing ‘All you who live on earth in wretchedness, Arise! Only obedience holds us back from earthly bliss. Who wouldn’t rather be his own liege lord and master?’

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: The Threepenny Opera' (2014)

The Mixed Media column from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Threepenny Opera
Last year there was a semi-staging by director Ted Huffman of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank. This performance was sung in German with English subtitles and had a linking narration specially written by Brecht for concert performances such as this.

The Threepenny Opera is an adaptation of John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera which is a satire on the corruption of the Walpole government in the aftermath of the financial crash of the South Sea Company. John Gay had a relish for low life, an affinity shared with Brecht who set The Threepenny Opera in a Soho of the lumpenproletariat of thieves, beggars, and whores.

Max Hopp as the Narrator sang Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (The Ballad of Mack the Knife). Max Hopp recently had a leading role in the William S Burroughs-Tom Waits ‘musical fable’ The Black Rider at the Theater Basel.

Low-Dive Jenny performed by Meow Meow sang Seeräuberjenny (Pirate Jenny): ‘you toss me a penny, and I’m always quick to thank/Even though you see my rags/And fifty canons/Will fire at the shore/My Sirs, there your laughter will stop/Because the walls will fall/And the city will be level with the ground.’

Mark Padmore as Macheath and Nicholas Folwell as ‘Tiger’ Brown, the corrupt police chief duet on the Kanonen-Song (Cannon Song): ‘young men’s blood goes on being red/And the army goes on recruiting.’

Macheath and Jenny duet on the materialist II Dreigroschenfinale, Denn wovon lebt der Mensch? (Second Threepenny Opera Finale, What Keeps Mankind Alive); ‘Food is the first thing: morals follow on/You gentlemen who think you have a mission/to purge us from the seven deadly sins/ Should first sort out the basic food position.’

The Threepenny Opera is notable for Weill’s music which was scored for a jazz dance band drawing on the rhythms and idioms of the dance music of the time. Weill’s music is a reaction to the bourgeois genre of operetta. He emulates John Gay in his use of vernacular musical styles.

Brecht aims his satire at the corruption, hypocrisy, greed, self-satisfaction of the capitalist class, the venality of aspirations to bourgeois respectability and what the bourgeoisie had in common with ruthless criminals. Macheath says ‘What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?’

Theodore Adorno judged it the most important event since Berg’s Wozzeck and Brecht later wrote ‘young proletarians suddenly came to the theatre, in some cases for the first time, and then quite often came back.’

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission Engineers (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission Engineers (BTTTE) are the live performance extension of a trio of sound artists: Melanie Clifford, Howard Jacques and Nick Wilsdon who produce the BTTTE radio programme for the London radio arts station Resonance 104.4 fm. Last October BTTTE presented their Little Red Set: ‘dialectical cabaret in song, sound and exquisite hope’ at the Club Integral at the Grosvenor pub in Stockwell, South London.

BTTTE sang in Magyar Hidegen Fujnak a Szelek (Cold Winds are Blowing), a Hungarian folk song, the music collected by Zoltan Kallos in 1969 in Ördöngösfüzes in Mezoseg, today in Romania. The folk song is a prisoners’ song, a yearning to be free, to break the chains of oppression, reminding us of the Magyar working class attempts at controlling their own lives in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic or the 1956 Hungarian revolution which was crushed by the Russian Army.

The Song of Investment Capital Overseas written by Chris Cutler and Fred Frith of Avant-rock group Art Bears in 1980 is a satire on capitalist globalisation: ‘I empty villages, I burn their houses down, I set up factories, Lay out plantations, And bring prosperity to the poorer nations.’

BTTTE sang in German Epitaph 1919: Die rote Rosa written by Bertolt Brecht and set to music in 1928 by Kurt Weill as The Berlin Requiem: ‘Red Rosa now has vanished too. Where she lies is hid from view. She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.’ Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by Freikorps troops during the Spartacist working class uprising in Berlin in January 1919.

The Spanish El derecho de vivir en paz (The Right to Live in Peace) was written by Chilean folk singer Victor Jara who was murdered in the coup which overthrew the Allende government in 1973.

They finished with The Internationale written by Eugène Pottier: ‘if these vultures disappeared one of these days, the sun will shine forever, this is the final struggle, let us group together and tomorrow the Internationale will be the human race.’ It was written during the 1871 Paris Commune, of which Edouard Vaillant wrote: ‘If socialism wasn’t born of the Commune, it is from the Commune that dates that portion of international revolution that no longer wants to give battle in a city in order to be surrounded and crushed, but which instead wants, at the head of the proletarians of each and every country, to attack national and international reaction and put an end to the capitalist regime.’

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: ‘In the Jungle of the Cities’, & ‘Kill Your Darlings’ (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Jungle of the Cities by Bertolt Brecht

While Brecht’s Arturo Ui was in London’s West End, the Arcola Theatre in Dalston in East London produced Brecht’s early play Im Dickicht der Städte (In the Jungle of the Cities) directed by Peter Sturm. Im Dickicht is a bewildering and bizarre play. After its May 1923 première in Munich it became notorious for its impenetrability, was seen as incomprehensible so it was deemed to be Jewish or Bolshevik or ‘Modern’ or all three. In a Munich which was a hotbed of Nazism in the pre-Beer Hall putsch days, performances of the play were disrupted several times by the Nazis. Its first English language production would be in New York City in 1960 by Judith Malina and the Living Theatre.

Brecht’s play is set in a mythical Chicago in the years 1912-15, although the mythologised wilderness of the modern city he called Chicago could also be Berlin, what he called ‘some bleak anywhere’, a city which had ‘become wild, dark, mysterious.’ The play portrays the brutality of urban capitalism, the city in the grip of rampant capitalism and ‘the big city as a jungle… the enmity of the metropolis, its malignant stony consistency, its Babylonian confusion of languages.’ Brecht was inspired by the popular Danish gangster novel Hjulet (The Wheel) by JV Jensen, Rimbaud’s poem cycle A Season in Hell, Schiller’s play The Robbers, and the Upton Sinclair novel The Jungle which ‘set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit.’

Im Dickicht is the story of a savage battle between two men; Schlink, a Malay lumber dealer played by Jeffrey Kissoon, and George Garga, a book clerk in a lending library played by Joseph Arkley. Brecht wrote that poet Rimbaud was a model for the character of George Garga ‘a German translation from the French into the American.’ This struggle is at times an abstract wrestling match which can be seen as the class struggle in metaphorical terms. The relationship between Schlink and Garga is sado-masochistic at times, has elements of homosexuality which evokes the power struggle and relationship between the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine.

Im Dickicht could be the struggle against the pressing reality of the modern city, the human isolation and atomisation of individuals in capitalism where in crowded cities people are essentially alone. Schlink says ‘If you cram a ship full to bursting with human bodies, they’ll all freeze with loneliness.’ In this early play Brecht does not demonstrate his mature Marxist aesthetic with its clear political messages.

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Kill Your Darlings by Austin Bunn

Director John Krokidas and writer Austin Bunn’s 2013 film Kill Your Darlings draws on Jack Kerouac’s novel Vanity of Duluoz, portraying the early years (1943-44) of the ‘Beat Generation’ in New York City of Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), William Burroughs (Ben Foster), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan).

We meet Allen Ginsberg at home in New Jersey with his poet father Louis and his mother Naomi. Louis was a socialist, his parents had been active in the Yiddish Arbeiter Circle, and he went with his father to lectures by Eugene Debs, IWW founder and Socialist Party of America Presidential candidate. Louis named his first son after Debs: ‘He was magnificent. All the ironies of the capitalist system came blazing forth. He was a brilliant man.’ Allen’s mother was a member of the Communist Party.

Allen goes to Columbia University studying to be a Labor Lawyer, meets Lucien Carr (‘blond, eighteen, of fantastic male beauty’ (Vanity of Duluoz), William Burroughs (Harvard educated St Louis patrician), and Jack Kerouac, ‘the stocky Breton with blue eyes and coal black hair’ (Gerald Nicosia, 1983), football player, poet, Merchant Marine, and originator of ‘First Thought Best Thought.’ Jack and Lucien liked to sing together folk songs, Leadbelly’s country blues, communist work songs, and with Ginsberg and Burroughs ‘they would have Dostoyevskian confrontations, endure horrors out of Kafka’ (Nicosia). Their artistic endeavours are inspired by Yeats, Whitman, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, the pleasures and wild sensations of marijuana, alcohol, Benzedrine and the Bebop Jazz music revolution of Charlie Parker (Bird).

Kerouac was a ‘Canuck’, a French-Canadian from the textile manufacturing mill-town of Lowell in Massachusetts, 13 miles north of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Ann Charters described Lowell as ‘poor, dirty and rundown, both working-class and obstinately bourgeois, belligerently provincial.’ In the 1920s and 1930s Lowell entered economic decline when companies relocated to the South where labour was cheaper, and in 1931 Harpers Magazine called it a ‘depressed industrial desert.’

Kerouac’s first language was ‘joual’ the French of the ‘Canucks’, a dialect of working-class Quebec French, and he would overcome the handicaps of his working-class ‘Canuck’ origins to become the greatest writer since James Joyce, ‘not even 72 hours a week of underpaid mill work could keep these people in their place’ wrote Nicosia. Ginsberg overcame being a ‘spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses’ (Vanity of Duluoz) to become the poetical heir to William Blake, a 1960s Counter-Cultural guru and New Left icon. As Dave Kammerer says in the film ‘under the right circumstances he might change the world.’

Steve Clayton

Mr Puntila and His Man Matti (1999)

Theatre Review from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr Puntila and His Man Matti by Bertolt Brecht. The Right Size Company, Albery Theatre, London.

Here is a play to delight socialists. The story of a capitalist and his chauffeur, which becomes the subject of an uninhibited Marxist analysis. An evening of exuberant theatricality: an occasion when in the words of one critic, “Karl Marx meets the Marx Brothers”.

The story is simply told. Puntila, a widower and capitalist landlord, seems schizoid. When sober he is ruthless, unfriendly and exploitative. When drunk he becomes driven by lust and “sentimental overflowings of fraternity”. (At one stage he proposes to four women who are advised by Matti to form a union of fiancées, the better to protect themselves when Puntila becomes sober.) We follow several weeks in Puntila’s life as he moves between bouts of drunkenness and sobriety, trying to recruit labour and to marry his daughter to a wealthy diplomat.

“What kind of man am I?” wails Puntila in the middle of one drinking spree. “No one cares, Mr Puntila,” replies Matti, thus confirming that relations between capitalists and workers are determined not by the personalities of those involved but by their economic and social relations. And if members of the audience are unaware of the implications of the dialogue the actors occasionally drop out of character and form themselves into a group of singers in order to offer a Marxist analysis of the plot. Here is another example of the “double process” which I referred to when discussing a recent production of Mother Courage (November 1998). Brecht wants us both to lose ourselves in events, but at the same time to remain distant from them the better to understand the plight of the people in a more objective, scientific manner.

The acting is dazzling. Puntila and Matti remain on stage for most of the evening whilst the rest of the group of ten actors appear as a myriad of different characters. And the staging is full of wit and invention, and culminates in a real coup de theatre when the main structure collapses as a metaphor for the collapse of capitalism. An evening to treasure. Do look out for the Right Size Company and Mr Puntila and His Man Matti which is set for a national tour.

Michael Gill

Reviewing the audience (1978)

A still from the 1978 NYT production of England My Own.

Theatre Review from the October 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I went to see the National Youth Theatre’s production of Peter Terson’s England My Own I spent a good part of the evening watching the audience. The question that concerned me as a Socialist was, what is the play trying to say to the audience and how well does it succeed? Traditional theatre critics evaluate plays on the basis of supposedly aesthetic criteria : they are concerned with the play as such. The concern of this review is with the play as a medium of idea and image projection to the audience. Theatre always involves a separation between the image-projecting performers and the image-consuming audience. This relationship provides considerable power for those who own the means to produce plays for large audiences.

The main criticism of England My Own—and, indeed, of much of what describes itself as ‘political drama’—is that the images it throws out to the audience are all too readily and complacently lapped up, as if the audience has come for its periodic dose of liberal sentiments which it can absorb without having to think. Just as Crossroads panders to those who readily accept its image of society as being real, the National Youth Theatre are pandering to an audience of liberal trendies who know when to boo at the baddies and cheer on the goodies. Good pantomime it is, politically stimulating it isn’t.

England My Own is the story of how a youth, Adam Butler, is driven to join the National Front and is eventually killed while carrying a Union Jack through a West Indian carnival. The events leading to this fatal climax rely on stereotypes (often offensive) and situations which sound as if they were invented by a supporter of the National Front. So, we are shown Adam Butler being badly educated by a trendy teacher (while his Indian classmate who, like all caricatures of an Indian student, wants to become a shopkeeper, studies diligently), refused the position of Head Boy because the liberal headmaster believes that a black pupil should have the prestige, given an apprenticeship under a caricature of a bigoted and indolent cloth-capped worker, sent to borstal where he is disciplined to obey and finally, after his granny is molested by hooligans, is persuaded to join the National Front by a caricature of a repressed homosexual who dresses up in a Nazi uniform. Many of these scenes were amusing and the acting often perceptive, but the question still remains, why did the audience laugh? What’s funny about a racist carpenter who drinks tea all day? This is just another variation on the ‘all workers are lazy’ theme. Why laugh at the illiterate NF Northerner who was conned into the party? Behind this lies the assumption that politics isn’t for the working class. Why have the National Front organiser as a uniformed homosexual? This is only a step away from the logic which says that gays should be kept away from little children. Stereotypes lead the audience to accept certain images about capitalism—images which are just as pernicious as those which back up the National Front.

This is not to say that theatre cannot be used to challenge capitalist values. Political themes can sometimes be dealt with most perceptively in the dramatic form. But in England My Own the audience was simply shown what they expected to see and never anything likely to shake them from the complacent liberalism which is characteristic of the current ‘anti-fascist’ movement. Not once were they told that there will always be the threat of fascism as long as we have capitalism; that leaders are harmful whether they wear uniforms or not; that even if Adam Butler had not become a martyr to a futile cause, his endless problems would still prevail because he is a member of the working class.

England My Own was theatre for pleasure and workers are never going to reject capitalism while they are entertained by it. Consider the comments of Bertolt Brecht, written many years ago. but perhaps the best summary of the inadequacy of political drama today—and its possibilities:

  The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt that too— Just like me—It’s only natural—It’ll never change—The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable—That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world—I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.
 The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it — That’s not the way—That’s extraordinary, hardly believable—It’s got to stop— The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary— That’s great art; nothing obvious in it—I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.
(“Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett, Methuen)

Steve Coleman

The Passing Show: The Devlin Report (1959)

The Passing Show column from the September 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Devlin Report

The Devlin Report was in line with the opinions of those who see the future of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland lying in the creation of a multi-racial, capitalist society. This strand of thought sees the Africans as being the wage-workers of this society, and wants them treated as wage-workers are treated here, with (ultimately) votes and "free speech" and the rest of the paraphernalia of capitalist democracy. This, in effect, would delude the Africans into believing that they are the real rulers of the country, just as the capitalist class tries to delude the workers in Britain. The result of this would be to turn the Africans (so this school believes) into respectable wage-workers, labouring as steadily for the profit of their employers as the wage-workers do in this country.

It seems likely that this trend of thought will prevail in the counsels of the ruling class, although for the present the British Government, and British officialdom in Nyasaland, seem to have been won over to the “settler" views of the white Rhodesian landowners, who regard the Africans merely as labourers on the land who must be kept in submission at all costs. But whatever the ruling class thinks and does, the view of the Socialist Party is clear. The only way to bring about a sound society, and to secure the free development of the human personality, in Nyasaland as elsewhere, is to establish Socialism.

Beating and Killing

The Devlin Commission allowed the Government one or two crumbs of comfort. It found that at the famous meeting of Congress leaders on January 25th “there was talk of beating and killing Europeans," and that when the trouble started “the Government of Nyasaland had to act or abdicate" The Observer (26-7-59). As to that, those of us who have frequently come into contact with white settlers from Kenya and Southern Africa can only say this: that if every settler who talked of beating and killing Africans were put in jail without trial, then the Africans would have to govern themselves, for there would be too few whites left to do it.

Religious Wars

A recent television broadcast of Bertolt Brecht's play “Mother Courage and Her Children" elicited this information in the Radio Times (30-6-59):

The Thirty Years’ War 1618-1648 was a religious war waged by the King of Sweden and the Protestant Princes of Northern Germany against the Catholics under the Emperor of Austria, aided by Poland and France. It ravaged the whole of Europe and killed half its population on the battlefields or by plague and famine. It brought no advantage to either side.

Socialists, in the light of the materialist conception of history, realise that the Thirty Years’ War was not a religious war, and that men do not murder each other merely because they are of different religions—or we should have civil war in this country between the Anglicans and Catholics, who now dwell peaceably together. The Thirty Years’ War was fought, like other wars, because the ruling classes of the countries taking part believed that they would get something out of it—either an increase of their wealth, or at least the safeguarding of the wealth they already had. But the Christians hold up their hands in horror when they hear the theory that the Thirty Years’ War (and others like it) was not a religious war. Such beliefs, they cry, are atheistic and blasphemous, and people who hold them are merely encouraging the spread of materialism.

How the Christians love to claim the slaughter and the devastation for their own!

Sidney Webb

The spate of speeches about Sidney Webb on his centenary mostly contained some sad, head-shaking references to the praise given by the Webbs to the Stalinist system in their book “Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?" (This was the title of the first edition: the Webbs even went so far as to remove the question mark in subsequent issues.) For example, Lord Attlee’s speech, reported in the Manchester Guardian (14-7-59):

Webb tended to deal too much with institutions and not enough with people, and that may have accounted, Lord Attlee thought, for the extraordinary aberration towards the aid of his life of' his admiration for the Soviet Union.

But why arc these Labour Party men, these Fabians, so surprised? Sidney Webb spent his life working for Fabianism, the slow conversion of private capitalism into state capitalism. Then he and his wife went to Russia, and found their ideal system, state capitalism, in full operation; so, being honest if misguided people, they wrote a book praising it. What is so surprising in that?

Alwyn Edgar

Free the airwaves! (1984)

From the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rapid development of the technology of communications makes present social relations more and more outdated with every day. The obstacle to a more free use of these exciting new channels is the same as that which has held back the spreading of knowledge for hundreds of years: the fact that a minority class possess and control the means of communication just as they do the means of production in general.

In 1637, under a decree of the Star Chamber, whipping, the pillory and imprisonment were to be the penalties for publishing without the consent of the licensers, who were headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In later years, an invidious “tax on knowledge" known as the Stamp Duty was the slightly more subtle method used to prevent the majority of the population making "subversive" use of their growing literacy. In 1831, however, and in defiance of the Stamp Duty laws. Henry Hetherington brought out the Poor Man's Guardian, a "weekly newspaper for the people, established contrary to law, to try the power of ‘Might’ against ‘Right', price Id”. On the front page, in place of the official government red stamp was a black one inscribed “Knowledge is Power", with a drawing of a printing press and the words "Liberty of the Press”. The first paragraph of this journal is worth quoting from, if only to demonstrate the difference between this early working-class paper, and its latter-day name-sake, the Liberal Man’s Guardian:

No more evasion; we will rot trespass, but deny the authority of our "lords" to enclose the common against us; we will demand our right, nor treat but with contempt the despotic "law" which would deprive us of it.

The Stamp Duty was finally abolished in 1855, but not before Hetherington had served a prison sentence for his pains.

The capitalist state is a coercive machine and overcomes the sporadic resistance of individuals and groups by resorting to force or the threat of it. But it could not survive for long if it had constantly to use such brutal (and costly) methods. In the course of the nineteenth century in Europe there gradually evolved an ideology of reformism, the intention of which was to replace repression with placatory gestures to accommodate the working class into the administration of their own exploitation. This presented the ruling class with a dilemma on the question of working-class literacy. As a Justice of the Peace was quoted as saying in 1807:

It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be instructed in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes — that they may read the scriptures. As to writing and arithmetic, it may be apprehended that such a degree of knowledge would produce in them a derelish for the laborious occupations of life.

 In 1870, this dilemma was solved through the enactment of the Education Act. which provided for a standard system of state-controlled schooling, capable of manufacturing the raw material for modern industry: literate, numerate and disciplined wage-slaves. The tradition of independent working-class self-education continued to flourish, however, in Mechanics Institutes, in bodies such as the Workers Educational Association, and through the carefully preserved bookshelves of knowledge passed down from one generation of workers to another, cherished for the relevance of their contents to the problems which confront workers: the works of Marx and Engels, of William Morris and Robert Tressell.

The early twentieth century witnessed an explosion of large-scale communication technologies, once again under the strict and stifling control of the state or of private business interests. In 1984, more than one hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Poor Man's Guardian, it is still illegal for anyone to broadcast publicly over the airwaves to others, without the (unlikely) approval of the BBC or IBA. The 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act allows the Home Office almost total power to control and regulate the use of the frequency spectrum. The capitalist class monopolise the land and factories across the world (including the state capitalist Russian empire); the air itself, however, is no more immune from this tragic abdication of responsibility for our world and lives which we make by allowing a minority to possess that world.

The 1930s saw the evolution of the new culture industry, with an increasingly uniform state-regulated leisure entering the sway of the world market. In marketing communications as a commodity in itself, huge profits were accumulated. The big telecommunications multinationals such as IBM. ITT, Western Electric and AT & T are usually to be found on the list of top ten US companies today.

Of course, there have continually been attempts at various levels to evade this monopoly. In 1962 a young Irish businessman. Ronan O’Rahilly, tried to promote a recording of Georgie Fame and came up against the power of EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips, who between them cornered 99 per cent of the market. All the radio stations, including Radio Luxembourg, were working hand in glove with these companies, so O’Rahilly founded Radio Caroline. In 1967, however, the Labour government’s Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill outlawed all the pirate stations and later that year the BBC’s new 4-channel radio service came into operation with Radio One as a pop channel, all safely under the control of the (Labour administered) capitalist state.

Communications technology in the twentieth century has been developed according to the needs of profit and, as a corollary to this, according to military needs. By the mid-seventies there were, according to NASA, about 3,700 satellites in space. Of these, only a handful were communications satellites; the vast majority served the military establishments of the superpowers, in command and message systems, logistics, interception and surveillance.

Under capitalism, the latest advances in communication technology will be used to improve the efficiency of profit accumulation while dividing people more and more from one another and from their own self- determined needs. For example an advertisement for one of the home microcomputers on the market speaks of the delights of "balancing the family budget" (working out what you can no longer afford after splashing out on the computer) and of "the fascination of controlling your own private little world" as being "addictive".

With the advent of socialist democracy, there could be a great proliferation of multilateral communications systems. We must forget the false division between the passive entertainment of the media and the active process of education. In the words of Brecht, “Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication". But for the devices at the disposal of humanity to be used to enhance, rather than obstruct, the democratic control of society, we must replace the social relationship of employers and employed which permeates the world today with social relationships of equality and co-operation:

A microphone is not an car, a camera is not an eye and a computer is not a brain . . . as we design technological systems, we are in fact designing sets of social relationships. (Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee?)

The forms which communication takes will be directly related, in other words, to the form which society takes. If we are to start communicating with one another globally on the sophisticated level which modern technology has made possible it is a social revolution, rather than a technological revolution, which is urgently needed.

Clifford Slapper

Wring their necks (1997)

From the March 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a poignant moment in Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage, where the protagonist. Courage, despairing at the likely impact the demobilisation of any army will have on her canteen-wagon business, sighs "Peace’ll wring my neck."

They're not words that are meant to be taken lightly. Brecht was fully aware that war was just the continuation of business by other means, and the words are meant to scream out at you from the page, echoing at every announcement of arms sales. They remind you that there are thousands of such Courages roaming the world every day peddling their wares and dreading always the cessation of hostilities or even the threat of peace.

One is the Defence Minister Michael Portillo. Towards the end of November last year he could be found flying to the UAE to sign a co-operation agreement whereby the British government would commit British troops to the defence of the UAE in return for arms contracts his industrial sources suggested could be worth £2 billion.

One week later, Britain's other prized arms promoter, Prince Charles, was also off to the UAE. No doubt in order to lick the sand from the boots Portillo missed.

Only weeks earlier it had been revealed that the British off-shore firm. Mil-Tec Corporation, had supplied $5.5 million-worth of arms to the Hutu militia in Rwanda, and most of this in the wake of the UN imposition of arms sanctions. In true Thatcherite tradition they were in fact "battling for Britain" and hence the government has decided to take no further action. Coincidentally, this came at the same time as evidence was emerging that Britain was re-equipping the Argentinian navy in exchange for a deal that allows Britain to explore for oil in the contested waters between the Malvinas (Falklands) and Argentina.

November was in fact a busy month for the arms dealers. The US, for instance, could be found retraining and rearming Muslim and Croatian forces in Bosnia. One consignment of arms on just one Adriatic-bound ship contained 45 M60 tanks, 80 M1 13 troop carriers, 15 UH-I helicopters, 840 anti-tank weapons and 45,000 rifles complete with ammunition.

As December dawned, the Observer reported:

"The growing number of deals involving conventional arms and nuclear technology between Russia, China and Iran is creating an informal club of powers capable of altering the balance in regional conflicts that would challenge the West’s assumptions of weapons superiority"(1 December 1996).

Russia has signed a $2 billion contract with China and is none too concerned that Iran has announced plans for a $4.5 billion oil-backed deal with China for military equipmentand joint weapons production.

Though such weapons might realistically be used against Russia it does not perplex the likes of one Russian spokesman, Anton Surikov who, believing the pros outweigh the cons, announced that Russia's security was strengthened by the rearming of America’s military rivals with submarines, missiles and sophisticated fighter aircraft. The logic being that in future less Western attention would be focused on Russia who could be left to carry on its global profit-seeking unmolested.

January came and Michael "Courage" Portillo gave the nod for the sale of 350 armoured cars and police vehicles to Indonesia, in spite of the MoD admitting they would most likely be used to suppress pro-democracy demonstrations. This was an admission that makes a fool of Trade Minister Anthony Nelson who declared last year: "We do not allow arms to be exported indiscriminately. We do not export equipment which is likely to be used for internal repression" (Observer, 19 November 1996). Which is why the same paper could report on the same day that "Britain covertly sold arms which ended up on the Turkish side of flashpoint island of Cyprus".

Arming the rest of the world, however, gives the West the perfect reason for arming itself against its arms buyers. Thus because the world is militarily an unsafe place, Britain is desperate for 232 Eurofighters costing £16 billion, 386 Challenger 2 tanks and 64 EH 101 battle helicopters.

As the arms trade escalates, we may well ask where arms suppliers, tainted with the blood of Rwandans and Indonesians. and indeed workers the world over, will draw the line. History, though, shows that the competitive drive for profit obscures all such lines, and that wars, or the threat of them draw the arms suppliers like flies to a cow pat.

John Bissett

Mixed Media: Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be (2015)

The Mixed Media column from the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, the comedy play with music by Frank Norman and Lionel Bart was revived in 2014 at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in London, directed by Terry Johnson. The original 1959 production by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop was described by Littlewood as 'Guys and Dolls but with its flies undone.' The music and lyrics were written by Lionel Bart, a gay Jewish East End boy, or in his own words 'a working-class homosexual Jewish junkie commie.'

Fings depicts a world of the 'lumpen proletariat' of gamblers, pimps, prostitutes, razor gangs, and crooks in a struggling 'schpieler' (a mix of gambling joint and knocking shop) in a 1950s Soho reminiscent of Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. The play is performed in cockney rhyming slang, thieves cant, and Polari, the slang in gay subculture until the late 1960s. Paul Baker in Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men writes 'Polari flourished in the repressive 1950s, where the regulation of post-war sexual morality was viewed as a priority, and prosecutions against gay men reached record levels.' The play includes a song Contempery (sic)sung by Horace, a gay interior designer while the title song includes the line 'poofs in coffee 'ouses'

In the 1950s the police's image was projected by BBC TV's cosy Dixon of Dock Green, and it was not until 1963 that police corruption became public knowledge when Detective Sergeant Harold Challenor was charged with corruption offences at the Old Bailey: 'Soho sounded like Chicago when Challenor described it, he believed that fighting crime in Soho was like trying to swim against a tide of sewage' (James Morton Bent Coppers).

In Fings the 'schpieler' is handed over to the bent copper. Before the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act it was 'fahsends of pounds passing across the baize' but the Act legalised gambling in the UK, betting shops opened, and the government hoped to take gambling off the streets and end the practice of bookmakers sending 'runners' to collect from punters. The Act 'knocked their street-based competitors out of business at a stroke, a lot of them found that the capital required to set up premises, pay staff and 'go straight' was beyond them' (The Independent 5 April 2008).

In the 1950s there was concern about the visibility of prostitutes in London, and the Wolfenden Committee recommended a crackdown on street prostitution, and these were put into effect in the 1959 Street Offences Act: 'It shall be an offence for a common prostitute to loiter or solicit in a street or public place for the purpose of prostitution.' The song Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be is Bart's satirical ode to the good old days of unchecked prostitution: 'I used to lead a lovely life of sin, dough! I charged a ton, now it’s become an undercover game... there used to be class doing the town, buying a bit of vice, and that's when a brass couldn't go down under the union price... I've got news for Wolfenden, Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be.' The Act forced the majority of prostitutes off the street. In Fings the prostitutes are skint. Helen J Self in History Repeating Itself: The Regulation of Prostitution and Trafficking writes 'the essence of the scheme was not to abolish prostitution, but to push women off the streets . . . off-street outlets for prostitution multiplied . . . other unwelcome side-effects was an increase in kerb-crawling.'

The Socialist Standard of October 1957 wrote 'the Committee's aim is simply to brush the dirt under the carpet' and 'the real causes of prostitution are the economic and social conditions in which it lives and flourishes. It is, in fact, a product of the monogamous marriage system within the framework of buying-and-selling societies' which reflects Marx and Engels view that 'the bourgeois family finds its complement in public prostitution' (Manifesto of the Communist Party). Lenin in an interview with Clara Zetkin argued that prostitutes are 'victims of bourgeois society, accursed by two concepts; firstly of its accursed system of property and secondly of its accursed moral hypocrisy' (The Women's Question).

The English Collective of Prostitutes established in 1975 seeks the decriminalisation of prostitution which is supported by trade unions such as the CWU and GMB, but 'sex work' has divided the trade union movement. In 2009 the TUC Women’s Congress voted against the decriminalisation of the sex industry and the unionisation of sex workers. The 2009 Policing and Crime Act, by targeting brothels for raids drove prostitution further underground, increasing the vulnerability of sex workers, and preventing women from reporting violence.

Fings concerns Rosie, an innocent young woman on the run from a violent partner, who goes on the game. Bart's Where Do the Little Birds Go, and The Ceiling's Coming Dahn are 'two of the best songs written for women in post-war English musical theatre' and makes Bart 'the uncrowned King of composing the English Whore's lament: give him a brass, and he'll expose the pain and doubt and fear and love in her' (The London Bluebird, 30 August 2012).

Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be is vibrant working-class theatre devoid of bourgeois moralising.

Steve Clayton

What liberation? (1998)

Book Review from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mother Courage: Letters from Mothers in Poverty at the End of the Century. edited by Christine Gowdridge, A. Susan Williams and Margaret Wynn. Penguin 1997.

The Maternity Alliance was founded in 1980 to campaign for improvements in the lives of parents and babies in Britain. In its policy document, "Maternity into the twenty first century", the Alliance states, "We believe not only in the right of women to choose where and how to give birth, but, most importantly, in the need to address the economic and social factors which . . . determine women's experience of pregnancy and the health of the baby."

Mother Courage, published in association with the Maternity Alliance, is a collection of letters written by mothers whose struggle against poverty in their daily lives undermines the work of bearing and raising their children. It mirrors a similar publication by the Women's Co-operation Guild 1915, Maternity: Letters from Working Women, and is overtly political in its intent. In the introduction by Ann Oakley, the changes and continuities in the lives of mothers in poverty over the intervening period are chronicled. The question is posed, but remains unanswered, "Why is it still necessary, over 80 years later, to collect together and publicise women's accounts in this way. Surely the situation of mothers is vastly different now?"

Clearly there have been real improvements, particularly in the area of maternal and child health following the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948. But there is also something much more fundamental going on than mere deficiencies in the welfare state when it still has to be stated as an aim for the next century that "no baby should be born poor" (Maternity Alliance policy document).

Nonetheless this is an important book that gives voice to those mothers whose welfare is systematically neglected and about whom our society is silent, except in condemnation. Their poverty is one of bare subsistence on means-tested benefits, or of being trapped into low paid, insecure part-time work. They are frequently without the financial, practical or emotional support from the father of their children, and many face domestic violence.

Submerged beneath the political rhetoric of the family as the moral heart of society (and motherhood as its lynchpin), they sustain their hopes and fears with more courage than most. The book bears the following dedication from Brecht's 1940 play, Mother Courage: "Poor folk got to have courage . . . Mere fact they bring kids into world shows they got courage." Remember these mothers when next you hear the claim that women have been liberated.

Helen Roberts

Bertold Brecht's Mother Courage (1998)

Theatre Review from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht. Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich.

Brecht's epic plays Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941, The Life of Galileo (1943), The Good Person of Szechuan (1943) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945), dont lack for performances, in spite of their overtly political agendas. Brecht would no doubt find some irony in the fact that the essentially bourgeois theatrical establishment finds merit and an audience for these plays, in spite of their obviously revolutionary flavour.

At one level Mother Courage is an account of the struggle of a gutsy woman and her family in a period of war. Brecht sets the play in the Thirty Years War the better to enlist the objectivity of the audience. However, the play is also structured so that it can be seen as a parable and metaphor, and audiences are invited to draw particular conclusions about the nature of all wars and people's reactions to them. the challenge for anyone directing and playing in Mother Courage is to ensure that play emerges essentially as a metaphor, and that the audience doesnt identify too much with the plight of its apparent heroine. Mother Courage, pushing her cart from one place to another, is a business woman intent on making money out of the war. She says that she isn't interested in politics only the wellbeing of her family and herself, but the play makes it clear that she colludes with the system that sees war as a means of making profits, and in so doing she loses all her children.

Brecht saw the theatre as serving the needs of society not those of the playwright, and from his (as he saw it) anti-capitalist position this meant using the theatre as a vehicle for criticising capitalism. Typically Brecht wished to display events on stage in an unusual way: a way which would prevent use from identifying ourselves unreservedly with the plight of, for example, a single character. He talked about "a double process" which would allow us "to lose ourselves in the agony (of events) and at the same time not to lose ourselves", the better to understand the plight of people in a more objective, analytical manner. However, Brecht himself wasnt always successful in achieving the necessary balance. At the play's first performance in Zurich in 1941, which he directed, the audience seems to have hugely admired Mother Courage's spirit and her ability to survive, without recognising Brecht's larger strictures about capitalism and war.

The audience at the Wolsey in Ipswich when I saw the play recently made no such easy identification. In an admirable production which manages to draw the audience into the spirit of the enterprise, we are left in no doubt about the roots of war and its monstrous human consequences; and of the culpability of Mother Courage in the death of her children. Full of the satire and occasional moments of the grotesque, and intercut by songs in the manner of a music hall, the play makes for wonderful evening. As Brecht had it "War is a continuation of business by other means" and "business people are in it for what they can get". Those leaving the theatre that evening and being immediately confronted by a newspaper poster advising of "Kosovo Air Strikes", might have recognised the force of these injunctions in a new way.

Michael Gill