Back to front (1979)

From the June 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tactics and strategy remain two of the most overused words in the vocabulary of the left wing, making anything excusable, everything permissible. But despite their seemingly magical qualities, they are essentially simple words: tactics means skillful manoeuvring in the face of the enemy; strategy, the art of deciding which tactic is the correct one for the task in hand.

Left wing use of these words does not relate to warfare but to a specific kind of combat — class struggle. Tactics and strategy are the means by which the immediate, or day-to-day, struggles of the working class (over wages, housing, employment and so on) can be transformed into a revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism.

The words also carry with them the direct implication of the existence of leaders and led. The generalship, or strategy, is conducted by the leaders, or to use the jargon, the vanguard. This vanguard decides which tactics are to be used and, hopefully, responded to by the working class. In left wing ideology workers, independently, can only develop a trade union consciousness.

The claim to be a vanguard, or a member of it, of necessity involves the ability to decide on the right tactics and overall strategy. For what is the use in having a vanguard if it does not possess superior political judgement to that of the broad mass of the people? It follows, then, that the vanguard can only be justified on the grounds that it can, and does, devise the correct tactics for socialist advance.

But the attachment to this Leninist-inspired doctrine produces contradictions apparent from the outset. In times of economic crisis the left knowingly formulate a series of tactical demands which capitalism will not, or cannot, meet. For example, five days work or five days pay ; they mobilise as many workers as they can round these utopian objectives. By striking for unrealistic demands workers will, it is hoped, learn the folly of purely industrial action. In the political arena the same absurd policy prevails: workers are called upon to vote for a Labour government which the left knows will betray their aspirations.

Two Examples

But in practice this policy of making extravagant demands has proved unworkable; objectives have had to be realisable in order to gain working class support, expectations, once aroused, had to be satisfied. These failures in elementary theoretical considerations were more than matched by similar lapses in political practice. Of the numerous examples which might be cited (the role of the Labour Party, Grunwick, Chile, Vietnam) let us confine our attention to two examples, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the current Right to Work Campaign.

In the 1950s Cold War politics had made the threat of a nuclear holocaust a distinct possibility. Many people became, not unreasonably, concerned and afraid. Out of this widespread fear emerged CND, the pre-eminent left wing organisation of the time. Under its umbrella, mass protests took place in Britain. The object of the exercise was to seek support in a non-sectarian manner from all well-intentioned people (in much the same way as the Anti-Nazi League does today) to rid the world of the nuclear menace. Its other purpose, although normally unstated, was to recharge the flagging fortunes of the left in Britain.

For a time CND was spectacularly successful; the Aldermaston march almost became a British institution; its slogan. Ban the Bomb, became a shibboleth known to each one of us; maximum publicity was gained through sit-down protests and recruitment of some major public figures, such as Bertrand Russell. In fact, so powerful did the movement become that it nearly split the Labour Party over whether Britain should go it alone and renounce the use of nuclear warfare.

The influence, however, was short-lived. Membership declined as nuclear stockpiles grew. Many countries who, at the formation of CND, did not possess the technology to produce nuclear weapons, gradually were able to do so; for example, Brazil, China, India, South Africa. In terms of destructive power, since ‘Little Boy’ fell on Hiroshima, present stockpiles are sufficient to annihilate the total world population 690 times over All the work was for nothing.

Failure

The failure of CND was not just its inability to realise that capitalism whether operated by Labour or Tory, was stubbornly resistant to change in this crucial area of arms production; the fault went much deeper than that.

The fifties were the era when we ‘never had it so good’, or at least so we were told. The working class were seduced, according to the story, by easy living, fat wage packets and the consumer society. But the answer lay more in the failings of the vanguard than in the satiated workers. CND was broad-based containing liberals, Christians, pacifists, trotskyists and others from beatniks to pop stars. Like all popular fronts it was held together by one aim — banning the bomb. Once this was seen to be unrealistic, the movement collapsed.

However, no such explanation could be given for the failure of the Right to Work Campaign to make an impact in the current conditions of economic crisis. Unemployment at present is hovering around the one-and-a-half million mark, according to government sources. The Right to Work Campaign's lack of success is just one more example of miscalculation by the vanguard (of the Socialist Workers Party).

As for the origins of the movement, the SWP can claim no credit. The campaign is modelled on a similar movement of the 1920s and 30s organised by the Communist Party, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. The claim for the right to employment at a time of crisis in the economy and in the teeth of capitalist opposition would, it was hoped, demonstrate to the workers that capitalism was incapable of guaranteeing men and women a decent standard of life. Realising this, the workers would seek an alternative political solution to capitalism, socialism. The NUWM was extremely successful in mobilising hundreds of thousands of workers against unemployment.

However, the conditions were more fortuitous than now. In those days unemployment benefit was low and certain groups of workers were excluded altogether; there was also a rigid system of means tests, no health service and. finally, the memory of the broken promises of the 1914-18 war was still fresh in people’s minds. The NUWM was therefore an organ of hope to a dispirited and embittered section of the working class. But although the unemployed marched the streets, lobbied MPs, wrote indignant letters to the newspapers and attended countless meetings, nothing was achieved. Few of them found work and of those that did, most soon forgot about the need to change society.

Lofty Pedestal

The lesson was clear; hungry people could be mobilised to alleviate their hunger, but to change society socialist understanding is needed. But, learning nothing from history, the sins of the fathers were visited upon their sons. The SWP, operating in the changed conditions of welfare capitalism where the harsher edge of poverty had been offset to an extent through social security benefits, redundancy payments and the health service, attempted to enact the same policies at the CP. Like its predecessor, it failed disastrously. But whilst the NUWM could claim to have enlisted the support of thousands, the SWP has achieved nothing of significance outside of a few token marches and lobbying of the Labour Party Conference and the TUC.

From these brief histories of the CND and the Right to Work Campaign it is apparent that the vanguard's claim to tactical superiority over the workers is spurious. They have demonstrably failed on the most simple matters of judgement and analysis. These simple errors are compounded by faulty theory, which involves uncritical acceptance of Leninist theory.

Moreover, it is futile for the vanguard to endlessly find scapegoats for faulty theoretical formulations in the skullduggery of politicians, the wrong leaders, or the ruthlessness of the capitalist class. Time, then, that the vanguard came down from its lofty pedestal and admitted that workers can aspire to something more than a trade union consciousness, that it does not hold the holy writ in its hands, and came to terms with the real problem of building a mass socialist consciousness.

Bill Knox

A grown-up attitude (1985)

From the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the last Labour Party conference Neil Kinnock made an impassioned appeal to Labour members to sink their differences and rally round his leadership. He asked them to win power for Labour so that they could end the blight and waste of unemployment and make the world a safer place to live in. Kinnock argued that these social evils flowed from the policies of the Thatcher government, thus implying two things: firstly, that unemployment is the result of government policies; and secondly that a change in government will remedy the situation

Poverty and unemployment have indeed increased in the last four years or so. Where the writer lives—Scotland—there are now three-quarters of a million people living below or on the "official'' poverty line and a further quarter of a million working in low paid jobs which place them on or below this line. The poor live on incomes that give a married couple with two youngsters only £59.20 a week, or £8.46 a day. a payment which in real terms is only 25 per cent above Rowntree's official poverty line of 1936, which he considered "the minimum in which physical efficiency could be maintained". These appalling figures apply equally to other parts of Britain. Recent estimates of poverty, using only a slightly more generous estimate than that of the DHSS. put the number of British people in poverty at fifteen million. Once in poverty a whole series of forms of deprivation follow: bad health, poor housing and educational facilities, and so on. Poverty has no respect for age; it hits the young and the old the hardest. One Glasgow pensioner puts its impact in vivid terms: "Eighty-two years old and hardly a stick of furniture to call my own. I can't afford to heat my house and eat as well".

The cause of poverty is not to be found in the policies of the Thatcher government, but in capitalism itself. It is a society of glaring contradictions in which people starve in the face of a mountain of food, where people are homeless and at the same time building workers are made unemployed; where more is spent on amassing weapons of annihilation than on health. Capitalism is blind to need; it exists only to accumulate wealth for the tiny proportion of the population who own the resources of society. Because it is based on the anarchy of the market, from time to time it stumbles into crisis. This, of course, occurs on a world-scale and not just in Britain. We at present are living through such a world depression, in which workers have been thrown out of jobs not because they have produced too little, but paradoxically because they have produced "too much". The trouble with Kinnock and Thatcher is that they assume that governments can do something about it. Slumps, they claim, can be ended through changes in government policy. For Kinnock it is increased government expenditure; for Thatcher it is decreasing public expenditure.

Both are doomed to failure. In the 1970s government expenditure increased four times yet unemployment rose from half-a-million to two million. Faced with such problems. Denis Healey, the Labour Chancellor, imposed the first round of spending cuts in the social services. The Thatcher government has carried on where Labour left off in the belief that cutting public expenditure and reducing taxation would stimulate investment in industry. What both miss is the fact that slumps are natural features of capitalism. As an economic system capitalism has been characterised by booms and slumps throughout its historical development. Only when business confidence is restored by the prospects of renewed profitability will investment recommence and unemployment fall as output increases. Claims that Labour or Tory can get Britain working are fatuous and also encourage people to believe in simplistic notions of good and bad governments.


At the moment the very mention of the word "Thatcherism" is enough to make a left winger foam at the mouth, to seethe with anger and indignation. The reaction is quite understandable. Thatcher and her crowd, in their exhortations to the unemployed to get on their bikes and find work, and their comparisons of striking miners with international terrorists, are callous and calculating. The trouble is that their rhetoric and complacency amid a multitude of personal disasters distract people from examining the system they represent and fix attention on personalities. Not so long ago the personification of evil was Edward Heath. Since then he has become a good guy, although not as good as Kinnock.

Although we cannot compare the government performances of Thatcher and Kinnock, comparison can be made between former Labour governments and the present Tory one. In the area of trade unionism the left argues that present Tory policy is designed to shackle and weaken organised labour. We would agree with this verdict, but is the Labour Party any better? During the so-called winter of discontent James Callaghan, Labour Prime Minister,

said in the Commons (January 1979) that "everyone has the right to cross a picket line and I hope they will do so". Remember also it was Labour back in the 1960s through Barbara Castle's white paper In Place of Strife — who tried to impose upon the trade unions measures not dissimilar to present Tory policy — for example secret ballots, cooling off periods, and so on. Moreover Labour s treatment of strikers is no more sympathetic than that of Thatcher. During the last Labour government the vicious Special Patrol Group was used on pickets at Grunwick; troops were used to break the firemen's strike; and the public sector workers opposed to Labour's "social contract" (read contrick) were vilified and hounded

Thatcher is also accused of running down the social services and of creating more inequality by making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Indeed inequality has increased, but again has Labour done better? Under the last Labour government there were cutbacks on spending in health, education and housing. The Child Poverty Action Group reckoned that children were worse off under Labour than they had been under the Heath government of 1970-74. It was during the Wilson/Callaghan government that the Fight the Cuts demos began. What inflamed much of the protest was that while the working class was bearing the brunt of the economic crisis the rich were seeing their incomes increase. During the Heath government the proportion of wealth owned by the top 1 per cent fell from 30 per cent to 22.5 per cent; under Labour it climbed to 23.5 per cent in 1975. 24.9 per cent in 1976, and so on upwards. The original reason for Labour coming into being was to redistribute wealth and this they have failed miserably to do.

The past experience of Labour gives us nothing to cheer about and neither do we believe that things will be much different if Kinnock gets elected. Blind faith in leaders has got the working class nowhere. In the 1950s the darling of the left was Nye Bevan, who led the fight within the Labour Party for unilateral nuclear disarmament — that is until he became the shadow foreign minister and asked members not to send him naked to the conference tables of the world. In other words, without the bargaining counter of the nuclear bomb. More recently, another former pacifist—Michael Foot— outdid the Tories in his jingoism during the Falklands War. He, along with Tony Benn, was a member of the Labour Cabinet which introduced Polaris behind the backs of their own MPs. How can we believe that Kinnock will prove different, particularly when surrounded by such well-known "socialists'' as Hattersley and Kaufman?

There is no doubt that the Labour leadership is once again ready to give full support to British capitalism. This does not surprise us; since Labour has no idea what socialism is. it has no notion of how to achieve socialism. Both the Tories and Labour are out to run capitalism. They may disagree as to the best way to run the system but they have the same objective. But capitalism has shown itself to be incapable of operating in the interests of the working class. Kinnock or Thatcher represent the politics of the nursery. Why not join the grown-ups in the struggle for socialism?

Bill Knox

Airey Neave and the tactics of illusion (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The killing of Airey Neave by an assassin’s bomb brought much huffing and puffing from politicians on the virtue of democracy. Margaret Thatcher said that Neave’s death “diminishes us, but it will enhance our resolve that the God-given freedoms in which he believed . . . will in the end triumph over the acts of evil men.” Some politicians have of course reacted hysterically, demanding blood letting. George Gardiner, Tory MP for Reigate, for instance, said that he “would gladly see every man and woman found guilty of causing death by an act of terrorism stood up against a wall and shot.” (Sunday Express 1.4.79).

Had Neave been an ordinary citizen it is doubtful whether the incident would have made News at Ten, but then politicians are special cases. Indeed, Neave was reputed to be a man of outstanding qualities, a real Bulldog Drummond, who escaped from Colditz and worked with the French Resistance during the Second World War under the code name ‘Saturday’. Notwithstanding his fighting qualities, he was also said to be a “soft spoken” and "gentle” man. (Sunday Express 1.4.79). Thatcher said he was “a very dear friend” who was “strong to root out injustice.”

However, for all his reputed qualities of gentility, bravery and integrity, there was another side to his character. Neave was the Tory spokesman on Ireland, and as such advocated and supported vicious and repressive government. Neither he, nor Gardiner for that matter, expressed sympathy for the 13 victims of the "Bloody Sunday” massacre conducted by the British Army. Neither was he outspoken against the torture (sorry, inhuman treatment) of IRA suspects. In fact, Neave defended the now illegal methods of interrogation. He also approved of the activities of Murder Incorporated—Special Air Services—and wanted the death penalty reintroduced for “terrorist” offences (Sunday Mail 1.4.79). In short, Neave was anything but gentle.

His death will therefore not be mourned by socialists, although we do strongly condemn the tactics of the so- called Irish National Liberation Army and other organisations who seek change by the bomb.

TERROR TACTICS

In recent years a number of “liberation organisations” have sought to achieve their political ends through violence. The Angry Brigade was one; the Red Brigades and Baader Meinhof Group were others. These claimed to represent the interests of the working class, although they had no mandate to do so. They sought justification for their acts in the passivity of the working class, who they regarded as blind and stupid for failing to recognise their own interests. They therefore had to be galvanised into an offensive against capitalism by an insurrectionary vanguard, who through acts of violence against the capitalist State would show the workers that the system was vulnerable and could easily be damaged. On seeing this the workers would awake from their political slumber and overthrow capitalism by armed struggle. At least, that is how the story goes; reality is somewhat different.

The tactic of terror is an old anarchist one. It came to prominence in Russia in the late nineteenth century, when a political group known as the People’s Will assassinated the Czar Alexander III. Since then various organisations have employed the tactic from time to time, assassinating leading political figures in a vain attempt at social or political transformation. By changing the leaders it was, and is, assumed that some change or collapse of the system will follow. All that happens however is the new leaders are appointed to carry out similar policies to their predecessors. It is just a simple case of new wine in old bottles.

Neither have these anarchistic groups made a favourable impression on the working class. Indeed, such actions have had the opposite effect. In Italy the recent assassination of ex Premier Aldo Moro brought millions of workers out on strike in a spontaneous protest against the murderous activities of the Red Brigades. Similar protests occurred in Birmingham a few years ago after the IRA had bombed a pub, killing a number of young people. The event led to the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act. So they are not even successful. Neither are they remembered. Names such as Prescott, Baader are quickly forgotten.

It might then be reasonable to ask why they engage in the activities in the first place, when the results seem so disappointing. Some no doubt take to it for the excitement. But the main reason is undoubtedly one of isolation. Because they have failed to gain the support of the working class by legitimate means, they abandon the hard, and more difficult task of propaganda in favour of what seems a quicker course—violence.

NO SHORT CUTS

We reject the notion that a gun rather than an idea can bring about socialism. It can only come about through the united class conscious action of the majority of workers. There are no short cuts or easy ways, just sheer hard and repetitive work. Not a glamorous as gun battles, not sensational enough to get front page treatment from the press, but in the end more worthwhile and lasting. For if you cannot convince a person to vote for an idea, you’ll never convince him to fire a gun for it. In the struggle to win over the working class for socialism violence has no role to play. We leave that to the followers of the forgotten romantics. As for the political lackeys of capitalism, like Neave, we offer no sympathy, just implacable hostility.

Bill Knox

The Labour Party is not, and has never been, a Socialist Party (1977)

From the June 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent furore in the press and within the Labour Party itself over whether the Party will admit to its ranks “Marxists” has been the cause of much debate concerning the origins of Labourism. Tony Benn, a member of the Government, defended the notion that Marxism has had a strong influence in developing the Labour Party. Benn’s claim is spurious and unfounded: the rejection of Marxism, and hence revolution, fated Labour to follow a reformist path leading to the inevitable disillusionment of its members.

Most of Labour’s early leaders if asked what books were seminal in shaping their views of society would probably mention John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, the Bible. If Capital was mentioned at all it would come a long way down the list. In fact, it has been claimed that the Labour Party owes more to the writings of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, than to the founder of scientific Socialism, Karl Marx. Keir Hardie, founder of the Independent Labour Party, said: “I claim for Socialism that it is the embodiment of Christianity in our industrial system,” It was said of Hardie’s meetings that they often began with a hymn, followed by a lesson, and concluded with a prayer.

The Labour Party’s view of society at its foundation was not an economic analysis of capitalism. The capitalist system was bad because it was run by hard-faced politicians who were indifferent to social evils, and not because of its economic laws which placed the pursuit of profit above all else. Therefore, the solution to the problems of society lay in removing these men from; office and replacing them with a more decent set who would, by reforms, abolish the poor, feed the hungry, etc.

This was a denial of reality. No party, however well-intentioned, could hope to spirit away the essential basis of capitalism, whilst at the same time acting as custodian of that very system. The only option was to change society in a revolutionary way and this was rejected out of hand by the Labourites. Thus, having no Marxist outlook, it was understandable that Labour leaders would find working with the avowedly capitalist Liberals no hardship (it still is the case). Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, said he could see “no profound” gulf between Liberalism and Socialism. He argued that socialism was to be furthered by the close collaboration of men of goodwill from all [sic] classes on the basis of “conceptions of right and wrong” common to all. Keir Hardie’s hatred of class strife was a direct result of his Christian beliefs and Liberal upbringing.

The Labourites from the beginning shied away from the fact that the working class’s interests were diametrically opposed to those of the capitalists. In fact they held firmly to the principles of free-trade Liberalism. Keir Hardie himself left the Liberal Party not because he found the policies of Gladstone distasteful, but as a result of the way the local party branch chose its parliamentary candidates; a method which excluded working men. Hardie affirmed his still-felt affinity for Liberalism when he stood for election as an independent labour candidate in 1892. His election manifesto stated: “Generally I am in agreement with the present programme of the Liberal Party.” So much was Liberalism the cornerstone of much of the early ILP ideology that the Manchester Guardian could say, in 1901, of its annual conference: “what must strike a liberal . . . is, one would say, how much of the proceedings are devoted to the advocacy of traditional Liberal principles.”

When it came to deciding what Hardie’s party was to be called, the 1893 Conference rejected the idea of naming the new party the Socialist Labour Party, for in the words of Katherine Conway: “The new party has to appeal to an electorate, which has as yet no full understanding of Socialism.” This opportunistic approach to the working-class electorate has characterized the Labourites from the earliest times. Its refusal to commit itself to definite principles was the nearest it ever got to having principles, Henry Pelling, the historian, has argued in his book The Origins of the Labour Party that by adopting the broad, indefinite title of the ILP, the party was only reflecting the fact that most of its support lay in local parties and union branches which were not committed to socialism. The object of these bodies was to build a parliamentary party on the basis of social reform, not social revolution. The eight-hour day, abolition of overtime, old-age pensions, and so on, were prominent amongst the ILP’s early demands. Their allies in this were to be trade unions.

This appeal to trade unions proved ultimately successful. It was union support which saved the infant Labour party. For in the general election of the late 1890’s all the Labour candidates had been defeated, polling 44,000 votes in all, and the ILP was on the verge of bankruptcy.

But the unions were not attracted by overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with Socialism. What interested them most was the creation of a political party which would safeguard their immediate existence by using parliament to pass favourable legislation. This would have been entrusted to the Liberals, as traditionally had been the case. However, they had allowed the employers to organize strike-breaking organizations, especially in the docks, they had voted against the eighth-hour day demand, they had watched without a murmur the Taff Vale case of 1900. It was disillusionment with Liberalism and not capitalism which forced the unions to throw in their lot with Labour.

During the period between 1906 and 1914, the Labour mps merely acted as a pressure group, prepared to barter their vote for small, piecemeal legislative measures advancing the cause of trade unionism, and in this they were reasonably successful. For example, they secured the repeal of the Taff Vale judgement in the Trades Disputes Act of 1906. However, Labour was normally content to follow the Liberal lead at this time, which led it to be described as the “handmaiden of liberalism.”

Let us turn to another group concerned in the formation of the Labour Party, the Fabians. They were a group of well-to-do intellectuals, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb amongst them. It was the Fabians who, in Britain, made socialism synonymous with the state. They made the remarkable discovery that in the wasteland of capitalism there were patches of socialism in the form of public baths, parks, playfields, cemeteries, washhouses and public conveniences. Even the War Office and Scotland Yard had for them the character of socialist institutions. Another of their brilliant contributions was the theory of gradualism: the official socialism of the Labour Party. Finding words like “revolution” alien to their vocabulary, the Fabians argued that socialism was to evolve almost imperceptibly over many years, until one night everyone would go to bed (except those on nightshift) and in the morning they would wake up inside socialism. To quote Keir Hardie, Socialism would come “like a thief in the night”. The main agent for this unconscious change in society—no one was to be aware it was occurring, except the Fabians — was to be the state. Attempts at putting this theory into practice via nationalization have not brought Socialism one inch nearer, neither have they reduced class conflict—witness the recent bitter battles with the miners.

The emphasis it placed upon working within the capitalist system, meant that the Labour Party was open to all sorts of social reformers and cranks. Trade unionists, dissatisfied Liberals, well-to-do philanthropists, and out-and-out careerists saw in the Labour Party a meal-ticket. A direct result of the influx of the intellectuals and managerial types was the ousting of working people from the representative positions in the party. By 1945, Arthur Greenwood, Labour’s Lord Privy Seal, could say approvingly: “I look around my colleagues and I see landlords, capitalists and lawyers. We are a cross section of the national life, and this is something that has never happened before.” (Hansard, 17th August 1945)

Thus in the origins of the Labour Party we can see the seeds of future failures. The Labour Party has not brought Socialism about because from the outset it never was a Socialist party. It sought to win votes on the basis of social reform and not social revolution. Any socialists who might have existed in the Labour ranks at that time were swamped by non-socialists, who dictated the party’s course along essentially reformist and capitalist lines. Any notion that once into office the Labourites could take the capitalist dog for a walk has been subsequently shown to be false. The dog has taken them for a long walk down the road of power politics and social evils. Support of two world wars, presiding over massive unemployment, etc., has been the sorry outcome for a party, which failed to realize that capitalism can only be run in the interests of the capitalist class. It was not a question of good men with Christian principles, but of socialist economics.

Bill Knox

Socialism and the working class (1978)

From the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern society is split into two classes—the working class and the capitalist class. The working class is exploited by the capitalist class because it produces a surplus of wealth over and above what it gets back in wages. It is this unpaid surplus which creates the vast differences in the ownership of wealth between those who produce but do not own and those who own but do not produce. This simple fact provides the answer as to why seven per cent of the population owns eighty-four per cent of the personal wealth; why some people can spend more on race horses, sex, alcohol in an hour, a day, a week, than some (the vast majority) can earn in a year or a lifetime. It also explains why constant upheavals in industry take place, as men and women struggle over the fruits of production.

These glaring inequalities in the ownership of wealth, these profound economic struggles, can only be solved by the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism, a classless society. Our opponents, however, whether from right or left, would disagree.

Nationalists, for example, would say that class is as irrelevant as it is outmoded, that it is much more realistic to talk of common national origins, such as Scots or Welsh, or whatever. By doing so, the nationalists hope to gloss over the obvious fact that in any nation state—independent or dependent—there exists deep conflicts between different sections of society and no amount of patriotism or flag-waving will overcome them: Scottish employers do not treat their workers any better than, say, Japanese employers would. Employers, no matter their national origins or colour, are only interested in getting as much from their workforce for as little as they can pay: profits come before patriotism.

In much the same vein, the television pundits, the employers, the politicians, both Labour and Conservative, and many trade unionists, often refer to industry in terms of teamwork. They deny the operation of the class struggle by insisting that there is a community of interests between the workers and management with both working towards a common end. (To a certain extent this is true, both are working for a common goal — the enrichment of the shareholders).

What these people fail to understand (or if they do they keep it quiet) is why the team continually falls into opposing parts over such things as wages and conditions. These apologists of capitalism put it down to either bad management or greedy workers led on by militant wreckers. This is not the case and never has been. Strikes and lock-outs happen because there is a struggle between the capitalists and the workers over the fruits of production and not because of the machinations of shady characters or the inherent greed of the workers. For this reason there can be no one team with agreed common goals in industry, but competing teams based on class membership.

Our opponents on the left would agree with us that there is a class struggle. If pressed they might even concede that this struggle is a two class affair, working and capitalist. However, given a few moments reflection, they would probably inform us that we are mistaken, there are actually three classes in society, the third being the 'middle class'. After another few moments our left-winger turned sociologist may come up with an even more complex array of classes; lower working class, upper working class, lower middle class, petty bourgeoisie, middle class, upper middle class, upper class (this is never sub-divided, the uppers is upper, OK), and so on, to the point where market research takes over from Marxism. But it doesn't stop here, the left winger will casually inform us, as if we didn't know, that there are also sub- or under-classes, that is, women, blacks, youth, catholics. This is where the socialist if he or she has not already choked on a handy volume of Capital, loses patience and makes a number of informative comments.

QUESTION AND ANSWER

1) What is class?
Class is not defined in terms of social status, that is, whether you attend the badminton club or the darts club, or by the colour of your collar, blue or white, or by the colour of your skin, your age, your sex. Class is determined by your relationship to the means of production, that is, if in order to live you are forced to sell your mental and physical energies for a wage or a salary then you are a member of the working class.

2) "But surely", asks the left winger, "the salaried worker and the wage earner have a different social standing?"

This may have been true in the nineteenth century in Britain, but it is certainly not the case to-day. In the nineteenth century, the clerk, for example, had a special place in the labour market. He lacked job mobility, he was associated with one employer and one business. Furthermore, the ties between him and his employer were close and personal. By loyal and faithful service, the clerk could look forward to becoming a partner in the firm, and many did. Again, there were no fixed or standard wages and conditions in clerking, just as each office had its own particular working arrangements each clerk had his own price.

Obviously under such widely varying conditions of work trade unionism developed very slowly. Although it is significant that in the larger offices successful attempts were made to organise the workers into trade unions, for instance, the Railway Clerks Association (later TASS) was founded in 1897.

The twentieth century dramatically altered the position of the clerk. The  introduction of the typewriter flooded the offices with cheap female labour, reducing the bargaining power of the clerks. The growth of bureaucracy blocked promotion chances and led to a clear cut division between 'managerial' and 'clerical'.

It also created standard conditions of employment, crowded people together in large offices, made the boss a distant figure, and increased the clerk's sense of powerlessness in his working environment. unions developed apace with the changing position of the clerk, and in its turn further uniform conditions in terms of wages, hours, and so on. It is changes such as these which have made the white collar section of the trade union movement the fastest growing. It is also a recognition by the clerks that their interest are not those of their employers.

Moving up the salary scale, the picture is the same. Groups of workers, teachers, nurses, doctors, have found their former position of relative privilege eroded and have been forced to take steps to intensify their opposition to their employers through strikes (previously unheard of) and other forms of industrial action.

This is unsurprising given the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few: ninety-three per cent of all adults in 1970 held not even one single share; five out of six families had no invested income.

3) But don;t the brain workers look down on the manual workers? What this really means is that the working class is not united  in its opposition to capitalism. This sad fact has to be admitted; there are divisions within the working class, and the divide is not simply a question of collar. The employed look down on the unemployed; white workers look down upon black workers; male workers attempt to block the hiring of female workers; region fights region, youth fights old. The policy of divide and rule is still profitably employed to split the working class into warring factions.

BLUE AND WHITE COLLAR

In the case of the blue and white collar divide, the office staff often enjoy certain benefits denied to their fellow workers on the shop floor, such as better pension and sick pay schemes, longer paid holidays, working in a cleaner and less dangerous environment. This can have the effect of maintaining the loyalty of the office staff in times of dispute, but since in many cases the wages of the office workers are lower that the manual workers, it is really a case of the merry-go-round and the swings.

In spite of this, such seemingly preferential treatment may encourage the white collared salariat to view themselves as superior to manual workers but it does not make them a separate class. There may be differences in wages and conditions but the uniting factor is working for a wage or a salary. It is the prostitution of one's labour which makes for the common bond between all members of the working class.

4) What then is the task facing socialists?
It is the task of socialists, firstly, to reject the terminology of class as handed down by the apologists of capitalism, the politicians, the media-men, the academics, and not pander to the illusions people may have about themselves; and, secondly, to encourage unbreakable unity of the working class to the extent that it can act as the agent of revolutionary change by making workers aware of their class position and common interests. In fact, to make the working class aware of itself as a class so that it might, paradoxically, end class society.

Bill Knox

The State and its abolition (Part 4)

From the Spring 1985 issue of the World Socialist

3. Notes on the State

Central to socialist thinking on the nature of the capitalist state is the concept of class. Drawing on the writings of Marx, socialists argue that we live in a class-based society, in which a small minority own and control the means of producing wealth to the exclusion of the rest of the population.

Specifically, we live in a society which is divided on class lines: the owners of capital, the capitalist class, and the sellers of labour power, the working class. This relationship between buyer and seller of labour power is necessarily antagonistic and this antagonism expresses itself from time to time in struggle over the distribution of the social product. Because of this socialists argue that the state cannot remain neutral — a passive observer of the class struggle. Rather we say that the state must intervene on the side of the economically dominant or owning class, because the state is controlled directly or indirectly by this class. This puts us at odds with the views of the "pluralists" who argue that power is diffused throughout a plurality of institutions in society and that the state is neutral in relation to the class struggle. But although it is possible to demonstrate the unequal division of power and wealth in society, and hence show up the crucial weaknesses of this theory, we still do not arrive at an answer to the central question of what makes the modern state capitalist.

DISSATISFACTION WITH CLASSICAL TEXTS

Ralph Miliband's study, The State in Capitalist Society, that came out in 1969 signalled a general dissatisfaction in academic circles with the original Marxist writings on the state and this was reinforced in subsequent studies. It was concluded that Marx had not developed a coherent account of the nature of the capitalist state, particularly in regard to its role in the process of capital accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist social relations; indeed, that many of the references Marx makes to the capitalist state were contradictory and theoretically confused: at times he referred to the state as an instrument of class rule; and then, more subtly, as a social regulator moderating and channelling social conflict; again, he talked of the state as parasitic, that is, the private property of individuals; and, finally, as epiphenomenon (simple surface reflection) of a system of property relations and resulting economic class struggle.

The claim that the state is simply an instrument of class power used by the economically dominant class to dominate subordinate classes is highly problematical and (possibly) ahistorical. Although the ruling class owns and controls the material and mental means of production, one cannot automatically assume that it thereby controls, runs, dictates to, or is predominant in the state as well. The ruling class is not a monolithic power bloc; it is fragmented, with differing and, at times, conflicting interests. Moreover, in certain historical circumstances, the economically dominant class has not held state power, for example, in nineteenth century Prussia where the aristocracy (the junkers) controlled the state although it was a declining economic force.

Numerous problems also arise with the view of the state as a factor of cohesion in society, regulating the struggle between the classes, either by repression or concession. The main difficulty with this approach is that it suggests that the conflict over the social product is resolvable, and if taken to its logical conclusion it precludes the possibility of revolution as the state, in its role as class mediator, can act to defuse crises arising out of the contradictions within the capitalist mode of production. It is also very much akin to the liberal view of the state as "nightwatchman". Likewise, the parasitic approach can only lead to demands for a democratisation rather than the abolition of government and, perhaps, this is why Marx dropped references to it in his later writings.

The ephiphenomenon aspect of Marx's views on the state is rooted in the metaphor of base and superstructure, that is, that the state in its legal and political forms is simply a reflection of the economic base of society. This implies that the state is a passive instrument in the class struggle or, at best, is a tool of the ruling class. To adopt such a position leads one either to the reductionism of the equation that class power equals state power, or, to ignore the role the state has played, and is playing, in organising the labour process and in creating the conditions for further capital accumulation. The epiphenomenon view thus places a straightjacket on the activities of the state, divesting it of any autonomy or freedom of action, something which is at odds with the historical development of capitalism.

Dissatisfaction with the classical Marxist texts on the nature of the state led to a reformulation of theoretical perspectives by a new generation of Marx students. The outcome has been by no means theoretically homogenous, in fact, a variety of perspectives have emerged which we will now attempt to synthesise.

RELATIONSHIP OF THE RULING CLASS TO THE STATE

In Marxism and Politics, Miliband offers three possible, but not necessarily interrelated, explanations concerning the relationship of the ruling class to the state. The first of these concentrates on the personnel of the state. Miliband argues that those who control the state share a similar or common social background and are linked together by economic and cultural ties. These links result in a cluster of common ideological and political attitudes, as well as common perspectives and values. Thus those who run the state apparatus are by virtue of their circumstances favourably disposed to those who own and control the economic means of life. Empirical evidence would tend to bear out some of Miliband's assumptions. In The State in Capitalist Society, he provides an impressive array of detailed information which chronicles the interconnections between the elite groupings in society. The state is largely run by people from similar social backgrounds and educational establishments, in spite of numerous Labour governments and so-called working class occupational mobility. But this approach inevitably leads to the reductionism mentioned earlier as it does not explain how the state is capitalist. Crucially it does not amount to a Marxist theory of the state as it discusses the state in isolation from socio-economic forces. Miliband's work serves only as a rebuttal to pluralist assumptions about political democracy.

To buttress the obvious shortcomings of this approach Miliband introduces an economic dimension to his analysis. This centres on the role of capital as a pressure group. Here capital, particularly "monopoly capital", uses its position as the major controller of wealth and, hence, of investment to demand the ear of government. The fear in governing circles of multinationals redirecting investment and causing large numbers of job losses ensures that they listen sympathetically to them. In some accounts of this process, particularly that of Baran and Sweezey and the "Communist" Party, the state and monopoly capital become fused; the former acting as a pliant tool of the latter. These views ignore the fact that the state often acts against the interests of certain sections of the capitalist class. The state passes reforms in the social and economic fields which capital dislikes, for example, high levels of unemployment benefit and spending on welfare services in general. Moreover this approach reduces the state to an epiphenomenal position, that is, the nature of the state is drawn from the immanent tendencies of capital accumulation. It also disregards the role of class struggle in shaping the way the state responds to certain issues and problems.

HOW CONSTRAINING ARE THE CONSTRAINTS?

The problematic nature of the above approach and its corollary that small and medium size capitals should unite with the working class in a struggle to overthrow monopoly capitalism has been severely criticised by "structural Marxists" such as Althusser and Poulantzas, and this leads us to the third explanation offered by Miliband. Structuralists argue that "the state is an instrument of the ruling class because given its insertion in the capitalist mode of production (CMP) it cannot be anything else". Thus it matters little who constitutes the personnel of the state, or what pressure is exerted by capitalists, as the actions of the state are determined by the "nature and requirements of the CMP". In other words, a capitalist economy has its own logic or rationality to which any government or state must sooner or later submit, regardless of its ideological or political preferences; the existence of the capitalist mode of production constrains the state to act in ways favourable to the expansion and preservation of the economic system and against the interests of the working class.

The structuralist view has been further refined by the work of the "capital logic" school of Berlin. This approach derives the character of the capitalist state from the categories of the capitalist economy, the process of production and accumulation. The state is seen as a political force which is required to secure the reproduction of wage labour—to the extent that this cannot be done through market forces—and to ensure the subordination of labour to capital. This requires the state to intervene in areas such as factory legislation, supervision of trade union activities and social welfare. In this role the state is prepared to act not only against the working class, but also against individual capitals or fractions of capital which threaten the interests of capital in general.

Although it has a persuasive logic to it the structuralist view has a number of crucial weaknesses. Firstly, how constraining are the constraints? If total, then the outcome of that totality is economic determinism, as it would lead to a situation where human beings are deprived of any freedom of action or choice. Man however is not simply the product of economic forces, but a complex organism, whose actions are determined by many competing factors such as tradition, religion (where appropriate), altruism, nationalism, and so on. Secondly, and this follows from the first point, if we accept the structuralist position on the state, then we preclude consideration of how workers in struggle have affected the nature of the state and how it reacts to working class demands. In short, we could dismiss the last 150 years or so of the class struggle.

Similarly, the capital logic approach not only fails to account for the origins of the capitalist state, but fails to show convincingly how it can operate as the ideal collective capitalist. In short, how does it determine, and by what means, what are the "best" interests of capital? Moreover, in this scheme everything that occurs in a capitalist society apparently corresponds to the needs of capital accumulation, and even where modified by class struggle the interests of capital are always realised. The whole theory is deterministic, and can only provide a partial analysis to the central issue of what makes the state capitalist.

WHAT MAKES THE STATE A CLASS STATE

These explanations, although more systematic and coherent than some earlier Marxists' writings on the state, fail to explain the central issue of what makes the modern state a class state: the state of the capitalist class. The main reason behind this is the reductionism of the approaches. This means that a more adequate theoretical approach is necessary; one which takes account of the actual historical development of the state and how this development has been influenced by the balance of class forces at specific historical moments, and appreciates that the state can and does enjoy a fairly high degree of autonomy and independence in the manner of its operation as a class state. After all if the state is to act in the interests of the capitalist class it must be free to come to a decision as to what actually constitutes those interests. In doing so it may have to favour one fraction of capital against another in order to preserve or promote the long or short term interests of the sum total of the system's parts. This explains why particular social and economic policies are possible even though powerful economic groups are opposed to them.

This approach also allows for an account to be taken of the way the working class, through trade unions and other defence mechanisms, have affected the development of the state. For, given the nature of competitive capitalism, workers are forced to resist the encroachments of capital. The state must react in some positive way to workers' (reformist) demands. Failure to do so would lead to civil strife and political instability. Thus state forms and institutions, without this in any way threatening underlying capitalist social relations, are partly the outcome of working class struggle and cannot simply be attributed to the interests of the ruling class or a mere reflection of the changing needs of the capitalist mode of production.

Socialists, then, do not accept the pluralist view that the state is the property of no single class and that because of this it responds to the demands of all sections of society. We recognise that the modern state is comprised of a flexible set of institutions which operate subtly and is, ultimately, the executive committee for the capitalist class.

Bill Knox

James Maxton: a political failure (1988)

Book Review from the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Maxton's whole political life was devoted to the Independent Labour Party (ILP). He was its Chairman in 1926-1931 and again in 1934-39, served on various committees in the organisation and was one of its principal spokesmen in Parliament and up and down the country. So the measure of his achievement is to be looked for in the principles and policy of the ILP, its rise and eventual winding up.

In his book on Maxton in the Manchester University Press "Lives of the Left" series William Knox sets himself the task of evaluating Maxton's work. He rejects AJ.P. Taylor's assessment that it was "barren of achievement" but concedes that Maxton was not responsible for any identifiable body of political theory. On Maxton's claim that he was a Marxist, the author says that it was "a brand of idiosyncratic Marxism", whatever that may mean.

He quotes many opinions of Maxton: That he was a "powerful orator"; that he was "the finest gentleman in the House of Commons" (Winston Churchill); That he was "the greatest Briton of this generation both in his ideas and his life" and that "he made more socialists than any other comparable figure in Britain" (Fenner Brockway).

The author says that between 1922 and 1945 Maxton was "the personification of British left-wing democratic socialism", and offers this final judgement:

His oratory and challenging idealism influenced thousands of young people to become Socialists and instilled in them a vision of Socialist society which transcended the narrow, unimaginative doctrines of Stalinism and State Capitalism. As long as the idea of "Red Clydeside" and the world community of freely co-operative producers endures then so long will the name of Maxton, the "incorruptible conscience" of the British left. His search for a Socialist/Humanist solution to economic crisis and war is as urgent today as it was in the 1930s (page 150).

The reader of this may well wonder what exactly the author is trying to say. A critical look at Maxton's aims and activities in the ILP point to a much more definite conclusion. Maxton declared his great admiration for Keir Hardie, founder of the ILP and "Father of the Labour Party" and shared his views on aims and policy. (Maxton was, too, a great admirer of Lenin). He also shared Keir Hardie's weakness for making contradictory statements, sometimes declaring a commitment to socialism as a sole objective; sometimes looking to reforms of capitalism to solve society's problems.

Keir Hardie declared his unqualified support for socialism as defined by Marx in his From Serfdom to Socialism, published in 1907 when he was first Chairman of the Labour Party and three years later in his My Confession of Faith in the Labour Alliance. Maxton did the same in debate with The Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1928, a report of which was published in the Socialist Standard (June 1928). After the opening speech in which J. Fitzgerald had stated the case for the SPGB, Maxton said: "This state¬ment of socialist first principles was unassailable. The definitions were clear and correct. He accepted absolutely the diagnosis given". Several debates with the ILP took place over the years and it was customary for their speakers to take that line.

But later in the debate Maxton discovered "a point of difference". It concerned the need now to build up an effective machine for the achievement of socialism in the form of a majority of Labour MPs in the House of Commons. In this Maxton was following the strategy laid down by Keir Hardie when the ILP was formed in 1893. Hardie argued that it was useless simply to ask the workers to vote for socialism because they are not ready for it. As evidence he pointed to the inability of the Social Democratic Federation to get its candidates elected. Hardie's alternative was for the ILP to work first for the formation of a working class organisation with mass trade union support to send to Parliament MPs independent of the Liberals and Tories and then tackle the job of winning them over to socialism. That organisation was the Labour Party. Maxton repeated this in the debate: "The ILP seeks to induce the Labour Party to accept Socialism as their Object". But of necessity the strategy carried with it the tactic of promising all sorts of reforms in order to attract the votes of non-socialist workers. As Maxton put it, when defending the ILP's reformist "Living Income" policy: "The ILP wants socialism but the workers want a living wage".

The first half of the Keir Hardie strategy was a remarkable success story. The ILP concentrated on recruiting first the young local officials of the unions and then the national officials, so that by 1910 when there were 42 Labour MPs in Parliament more than half were members of the ILP. Its membership reached 50,000. As the Labour Party grew this continued and in 1924 when the first Labour government came into office, out of 193 Labour MPs 132 were members of the ILP. Twenty-six of them were in the government and six of them, including Prime Minister MacDonald, were in the cabinet. In 1929 out of 288 Labour MPs over 200 were members of the ILP. Again it was very strongly represented in the government and cabinet including, as before, MacDonald as Prime Minister. Among the MPs was another ILP member, Clement Attlee, who was to become Labour Prime Minister in the 1945 government. A distinction has to be made between members of the ILP who were candidates of local Labour Parties and the much smaller number who were the ILPs own candidates standing under Labour Party auspices.

So far so good. At that stage the ILP could congratulate itself on building up the mass party Keir Hardie wanted. But what of the next stage, getting the Labour Party to accept socialism as its object? If the ILP was to win over the Labour Party membership to socialism, who was to win over the ILP membership to socialism as a first step? For while the ILP published works by Marx, and Keir Hardie and Maxton could declare their support for Marx's conception of socialism, their own publications and election programmes were full of proposals for reforming capitalism. In the debate Maxton personally disowned some of these but that did not prevent the ILP continuing with them, because the majority of their own members had been recruited, not on the demand for socialism, but attracted by the reforms. A typical example of these many reforms was that dealing with unemployment, in the ILP's The Socialist Programme (1923). Having said that there was practically no unemployment in France, Belgium and Italy it explained how the same effect could be achieved in Britain if only the banks would "lend freely". Before many years had passed all of those countries, and Britain were submerged in unemployment much heavier than the level to be reached in the 1980s, but by then the ILP had discovered a new false cure for unemployment in the old rubbish of Keynes.

The ILP consistently misled the workers with its description of state capitalism (nationalisation) as socialism. One of its favourite nostrums was the nationalisation of the Bank of England. At the end of his life, when the Attlee Labour government came to power in 1945, "Maxton" says Knox, "especially welcomed the nationalisation of the Bank of England" (page 145) but by then the ILP had broken with the Labour Party and Maxton was opposed to re-affiliation.

With the formation of the first two Labour governments trouble had built up for the ILP in its relations with the Labour Party. In 1930 at a conference of the Scottish group of the ILP a resolution was passed demanding the expulsion of MacDonald from the Labour Party. The National Administrative Council of the ILP in June 1931 carried the following resolution:

It must be noted as a remarkable fact that to wage a Socialist fight against the poverty of the working class is made more difficult when a Labour Government is in power than at other times, and that obstacles are put in the way and threats directed against working class organisations maintaining that fight.

Maxton opposed the demand for MacDonald's expulsion. He was against expelling anybody. He wanted to keep them in the Party where they were "under control". He had got it all wrong. The ILP didn't control the Labour Party leadership, nor its own members who were leaders in the Labour Party. It was the Labour Prime Minister and his fellow ministers who insisted on enforcing the Labour Party discipline on the small group of the ILP's own Members of Parliament. It was over this issue that the ILP in 1932 disaffiliated from the Labour Party, by which time MacDonald and a few others had joined the Tories and Liberals in forming a National government. The whole of the Keir Hardie-Maxton strategy for socialism was in ruins.

Knox's statement about Maxton's oratory "which influenced thousands of young people to become socialists" can now be seen for what it is worth. It never even influenced them to remain loyal to the ILP, let alone to become socialists. When Maxton won the seat at Bridgeton in 1929 he got over 21,000 votes. When the ILP put up a candidate there at the 1955 election his vote was 2619 and he lost his deposit. After the 1945 general election the number of ILP members in Parliament had dropped to four, all of whom eventually drifted back into the Labour Party. The ILP has now vanished.

So what can be said of Maxton? He worked devotedly all his political life in the service of the ILP but his efforts achieved nothing for socialism because the Keir Hardie plan he followed was mistaken from the start. They had a wrong idea about the politics and economics of capitalism — and the same is true of all the long line of Labour Party leadership through MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan to Kinnock. As they see it, if you have the "right leaders with the right compassionate" policy as the government, all the evils of capitalism can be got rid of, one after the other. Marx and Engels wrote about such people in the Communist Manifesto in 1848:

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole and corner reformers of every imaginable kind.

Keir Hardie, in 1907, said that the first "evil" they would tackle would be armaments. Eighty years later, with the destructive power of weapons multiplied a thousandfold, his political successors are still talking about it. On the political side Keir Hardie and Maxton imagined a working class becoming more and more attracted to socialism as they saw Labour governments progressively getting rid of war, poverty, unemployment, crisis, depressions and the rest. Capitalism isn't like that. Its "evils" are an integral part of the system itself, only to be removed by abolishing it - for which the Labour Party and the ILP never had, or sought, a mandate. So in 1987 we see the workers returning a Tory government to power for a third time.

The only organisation that can consistently carry on propaganda for socialism is one the membership of which is confined to socialists, with socialism as its only objective. The Labour Party and ILP never met this requirement. If winning over the working class to accept the socialist case is a painfully slow process, it is made more difficult by the reformist propaganda of the Labour Party and ILP.

Edgar Hardcastle

What is Class (2002)

Book Review from the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Industrial Nation. Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800-present. By W. W. Knox. Edinburgh University Press.

This is a history of the working class in Scotland - or, more accurately, as the title suggests, of the "traditional" working class, i.e. manual, in fact essentially skilled manual, workers in mining and heavy industry - by a professional historian.

These days there are plenty of people who say that class is irrelevant and that in fact it never was. Knox is not amongst these (after all, he is a former member of the Socialist Party). Clearly, since 1800 a section of society has seen itself as constituting "the working class(es)" and in the 20th century this found expression on the political field in the Labour Party (literally, the party of Labour). It is true that the Labour Party never was a revolutionary, socialist party but merely sought a better deal for the working class within capitalism. In this, however, it accurately reflected the views of those who voted for it and otherwise generally supported it.

This may not have been how Marx envisaged things developinghe expected the working class to develop from a mere economic category (a "class in itself") into a revolutionary political actor (a "class for itself")but at least the process started even if it did get stuck on route as it were. A "class consciousness" did develop among particular sections of the working class but this did not develop into a revolutionary socialist consciousness. It stopped at trade-unionism and Labourism, the idea and practice of the working class as a class within capitalism but which wanted a better deal within this system, not to replace it with a classless and exploitation-free society. Indeed, there is a school of thought which argues that thisincorporation of the working class into the political structures of capitalist societyhas been the historic role, even the conscious aim, of trade unions and the Labour Party.

So, even if a working class "for itself" has never developed, a class consciousness of a lesser sort did, and it is this that Knox studies in relation to Scotland. In contrast to England, a number of differences stand out. First, partly as a result of the Highland clearances, anti-landlordism was more widespread in Scotland, reflected in the domination of the Liberal Party there up to 1914. Second, emigration of both Protestants and Catholics from Ireland kept alive religious sectarianism. Third, there was the ILP, the Independent Labour Party.

Knox argues that the ILP inherited the programme of radical Liberalism (anti-landlordism, Scottish Home Rule, republicanism, pacifism, teetotalism, and municipal "socialism") and was largely an expression of the views of the apprentice-trained skilled craft workers, who were male and, due to discrimination against Catholics, Protestant. They were respectable workers who didn't drink or swear or beat their wife (or so we are told) and considered themselves a cut above the rest of the working class who lived in slums and worked as labourers or depended on the poor law. Until 1932 the ILP was to all intents and purposes the Labour Party in Scotland, but in that year it committed political suicide by disaffiliating from Labour and trying to go it alone.

Knox sees the disaffiliation of the ILP as a key event in the history of Labour in Scotland because it meant thatin a sense, provided the opportunity forthe Labour Party to reconstitute itself on a new and different basis, as a party which rejected pacifism, Home Rule and republicanism and which embraced state intervention, including nationalisation at UK level, as the way forward; in other words, a state capitalism run by remote planners and bureaucrats such as was implemented by the post-war Attlee Labour government and which has now come to be known as Old Labourism.

While many workers in England deserted Labour for Thatcher in the 1980s, workers in Scotland continued to support Labour. Knox explains this by the fact that many more workers in Scotland than in England are dependent on the state for jobs, housing and income and also by a continuing acceptance of the "core values of democracy, fairness and social justice" inherited from the radical Liberalism of the 19th century. In his view, this is why free-market Toryism will never get a look-in in Scotland and why, as Blair continues Thatcher's campaign against the "nanny State", the workers in Scotland may choose to express these underlying core values in some kind of radical nationalism.

One criticism of the book would be that it is a history only of one section of Marx's "working class in itself", i.e. the class of those forced by economic necessity to sell their ability to work in order to live, in that it ignores non-manual workers. Towards the end the amorphous term "middle class" even creeps in. These now even constitute a majority of the working class in itself. Indeed, it could be said that the reality behind the claim that "we're all middle class now" could be more accurately expressed by saying "we're all working class now".

Finally, a quibble perhaps, but surely Knox knows that the British Socialist Party (the reformist party which eventually provided the bulk of the members of the British Communist Party in 1921) was not, like the British Socialist Labour Party, a "splinter group" from the SDF. It was the name adopted by the SDF when in 1911 it merged with a breakaway from the ILP. Could it be that his proof-reader confused (as Lenin once did) the BSP with the SPGB (which could indeed be described as a "splinter group" from the SDF)?

Adam Buick