Where Are You Going (1958)

From the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

By this time, you the reader, will once again have embarked on another year’s effort, which like all previous efforts, is a two-fold one—to maintain some kind of a living, the best you can get under the circumstances, whilst continuing to be the wealth producing agent for the minority who control your destiny; not a very dignified position to be in you will agree but one that you have accepted far too long.

You had your Christmas respite and indulged in the traditional manner. Throughout the holiday you strove to foster the spirit of good will; the “live and let live” idea. Now, it is once again all over and you must face up to the stern reality of life under Capitalism without the cap and bells. In fact you are expected, those of you who have one, to get back on “the job.”

It is at this juncture that we in the Socialist Party without wishing to be impertinent, ask the question “Where are you going this year?” Naturally we arc not referring to the spate of advertisements already filling the press, extolling the joys of wintering in the Bahamas, and other exotic places. We mean “What are your plans for improving your lot in 1958 ?” You will agree that 1957 took more out of you than you received in return. This situation is what industrialists would call “bad business.” and bad business indeed it was for the working class. This was true also for your fellow workers in the U.S.A., Russia and everywhere else. Everywhere, the sum total of dividends accruing to the world's workers in 1957 after payment of “overhead expenses” (food, clothes, shelter and an occasional “ break ”) was merely an increase in strain and stress; an increase in genuine, all-round fear. 1958 it now appears is already given over to an increase in the scientific armament race with all the above-mentioned evils attached and perhaps more.

The writer, has, for some time past, been in the habit of reading (in the same way as many renew the acquaintance with Dickens’ Christmas Carol) at the commencement of the New Year, some of the curious reasons and antidotes for the phenomena of poverty. He finds that the reasons are extremely varied and in most cases amusing. Economists and philanthropists together with our old friends the politicians and clergy offer all kinds of excuses including “sun-spots” which affect the weather and crops, mysterious psychological brain disturbances which affect the business acumen of industrial magnates and so on not forgetting the theory of the inherent wickedness of Man’s heart.

So you see, we are told to be patient, virtuous and hard working in the hope that, Micawber like, somehow, things will turn out all right.

In the light of all this, you may of course decide to run for the nearest hatchet, believing that humanity will not free itself “till the last Capitalist is hanged by the entrails of the last priest.” We don't think, however, that you are so foolishly energetic. Rather, you are more likely to put away your bells and lanterns, place the frost fairy back into her cardboard box and live in hope that you will be in a position to reverse the process next Christmas.

Readers of the Socialist Standard will know that it is not our custom to mouth empty platitudes and perhaps the phrase “Happy New Year” has fallen into nothing more than a platitude these days but what we do urge is that you take upon yourselves the business of seeing this year—1958 as the year in which you commenced to do something about putting things right You can best do this by supporting the Socialist movement which in your case is the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Better still send us a real New Year’s card—an application for membership.

W. Brain

Bank of England Swindle (1958)

From the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Shabby "Tribune" Stunt

Professional politicians put over so many impudent stunts, made possible by the short memories of the electors, that they understandably grow careless and expect to get away with murder. But surely they cannot perpetrate the same swindle twice in a dozen years? It seems that Tribune, “Labour’s Independent Weekly,” is confident that they can. Its stunt at the end of 1957 was to launch a campaign for the next Labour Government to “take over the Bank of England.” Its issue of 20th December, 1957, carried the bold, front-page headline: “Let’s Nationalise the Bank of England!” with the sub-heading: “You thought we had done it already? You were wrong.”

Who Led the Workers Up the Garden?

As a fact, of course, the Bank was nationalised in 1946 by the Labour Government's “Bank of England Act.” So when Tribune comes along now and pretends that it wasn’t, it is a piece of trickery, designed to cover up the blatant failure of nationalisation to make any difference to the workers. The nationalised Bank is no more popular with the voters than was its privately-owned predecessor under Montague Norman, and Tribune is trying to lay the blame for the failure of Nationalisation on other shoulders. But the responsibility rests squarely on the Labour Party, including the group behind Tribune, who, as M.P.s or Ministers, fully supported that Act in 1946. It was they who told us what a fine thing it was going to be; an instalment of Socialism, they said. It was they who spoke and voted for the Act and later boasted of its “success” when they fought the next election in 1950. Bevan and Mikardo were two of those who voted for the Act, and neither they nor any others got up, in the House or outside, to say that it was a fraud and would not make a ha’porth of difference to the workers—that was left to the S.P.G.B. to say.

It is only now that Tribune, in effect, admits that the Act changed nothing.

Then the story was different. Typical claims made by Labour Ministers and M.P.s (backed by the Tribune group) were that the Act had given the Government “undivided control ”; which was said to be “helping the Government to maintain full employment and to further economic recovery” (Labour Party, Speakers' Handbook, 1949-50, page 115). And: “The Bank is another industry under public ownership which is both serving the national interest and paying its way.”

When the Act for Nationalisation was being voted in Parliament the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Dalton, rapturously declared that “it is a model It will, in due course, make a streamlined Socialist Statute” (House of Commons Report, 29th October, 1945).

"Tribune's" Charges

To the thoughtless reader who has forgotten what happened when the Bank was nationalised Tribune's slashing charges may make convincing reading. How telling for Tribune to point out that only one of the 18 directors “comes from the trade union movement”; that 15 of them went to those “well-known nurseries of privilege,” Winchester, Marlborough, Rugby and Wellington; that “ten of the eighteen spend only a small part of their time at Threadneedle Street. The rest is devoted to running some of Britain's most powerful industrial and financial groups.” And is it not true, as Tribune says, that these, part-time directors, “are bound to think and act as businessmen and there is' plenty of doubt whether what is good for capitalism is good for Britain.”?

Tribune (20/12/57) publishes the photon of ten of these part-time directors of the Bank with the caption: “They’re all Bank of England directors and City men!”

Fine virile stuff, you think ? But it is less than half of the full story. Let us now look at the rest

What "Tribune” Keeps Dark

Of course it does not really matter whether the men in charge of a capitalist institution came from the coal mine and the elementary school or from Eton and Winchester, but Tribune now pretends that it does and the innocent reader may think that the selection of men from those public schools is a nasty Tory plot. But Mr. Dalton, who piloted the Nationalisation Act through the Commons went to Eton, and one of Winchester’s proud sons is Mr. Gaitskell, present leader of the Labour Party, whom Tribune will be supporting at the next election. And who is responsible for many of the directors being part-timers (as if that mattered either)? The answer is that the provision for part-time directors is in the 1946 Act that the Tribune group then supported. And is it true that ten of them have other business and banking interests? Sure it is, but so it was when the Labour Government (including the Tribune's idols) appointed the court of governors in the years 1946-1951. Seven of the men now named by Tribune (L. J. Cadbury, Sir John Hanbury-Williams, Basil Sanderson, Geoffrey Eley, Lord Kindersley, Michael Babington Smith and Sir Charles Hambro) were actually appointed directors in the first place by the Labour Government—supported by Tribune. So that everything that Tribune lists as items in the present spurious campaign about the Bank of England was true also in 1946-1951 when Tribune was backing the Nationalisation Act and the Labour Government that carried it through. The only change is that then they were promising what great "socialist” benefits it would bring and now the voters don't believe this any more.

Trick in Preparation for the Next Election

Tribune now declares that control of the Bank of England is not in the hands of the Government but is “kept in the hands of a formidable team representing the Minority rent, interest and profit class.” They say this is intolerable and must be put right; presumably at the next election.

As we have already pointed out, the existing arrangements were created by the Tribune group and the rest of the Labour Party.

But the deception has another angle too. The Labour candidates and M.P.s who backed Tribune, fought the 1950 General Election on the Labour Party Declaration of Policy called “Let Us Win Through Together." It contained the following clause :-

  “Finance must be the servant and not the master of employment policy. Public ownership of the Bank of England has enabled the Government to control monetary policy. Subject to the will of Parliament, we shall take whatever measures may be required to control financial forces, so as to maintain full employment and promote the welfare of the nation.”

So Tribune were telling the electors in 1950 that the nationalisation of the Bank of England, already five years old, had “enabled the Government to control monetary policy.” Now they say that control is really in the hands of a group of capitalists, yet this very group were put there, as directors of the Bank, by Tribune's political friends! And the Labour Government, returned again to power in 1950, kept the same arrangements in being. Now Tribune says that the Bank of England is “run by the same old crowd as before,” that is by the crowd they put in control! Could humbug go further?

Bits of Socialism

When the Labour Government nationalised the Bank of England the S.P.G.B. stated that it was no concern of the workers and nothing to do with Socialism. Tribune, of course, was telling a different tale. Now Tribune largely admits the truth of what we said :-

  “What has actually happened provides a classic illustration of the failure which follows from the attempt to insert a small element of Socialism into institutions left in capitalist hands—the very doctrine since revived by the Labour Party Executive in Industry and Society. The small dose of Socialism is quickly swallowed up in the capitalist mass and nothing is changed.”

Of course as a statement of principle this is true, you cannot insert bits of socialism into capitalism, but for Tribune to say so is humbug. They were believers in that futility in 1946, are in favour of it now, and will be asking the workers to vote for it (and for the ex-Winchester leader of the Labour Party) when the next election comes.

What is more, the Tribune writer takes care to let us know that when he talks about Socialism it is with his tongue in his cheek. If he were a Socialist he would know that Socialism will have no use whatever for the financial banking, and currency machinery of capitalism, including its central organ the Bank of England. Yet the forefront of his demand on the next Labour Government is that it shall make the directors full-time instead of part-time; as if the difference between the capitalism that we have and the Socialism socialists want, is a question of the number of directorships capitalists shall hold.

If Tribune were interested in Socialism it would know that the way the Bank of England is owned, controlled and administered is a concern of the capitalist not of the workers, but Tribune couldn’t care less.

Here's hoping that at least some of Tribune's readers have long memories.

Edgar Hardcastle

Crisis in Indonesia (1958)

From the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Television, radio and newspapers for several weeks, on and off, have been announcing news from Indonesia: Military Coup in Sumatra, Oil Installations in Rebel Hands, Banks Seized in Indonesia, Take-Over Flags Hoisted, Dutch Alarm Over Communist Threat, Air-Lift for Dutch from Indonesia, Dutch Navy Moves, British Firms Fear Loss of Staff, Sea Claim By Indonesia.

Why the Western Capitalists are worried

Western capitalists with investments in Indonesia are, of course, worried about the seizure of property and investment in Java belonging to the Dutch. While the Western capitalists are prepared to cut one another’s throats in the struggle for trade, when there is a threat to their general interests, then they become brotherly. Of a total foreign investment of U.S. $1,400 million in Indonesia, the Dutch own U.S. $1,040 millions, the British U.S. $200 [millions], and the U.S.A. $90 millions. The Daily Express, which expresses a viewpoint of some of the capitalists in an editorial column, pressed the British Government to take action against die rebels.

But the map shows the strategic importance of the threat there to Western Capitalism. Indonesia, the sixth largest country in the world as far as population is concerned, consists of a string of islands stretching for 2,000 miles from Northern Australia across the Pacific Ocean to the mainland of Asia. Were Indonesia to fall to rebels favourable to the “Communist” group, the latter would leapfrog S.E.A.T.O. defences, the U.K. Far East Command in Singapore and the Commonwealth Strategic Reserve in Malaya. Forming a barrier between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, it would endanger “Free World" communications. Indonesia is the focal point in the S.E Asia collective defence system. How the great powers fish in troubled waters is indicated by U.S. aid totalling $33 million, while the Soviet Union have granted a credit of $100 million.

An Adolescent Ruling Class

These individual items of news are only facets of changes that are going on, mere symptoms of a grander development, and it might be as well if we look behind the news items at the developments taking place there. The Dutch East Indies, as Indonesia was called before independence, was sternly ruled by a Civil Service under the Netherlands. The native ruling class increased from small beginnings without training in the administration necessary for the efficient running of a modem state, for the Dutch filled practically every job. This had the effect of making the Indonesian capitalists rely particularly heavily on their workers for support for the Nationaist Party (P.N.I.) in attaining independence and in the running of that country since.

Workers in Indonesia

Strictly speaking the Indonesian working class started in the 18th Century as employees of the Dutch colonists, but it was with the opening of the Suez Canal and the demand by industry for rubber and oil, the two chief exports of the country, that led to rapid development. In 1919, the formation of the Central Workers' Union led to a wave of strikes. The Colonial Government was at first sympathetic but when they saw the conflagration spreading they soon turned on the workers. In 1923 the Communist Party (PKI) was formed and grew in popularity, claiming to be a Workers’ party. Although its policy was one of reforming capitalism, many gave their support as the one hope (or so it seemed to them, not being socialists) in a repressive colonial set-up. The pressure of the Dutch workers and administrators forced the concession of freedom of the press and assembly for the whites, but the Indonesian workers also benefited to a lesser extent. The workers who bore the exploitation were supported by the native capitalists who found it quite simple to lay the blame for the workers' troubles on the foreign exploiters and also by the student body who had poor hopes of suitable employment whilst the Dutch filled the Civil Service jobs. In 1927 a Communist Party insurrection was suppressed.

Meanwhile, the radical transformation of village life proceeded apace as the great plantations with their demand for wage-labour and the oil wells were developed. Strikes grew more frequent and in 1926/7 there was a particularly serious outbreak.

During World War II the Japanese seized the colony from the Dutch, and partly because they were heavily committed elsewhere, gave a measure of self-rule to the budding native capitalist class. After the War was over the Dutch tried unsuccessfully to resume control of this former colony but it was already too late; the Native Government, with the support of the workers, were too firmly entrenched. In 1947 the Dutch resorted to warfare, and the Indonesian workers fought for their masters with Japanese arms.

But in 1948/9, the U.S.A., dreading the setting-up of a Communist Government in Indonesia hostile to western capitalism, suspended Marshall Aid to the Dutch, and their attempt to resume control failed.

Trade Unions flourished and in 1953 they had a total membership of 1,400,000. The reforms advocated by the “Communist” PKI and their hostility to the Free-World Bloc brought them support and in June, 1954, 17 of their members were elected to the Indonesian parliament. In the provincial elections of last year the PKI made further advances.

Thieves fall out

But things have not gone too well for the ruling class. Having seized control of the machinery of government they are now quarreling over the division of part of the spoils; on the chief island of Java, where the capital is situated, they are fiddling the central government taxes to the anger of the exploiters on the other islands of the Archipelago. Although this passing of the taxation buck to less powerful groups is quite a normal procedure for some capitalists, those who are being mulcted of their hard won proceeds of exploitation have not been philosophical about it but have rebelled, under the leadership of the local military. It is this that chiefly lies behind the news of revolts in the outlying islands earlier last year.

Indonesian Meat but with Different Gravy

But with the rebellion in Java there are other factors. One of the dangers in Indonesian society is that of authoritarian political methods above the village level. The authoritarian tradition and the related habit of dependence upon orders from above, both stemming from the long period of colonial rule and from the absence of democratic methods in the past and the ignorance of the workers as to their true class interests, has left the working-class movement wide open to reprisals from their masters. The latter have had enough of the well-nigh endless demands for better conditions. It has for some years now been fairly generally recognised there that it only required a market setback to spark off a general attack on the workers. The falling prices of rubber and other tropical products and the surplus of oil on world markets in recent months have done the trick. In the mixed reports from Djakarta can be seen the anti-working class trend of events. The situation here recalls our comments on Hungary and on Malaya in past issues of the Socialist Standard where we said “In other countries whenever the ruling group is firmly in the saddle of government they lose no time in turning on the workers.” This attack was under the cover of a New Life Movement aimed at getting the workers to work harder. All party leaders are agreed that the seven hour day, existing on all estates and mines, is wholly inadequate. Workers were recently taken during working hours from a variety of coffee houses by military police and excoriated as “time corrupters.”

Another red herring is the Government’s claim on New Guinea. This vast undeveloped area 1,000 miles away would be nothing but embarrassment to the Indonesian Government unable even to control their existing domains, but it serves to distract attention from their anti-working class actions at home. Visitors to the lush tropical islands of Indonesia may find the landscape a great change from the more temperate parts of the world but if they listened to the utterances of the Indonesian government leaders they might well imagine themselves back home again. The current policy of telling the worker to take his finger out and get cracking with a developing welfare state as an inducement, is another instance. To an extent, then, the crisis in Indonesia is the pay-off for the workers there.

Homeless Dutch Refugees

But we cannot conclude without a comment on the Dutch refugees. Once again the similarity with the fairly recent events in Hungary is in the plight of these people. The inhumanity that results from the decision to expel the Dutch residents by the Indonesian Government acting in the interests of the capitalist class there is revealing. The break-up of families and the horror of both young and old at being uprooted and driven out is an almost continuous process in a class-dominated society. The Dutch refugees now join the grim procession; before them the Hungarians, the 900,000 Arab refugees in the Middle East, the Muslims who have fled from India, the Hindus from Pakistan, the continuous stream from East Germany and the enormous number of White Russians in China now being forced to move again. It seems that this column of spectres will go on while the present system of society lasts.

Frank Offord

Marx and Soviet Reality (1958)

Book Review from the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and Soviet Reality by Daniel Norman. The Batchworth Press, 1955. 2s. 6d. 

This is a very useful little booklet of 72 pages which demolishes, with numerous quotations from Marx and Engels, a large number of the myths the Bolsheviks have built up to delude the uncritical: particularly their claims to be Marxists and to have established Socialism in Russia.

The author shows that the Russian revolution was fundamentally a revolution, similar to the French revolution of 1789-93, for the purpose of bringing Russia out of semi-feudalism into modern capitalism. Its ruthlessness and barbarity were part of the hot-house process. He also shows that the revolution never went "off the track,” as the Trotskyists pretend, because Stalin only carried on the Lenin programme.

The opening paragraphs of the booklet indicate the author’s standpoint:

  “There it at least one point on which Soviet propaganda and the opponents of Marxian—and Socialism in general— agree: both describe the U.S.S.R. as the embodiment of the Marx-Engels conception of a Socialist society. Both claim to see in the masters of the Kremlin the heirs and faithful pupils of Marx, and in the Soviet policy the extension of Marxian policy in our time.
   "Nothing could be wider of the mark; nothing would have infuriated Marx and Engels more. For under its Marxist veneer of Bolshevik terminology, Soviet reality can be easily identified with everything abhorred, criticised, and fought against by Marx and Engels all their lives.”

Of unemployment in Russia the author has this to say:-

   "How can there by any question of unemployment where important part of the working population is permanently behind barbed wire, working for wages far under subsistence level, that is, in worse conditions than a slave of ancient times.” (Page 27.)

Although the means of production are owned by the State the new privileged class that has grown up in Russia had their position legalised by the Stalin Constitution of 1936, which confirmed the right to private property and the right to inheritance. So the claim of the wealthy to the products of the workers’ labour is protected in the same way as in other capitalist countries. Of the relation between the Russian State and the workers the author describes as follows:—

   “The fact that in the U.S.S.R. the State is the owner of the conditions of production—'the general capitalist’—and the direct producers are wage-earners, that therefore the relations between them, according to Marx, are still the relations between capital and labour, between employer and proletarians, whether or not this pleases the Soviet leaders. And there is no difficulty in discovering that all the characteristics of the capitalist system of exploitation are to be found in the Russian system of relationship between the State, owner of the means of production, and the direct producer, the worker." (Page 23.)

The author makes the following general observation on Soviet planning:—

   “The general aim of Soviet planning being the industrialisation of the country, the immediate task for the Russian State capitalist planners is 'augmentation of Capital,' and capital, be it State or private, is accumulated surplus value. The planning of wages is thus naturally reduced to squeezing as much unpaid labour as possible from the worker, and the planners see to it that they are not robbed of their part” (Page 21.)

There are numerous quotations from Capital, as well as from other writings of Marx and Engels to illustrate how different their conception was from that which the Bolsheviks have tried to foist upon them, and how truly the progress of Russian industrialisation has followed the path which Marx had forecast as necessary in order to establish capitalism there.

Marx pointed out that “The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.” The author shows how the Russian plans accomplished just this, increasing the number of industrial workers by over 20 millions between 1928 and 1940, "without taking into account the millions of peasants who, during this period, were sent to hard labour in Siberia find Central Asiatic Russia, nor the further millions who perished during the famines of the thirties.” (Page 32.)

A letter from Engels to Vera Zasulich April 23rd, 1885, is quoted in which Engels gave an astonishing forecast of events in Russia. After saying that a revolution in Russia was imminent, he goes on:—

    “This is one of the exceptional cases where it is possible for a handful of men to make a revolution . . .  Well, if ever Blanquism—the phantasy of turning a whole society topsy-turvy by the activity of a small conspiracy—had a certain justification for its existence, it is certainly in Petersburg.
   “Once the fire is set to the powder, once the forces released and the national energy transformed from potential into kinetic energy . . .  the men who have set the mine ablaze will be blown away by the explosion, which will be a thousand times stronger than they and which will seek its issue as it can, as the economic forces and resistances determine.
    "Supposing these men think they can seize power, what does it matter ? Provided they make the hole which will burst the dam, the torrent itself will soon rob them of their illusions. But if it so happens that these illusions had the effect of giving them a superior force of will, why complain of that? People who boasted that they had made a revolution have always seen, next day, that they had no idea what they were doing; that the revolution made bore no resemblance whatsoever to that they wanted to make." (Page 45.)

We have now given sufficient to enable the reader to judge the character of this booklet. We can certainly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the subject matter and who has hitherto been misled by the fraudulent propaganda of the Russian Communists and their supporters.

What the author’s own outlook is, apart from the subject with which be is dealing, is not clear. We would be interested to know what he means, for instance, by "the alternative contained in our society: a revolutionary evolution towards a Socialism which implies freedom and democracy” (page 68). Also whether he supports Marx’s mistaken view about the value of the cooperatives “as forms of transaction from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one.” (Page 22) 

This booklet puts views we have been expressing for nearly 40 years—see pamphlet “Russia Since 1917.”

Gilmac.

Heralding 1984 (1958)

Editorial from the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Daily Herald, early in January, ran a series of articles by “experts” to answer the question whether 25 years ahead we shall be living in George Orwell’s nightmare, “with common man enslaved by the State” or will 1984 “be a year of dazzling brilliance of scientific promise—with common man enjoying the new fruits of the earth?” (Daily Herald, 6/1/58). Sir Miles Thomas foresees that travel will be faster, cheaper and safer. Sir Adolphe Abrahams does not think we shall have the 3½ minute mile; but football will still be the top national game, we shall still have the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Cup Final will still be at Wembley. Jane Drew, “leading woman architect” thinks houses and streets will be more attractive, houses won’t be cold, and the “the TV set will take the place of the fireplace as the centre of the family circle.”

The Anti-Utopia Builders

Now the Herald is the organ of the Labour Party and claims to be socialist and the reader might well have expected to be told that 1984 would have seen the introduction of Socialism. The articles did not say that Socialism would be here or that it wouldn’t be here— the subject was just not mentioned. Several of the “experts” have either never heard of it at all, or, they think that it has nothing to do with their specialist subject; which goes to show just how little they know about Socialism.

In each of their supposedly isolated worlds the choice is between capitalism and socialism, there isn't any neutral no man's land. The kind of house you live in, the kind of vehicle you travel in and the kind of entertainment and sport you enjoy will depend on your position in society. If you are a wage-earner in a capitalist 1984 what you get will be what you can afford. All of this is a closed book to the Herald's writers and obviously doesn't have any importance for the Editor, or he would have directed his inquiries to the real question, whether Socialism will be here by then.

Capitalism, 1984 Variety

But one of the writers, Mr. Harry Nicholas, assistant secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, stands out from the rest, for he mentioned the word “socialist” His article, on the job situation, was the most deplorable of the lot. He answers the question very clearly, though without knowing he answers it. Capitalism it will be, with not a single essential feature altered. Not that Mr. Nicholas is pessimistic about it. He does not think “we will have any unemployment in the next 25 years, provided we have sanity in the financial sphere.” (He has clearly never examined the financial system if he thinks it isn't inherently idiotic). Automation, he says, will create jobs and markets. We shall be charitable and “in a good socialist way” we shall assist the backward countries and thus “create markets which will absorb the products of our industries” There will be fewer “'unskilled'” and more “skilled” workers, and higher standard rates of wages and less piecework. There will be more Company pension, sickness and other benefits to supplement the State schemes. Evidently Mr. Nicholas' optimism does not extend to the elimination of the wars that go with the struggle for markets. All he says in this field is that “because of the changes likely to take place in weapons of attack and defence, many of our Royal Ordnance factories and naval dockyards will have to be utilized for peacetime production.” He does not risk a forecast about the kind of weapons the other factories will be producing.

We may wind up by saying that while most of the contributions were useless, because the writers don't even know about the capitalist world we live in, Mr. Nicholas is pernicious as well because he has obviously heard about capitalism but sees no reason why or how or when it should be abolished: just like the Herald, and the Labour Party for which it speaks.

Old Familiar Faces (1958)

From the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

They're at it again! Take hold of yourself. Who? The lotus-flowers. The teeny-weenies with long hair. Gaiety Girls. Seventhday Adventists? No, no. Worse. The tea-shoppe Jacobins. Good Lord! You don't mean —? Listen and I'll whisper. Well I never! Left-wing intellectuals. A magazine, eh? I bet they mention Colin Wilson and Kingsley Amis a lot of times. Lots of long words. Funny bits about Marx. Professor Deutscher. And you'll never guess who else. Not—not him? Professor Cole it is. Here, take it away. February's filldyke month, isn't it? Expensive way of filling dykes, at three-and-six a time.

Here it is, then: Universities and Left Review. Very well got up, good typography; indeed, the Abbey Press (the people who print it) are to be complimented on having a range of bold, large and display types almost sufficient to keep up with the editors' delight in Names. The cover bears the contributors' names (Isaac Deutscher, Claude Bourdet, Peter de Francia, E. P. Thompson, G. D. H. Cole, Joan Robinson, etc.) in massive black letters, their topics in small ones. The first page has the editor's names in large heavy type, underlined, across the top; there are the contributors' names in not-so-large heavy type, and the titles in type so small that myopic left-wing intellectuals presumably have to guess them.

Page three lists the names (in capitals) and achievements of the editors and contributors. Universities attended, articles accepted by the New Statesman; books published, masterpieces, intended, all four editors are writing theses on, respectively, The Novels of Henry James, Charles Dickens, the dockers of London, Bristol and Liverpool, and "the theory of alienation, from Hegel to the Existentialists." Even the Business Manager's name (in caps.), and a piece to show that he, too—"scholar of Magdalen College, Oxford," it says. Is it a Freudian urge that makes one want to write naughty additions to this portentous list? How about "Cigarettes by Nosegay-Rizla"? Ah, no—too non-U: Abdulla it must be. "Underwear by St. Michael" might do, though. Quick, turn over before the temptation takes us. But no, no! not more names, more capitals . . . 

However, there are still the articles. After all, they have trumpets and spotlights and "My lords, ladies and gentlemen" before a prize-fight, but sooner or later the boxers, left alone, must come out fighting; and tonight there are reputed champions in the ring. Did we not pay three and sixpence to come in? Alas, the bigger they are the flatter they fall. The spryest of the lot, in fact, is Professor Cole, because he was wise enough to bring his own opponent: an old guy he cobbled together years ago ("tarted-up," of course, to quote one of Mr. Amis's most charming expressions) called "What Marx Really Meant," at which Professor Cole throws haymakers until his seconds lead him away, breathing heavily but unmarked.

The rest of them are unmarked, too, in a way. Hold them up to the light: not a stain—not a shadow, nor a trace, of an original idea or a thought which has not been raked out from the rag-bag of the nineteen-thirties. Not a stain, and shining pink. Here is E. P. Thompson, arguing whether it was right or not to have fought in Spain; the Art Critic writing-up artists who "represent a menace to the very foundations of the bourgeois idea of art"; the town-planners working-out nattier, more aseptic hutches for the working class. Here is the windy, outmoded vogue-language of left-wingers a generation ago: "significant," "chauvinist," "reactionary" and the rest.

Do they realize it, one wonders? Does any of them know that it's all past tense, that the Universities and Left Review is a dodo-house? Vol. I, No. 1. Spring 1957: but for this, one would be back with the Left News, the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals, or The Controversialist. Perhaps they don't realize it after all: one contributor actually writes of "a new social type in this country—the intellectual." Perhaps Claude Bourdet really thinks he has something new and unprecedented when he writes:

"The rehabilitation of the French left, then, depends upon a converging action of the Socialist Left still fighting in the Socialist Party, the democratic Communist opposition fighting inside the Communist Party, the left wing Mendesiste Radicals, along with the 'new left.' Under this four-fold influence the distant prospect is the reconstruction . . . of a strong united workers' Party, mingling Christian and traditional liberal influences with a dominant Marxist one."

The star performer, however, is Professor Deutscher. Professor Deutscher writes on "Russia in Transition" in No.1. Does Professor Deutscher say anything, in fifteen thousand words? Professor Deutscher does not. The sharpest intellect could find no quarrel with Professor Deutscher's conclusions, because there are none. Every statement is hedged with "may," "seem," "perhaps" and "should it arise." It is an extended version of one of Professor Deutscher's television interviews where some news-reader almost visibly touching his forelock, seeks enlightenment:

"'Please tell the viewers, Professor, just what is happening in Russia now.'
"'Well, you see, Lenin is reputed to have said to Trotsky just before the Russian Revolution . . . '
"'Thank you, Professor. And what do you think will happen in Russia?'
"'Well, Stalin was a dictator, you know. And Trotsky said to Bogdanov . . . And, of course, there were Nichaev and Lenin's grandmother . . .'
Thank you very much, Professor. Have you a final prophecy to leave with us?'
"I think Trotsky may have been right. On the other hand, Lunacharsky may have been right. Who knows? Somebody must be right.'
"'Very grateful to you, Professor. Well, viewers, I'm sure we are all, etc.'."

There is an expectancy throughout it all that suddenly Mr. Spike Milligan's face will peer over somebody's shoulder, crooning adenoidally. It is, in fact, very much like the evening paper's football forecasts, where all results except the stone certs are predicted in such phrases as "Anything can happen." And when anything has happened, the expert remains, of course, an expert. 

What purpose, then, does the Universities and Left Review serve? Pretentious, empty of ideas, its material picked from ideological dust-heaps, it has set out to make a splash—or, as the first editorial put it, to take a beachhead. Its avowed purpose is to publish discussion on "the common ground of a genuinely free and genuinely socialist society." Its way, the editors say, is "to take socialism at full stretch—as relevant only in so far as it is relevant to the full scale of man's activities."

If that were true—"the full scale of man's activities"—it really would be interesting. But, of course, it isn't. Search the Universities and Left Review, and only in a line here and a phrase there will you find the working class mentioned. Professor Cole has a good word for them, and there is a little lofty patronage from David Marquand ("in the thirties, there had to be an effective mass movement for the intellectuals to join") and E. P. Thompson ("the experience of rank-and-file political activity enriches us and keeps our ideas on the ground"). The names in the Universities and Left Review see themselves (bear witness, the articles on art, the cinema, architecture) as members of an élite: the General Staff on that beach-head the upper crust of the "genuinely socialist society."

This is the oldest, weariest idea of all. Its resurgence just now is probably more important to the "intellectuals" than ever before, however. The present-day world has very little use for them: a young man with a First in English Literature or a prize for philosophy is himself something of an archaism when the whole structure of education is being changed to produce physicists, technologists and other atom-age men. Unless the University men can succeed as writers or get into commercial television, their doom is schoolteaching or Government offices.

Some of them, aware of the situation, have responded angrily: the Angry Young Man is a useless young man whose abilities and ideals the world won't venerate any more. For others, there is another way to take: if the ruling class doesn't want them then the working class shall have them as its guides and philosophers, if not exactly friends. That in itself might not be so bad if the "intellectuals" were thereby realizing that they had an identity with the working class. Universities and Left Review shows nothing of the kind, however. The only affinity shown is in the advertisement for The Observer inside the cover, making the position sadly clear: U cries out to U.

Universities and Left Review seeks comment from the socialist viewpoint. It can be simply made. There is not a word concerning Socialism from beginning to end of the Universities and Left Review. Reformist claptrap, yes; pretentious verbiage, indeed; chatter about how things are for the intellectuals, above all. But of the interests of the working class, the great majority of mankind—not a whisper.

The most useful left-winger we ever saw was Tom Finney. The day he scored against the Arsenal—now, that was worth three-and-six.

Robert Coster