Ireland: The World Socialist Party Carries On! (1977)

Party News from the February 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whether we operate as a party is, in the circumstances in which we do actually function, difficult to state. How does a party such as ours operate in circumstances in which overt activity could bring dire retribution at the hands of any of the three factions of thugs — IRA, Loyalists, or British Army/Police (the latter functioning under the euphemism "security forces")? All we can do is use personal contact: explain ceaselessly, tirelessly, frustratingly — sometimes even dangerously — that capitalism creates the material conditions in which all this can happen. Ironically, people as individuals are prepared now, more than heretofore, to listen, and (perhaps good for the future) the struggle here often highlights the correctness of our attitudes. But bitterness, hate and blind emotions combine against reason and, as I say, they have the guns and the bombs and they make telephone calls.

As you will know, our premises at Pim Street, Belfast, were severely damaged in an arson attack — directed solely against our shabby little office. It was a victory for something; but we counter-attacked with hardboard and asphalt and continued to hold meetings there every Tuesday evening — you can imagine our mixed emotions when we thought we heard a foot on the stairs! Next we had a visit — fortunately, perhaps, in our absence — from the “security forces”. Lacking a key, they smashed in the door and made a military-medal-deserving attack on our few pathetic chairs and our display of back numbers. A group of the same worthies later met three of us leaving the place and, resisting our efforts at conversion, attacked the weakest of us — my eighteen-year-old daughter. The Provo heroes gave our room the coup-de-grace and ended our heroics with a bomb on an adjoining property.

Left without an address, we are still looking for a suitable place here. The job is rendered more difficult than usual by the fact that on top of the previous considerations like rent and accessibility and willingness to lease to Socialists, we now have as our primary concern the question of security in an area in which contacts from either side of our infamous “divide” will not feel threatened. That, here, is a tall order indeed . . .

M.

(The above is extracted from a letter to the General Secretary of the SPGB by the Secretary of the WSP of Ireland. All comrades here send their warmest fraternal greetings to those who are keeping the struggle for Socialism alive in such conditions.)

A dog's life (1977)

A Short Story from the February 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

This man who had a dog was a working-class man and and went out to work each day. He left home at seven o’clock in the morning and arrived back at seven in the evening. He was a responsible type. He didn’t think it right that his dog should run loose in the streets all day. He left it shut up in the house instead. Was this cruel?

He himself was all right. He wasn’t shut up —exactly — all day long. He got a lunch break from half-past twelve to half-past one. He could go where he liked and do what he liked then, for a whole hour. The poor dog was stuck in that same place day after day with nothing to do. Is it good enough? Those who work in offices, factories and shops can break the monotony by looking round, or thinking, or dreaming, or something. In a plant there is plenty of noise and activity; anyway we shouldn’t be bored because we have jobs to do. But alas, this dog . . . it could only walk round, sit down, lie down or go to sleep. It must have been murder. A day must have seemed like a year.

The man — I was going to say owner: he didn’t own much besides the dog — got to thinking. “If only I had a large lawn with a high wall or fence. I could make a flap in the bottom panel of the back door, then the poor brute could go in and out at will and have a romp round” ... oh! mustn’t let the manager catch him daydreaming about such things: like the dog, he would be through the door.

Let’s be fair, it has nothing to do with the firm. If you are caught slacking and get the sack, it serves you right. Still, not to worry: humans can cope. Not like poor dumb creatures. They depend on having their biscuits, water and scraps provided for them; they can’t even open tins of Chunky Dog Food for themselves.

People should not keep animals if they cannot look after them properly. It is easy for us. If we work, get on with the job, do as we’re told, play the game, etc. Especially if we don’t spend all our wages foolishly, and make sure we use our brains to the fullest — there’s no saying where you could finish up. Putting all the bright possibilities of our lives against the poor, patient, loyal, devoted, begging lives of our pets should make us thankful we are alive and well and able to work for our employers.

When you think about it, dogs, cats, budgies and goldfish don’t even have the simple pleasure of knowing what class they belong to.

Joe McGuinness

Abortion in Demand (1977)

Book Review from the February 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abortion in Demand by Victoria Greenwood and Jock Young. Pluto Press, £1.65.

This book gives an account of the attitudes and aims of both supporters and opponents of the 1967 Abortion Act and the James White Amendment Bill 1975. There is The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUCC) which is opposed to abortion except in a tiny minority of medical cases. In contrast the National Abortion Campaign (NAC) stands for abortion on demand. Less clear cut is the attitude of those who are in general agreement with the spirit of the 1967 Act. These, termed by Greenwood and Young the “reformers”, are divided into progressives who feel the Act only needs some administrative adjustments, and others like James White who consider the spirit of he Act to have been violated and want it severely amended.

The chapters which deal with the history of abortion law reform in Britain are informative. The same cannot be said of the confused views of V. Greenwood and J. Young. They are in favour of women having control over their own fertility and recognize the need for a fundamental transformation in society to make real freedom possible. That they do not define the transformation is significant. Anything beyond making the kind of strategic demand likely to have mass appeal is dismissed as utopian. The Abortion Law Reform Association is rebuked for concentrating on a single issue and for “pressure group politics” — seeking change through legislation. To prevent the dwindling of support that can happen when an issue is no longer topical they suggest that the campaign or abortion should be linked with other demands thus giving a wider perspective. The Working Women’s Charter — 1976 — is approved as giving a suitably broad basis from which to work. (11 points of the charter include “right of women to work”, “national minimum wage”, "free state-financed community-controlled child care facilities”, “child benefits . . .  £5 per child”; p. 137). This series of linked demands “provides a basis for women to make a real choice whether to have a child or not. We are not told how most of these aims are to be realised — if not through Parliament.

The issue of abortion law reform illustrates the dilemma facing all reformists including NAC supporters. There is the need for legislation which is precise enough to solve the problem in the manner intended. Most of those women who benefited from the 1967 Act were single, or married with fewer than 3 children. “As it turned out abortion was not the solution to problems of poverty, overcrowding and deprivation; it was more frequently a choice available to ‘normal’ women with whom the Act was not concerned” (p.34). In a postscript (on the first Report of Select Committee on Abortion) the authors point out that only abortion on demand will cater for the “most exploited group of women”. But as they are also aware, gaining the right to choose abortion would give “merely a freedom in a situation of limited alternatives” (p.127).

Socialists are frequently told of social ills which "cannot wait” for Socialism, by opponents who are prepared to spend decades on their campaigns. “The 1967 Act was the end result of thirty years’ concerted reformist politics", p.15. V. Greenwood and J. Young recognize the limitations of reforms yet still urge the support of reformist campaigns. Demands, even wider based demands, made by those who know that a fundamental change in the social system is the only solution are still reformist. And they effectively delay that solution.

Pat Deutz

Comparisons with the nineteen-thirties (1977)

From the February 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the most frightening things about the present depression to large numbers of people is the destruction of their belief that “bad times” would never come back. After the long post-war period without unemployment on the pre-war mass scale, it was widely assumed that chronic depression belonged to a past era which had ended. When the crisis took hold, the spectre of 1929 was raised by journalists and commentators; and as its effects intensified, the feeling spread of an old film with a cast of millions being shown again. Are the nineteen-thirties being re-enacted? There are differences as well as similarities. Some of the factors in the pre-war situation were apparent opposites to those at work today, showing that they are neither causes nor remedies of the depression. A comparison is of interest.

The 1929 crisis originated in agriculture, and was marked by the collapse of a speculative fever in the United States. In Britain it was preceded by a short boom period in new industries such as electricity, chemicals and motor-cars. It took place when — as a result of government restriction of the note-issue — the pound sterling had risen, i.e. was dearer abroad: this, and a close-down on lending in America following the Wall Street crash, killed purchases of British exports in the USA. Prices fell throughout the period 1929-33 when the depression was most acute. The British Index of Retail Prices of Food went down from 160 in 1927 to 154 in 1929, 131 in 1931, and 120 in 1933.

The present depression was preceded by minor crises which increased in severity from the nineteen- fifties onwards. Its strongest industrial features were the break in the motor-car boom and the slump in house-building; but it has been accompanied by continuing price rises now running at an annual rate of 15-20 per cent. This has been the result of inflation promoted by Labour and Conservative governments alike since the war, and one aspect of the crisis is the long run of that economic policy. Previously in the 19th and 20th centuries the operation of any policy was interrupted after a few years by a prolonged depression or a war.

The inflation policy was started by the post-war Labour government, and until now no economic or political catastrophe has baulked it. In the early nineteen-sixties party leaders were clearly unsure how to continue it, or if it could continue. Thus, immediately the 1964 Labour Government was elected Wilson and Callaghan announced measures to deal with an economic “Dunkirk” which was upon Britain, while the Tory leader Douglas- Home denied that a crisis existed (reversing the position a year earlier, when Home claimed there was a crisis and Wilson disputed it).

The world’s finance ministries in 1929 were firmly against using government expenditure to try to remedy the fall in demand. Later, groups of MPs of different parties argued for State interference and planning — Torv MPs (including Macmillan) from the depressed north-eastern areas, as well as Labourites and Lloyd George, the Liberal. Against this, the recovery in Germany took place with the ruling Nazi party declaring opposition in principle to State management; the Nazis in fact de-nationalized many undertakings. In the Economic Journal R. F. Kahn contended that “the creation of money” could do nothing but good when there were idle resources and unused productive capacity, and this was taken up by Lord Beaverbrook in his papers: the remedy for the depression, said the Daily Express, was inflation.

The Express and the Mail also campaigned for import controls — taxing all imported goods, but giving preference to those produced in the British Empire. In 1932 a 10 per cent duty was imposed on all imports except wheat and meat, and the Ottawa Agreements establishing Empire Preference were signed. Though Labour and Liberal MPs opposed Protection, both parties supported a campaign to “Boycott Japanese Goods”. This was presented as a moral stand in view of Japan having invaded Manchuria and left the League of Nations, but a flood of cheap Japanese goods into Britain was held to be putting British workers on the dole: at the 1935 Jubilee and George VI’s Coronation, girls stood in Japanese stockings and waved Union Jacks made in Japan while they watched the parades.

The popular cries on all sides were remarkably similar to those of today. “The right to work” was demanded in marches and demonstrations on behalf of the unemployed. This “right”, incidentally, was a constitutional one in Nazi Germany, and is part of the Russian constitution also. C. W. Guillebaud’s 1939 book The Economic Recovery of Germany, 1933-38, described the position:

Rather than permit this [prolonged unemployment] the State will itself provide alternative employment in some form—if not 'regular’ then ‘substitute’ employment. As a corollary to this recognition of the right to work the State imposes the duty to work, and this is a very far-reaching obligation.

The “training centres” for unemployed young men set up half-heartedly — as now — by the Government in Britain were opposed by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, but in letters to The Times supporting the centres there was a lot of praise for the German labour camps for the unemployed.

As now and always, the working class was blamed for everything and it was commonly said that the unemployed were layabouts living too well on the dole. The magazine Good Housekeeping referred to “profiteers, dole-drawers, music-hall artists — in fact the only people who have money today”. (Quoted in The Long Week-End by Graves and Hodge). The National Confederation of Employers’ Associations claimed in 1931 that unemployment pay was sapping the nation’s strength by preventing "unemployment acting as a corrective factor in the adjustment of wage levels”. There was pressure also to stop married women being either employed or registered as unemployed, under the Anomalies Regulations of 1932. This can be compared with the discovery by “a top doctor”, headlined in the News of the World on 2nd January 1977, that married women going to work are in dire peril of bad health and infertility.

The birth-rate was low in the nineteen-thirties. In 1933 it touched he lowest point of any peace-time year before or since, and it was predicted that by 1961 the population of Britain would be under 40 millions. Family allowances were proposed to try to turn the tide. The question was debated in Parliament in 1937 with reference to the “danger to the maintenance of the British Empire” from under-population: Malthus was stood on his head. There was no shortage of particular scapegoats for the plight of the time, immigrants and Jews. The British Union of Fascists, like the National Front today, traded in this kind of ignorance, and it is a melancholy reflection that the fascist-fighting Communist Party recruited numbers of Jews who were unaware then of what happened in the Communists’ beloved Russia.

 

The CP and other ’‘militant” groups based much of their propaganda in the ‘thirties on the belief that the capitalist system would collapse, and this fallacy has risen again in the same guise of a serious theory. It was contended that radicals of all varieties should rally together; the Communists sucked up to the Labour Party they had recently been ready to attack physically, and sought an alliance with the ILP. Another still-persistent belief was that the crisis itself was a manoeuvre by powerful agents of reaction; the Labour Daily Herald said it was “a bankers’ ramp”. Radical factions formed and re-formed, with titles remarkably like those of today; and there was a fear among trade-union and labour leaders of subversion by “revolutionary” movements.

Throughout the depression, it was all right for some. The first knighthoods of trade-union leaders were given in 1935: Sir Arthur Pugh and Sir Walter Citrine, for services to capitalism. The violent contrasts between the lives of rich and poor furnished material for damning (but reform-minded) reports similar to the Inner City Studies published on 12th January 1977. The crisis and the depression affected the rich very little. Colin Clark, the economist, estimated a fall of 9-11 per cent, in personal expenditure of those with incomes over £250, from 1929 to 1933 — a figure well balanced by the sharp fall in prices.

The depressed areas of the ‘thirties were those with older industries such as shipbuilding, iron and steel, coal, and textiles. The new light industries in other areas expanded, and the multiple stores selling cheap shoddy goods paid high dividends (a table published by the News Chronicle called Woolworth’s and their like “depression-proof investments”). It was a chaotic, insensible time brought about by the senseless chaos of capitalistic production, and that applies with undiminished force in the nineteen-seventies. What were proposed as cures for the economic and social problems then are in operation in the depression today, but are regarded as part of the trouble: inflation and the Welfare State. Conversely, today’s alleged solutions were part of the situation in the nineteen-thirties: a “strong” pound, import controls, and low prices (including wages).

One more similarity is the circuses provided to mollify the breadless. In the midst of mass unemployment, they had a Royal Jubilee and a Coronation; by what may be thought a nice coincidence, 1977 offers a Jubilee too. In Coronation week, 1938, everyone registered with the Unemployment Assistance Board was paid an extra 2s.6d. What overwhelming bounty is in store this year? W.H. Auden called the nineteen-thirties a "low, dishonest decade”. No more so than any other decade under capitalism, Mr. Poet; and that isn’t the point anyway. The ’thirties and the ’seventies show the capitalist system in its cycle, which will come round again if it is not stopped. On a brief inspection, plainly the only alternative is Socialism.

Robert Barltrop

Lewis Henry Morgan and the last 100 years (1977)

From the February 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

One hundred years ago, in March 1877, Morgan's final work, Ancient Society, appeared. Morgan was not a Socialist, but his book was the result of objective investigation into mankind and its social institutions. If anything, he was religious. The book is dedicated to the Rev. Mcllvaine, DD, a close friend, and describes the evolution of society in approximately 600 pages. Marx and Engels praised the work, and Engels, writing in the 1884 preface of his own work The Origin of the Family, said Morgan "in his own way had discovered afresh in America the materialist conception of history discovered by Marx forty years ago". Marx intended to present the result of Morgan's researches in the light of his own conclusions, but his death in 1883 prevented it. Engels took over the task and based The Origin of the Family on Morgan, but went far beyond Morgan by showing the political and economic implications, the changing political systems arising from the historic development of property, the emergence of social classes and consequently the State. 

Working independently, Morgan provided the scientific corroboration of Marx's theories. He was the founder of the science of anthropology, but his work was largely ignored on both sides of the Atlantic when it was realized that his theories and discoveries clashed with the ideas and interests of the ruling class. The established capitalist view was that religion, property and the family are as old as man himself, and these institutions had always existed and were unchanging elements in society. Scientific ideas which challenged this concept were treated with hostility. Morgan, a Republican Senator and lawyer, spent forty years on the preparation of his book, his sole purpose being to explain the evolutionary process, but in doing so he inadvertently committed the cardinal sin of exposing the working of society. He showed that the idea of property had undergone the same growth and development as had society generally, and was far removed from being an eternal category: 

Commencing at zero in savagery the fashion for the possession of property as the representative of accumulated subsistence has now become dominant over the human mind in civilised races."

(Ancient Society, p. vii preface. MacMillan, 1877.) 

Part 4 of the book goes into greater detail and investigates the growth of the idea. The growth of property is shown to be closely connected with the increase of invention and discovery, and with the improvement of social institutions, commencing with the stage defined as Savagery. Human progress from a state of ignorance in Savagery slowly advanced as men gained experience, as nature forced them to obtain subsistence or perish. The procuring of the means of subsistence is intimately associated with the idea of property in the very early stages of man's development. The gradual accumulation of knowledge leading to greater control over nature pushes society along through its various stages up to Civilization: the idea of property is no longer based on subsistence but on its social power. 

Since the advent of civilisation the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its form so diversified, its uses so expanding, and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become on the part of the people an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation, The time will come nevertheless when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the State to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought in to just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. (Ancient Society, p. 552)

Views like these, backed up by factual evidence coming from a capitalist politician who was a rich man in his own right, shocked the capitalist class at the time. It was just as well that Morgan secured an audience at which he shook hands with the Pope in 1871. He certainly would not have received one after his book was published in 1877. These ideas attack the roots of capitalism and its claim to permanence. 

But this was not all. The central theme in Morgan's work was that mankind had gone through several successive stages in its road to Civilization. The proposed ethnical periods described by Morgan commenced with the three stages of Savagery — the lower status, middle and upper. Then came the lower, middle and upper status of Barbarism, and finally the status of Civilization. Food supply commenced with the collecting of natural food in tropical forests and the gradual acquiring of the knowledge of the use of fire and a fish subsistence, The invention of the bow and arrow prepared man's entry from the upper stage of Savagery into the lower stage of Barbarism. This began with the invention of pottery and the domestication of animals, followed by the cultivation of plants and the use of clay bricks in the middle status of Barbarism. The upper stage of Barbarism commenced with the smelting of iron ore, the use of iron tools, and the development of field agriculture. Civilization was reached with the invention of the phonetic alphabet and the use of writing. 

These seven stages, claimed Morgan were universal as were the forms of social organization based upon the gens which corresponded to them. From Australia in the south, the whole of Europe including Rome and Greece, the Eastern Mediterranean and India — all their respective social organizations were based upon the gens. Although Morgan commenced his researches among the American Red Indians (he was a blood-brother of the Iroquois) he made an extensive study of the known forms of tribal society, and studied the histories of all forms of civilization. 

The point of Morgan's theories was that ethnic groups who had reached civilization had only done so after a long development through these seven stages, and that this general evolutionary principle governed all social development which had taken place. The fact that backwoods tribes discovered today in the state of savagery can be brought forward rapidly into capitalist civilization without undergoing the long development as postulated, does not invalidate the theory. 

The materialist conception of history discovered by Marx forty years earlier had the same principles, but with the addition that the economic organization and social relations corresponded to the' particular stage society had reached in the development of its productive forces. Morgan proved the existence of a social organization which was neither political nor economic, but pureIy administrative. It was based on gentes, phratries and tribes, and he demonstrated how this form of organization held ancient society together and prevailed throughout the entire ancient world. The gens were founded upon kin; descent was linked to the female line and it embraced all persons who could trace their descent through a common female ancestor, and possessed a common gentile name. 

These gentile institutions were thoroughly democratic. Two or more related gens organized themselves in phratries (brotherhoods), and a number of phratries constituted a tribe. Several tribes formed a confederacy, and eventually coalesced into a nation occupying common territory. Because the basic unit of organization was democratic there was no State or political society. As special social needs or objectives arose, the form of organization was enlarged to meet them, but its democratic function was maintained throughout. Bureaucracy could not arise because there was no separation between administration and people, as exists today in the form of the coercive state which has replaced the administration of 'people by territorial government administering and maintaining property relations in the interests of a small minority of people. 

Morgan also showed that systems of communal ownership gave rise to and were the basis of this social organization for many thousands of years. The State, which according to the capitalists had existed throughout history, was a comparatively recent development, and arose with the advent of private property. 

Theories such as these could not go unchallenged. The ruling class did what it will always do when its interests are threatened: ignore or misrepresent the facts. Anthropology was taught in universities in England and America, but up to very recently Morgan was ignored, although many of his theories and methods were plagiarized. His classification of ethnic periods was attacked, as also was his theory of the origin of the family, and the role of women as the original property owners. Morgan showed that the family had passed through successive forms commencing with consanguinity, which was founded on the marriage of brothers and sisters (own and collateral) in a group. This was succeeded by the Punaluan (intimate friend) family founded up on the intermarriage of several sisters wit'h each other's husbands in a group. Also, the intermarriage of several brothers with each other's wives in a group. Then the pairing family founded upon single pairs, but without exclusive co-habitation and with voluntary separation. The patriarchal family founded upon the marriage of one man with several wives. Finally, the present monogamous family founded upon single pairs with an exclusive co-habitation. 

The impact this information had on bourgeois Victorian society who bad barely recovered from the shock of Darwinism, was startling. Darwin at least dealt mainly with animals and man's biology, but the shame of being confronted in the respectable atmosphere of Victorian society steeped in cant about the dignity of the family and marriage, with tales of incest, group sex and polygamy, and all the other alleged vices (practised in secret by wealthy parasites) brought forth an avalanche of protest led by the religious hyenas of all creeds. The anti-evolutionary school of anthropology was founded by Dr. Franz Boas, Professor Westermarck, Malinowski, Lowie, Ashley Montague and many others. Their object was not so much to develop the infant science of anthropology as to prove Morgan wrong. The Catholic "cultural historical" school of anthropology led by Fathers Wilhelm Schmidt and Wilhelm Sylvester, and A Sieker, SJ, set out to oppose the theories of primitive communism. As far as the Jesuits were concerned Morgan's work was more beneficial to Socialists like Marx and Engels than any other section of the community. Lowie insisted that the State in various forms had always existed, and C. H. Stark and Professor Westermarck maintained that the present capitalist-type family had always existed. Dr. Franz Boas of Columbia University refused to admit discussion of the question because in his opinion there was no evidence, nor could there be any. He described Morgan's stages as arbitrary postulations. Morgan also upset the Jews by pointing out that Abraham married his half-sister Sarah.

The last hundred years have produced numerous controversies about certain aspects of Morgan's theories. For the most part these are peripheral and largely concern questions of detail. The main body of his work has stood up and remains the cornerstone of modem anthropology. The section in Ancient Society dealing with the origin of early Greek and Roman society is a classic by any standards, and brought particular praise from Marx. 

Morgan has become the Marx of anthropology, and like his famous contemporary is always being repudiated — a periodical exercise which usually collapses through lack of evidence being presented by the detractors, Typical of the kind of criticism are the remarks contained in Peter Farb's book Man's Rise to Civilisation (Paladin Books, 1971): 

He was a thoroughly conventional man, unquestioning in religious orthodoxy, and also a staunch capitalist, but he published his theories in Ancient Society at the same time Marx was working on the third volume of 'Das Kapital' (p. 100). 

There is no connection between the two, but the object is to discredit Morgan by implying that if it bad not been for Marx Morgan's theories would have had no importance. Later Farb makes his position clear: 

That bourgeois gentleman, Morgan, is to this day enshrined in the pantheon of socialist thinking," (p, 100) 

Again the innuendo being: only because of Marx and Engels's influence. Rubbish like this is supposed to represent a criticism of Morgan's work, but Farb carefully refrains from going into the work itself. His other nonsensical statement that "By a strange irony the League of the Iroquois has become a model for Marx's theory" shows his ignorance of the subject and of Morgan's theories as well as Marx's. 

The relevance of Morgan and Marx to modem Socialist thought and propaganda is in providing the positive proof that capitalist society is the culmination of a whole series of historical social changes. Men's ideas change, habits of thought and conceptions of life change. The man of today is not the man of tomorrow; the environment of today is not the environment of tomorrow, any more than the man of yesterday and his environment are relevant today. Capitalism is not the end of social progression, although the capitalist class and their servile adherents will claim it to be so, Morgan reckoned that out of an estimated 100,000 years that man bad spent on earth, at least 60,000 (three-fifths) had been spent in a state of Savagery; 35,000 years in the various stages of Barbarism, and 5,000 years in Civilization. Out of those five thousand years only the last 250 years have been spent under capitalism. 

The intensity of capitalism's development, with its compression of time and space, has produced the subjective man with little sense of history, dominated by social conditions which are not only anti-social but obsolete and unnecessary. Man must become objective and not dominated by his immediate conditions. We must move on to Socialism. A Socialist society will organize itself on a democratic basis at every level. The social form will not, nor cannot be, tied to the past, but it will truly reflect the great contribution of the past in he form of the accumulated knowledge and social experience so painfully acquired which has made Socialism possible. It should not be forgotten that the principal institutions of mankind have developed from a few germs of thought and a few simple cells of organization. The natural form of social man is that which equates him with his fellow man, and that great equalizer is common ownership of the means whereby he lives.

Jim D'Arcy

Obituary: Ted Lake (1977)

Obituary from the February 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is always sad to record the death of older members who formed the backbone of the Party in its critical years. If we refer to the early days as our "vintage era" it is because we are grateful for the unremitting efforts of men like Ted Lake who against tremendous odds ensured the future of the Socialist Party.

Ted joined in 1910 and commenced speaking in 1912. His first meeting was at Buckhold Road, Wandsworth. At that time the Party was running 25 outdoor meetings per week in London, with a strength of thirty speakers. The list that month showed names like Fitzgerald, Anderson, Kohn, Fairbrother, Hoskyns and Fox. Ted was the last of the line and was 88 when he died in January of this year. He was a member of the old Battersea branch, and later SW London branch. He introduced his wife Min to the Party in 1926 and she died only a few days before Ted. Both transferred to Central Branch in 1958 when they retired to Banstead.

On the death of Jack Butler by a bomb in 1944, Ted was elected Party Treasurer and held the position until 1968. He was also a member of the Executive Committee for over forty years. The Party was always short of cash. The EC had to think twice before any venture. With Lake as our hard-headed Treasurer sitting at the EC table we had to think three times. Good husbandry was never better practised and never was an EC so cost-conscious as with Lake at the financial helm.

Ted will be remembered for his irreconcilable opposition to the Party's decision to contest Parliamentary elections. He felt that, bearing in mind the size of the Party, we ought to wait until we had greater support among the working class. Originally the 1944 Annual Conference decided to contest St. Pancras, Marylebone and Paddington. Lake referred to these as the "Railway termini". When we finally chose North Paddington in the 1945 General Election we booked the Metropolitan Music Hall for a mass meeting. Ted remarked wryly  that the electors would be treated to a "new turn". In the event the meeting proved successful beyond expectation; over 1,700 people attended, and several hundred more could not get in. The great enthusiasm and energy of the members caused him to thaw slightly in his anti-election tradition but he never abandoned it.

He lectured for many years, his favourite subject being the State. Forced by his wife's health and his failing eyesight to give up his activities at the age of 80, he managed to appear occasionally at Conferences. Some months before his death he was anxious that his books should find a place in the Party library. This was arranged before he died, and thus we are still able to benefit from a life spent in the splendid cause we have become heir to. To members of his family we offer our sympathy in this double bereavement.

J. D.