Danger: diplomats at work (1985)

Editorial from the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year, which will see the fortieth anniversary of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, began with what we were told was an auspicious event. In Geneva the Russians and the Americans met to open negotiations about opening negotiations about a future treaty on arms reduction. To be accurate, it was not the "Russians" and the "Americans" who met, in the sense that the negotiations concerned the interests of the majority of the people of those countries. It was representatives of the state powers of those countries, principally in the persons of Gromyko and Shultz, who went to Geneva — and in each case the state power exists to look after the interests of the owning, privileged class of the nation. So it was really the ruling capitalist classes of Russia and America who sent their representatives to talk about how they might reduce their respective capacities to destroy each other and much else of the world at the same time.

At such events it is common for the politicians concerned to make carefully calculated, coded gestures from which the commentators can dredge up a few apparent portents for the future. Such a gesture was Gromyko's hesitant use of the English language to announce the Russian government's attitude towards the negotiations. If this hardened man of the Kremlin was prepared to put himself out to master a few words of English, speculated the media, surely his government must be seriously committed to the fruitful outcome of the talks. Did those halting words signal new hope for this harassed world? There was much relief and praise for the assembled politicians; here, we were encouraged to believe. were high-ranking diplomats earnestly searching for a reduction in world tension, to ensure that there will never again be another Hiroshima. Clearly, this was what is called statesmanship and we should all be thankful for it. even if those same diplomats have in their time managed to stomach the needless death or the slaughter of millions of people.

But if this was statesmanship then it was a case in which its practitioners first organised the building up of a vast arsenal of globally destructive weapons, to the point at which a nuclear war in space is in prospect, before they tentatively began to explore how that arsenal might be reduced — or rather how it might be reduced without putting their interests at risk. This exploration allows the "statesmen" to pose as the saviours of humanity, if we can forget that they agreed to the build-up of the arms in the first place. And if we can forget that, whatever they might announce in their self-congratulatory communiques, they have no realistic hope or intention of exploring the elimination of nuclear weapons, nor of "conventional" arms, nor of the cause of war itself.

Even at that, the politicians have approached the matter with extreme caution. Shultz warned that "a long and arduous process lay ahead" and Gromyko said that the talks were "only a step compared to the immense tasks that are to be addressed in the course of the negotiations on space and nuclear arms . . ." The reason for this caution is obvious; there are vastly important interests at stake in these talks, expressed in the scale of the spending on armaments by the social class whose interests are represented by Shultz and Gromyko. There is good reason, if we accept the priorities of capitalism, for this spending for it goes to protect and expand the powers' standing in the world's economic, commercial and political conflicts. It goes to protect the capitalists' markets and to conquer others for them; it goes to secure their hold on cheap sources of raw material; it goes to establish and maintain their grip on areas of domination such as the Russians have in Eastern Europe and the Americans have over much of the Far East. Expending huge amounts of energy and resources in protecting those interests is considered justifiable even though tens of millions die of famine each year, or of avoidable diseases, or rot in slums, or wither away through neglect and lack of medical care.

Capitalism is lavish with the means of destruction because it is a social system which must operate through competition and conflict; co-operation and harmony are foreign to its nature. The basis of this society—the class ownership of the means of production and distribution — ensures that wealth is produced as commodities, as objects and services intended for sale on the market as opposed to the satisfaction of human needs. Cheap production is important to the capitalist class because it can make their goods more competitive in the markets; thus they must always be concerned to find and exploit the most abundant fields of raw materials, as they have in the North Sea. Access to hungry markets is also vital to their interests for it is there that they can most easily sell their products, with a better chance of getting the highest price. These are aspects of that continuing competitive struggle which is responsible for the world's armed forces and the weapons with which they fight, which are now capable of reducing millions of us to nuclear vapour.

There is no solution to this terrifying situation as long as the basis of capitalism is unchanged. But to change this basis would be to abolish the system and when we have done that there is only one society which can replace it. Socialism will be founded on the world-wide, communal ownership of the means of life. Its wealth will not be produced for sale, for the profit of a minority, but for the consumption and the benefit of the entire people of the world. Competition will be replaced by co-operation. There will be a full participation in all society's activities. especially its productive work, and free access by all to its wealth. On that basis there can be no cause for conflict: common ownership and free access will bring a world of human harmony. And all of this will be organised and operated at the democratically formed will of the people.

That, in brief, is socialism. It is the only way to abolish the problems which at present plague the world and which hamper human progress. It is the only political objective worth the workers' attention. Beside the certainty of the security and abundance of socialism, the false promises of capitalism's leaders are as rancid crumbs. However the diplomats bargain and dissemble they cannot negotiate away the realities of capitalism. The world awaits its appropriation by the working class.

What Causes Famines? (1985)

From the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent events in Ethiopia have brought the question of famine back into the news. But what are famines? And what causes them? The obvious answer seems to be a situation where people are dying through lack of food in a particular region.

Were we living in a world where everyone had an automatic right to the amount of food they needed to stay alive this simple explanation might be plausible. The only way, in such circumstances, that a famine could arise would be if the total amount of food available to the people of a particular region fell below that needed to feed them all. The trouble with this simplistic explanation is that it is contradicted by the facts. First, there is the fact that during famines some starve while others have no problem obtaining food, whereas if the above explanation were true all people would suffer equally. Secondly, in a number of famines not only has the amount of food available in the region not fallen, or not fallen substantially, but food has even been exported.

These two examples show that a famine is not just a question of the total amount of food available in relation to the total number of people in a particular region; it is more complicated than this. People's access to food (as to other goods) is not free, but depends on a number of economic, social and legal factors defining their position in society.

In a developed capitalist country like Britain access to food depends almost exclusively on having money. People get this money in a number of ways: from owning property (as a non-work income such as rent, interest and profit), from trading or from selling some service, from selling their mental and physical energies (for a wage or salary), and from the state (as pensions and other allowances). So people get money which then gives them a claim on food, of a quantity and quality related to the amount of money they have. This claim is basically a property claim in that the exchange of money for food is a property-transaction involving an exchange of equivalent values.

In undeveloped countries like Ethiopia or Bangladesh the situation is basically the same, except that a category that has virtually disappeared in the developed countries has a much greater weight, namely, those who directly work the land. Such people can have access to food without money as they can consume part of what they grow, but here again this is an individual entitlement arising out of a property situation. They are entitled to the food because they own (or have rented) the land on which it is grown. There are also more people in the undeveloped countries whose entitlement arises out of money obtained from petty trading or selling some service rather than from the sale of their labour power.

This, then, is the framework in which famines occur. It enables us to see why the amount of food available in a region is not the determining factor in a famine. The determining factor is the pattern of people's legal entitlement to acquire food and it is changes in this rather than in food availability that provoke famines.

This point, which is fairly obvious when you reflect a little on the nature of the private property world in which we live, has been well developed in a study undertaken by Amartya Sen for the ILO, published in 1981 under the title Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Sen's basic point is that "starvation . . . is a function of entitlements and not of food availability as such":

 It is the totality of entitlement relations that governs whether a person will have the ability to acquire enough food to avoid starvation, and food supply is only one influence among many affecting his entitlement relations.

To test the validity of this "entitlement" approach, as opposed to the "food availability decline" approach, Sen examines four famines — the Great Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famines of 1973 and 1974, the Sahel famines of the 1970s and the 1974 Bangladesh famines. The statistics he produces show that these are better explained in terms of a collapse of entitlements to acquire food legally, through exchange or through direct consumption, among certain sectors of the population rather than in terms of a fall in the amount of food available.

Thus he concludes with regard to the Ethiopian famine of 1973:

  The Ethiopian famine took place with no abnormal reduction in food output, and consumption of food per head at the height of the famine in 1973 was fairly normal for Ethiopia as a whole. While the food output in Wollo was substantially reduced in 1973. the inability of Wollo to command food from outside was the result of the low purchasing power in that province. A remarkable feature of the Wollo famine is that food prices in general rose very little, and people were dying of starvation even when food was selling at prices not very different from pre-drought levels. The phenomenon can be understood in terms of extensive entitlement failures of various sections of the Wollo population.

About the Bangladesh famine he says:

  The food availability approach offers very little in the way of explanation The total output, as well as availability figures for Bangladesh as a whole, point precisely in the opposite direction. as do the inter-district figures of production as well as availability. Whatever the Bangladesh famine of 1974 might have been, it wasn't a Food Availability Decline famine.

What Sen calls the "entitlement" approach also provides an explanation for the export of food from famine regions:

  Viewed from the entitlement angle, there is nothing extraordinary in the market mechanism taking food away from famine-stricken areas to elsewhere. Market demands are not reflections of biological needs or psychological desires, but choices based on exchange entitlement relations. If one doesn't have much to exchange, one can't demand very much, and may thus lose out in competition with others whose needs may be a good deal less acute, but whose entitlements are stronger. In fact, in a slump famine such a tendency will be quite common, unless other regions have a more severe depression. Thus, food being exported from famine-stricken areas may be a “natural" characteristic of the market which respects entitlement rather than needs.

In other words, people starve because in private property society they have come to have no legal access to the food they need to stay alive. As Sen puts it in the closing paragraph of his book:

  The focus on entitlement has the effect of emphasizing legal rights. Other relevant factors, for example market forces, can be seen as operating through a system of legal relations (ownership rights, contractual obligations, legal exchanges etc). The law stands between food availability and food entitlement. Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance.

What is the solution? Sen himself seems to think that famines could be avoided if some sort of social security system was introduced in the undeveloped countries which would ensure people a minimum (even if only a bare minimum) state income when their other "entitlements" fail. Something along these lines may well be tried sometime (where are these poor states going to get the money from?) but manifestly this would only be a palliative. To solve the problem a much more fundamental change is required: the abolition of private property.

All that is on and in the Earth must become the common property of all the people of the Earth. Once the world has been organised on such a communist (in the original sense of the term) basis, access to food, and all other goods, would no longer be dependent on establishing a legal right through owning property, selling one's labour power, and so on. but would be something that every human being would have in application of the principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". Given that a more intensive and extensive use of already-applied agricultural techniques could provide enough food adequately to feed every single man, woman and child on the planet, famine and starvation would be impossible. Indeed, people living in socialism will look back at the twentieth century as a Dark Age of continual wars and famines and will wonder why such things were allowed to happen.

Adam Buick

Trouble in store (1985)

From the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

They might have said: "The people who own this supermarket hope you will come in and buy food here. But no matter how much you need it. you must not take anything from the shop unless you pay for it because that's the way we get profits on our investments. If you don't obey these rules you will probably be punished under the law."

What they actually said, in two posters side by side on the door, was: "Welcome to Safeways'. "Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted".

Like many other offences, shoplifting has apparently been on the increase, from 126,844 incidents recorded by the police in 1972 to 242,304 in 1982. The total value of goods lost to the shops in this way is set at about £8 million a year but it is likely that it really amounts to a lot more than that; in particular shop assistants are suspected of a vast amount of undetected theft. Anyone starting a career in crime by testing out their welcome at Safeways may be reassured by the fact that about 50 per cent of contested cases result in an acquittal in court.

There are various methods for the apprentice shoplifter to consider, from the simple one of putting items straight into a shopping bag instead of into the basket so thoughtfully provided by the supermarket and leaving without paying for them; to the more difficult, like grabbing a discarded receipt. finding foods for the same price and getting a refund on them. In between lie methods requiring some manual dexterity, like swapping those sticky price tags or "gleaning"—opening packs of food and eating it while in the store, which can give a supermarket shelf the appearance of a field ravaged by locusts. Some known shoplifters. presumably on their day off, relax by playing games, attracting attention by concealing some item on their person and walking around the shop for a while before replacing it. to the chagrin of the watching store detective.

Who are the shoplifters? An article in Justice of the Peace (28 January 1984) said there has been ". . . an increase in the incidence of organised or group shoplifting (the Australian gang) and the use of violence arid intimidation. . ." but this aggravation of magistrates' paranoia represents too alarmist a picture. A very high "clear-up" rate is claimed by the police for shoplifting — 88 per cent compared to 37 per cent for all offences — which is a measure of the shoplifters' ineptitude. Then there is the fact that nearly half of the incidents recorded in 1982 concerned goods worth £5 or less, which is hardly the type of loot looked for by determined. sophisticated gangs. In fact, juveniles make up the largest group of shoplifters and. according to the Home Office (Designing Out Crime, HMSO). it is the offence most often committed by youngsters truanting from school.

The rising tide of shoplifting has been resisted by the shops in a strengthening of their defences. The Association of Prevention of Theft From Shops, whose Director is a Baroness, acts as an intelligence agency. Many goods are so packaged that it is very difficult to conceal others in with them (it is. of course, also very difficult to unpack the things when you get them home). In clothing shops, tags which can only be removed by a cashier set off a clamorous alarm if anyone tries to take them through the doorway. Shops are surveyed by closed circuit TV and patrolled by store detectives, whose vigilance may be sharpened by the commission they get for every successful arrest.

It is ironic that all this effort is expended to deal with a problem which the shops originally made for themselves. The age of the shoplifter is also the age of the self-service store: “Shoplifting", the Home Office unsurprisingly concluded, "is discouraged by the presence of assistants who are there to serve the customer." But the old style shops, where assistants, who had knowledge and skill as well as patience, served customers across counters, were relatively costly in floor space and wages. (Imagine the acreage of counters, and the swarms of staff, the average Safeways would need if they used that method today.)

All of that was swept away soon after the war in what was called the Great Marketing Revolution, in which a lot of money was invested with the object of cutting staff and making more profitable use of shop floor areas. The revolution left the customers to do the serving themselves, from displays replenished by squads of nocturnal "shelf-fillers" and then to volunteer to pay at check out tills operated at the kind of pressure to ensure the minimum of customer contact and the maximum of alienation. Now nobody stands chatting in a supermarket; the shelves can't talk back and the check out operators haven't got the time.

The big snag with the revolution was that it also allowed the customers to help themselves from the displays and so opened a field of crime to thousands of people who would not otherwise have had such a tempting opportunity. Vagrant alcoholics could help themselves to their booze, penurious mothers could help feed their children, aimless truants could arrange an afternoon s supply of free sweets and fags. About 4,000 of the yearly convictions for shoplifting are of people of 60 and over, many of them never having been in court before and who, but for the existence of the self-service shop, would almost certainly never have fallen foul of the law.

This has given rise to the stereotype of the menopausal shoplifter, a concept whose significance is obscured by the implication that age has to be a disability when in fact the problem lies in the disabling effects of capitalist society. The magistrates' courts see a continuous procession of these wretched, frightened people, often middle-aged women in despair. These women are often described in court, by helpful policemen. as "respectable", which means that they have been nurtured since birth on an insidious diet of capitalist morality. For them, the apex of attractiveness coincides with that of their profitability as an employee — with their youth. The fulfilment of their life began with employment, followed by marriage and a coping with children, housework. the mortgage and the bills while still disseminating a stereotypical sexual allure. At an age when cosmetic artifices can no longer smooth wrinkles, when no profit-conscious employer would give them a seat in the typing pool or at an assembly line, when their children have left home to grapple with the stresses of their own marriage, many women may feel their usefulness died with their fertility and that now they are unwanted, unattended.

An obvious way to draw attention to themselves is to offend against all they have been conditioned to regard as moral and correct. Such people could hardly burgle a house or hold up a bank but shoplifting is an easily available crime, fitting neatly into their daily routine of housework and shopping. Too often, however, their arrest is only another stage in a chronic depression. Hundreds of people every year are driven into a mental breakdown by their arrest and during a recent 18 month period the Portia Trust recorded 32 suicides by people accused of shoplifting. The other side of this bitter story is to be found in the people who own the supermarkets and the companies which supply them, among whom there are some massive fortunes: the Vestey family (£1.5 billion); the Sainsbury family (£900 million); James Goldsmith (£500 million); Garfield Weston (£300 million) (Sunday Times. 7 October 1984). These are some of the class whose interests are protected by the store detectives, the police and the courts, who welcome us to their shops as long as we pay for what we take away, whose interests are in the end responsible for the alienation, misery, depression and suicides.

In its early days shoplifting was perhaps not regarded quite so seriously. In fact one study found that some shops took the level of their loss as an index of their attractiveness. According to the Home Office. "Retailers . . . may be disinclined to change marketing techniques so long as these gain more in sales than they lose in theft". The balancing point, of course, is concerned with profits, which is as it should be in a society whose wealth is produced to be sold rather than to satisfy human needs. The shops warn us that in the end we all pay because they simply raise their prices to cover their losses to the shoplifters. But if it were possible for a company always to recoup losses in that way they would not need to defend themselves so tenaciously against theft, or wage demands, or a slump in their sales.

The shoplifters go to their work untroubled by the spurious, justifying economics of capitalism's defenders. Except that they might ponder on the greater act of legalised theft which establishes the property rights of the owners and whether a more comprehensive appropriation than their furtive acts might do better for the human race.

Ivan

Nationalism is poison (1985)

From the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

  This article was originally published in the Socialist Standard of March 1973. The case it states is as apt today as it was then.

In the struggle to win the minds of the working class Socialists have to contend not, on the whole, with rational critiques of the Socialist position but with deeply held and unquestioned values. A few of these, for example, might be religion, "human nature", "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work" or the association of Socialism with Russia. One of the strongest of these sacred beliefs, and one of the biggest obstacles to the establishment of Socialism, is nationalism ― the loyalty felt by many members of the working class to "their country", the political unit in which they happen to reside.

Socialists hold that the only real divisions which exist in the world are horizontal ones, between different social and economic groups. In advanced capitalist countries this consists in a division between the capitalist class, which owns and controls the means of production, and the working class, which owns none of them and which has to sell its mental and physical labour-power to the capitalist class in order to live. Feelings of loyalty to a nation-State are purely subjective, having no basis in reality; the working class in Britain has more in common with the workers in other countries than it has with the British capitalist class.

There, is however, an alternative view of the world. This is the belief that the important divisions are not horizontal, between different classes, but vertical, between various nations. A "nation" consists, according to this view, of a hierarchy of men and women who, although having differing incomes, social status and power, all have a common interest in working in harmony for the benefit of the whole unit and, if necessary, in fighting against other nations to defend this interest. This completely mistaken outlook is the one held by most members of the working class and nearly all political parties (including the Labour Party). Most historians reject Marx's declaration that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle", preferring instead to see history as a succession of struggles of nations against foreign domination, of subjects against tyrannical kings and of nations and races against each other.

Broadly speaking, nationalist ideologies and movements represent the interests of the capitalist class. Nationalism as such did not exist in pre-capitalist society and its growth and development represents the parallel development of the capitalist class. Nationalism as we know it today first made its appearance during the French Revolution. In the early stages of the revolution cosmopolitan ideas were prevalent ― it was believed that the rest of Europe would be inspired by France's example and would likewise overthrow the old order. When this failed to happen strong feelings of nationalism developed; France was seen as a chosen nation, picked out to be the standard-bearer of revolution throughout Europe.

Politically, nationalism is ambiguous, in that it can take on a "rightwing" or a "leftwing" form. This depends upon the position of the capitalist class in the particular time and place. If political power is held by the aristocracy or nobility, and the middle-class is struggling to assert itself, then nationalism will have "leftwing" connotations. This was the case in Europe until 1848, when nationalism was a romantic, revolutionary force against the traditional ruling class. However, once the bourgeoisie has captured and consolidated its power, then nationalism becomes a conservative and rightwing force.

Although every nationalist movement believes it is unique, there exist basically these two forms of nationalism side by side. In the advanced parts of the world ― the United States, Britain, Western Europe ― nationalism is conservative, whilst in pre-industrial countries engaged in struggles against a foreign ruling class, nationalism is a "leftwing" force.

The World Socialist Movement opposes all nationalist movements recognising that the working class has no country. There are certain other groups ― the Communist Parties of the world, and the so-called revolutionary left ― which, though claiming to have a class outlook, have a wholly opportunist and ambiguous attitude to nationalism, which reflects not so much the interest of the working class as it does Russian or Chinese foreign policy. These groups fully accept the mythology of the existence of "the nation". For example, from an Anti-Internment League pamphlet:

 The people of each nation have the right to determine how they shall be governed. Foreign interference is a fundamental attack on that right. When one nation takes offensive action against another, by introducing troops or in any other way, we cannot sit on the fence . . . And so to Ireland: Ireland is a nation; Ireland is not Britain; and the Irish have a right to decide whether or not they wish to have any association with the rest of these isles.

This attitude is a complete denial of Marxism; it is almost incomprehensible that people who describe themselves as Socialists should write of the "right to re-establish Irish nationhood" (from the same pamphlet). The Irish republican movement is in essence no different from any other nationalist movement; it was brought into being because of the need of a fledgling capitalist class to break away from Britain and erect protective tariff barriers in order to build an industrial economy. Socialists give the IRA and Sinn Fein no support whatsoever.

It will be argued that Marx and Engels supported nationalist movements and that therefore Socialists should do so today. Such an assertion is based on a faulty understanding of the Materialist Conception of History. Marx and Engels were living in an era when the bourgeoisie was engaged in a struggle to assert itself against the old feudal regimes. The victory of this class was a historically progressive step at that time in that it brought about the re-organization of society on a capitalist basis, the essential pre-condition for the establishment of socialism; and it created an urban proletariat, the only class which can bring about socialism. This was why Marx supported the rising capitalist class in their bid to capture political power. However, once capitalism reaches the point where socialism is a practical proposition, there is no need for socialists to advocate the capitalist industrialization of every corner of the globe; they can concentrate fully on the task of establishing socialism. Hence we give no support to any nationalist group, and in place of the opportunism and hypocrisy of the myriad Bolshevik groupings in advocating "national self-determination", socialists echo the rallying cry of Marx and Engels, "Workers of All Countries, Unite!"

Brendan Mee

Running Commentary: Feel the quality (1985)

The Running Commentary column from the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Feel the quality

Were the doctors who decided to refuse further kidney dialysis treatment to Derek Sage serious, when they said this was because his "quality of life was not good enough" to justify it?

Perhaps Derek Sage was a difficult, demanding, aggressive patient at the Churchill Hospital. Perhaps his behaviour did tend to disrupt the routine there; such places are at times rather like a huge factory with an overworked labour force where the routine is important, for without it everything might grind to a halt.

But does this case set a precedent? If so, there will be some trembling hands among the port glasses of the stately homes. If medical treatment is to be allocated on the basis of quality of life and on the demands the patient makes on social resources, how will the privileged class in society fare when they need it?

For example what contribution, other than helping to fill the columns of the gutter press, does Prince Andrew make to the quality of life? Is he not, with his unproductive. parasitic existence, an unjustifiable drain on human resources?

Then what about Mark Thatcher? Apart from losing himself in the desert in an exercise based on the assumption that he could find his way through it, and failing to become an accountant, what contribution has he made to the communal good?

These questions can be asked of the ruling class as a whole. In what way is the quality of life improved by the activities of this assortment of leeches and play-people? How do the majority of people, those who do the useful, productive work, benefit from those long, expensive nights in the casinos of the world, from those orgies of killing on the grouse moors, from those massively indulgent feasts which are called eating and drinking?

How do we benefit from any aspect of the existence of the owning, ruling, coercing. capitalist class? The answer to all these questions is that there is no advantage to humanity in any of this; in fact the opposite is true, for society will be a much happier, healthier, more peaceful place when their standing is removed and class society abolished.

But of course until that happens the capitalist class do not need to worry about their chances of getting medical treatment. What really settled the matter for Derek Sage was that he couldn't afford, at the time, to pay for dialysis. When the money was found for it he was whipped off to another hospital where patients can be as difficult as they like provided the bills are settled easily.

What it comes down to, is that what matters is not the quality of your life but the size of your bank balance — which is roughly how capitalism judges almost everything.

Cause or effect?

The latest issue of Social Trends, the government's statistical picture of what life is like in Britain today, gives no hope for anyone who waits for such surveys to come to any surprising or original conclusion.

For example, Social Trends finds that those who lost their jobs between 1979 and 1983 recorded higher rates of divorce, alcoholism and notified illness. Anyone with any ability to relate facts to each other will not be surprised at this; indeed, it would be astonishing if it were the other way round.

To the people who rely on selling their working abilities to an employer in order to live, holding a job often has an importance beyond mere physical survival. It is also something to do with status, with self-respect as a person who is usefully contributing towards a home and a family. The sack can bring on a depressive sense of unworthiness, at times leading to suicide.

So it is not unreasonable to expect the unemployed to react to the problems of being on the dole by taking to drink, or falling ill, or having difficulty in their personal relationships. The happy, secure, sunshine-bathed family so beloved of the advertising industry is a cruel myth. The reality of working class life, with its unrelenting struggle for survival, is much less attractive.

But of course, if the statisticians saw it as simply as that they might reason themselves out of a job. So Social Trends also contains some discussion about the sequence in which unemployment and illness are related. Which comes first? Is it more a matter of, say, heavy drinkers being more liable to be sacked when redundancies are in the offing, than teetotallers hitting the bottle as a consolation for being on the dole? Such trivial debating points are the stuff of life for the statisticians, the economists, the sociologists, but how important are they?

The majority of people in capitalist society have to find employment. Naturally, employers prefer to take on workers who are fit and well to those who are persistently on the sick-list or liable to lapse into alcoholism or drug abuse. Workers who suffer from these disabilities are among the most distressed members of their class. Their fate under the pressures of capitalism in the 1980s is a bitter illustration of the relentless degradation of working class poverty.

So whether unemployment and sickness are seen as cause or effect, we are brought back to the basic fact of capitalism's class relationships and of working class deprivation. These are not social trends, but inevitable social features which can be eradicated only by the abolition of capitalism.

Not guilty

Band Aid's record about famine-stricken Ethiopia was a shrewd contrast to the usual Christmas mush about presents and children and jolly sleigh rides. It went some way to resurrect, as well as rename, a not-now-so-popular pop group by appealing to the sickened reaction to the sight of wasting, pot-bellied, fly-smothered children.

In turn, this stimulates impatience at the apparent complacency and indolence of officialdom, fuelled by the notion that governments exist to organise away problems like famine with shipments of food, medical supplies and so on. So why don't they get on with their job. instead of leaving it up to a charitably inclined pop group and their customers?

Then there is the measure of induced guilt, as workers in places like Britain are encouraged to be embarrassed at the level of poverty they are accustomed to while millions of people elsewhere are even worse off, expiring through lack of basic necessities like food. British workers are told that, luckily for them, they live in the "affluence'' of the west and that if some of this were transferred to the Third World it would go a long way to eliminating famine, tropical diseases, shanty housing and the like.

There are many faults with these arguments. which get in the way of promoting the idea of a radical social revolution which will really solve these problems. If governments existed to protect human welfare, their priorities would be very different; they would devote a lot less resources to coercion and destruction and a lot more to humane constructiveness.

A society of class ownership is one of privilege, of poverty opposed to riches and of course there must be degrees of both these conditions. There are very rich people in the world and very poor. However poor a worker may be it may be possible, until we reach the very lowest and most degraded, to find someone who is even worse off. But this does not help the argument; the important point is that rich people don't get caught in a famine; hunger is another symptom of poverty and immunity from it another benefit of riches.

So it is actually a class issue. Throughout the world the majority of people are denied by their class standing full and free access to wealth. The guilt of workers who may be somewhat above the most wretched and doomed of people is a false reaction to the problem; it would be better applied as indignation about the social system which divides humanity into classes, with such catastrophic consequences for most of us.

50 Years Ago: Indian "Labour" Party (1985)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the growing industrialisation of India, trade unions have taken root, and with them the beginnings of political organisations having professedly working-class objects. Unfortunately, instead of learning from the mistakes of workers in European countries, the Indian workers are blindly following in the same path. Labour parties and parties calling themselves socialist are being formed, committed from the outset to all the tragic futilities of the European "Labour" parties. One such party is the "All-India Congress Socialist Party", formed last May. (An earlier attempt was criticised in these columns in July. 1932.) The Indian "Congress", from which the new party takes its name, is the central Indian nationalist organisation, which, under Gandhi's leadership, has fought the battles of the Indian capitalist class behind the camouflage of "independence from British rule". The new party is a constituent part of Congress, accepts its aims and objects, subscribes to its nationalistic (and there fore anti-socialist, anti-working class) doctrines. and fights elections under its banner and on its programme.

True, the new party professes to be socialist, although it has so far not attempted to embody its aims and methods in a Declaration of Principles. True, it admits that Congress, "as it is constituted, will not accept socialism today" (see Congress Socialist, Calcutta. September 29th. 1934). But having said this, the party organ goes on to enunciate the self-same delusion which enabled almost every European "Labour" party to exploit the name socialism while betraying everything that socialism stands for. Thus we are told that the Congress Socialist Party is going to "convert the Congress to the socialist viewpoint” — they might as well try to convert the British ruling class.

(From an article "The Coming Struggle in India". Socialist Standard, February 1935.)

Marx and England before 1849 (1985)

From the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was no doubt Engels who first drew Marx’s attention to the key importance of England for any adequate theory of communism. His father was a part-owner in a firm engaged in cotton spinning in the Rhineland as well as in Manchester, then the capital of the world cotton industry.

In November 1842 Engels went to England to work in the office of the Manchester factory of Ermen and Engels. He was already a communist in the sense of wanting to see established a society based on common ownership in which co-operation would replace competition and he soon made contact with like-minded people in England. From November 1843 he was contributing articles to The New Moral World, the organ of Owenite socialism. He was also a regular reader of the Chartist weekly, the Northern Star, then published in Leeds, though he did not contribute any articles to it at this time. He did, however, meet one of its journalists, George Julian Harney (1817—1897), who was later to prove a valuable contact between English and Continental revolutionaries.

If Engels had gone to Manchester earlier on in 1842 he would have witnessed the second wave of Chartist agitation and unrest in Britain. The "People's Charter" was a document that had been drawn up in 1838 in the form of a Bill to be presented to the House of Commons providing for six changes in the electoral law: universal suffrage for men. secret ballots, equal electoral districts, payment of MPs, no property qualification for MPs. and annual parliamentary elections. In itself this was a demand to continue and complete the "Reform" of Parliament begun with the Reform Act of 1832 enfranchising the capitalist class, or "middle" class as it was then known, but still leaving the workers voteless. A number of Radical MPs, as representatives of the capitalist middle class, had in fact played a part in drafting the Charter, regarding it as a means of further undermining the political power of the landed aristocracy.

The working class, however, whose acceptance of the Charter had been prepared by the trade union agitation and by the formation of Working Men’s Associations up and down the country in the preceding years, gave the Charter a social content — rejection of the economic system of "profit- mongering" and "wage-slavery" which the capitalist class had introduced and was extending — which was to make Chartism essentially a political movement of the working class, distinct from and hostile to the capitalist middle class.

The recognised leader of the Chartists in the 1840s was a former Irish MP and landlord, Feargus O’Connor (1794—1855). O’Connor was a very effective orator and enjoyed immense popularity among the working class. The Chartist movement also had its political thinkers such as James "Bronterre" O'Brien (1805—1864). dubbed by O'Connor "the Chartist schoolmaster" O'Brien had translated into English in 1836 the seminal work of European communism. Buonarotti’s History of Babeufs Conspiracy for Equality (1828). In the columns of the Northern Star and in other Chartist and Radical papers. O’Brien never ceased to emphasise the antagonism of interest between the working class and the middle class and to insist on the need for the workers to gain political power — through the implementation of the Charter — before they could do anything effective to improve their social position.

The Chartists faced competition, in their bid for working class support, from the Anti-Corn Law League which had been set up in 1838 to campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Its most prominent leaders were the industrialists John Bright (1811—1889) and Richard Cobden (1804—1865). The Corn Laws, passed after the end of the Napoleonic Wars to protect British (including Irish) agriculture from foreign competition, imposed a duty on imports of corn whenever the price fell below a certain amount. The effect was to maintain the price of corn and so of bread, in Britain at an artificially high level.

The Anti-Corn Law League tried to attract working class support by promising a "cheap loaf". The Chartists replied that, as a dispute between the capitalist and landlord classes, the repeal of the Corn Laws was not an issue that concerned wage-workers but a diversion from what ought to be their main aim: the winning of political power through the implementation of the Charter. The Chartists also pointed out that a "cheap loaf" would mean cheap wages.

A first petition for the Charter had been rejected by the House of Commons in May 1839. A second, more radical, petition was presented to Parliament in May 1842. As in 1839 it was rejected and. as in 1839, unrest broke out. In July and August, a few months before Engels’ arrival, the North of England experienced a wave of strikes. These were primarily industrial in that the basic aim was to restore the wage levels that had prevailed in 1840, but the demand for the implementation of the Charter was also put forward by some of the strikers. It was suggested at the time that some of the strikes had been deliberately provoked by the employers in order to create unrest as a means of putting pressure on the government to repeal the Corn Laws.

Engels was planning to write a book on the social history of England and, for this, besides reading Chartist and Owenite literature and participating in their meetings, he read the works of English writers on economic theory, or ’political economy" as it was then called. On the basis of this reading he sent an article entitled "An Outline of a Critique of National Economy" to Marx in Paris (who had meantime, during the winter of 1843-4, himself become a communist) which was published in the first — and only issue of the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher in February 1844. This article was a criticism of the theories of the political economists, as represented by Adam Smith (1723—1790), David Ricardo (1772— 1823) and his disciples James Mill (1773— 1836) and J.R. McCulloch (1789—1864). and by Malthus (1766—1834) and the Frenchman J.B. Say (1767—1832). It greatly impressed Marx and helped orient his studies towards economics. In fact, the "critique of political economy" which Engels had suggested needed to be done was to become virtually Marx's life work.

Marx began his study of economics by reading — in French translation — the authors mentioned by Engels and made some preliminary notes for a work on economics of his own, some of which have survived as the ’Paris Manuscripts" of 1844. Marx does refer once or twice to England in these manuscripts noting, for instance, that landed property there was no longer feudal but money-making, a point he was to incorporate into his later analyses of English history, society and politics.

Engels remained in Manchester until August 1844. The book he wrote on his return to Germany was not the social history of England he had originally planned but one describing the terrible conditions under which the working class lived in England which, according to the theories of the political economists, was the richest country in the world. This book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, was published in Leipzig in May 1845 and also influenced Marx’s thinking, this time with regard to the political development of the working class. In the chapter on "Labour Movements", which gave a very sympathetic account of trade unionism, Chartism and Owenite socialism, Engels outlined a pattern for the evolution of the working class movement under capitalism. Working class resistance to capitalist class domination first took the form, said Engels, of individual acts of crime, then of machine-smashing before evolving into trade unionism with the strike, or "turn-out", as its weapon. Out of trade unionism, Engels went on, had developed Chartism, a general political movement of the working class against the capitalist class:

Chartism is the compact form of their opposition to the bourgeoisie. In the Unions and turnouts opposition always remained isolated: it was single working-men or sections who fought a single bourgeois. If the fight became general this was scarcely by the intention of the working-men; or, when it did happen intentionally, Chartism was at the bottom of it. But in Chartism it is the whole working-class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and attacks, first of all, the political power, the legislative rampart with which the bourgeoisie has surrounded itself (p.254).

Finally, said Engels, the Chartist movement could be expected to become explicitly socialist (communist).

Marx was expelled from France in February 1845 and went to live in Brussels. Engels joined him there a few months later. In July and August they went to England for six weeks. Marx's first visit to the country. In London they met Wilhelm Weitling (1809-1864), the German tailor whose communist writings had influenced the German artisans in Paris who had helped convert Marx to communism. They also met Harney, still a journalist on the Northern Star, now edited from London, who agreed to accept articles from Engels, the first of which was published in September. From London Marx and Engels went on to Manchester where they spent most of the time they were in England. Marx was particularly interested in reading some books on economics which he had been unable to obtain on the Continent. particularly those by English-language authors who criticised the existing economic system from a communist or working class point of view such as the Owenite, William Thompson (1785 -1833), from whose An Enquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth he made extensive notes.

Another of these writers who particularly impressed him was John Francis Bray (1809-1897). Bray, a journeyman printer, was the author of Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy which had been published in Leeds as recently as 1839. He, like Thompson, had been influenced by Owenite ideas and advocated "the system of community possessions" as the long-term ideal society. As a transition to such a communist society, he proposed the exchange of goods according to their labour content.

In the criticism of Proudhon s views which Marx wrote in the winter of 1846 7 and which was published, in French, as The Poverty of Philosophy in Brussels in July 1847. Marx quoted extensively from Bray (whose book he described as "remarkable ”) in order to show that Proudhon's views had been anticipated in England:

Anyone who is in any way familiar with the trend of political economy in England cannot fail to know that almost all the Socialists in that country have, at different periods, proposed the equalitarian application of the Ricardian theory. We could quote for M. Proudhon: Hodgskin, Political Economy, 1827; William Thompson. An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness, 1824; T.R. Edmonds, Practical Moral and Political Economy. 1828. etc., etc., and four more pages of etc. We shall content ourselves with listening to an English Communist. Mr Bray (p.77).

Later on, after he had moved to England. Marx read other works in this tradition and was particularly impressed by another book by the same Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) he mentions here, Labour Defended against the claims of Capital (1825), describing it in Capital as “this admirable work". Hodgskin, a retired naval lieutenant, was not in fact an Owenite but he was staunchly pro-trade union and pro-working class.

In a sense Marx, too, could be classed among those who "proposed the equalitarian application of the Ricardian theory" since he also started out from Ricardo's labour theory of value and analysis of society divided into a landlord class, a capitalist class and a working class and gave these theories a pro-working class interpretation. In fact, until he made the key theoretical distinction (in 1858) between "labour" and "labour power ”, which enabled him to realise that what workers sold to the capitalists for wages was not their labour (the product of their labour, what they produced) but their labour-power (their mental and physical energies, their capacity to work), Marx's explanation of how the working class was exploited under capitalism was not basically different from those of writers like Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray.

They thought that workers were paid less than the value of what they produced because competition held wages, as the price of their "labour", down to subsistence levels, the surplus over and above this being the source of the profits of their capitalist employers. Marx's solution — "union", "combination", "association", "co-operation". to overcome the effects of competition — was not all that different either. Marx in fact always had the highest respect for the original "English Socialist". Robert Owen (1771-1858). who made himself the champion of this idea.

But, unlike Owen, Marx held that the working class would have to gain control of political power before anything lasting could be done to improve their lot. This once again was derived from the English working class movement. In the final section of The Poverty of Philosophy on "strikes and combinations of workers”, Marx puts forward the same pattern for the evolution of the understanding and organisation of the working class as Engels, basing himself on the experience of Chartism, had done in 1845:

England, whose industry has attained the highest degree of development, has the biggest and best organised combinations. In England they have not stopped at partial combinations which have no other object than a passing strike, and which disappear with it. Permanent combinations have been formed, trades unions, which serve as ramparts for the workers in their struggles with the employers And at the present time all these local trades unions find a rallying point in the National Association of United Trades, the central committee of which is in London, and which already numbers 80,000 members. The organisation of these strikes, combinations, and trades unions went on simultaneously with the political struggles of the workers, who now constitute a large political party, under the name of Chartists.
  The first attempts of workers to associate among themselves always take place in the form of combinations. Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance—combination. Thus combination always has a double aim. that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations. at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favour of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favour of wages. In this struggle — a veritable civil war — all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.
    Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people in the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle (pp 194 5).

The same pattern is again described in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and it remained Marx's view to the end of his life and was to be the basis for his intervention in the English working class movement in 1852-6 and in 1864-72.

Meanwhile, in 1846, the Anti-Corn Law League had achieved success when the British Parliament voted to repeal the Corn Laws with effect from 1848. This marked the beginning of the era of Free Trade for Britain and was a significant economic event which Marx, as a student of economics, did not let pass without comment. In September 1847 he attended a conference on Free Trade in Brussels. He had intended making a contribution to the discussion, but was denied the opportunity of doing so. The text of his intended speech was later published in the Belgian French-language journal L'Atelier. It was also translated into English and published in the Northern Star, of which Harney was now the editor, on 9 October and so became the first article by Marx to appear in print in England (and indeed in English). Marx returned to the question of Free Trade in another speech in Brussels on 9 January 1848 in which he declared himself in favour of Free Trade on the sole ground that it would hasten the revolutionary confrontation between the working class and the capitalist class:

The English workers have made the English free-traders realise that they are not the dupes of their illusions or of their lies; and if, in spite of this, the workers made common cause with them against the landlords, it was for the purpose of destroying the last remnants of feudalism and in order to have only one enemy left to deal with (pp.241-2).

In November and December 1847 Marx was in England for a second time, to take part in the second congress of the Communist League (Kommunistenbund) at which he and Engels were appointed to draw up a statement of the communist aims and principles of this German workers' organisation. While he was in London Marx was invited to make one of the speeches at a dinner, organised by the Society of Fraternal Democrats with which Harney was associated. to commemorate the Polish uprising of 1830. This was the first occasion Marx spoke to an audience in England (even though he spoke in German) and. addressing himself to the Chartists, he told them that the best way they could aid the cause of Polish freedom would be to achieve "the victory of the English proletariat over the English bourgeoisie" Marx and Engels later met Harney privately, together with another Chartist and Fraternal Democrat, Ernest Jones (1819-1868), to discuss the organisation of an international congress of "Democrats" (which then referred to those who wanted a thorough-going bourgeois-democratic revolution).

The planned international congress never took place, even though Harney and Jones did meet Marx in Paris in March 1848 where he had returned following the overthrow of King Louis-Philippe in February. It was overtaken by events as the European refugees, including Marx and Engels, hurried back to take part in the bourgeois-democratic revolutions which were breaking out in their native countries. Thus in April Marx moved to Cologne where he revived the newspaper he had edited there before he was a communist in 1842-3 calling it the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Most of the articles he wrote for this daily concerned the day-to-day conduct of the bourgeois-national-democratic revolution that was then going on in Germany — which Marx held communists should work for on the grounds that it would be, as he and Engels had put it in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution". One or two of the articles did mention England in passing: a comparison of the French and English bourgeois revolutions with current events in Germany and an article on the prospects for the year 1849 which mentioned the abortive "Young Ireland" uprising of June 1848 and which declared:

Only a world war can break old England, as only this can provide the Chartists, the party of the organised English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising against their powerful oppressors. Only when the Chartists head the English government will the social revolution pass from the sphere of utopia to that of reality (184. 1.1.1849 NRhz).

But 1849 was not to live up to Marx's expectations. Not only was the bourgeois revolution in Germany not immediately followed by a proletarian revolution, but the bourgeois revolution itself did not take place properly as the King of Prussia re-asserted his feudal-bureaucratic rule over the Rhineland. As for the Chartists, they had already missed their chance in February 1848 when they had failed to react after Parliament rejected. for the third time, a Petition for the Charter. The British government was quick to exploit this weakness and Ernest Jones and a number of other prominent Chartists were already in prison while Marx was speculating about the conditions for a successful Chartist uprising in Britain.

In June Marx left Cologne for Paris and, being made unwelcome there, moved on in August to London, where his permanent home  was to be for the rest of his life.

Adam Buick

Exposed: What Militant really stands for (1985)

From the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

When an organisation comes on the scene claiming to stand for the interest of the workers it is necessary to examine its principles and policies critically and responsibly. There's no point in believing everything a political organisation says about itself; after all, the Labour Party has claimed for years that it stands for the workers' interest and look what happened. The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not, of course, give credence to the pronouncements of the mass media: to do so would be to accept the Militant Tendency as a Marxist organisation, committed to working for a socialist revolution. We wish that the media were right, because we would describe ourselves in precisely that way. But there is evidence to show that the Militant Tendency is far from being either what it claims to be or what the capitalist media says it is; that it is in fact just another front for the very capitalist system it sloganises against.

We expose the Militant Tendency as reformist. not in a spirit of animosity towards our fellow workers in the organisation, but because the need for socialism is now more urgent than ever and there can be no time lost in diversions. Last September we were passed a letter addressed to the Political Editor of Militant, written by a worker who had been selling and supporting the paper for two years. The following extracts (which we publish with the writer s permission) make clear what he had learnt in the period:

  Having read What Militant Stands For and having come across so many Militant supporters in the Labour Party Young Socialists. I come to the conclusion that Militant does not argue for "bold socialist policies" as I had mistakenly believed. The ideas of Militant, together with the equally reformist Labour Party and LPYS do not constitute a real socialist alternative to the decaying and anarchic capitalist system.
   Clause IV (part 4) refers to the “. . . common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange". Surely if there is common ownership, so that everyone owns everything, then there is no need for a means of exchange, i.e. there is no need for money. This is a fundamental principle of what Marx himself advocated. Socialism is, I think you would agree, the establishment of a system of society where production is based on the needs of the majority producers of wealth and not on the private profit of the minority owners of wealth. If we are to renounce the profit system, it follows then that the possession and acquisition of money in exchange for goods and labour will be totally unnecessary.

The letter ended with a request for a response from the political editor of Militant and an expression of hope that readers of the paper would write in with their reactions. But readers of Militant were never given a chance to read the letter. The leaders decided that these arguments were not for the consumption of the rank and file. No reply was received from the political editor. Hardly surprising: earlier in 1984 the Islington branch of the Socialist Party challenged the Militant leaders to debate their ideas in public. Their reply was that there is no point in "socialists" debating with each other we should be spending our time fighting the real enemy, the Tories. But we don't think the Tories are the main enemy: we think that all capitalist parties are the enemy, including the Labour Party and the Militant Tendency.

The writer of the letter from which we quote was given the privilege of a private reply. A letter (dated 24 September) was written to him by Dave Carr, the regional organiser for the Militant Tendency in his area. In it Carr attempted to spell out what his organisation meant when they called themselves socialists. A copy was sent to us and we were given permission to use it. Not being in favour of private debates, we have decided to make Carr's comments public, answer them, and leave our readers to see the anti-socialist nature of the Militant Tendency's position. For reasons of space we have cut out from Carr's letter one or two of the more wordy passages, and for convenience we print sections of it followed by our reply.

THE TRANSITION PERIOD
“The main confusion in your analysis (in which I see the dead-hand of the SPGB) is that you don't distinguish between socialism and communism. The implication being that it's possible for a workers' revolution to go from capitalism without any intermediate stages to communism. This is mistaken. Marx and Engels stated that the overthrow of capitalism wouldn't result in the abolition of class society immediately. That's why they advanced the slogan of the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat', i.e. the working class control state power, resting on state ownership of property . . ."

The idea of the transition period was developed in the last century when it was feared that the political will for socialism might precede an advance in productive potential sufficient to make a society of production for use and free access to all goods and services immediately possible. Now, with the aid of advanced technological know-how, the human race is capable of solving the problem of productive scarcity as soon as there is a political will to do so. There is no reason why a society in which each produces according to ability and takes freely according to self-defined need could not be established in a short time, without any transition period, if a majority of workers decide in favour of the socialist alternative. When Marx and Engels were writing this might not have been the case, but why should we accept the conditions of the nineteenth century as our political guide when we have only to look at present conditions to see the immediate possibility of socialism?

The distinction between socialism and communism was not made by Marx and is not accepted by socialists. It was Lenin and his small vanguard party in post-1917 Russia who popularised this false distinction: they called state capitalism (which Lenin admitted the Bolsheviks were setting up) socialism and promised socialism (which they called communism) at a future point in history, to be arrived at after the "socialist" transition period. The Russian workers are still waiting for the transition to end.

Over which class does the Militant Tendency think that the "workers' state" will dictate? Are workers going to be dictators over the capitalists who exploit us? The notion is ridiculous. Clearly, workers must democratically conquer state power in order to abolish classes and the state. In a classless society there will be no ruling class and therefore it will not require a state to coerce people on its behalf. As Engels put it: “The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is. at the same time, its last independent act as a state" (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific). According to the Militant Tendency, society will take possession of the means of production and they will become state property. The factories in Russia are state property; so are the British mines — and the Polish shipyards. The Militant Tendency wants state ownership of the entire means of wealth production and distribution. So. during their transition period there will be state owners to whom the majority of people will have to sell their labour power in return for wages and salaries. What they are proposing is wholesale nationalisation, not common ownership where no individual, company or state monopolises the means of life. And where there is a state there are police, prisons, armies, and all the other features of class coercion. Has the Militant Tendency worked out detailed plans for how such coercion will be managed? (For example. will there be capital punishment under their new state; will the "socialist" police be armed with rubber bullets; how long will prison sentences be for those whose behaviour is out of line with state policy?) If such plans exist, why does the Militant Tendency not publish them and let workers know what life will be like under the new "Militant" state? If. as we suspect, the Militant Tendency has no idea how their new state will be run, but expects the workers to believe that "state ownership of property" will not mean what it has in Russia, China, Albania and the other dictatorships over the proletariat, we are confident that the vast majority of workers will continue to regard the Militant Tendency’s plans as just so much Leninist nonsense.

“Under socialism capitalist laws of production (albeit in a modified form) would still exist. Yes. the wages system which conceals the creation of surplus value would be overthrown but workers would continue to receive wages. Money would continue to be used to regulate exchange and the economy. Basic goods, including many foodstuffs, could be given away but other commodities would continue to be bought and sold. Under socialism, the state and money will begin to disappear. Socialism will mean, that historical moment when the state turns into a semi-state and money begins to lose its magic power."

Is he barmy or are we? What a load of confused and illogical nonsense! If the laws of capitalism will still exist "under socialism” how are we going to know that we are not still living under capitalism? There will be no wages system, but there will be wages. What in the name of Groucho Marx does this mean? Either workers are forced to sell our labour power to an employer in return for a price called a wage or salary, or we are not. The Socialist Party contends that in a society where there are no exploiters and exploited the human ability to work will not be sold at a price, but contributed voluntarily. According to the Militant Tendency, workers will still sell labour power in return for wages "under socialism", but this capitalist process (the wages system) will be called socialism. What is a semi-state? Does it mean that the new "socialist" cops will walk around with one leg on the ground or that the government will pass half-baked laws? We are told in one paragraph that "socialism" will rest on "state ownership of property" and then that the new state will be "a semi-state". How will money "begin to disappear"? Does the Militant Tendency intend to phase out coins, one by one? No. obviously there must either be a system in which wealth does not belong to the workers who have created it. so they must buy access to it with money, or there must be complete free access. Common ownership, if the term has any logical meaning, must involve the abolition of exchange and monetary relationships. But the Militant Tendency does not aim to establish common ownership: it stands for state ownership, under which wages, money and all the laws of capitalist production (albeit in a modified form) would still exist. Why don’t they tell that to the workers in the next issue of Militant?

NATIONALISATION AND REFORMS
“Militant argues that the material basis for such a planned economy must be the state ownership of the major monopolies (the top 200 in our agitation). Are you saying that this measure, carried through by the working class, wouldn't abolish capitalism? Of course, the Labour leaders have no intention of nationalising the top 200 monopolies. That's precisely why we pose that demand. To expose their rottenness, while explaining how reforms such as minimum wage, shorter hours, public works programme etc. can be financed.” 

The nationalisation of the top two hundred companies in Britain would not lead to the abolition of capitalism, but to state capitalism. Indeed, this point is accepted in a passage quoted earlier which states, quite correctly, that the capitalist laws of production, in a modified form, are all that Militant means by socialism.

Why advocate a measure because the leaders for whom you vote and canvass support will not carry it out and so be exposed as rotten? This seems to the Socialist Party, in our non-Leninist innocence, to be a dishonest and confused political strategy. Let’s follow it through: come the next election Militant Tendency will go round the houses telling workers to vote for Labour leaders. "Why should we vote for them?” ask the workers. "Because they stand for nationalisation which will be good for you.” But while telling them that you’re laughing inwardly and thinking "Silly suckers. They’ve got to vote for these leaders to find out just what sort of swines they are.” Why not start out by telling the workers what you know that the Labour leaders are rotten? Answer: because, as Leninists, you think that workers are too stupid to understand what you’ve understood, so you've got to trick them into doing the wrong thing so that they learn by their mistakes.

Socialists don't want minimum wages, we want the abolition of wage labour. The capitalist class will hardly be trembling when they hear that Militant's "revolution” amounts to little more than the provision of Keynesian financing for a few reforms of capitalism.

“. . . Trotsky, in The Transitional Programme, argued that a revolutionary should advance demands within the working class movement that link the day-to-day struggles of the workers on economic issues etc. to the need to change society. These are described as bridging demands, designed with flexibility, to raise the combativity and consciousness of the working class. In fact, Marx and Engels went to some lengths to castigate both the reformists who merely put forward a programme of reforms under capitalism and those who simply called for revolution aloof from the struggles of the working class. Both groups of 'socialists’ were sectarian."

Marx and Engels rightly held that simply to advocate a list of reforms of capitalism is a waste of workers' time. We also agree that it would be sectarian for socialists merely to preach about revolution, "aloof from the struggles of the working class". That is why the Socialist Party adopts neither of these approaches: we do not propagandise in an abstract way about how nice socialism would be but relate our analysis to the day-to-day struggle of our class; neither do we waste workers’ time merely putting forward a programme of reforms of capitalism.

Now let us look at Militant and its policies, which well live up to the description of being "designed with flexibility". The Militant Tendency does not fall into the error of simply calling for revolution — it is too busy urging workers to vote Labour so that they will realise why they shouldn't. But does the Militant Tendency "merely put forward a programme of reforms under capitalism"? If we consult pages 2 and 3 of the pamphlet, Militant—What We Stand For we find a list of eighteen reforms of capitalism. For example "Reversal of all Tory cuts and a massive programme of public works on housing, education, the health service etc."; "Opening of the books of the monopolies to inspection by committees of shop stewards, housewives and small shopkeepers"; and, of course, "Abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords". These are mere reforms of capitalism. How will the struggle to implement them "raise the combativity and consciousness of the working class"? Indeed. how have they, because reformist workers have been fighting for these things for decades and such activity has simply diverted their minds from socialist ideas. Even if the Queen was sent to work in the corner shop and allowed to inspect the books of the big companies, the capitalist system would still exist. In short, the Militant Tendency presents itself to workers as an organisation with a list of reforms of capitalism which it wants to implement. They may be radical reforms, but then Militant can afford to advocate the most radical of reforms because they have only the faintest chance of ever implementing them as a capitalist government. Trotsky and other tricksters were wrong: if you want socialism you talk to workers about the need for socialism — you don't waste their time with a lot of paper radicalism about reforming capitalism.

CAPITALIST DEATH AGONY?

“Militant consistently points out that the social and economic problems facing the working class are a product of capitalism in its death agony."

Capitalism will not die; it has to be killed. When capitalism is passing through one of its periodic economic recessions there are usually confused people on the left who imagine that quite normal features of capitalism in chaos are indicators of the system's imminent demise. For example. W. Paul, a prominent member of the Communist Party, asserted in 1922 that "The most important fact in modern history is the breakdown in capitalism . . there is the greatest possibility that the social revolution may take place in the immediate future." (Labour Monthly, 15 February 1922.) The revolution could happen soon, but not until the majority of non-socialist workers, including members of the Militant Tendency, understand it. want it and organise for it in a democratic and conscious way.

THE PARTY AND REVOLUTION 
"So, how does a revolutionary party break the workers away from its bankrupt leaders? As Marxists, Militant comrades fight alongside the working class. We strive to be the best workers, the best class fighters. We win the respect of the rank and file. We counterpose to the reformist leaders a socialist programme of demands and challenge the leadership to fight for them. In doing so, it exposes in the eyes of workers the rottenness of their leaders. We also show our preparedness to contest the leadership of the trade unions and Labour Parties to contrast Marxism with reformism."

What, in reality, does the Militant Tendency do? It works within the capitalist Labour Party, like agnostics trying to infiltrate the Vatican. It advises workers at election time, when the state is up for grabs, to waste their votes on electing rotten leaders.

The Militant Tendency has failed miserably to get the leaders of the Labour Party to fight for its demands. The only Militant policies Labour now accepts are ones which it has always accepted for the sake of radical appearances. Indeed, such respect has the Militant Tendency won from the rank and file of the Labour Party and the unions that its leaders were kicked out of the party in 1983.

Ted Grant. Peter Taaffe and the rest of the Militant top men want to be the new leaders. They think they can run the system better than previous Labour leaders. But. when scrutinised, the would-be leaders' policies consist of nothing more than sterile old reforms and a long-term plan to introduce state capitalism. Is it any surprise that most trade unionists would rather watch a good football match than listen to Ted Grant ranting on about what a great leader he would be?

"The SPGB argues that only the working class can achieve socialism, yet it refuses to ‘dirty its hands' in fighting for an alternative leadership in the working class. In short, it adopts an ultra-left, sectarian position . . . Let's be honest — it's simply not good enough to say socialism is production for need, not profit. We all know that. It's not good enough to say we should renounce capitalism. We all do that. The question is . . . How is capitalism to be overthrown? As Marx, Engels. Lenin and Trotsky explained time and time again, socialism has to be consciously constructed. That's why Marx, Engels. Lenin and Trotsky attempted to build revolutionary parties and revolutionary Internationals to lead the working class to power. It’s no good dodging the issue. The only conclusion a serious Marxist can arrive at is the need to build a revolutionary party. Militant represents the beginning of such a party, disciplined and based on the ideas of Marxism.”

Like Marx, the Socialist Party stands for the emancipation of the working class by the working class, not by leaders who will do our thinking for us. Together with other parties around the world holding the same principles. we stand for working-class revolution. Our role is simply to spread socialist ideas and to be used as a political instrument by conscious workers. It would be arrogant for us to think that we can lead our fellow workers or that anyone else should. That is why we are hostile both to the present leaders and to would-be leaders and would not dirty our hands in the opportunist business of appointing top dogs.

How is capitalism to be overthrown? The Principles of the Socialist Party make this quite clear. Lenin and Trotsky, who were leaders of the Bolshevik dictatorship over the proletariat, did not hold the view that revolution had to be constructed consciously; they took the view that workers are incapable of achieving socialist consciousness and must be led by professional intellectuals from outside the working class. Leninist parties reflect this elitist attitude. Leninists think that their historical role is to lead workers who could not possibly see what they have seen. Leninist parties, including the Revolutionary Socialist League (which is the real name of the Militant Tendency), are hierarchical, secretive, often dishonest organisations. usually dominated by a handful of demagogues who hand down orders to the inferior ranks in accordance with the Leninist theory of "democratic centralism", or control from the top downwards. The Third International, which was the undemocratic, Moscow-dominated body in which Lenin and Trotsky participated, was as unlike Marx's First International as the Militant Tendency is unlike the Socialist Party.

Members of the Labour Party who have told Militant members to get out and form their own Trotskyist party have got a point: the average Labour voter wants straight reformism. of the kind that Neil Kinnock is so expert in offering. Reformist workers don't want the same old dish served up with a queer Trotskyist sauce on it. Still, that's a problem for the Labour Party, not for socialists. As far as we are concerned neither Neil Kinnock (the opportunist with a chance) nor Ted Grant (the opportunist without a chance) should be treated with anything but contempt and hostility.

The Militant Tendency serves as a dangerous instrument for confusion. It may not do so intentionally — but then few confused people do. It is not only incapable of leading workers to socialism (socialism, by its very nature, will not be the product of leaders and followers), but it is also hopelessly ignorant about capitalism, socialism and the path from one to the other. We are always ready to debate these issues, for there can be few things more important in the working-class movement than open, clear and critical debate. But so far the Militant leaders have refused to expose their ideas to such public criticism. Supporters of the Militant Tendency should think carefully about their case and ours and, having done so, follow understanding to its logical conclusion.

Steve Coleman