Are you a reformist? (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Society needs to be changed. Few people doubt that. We have a world which is bursting with discontent. Bombs scare people. The dole queue is the fate of millions and the threat facing millions more. There is the grotesque spectacle of mass starvation while food rots, of overcrowded hospitals and poor welfare services. The streets are unsafe as the poor who are stronger steal from the poor who are weaker while the rich whose robbery is legal have well-protected mansions. This is the age of the shoddy goods. Fast food. Old people wait for the cold of winter when thousands freeze to death. This is called civilisation, but it does not feel very civilised. There is plenty of discontent around.

There are three things which can be done with that discontent. It can be bottled up. Millions of workers have learned to complain and accept. What can they do? It is easy to feel powerless when the problems are so huge, growing all the time — and politicians, despite their claims to sincerity, have done nothing to solve them. So vast numbers of people ignore politics and turn to the bottle or the soap opera or the mind-numbing drug or the pursuit of the many other phoney escape routes presented to the working class by those who benefit from apathy. Then, one can try to reform the problems of society out of existence — elect MPs to pass laws. Sign petitions and go on marches. Put sticking plaster on the ever-increasing wounds of a society which is problem-producing. That is what the reformist does.

Or thirdly, one goes for revolution. Seeing that these many problems of society are not the result of separate causes which can be removed by piecemeal reform, the revolutionary understands that one single cause creates the social ills which face us and that is the capitalist system. It is a system which does not throw up problems by accident, but does so of necessity. War is needed by a system of competition; unemployment is needed by a system where wage slavery is a "privilege" only on offer to those who can be exploited for profit; mass hunger is needed by a system where food is a commodity to be sold on the market for profit and starving millions do not constitute a market; shoddy production is needed by a system which cares not for the quality of what is made but its cheapness. A system called world capitalism is the root cause of the social problems which afflict us and therefore it is world capitalism which must be abolished and replaced by a totally new social system where production is solely for use: socialism. That is the analysis and the objective of the revolutionary socialist.

Only socialist revolution will eradicate the problems caused by the capitalist system. As long as the system remains, however much it is reformed, it will throw up more problems. more discontent. The socialist is not in the business of reforming capitalism, for to do so is to make repairs to a structure which is only fit for immediate demolition. That is not to say that socialists oppose reforms: we do not. If, for example, the bosses offer the workers free health treatment or the right to reply to media lies or other reforms, socialists will not refuse to take what is given. Our opposition is not to reforms, some of which have benefited many workers (all too often at the expense of others), but to reformism — the belief that it is worth bothering to reform capitalism.

One reformist argument is to point to what has been achieved. Indeed, capitalism has been reformed and some of these reforms were campaigned for. But two points need to be considered in opposition to this claim for reformist success. Firstly, it is hard to think of any whole problem which reformists have tried to remove which has been successfully eradicated. They have tried to abolish homelessness but in 1987, despite all the legislation inspired by reformists. there are more homeless workers than when the main housing campaign, Shelter, was set up. Despite all kinds of treaties and government policies to eliminate bombs, there are now far, far more bombs in existence than when the reformist disarmers first started. Sincere reformists for many decades before the name Geldof was heard of spoke of making mass starvation a thing of the past but there are more children starving today than there were when the reformists began their campaigns. As the system goes on new problems arise which previous generations of reformists had not even heard of.

Secondly, even if we grant that it is a good thing that reforms have achieved the slightest measures of success, who is to say that the capitalists would not have granted these reforms anyway, without the reformists pleading and petitioning? For example, it could be argued that the National Health Service was a result of reformist pressure being successful but it is much more historically valid to recognise that the NHS was essentially a capitalist measure carried through as a get-you-back-to-work-service in the interests of the smooth running of the system. Again, if the capitalists should ever decide to disarm, however slightly, that will be much more because of the needs of the bosses to reduce the cost of militarism than the moral demands of reformists.

But should we accept that the achievement of “something now", however slight, is success for reformism? No: very often the "something" which reformists are offered is a means of buying off workers, of reducing discontent and so giving capitalism a longer lease of life. Minor reforms serve as a cosmetic exercise, appearing to give the profit system a humane face. And when it is necessary for the system to withdraw such humane offerings it will do so, as is being seen in Britain in the present recession during which both Labour and Tory governments have destroyed whole areas of the "welfare state". If the power to give reforms is left in the hands of the bosses, then so is the power to take them away: yesterday's "something now" is all too often today's "something vanished".

Tied to the "something now" defence of reformism is the belief in what is called "the meantime". It is often stated by supporters of reformist campaigns and parties in the following way: "Yes, a socialist revolution would solve the problems of capitalism but we cannot wait for millions of workers to understand and want socialism, so in the meantime we must. . . . save the whale, ban the bomb, build nuclear defence shelters, oppose cuts in welfare spending". There are two major flaws in such reasoning. The first is a matter of logic: if it is accepted that capitalism does cause such problems and will go on doing so until "the meantime" is over, why try to solve problems which are the inevitable product of a system which is to remain in being during the very period that the reformist activity is taking place? Logically, the person who accepts "the meantime" thesis should become totally inactive and put up with whatever problems the system throws up. Secondly, if the reformist who recognises the possibility of abolishing capitalism and thus making reformism unnecessary can do so why does s/he imagine that it will be a task involving a lengthy "meantime" for others to think the same way? In fact, if a reformist argues that reformism is only necessary while we are waiting for the workers to wake up and see the logic of revolutionary change, the intelligent move would be to join a party committed solely to the revolutionary socialist objective. so making it less likely that "the meantime" will be extended by workers being sucked in to reformist activity.

The Socialist Party does not advocate reforms. If we did we would be conceding that socialism is not an immediately practical proposition. We say that the socialist way of running society could now solve the problems facing humankind and that no amount of reforms, however long we would have to wait for them, could improve society in the way that socialism could as an immediate change. If we adopted a reform programme as a "meantime" or "minimum" policy there would be two consequences: firstly, all kinds of workers who accepted our reform demands but who regarded socialism as being of little or no practical importance, could join us and become a majority, so converting The Socialist Party into yet another "radical" capitalist party; secondly, as soon as we went into the game of competing with other parties to offer reforms it would be a sure thing that the revolutionary aim of socialism would be transformed into a utopian demand for the future, to be brought out on ceremonial occasions to satisfy the minority of revolutionary members. Indeed, the price of reformism would be higher than that: it would not be long before the reformist majority would be silencing the socialists, warning them that they are endangering electoral prospects by failing to concentrate on reform advocacy and that they should leave The Socialist Party in order to give it a better image. Other parties which started out with socialist intentions have gone that way. but the Socialist Party, based in all ways and at all times upon firm revolutionary principles. will not be diverted.

Capitalism without problems and discontent is a dream of Utopia which is not worthy of serious political effort. No worker looking for a way out of the mess of the present social disorder can be allowed to waste their hopes and energies on the treadmill of futile reformist politics. That is why The Socialist Party is hostile to reformism — not to reformists as fellow workers, but to reformism which wastes their sincerity and that is why if you are a reformist now is the time to make the great political step forward from struggling to mend capitalism to uniting consciously to end it.

Steve Coleman

Running Commentary: Equality before the law (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Equality before the law

The "rule of law" is one of those phrases that is tossed around freely by those who seek to maintain the status quo. It sums up the idea of everyone being equal before the law while no-one should be above the law. So one might have assumed that someone, apparently guilty of the crime of giving away £70 billion of "public" money illegally, would find the wrath of the judiciary descending pretty quickly. Not so, or at least not if you are the Secretary of State for the Environment.

Towards the end of last year, Nicholas Ridley, the environment minister, was forced to admit to Parliament that he and his predecessors had, strictly speaking, been acting unlawfully since 1981 in distributing £70 billion in rate support grant to local authorities. Of course when a member of the government breaks the law there's no real problem you simply change the law. which is what the government now intends to do by rushing a bill through Parliament which will retrospectively legalise what they’ve been doing for the last five years. Or, as Ridley put it: "It is merely validating the past and putting right for the future the position which the whole House thought always obtained". So much for the "rule of law". Clearly some people are more equal than others if they can change the law to "validate" in retrospect what was previously illegal.


Constabulary duties

It is hugely reassuring to have it, from so reliable a source, that there is this direct vocal link between God and Greater Manchester’s Chief Constable. Apart from the advantages this will give him in the afterlife, it enables James Anderton to speak authoritatively on worrisome issues like sex, drug addiction and AIDS.

The fact that their Chief is divinely inspired and informed may go some way to explain the activities of the police in Manchester. Unless we knew that it was with God’s approval, we might have written them off, too hastily, as a uniformed rabble of incontinently violent and repressive thugs. But now we know better, don’t we?

The real drawback with men like Anderton is that they offer themselves as caricatures, larger than life, to absorb the indignation against police excesses which should rightly be directed at the root of the problem.

Hating — and fearing — the Andertons (and who could possibly be fond of, or at ease with, them?) can lead to the conclusion that we need a police force purged of such ogres. While it is advisable to be especially wary of anyone at his level of authority who is insulated from reality by dangerous delusions, the cool fact is that we do not eradicate the problem by substituting Chief Constables with rather different priorities and opinions about their terms of reference.

The police are not there to be kind, understanding or protective towards us. Their job is to sustain class society and its privileges. A police force can no more be democratic than can a gang of criminals; both must operate in subterfuge, neither can be meticulous about respecting the rules if they can get to their objective more quickly by breaking them.

Privilege, power and secrecy are components of corruption so it is little wonder that, as we are occasionally allowed to see by courtesy of something like Operation Countryman, the police should so often be corrupt and lawless.

It is bad enough to live in a social system which needs a police force; even worse when the police themselves operate outside the law they are supposed to uphold; worst of all when the motivation of the police management is open to question. Beyond these facts, and of greater importance, it remains true that the only solution is in a society which will not have police, because the property rights they guard will not exist.

You have that on the authority of The Socialist Party and of all socialists everywhere.

Swing to, swing fro

It must be hell, being Margaret Thatcher or Neil Kinnock, watching the opinion polls bob up and down, swing backwards and forwards. one day putting your party percentages ahead then a few days later changing it all around.

If the people of this country are really as fickle as the polls indicate, changing their minds almost from day to day on the question of which party should form the government, or which political leader is more reliable, what hope is there of them ever getting a useful insight into the workings of capitalism? Wouldn't life be a lot easier for Kinnock and Thatcher — and cheaper for their parties — if the decision about who takes power were left to a small, stable elite who are not easily influenced to change their minds? Several names spring at once to mind: Lord Hailsham. David Steel. Jim Callaghan . . .

Perhaps the polls have got it wrong? Maybe the voters are consistent but this is stifled by loaded questions, or gets lost in mistakes in sampling or processing?

There might even be another, more audacious. explanation. The polls may, within their limits, have got it right for the voters are giving deliberately inconsistent answers because they don't give a damn about the result, knowing that choosing between Tory, Labour and Alliance is really no choice at all.

This would be perfectly understandable and reasonable — encouraging, even — as it would indicate that some of the voters have at least begun to grasp the vital fact that all of these parties are equally impotent in face of capitalism's problems. They offer programmes which are basically the same and their appeals — for example that their leaders are cleverer, more sincere, more moral than the other lot — is also the same.

Faced with the offer of more of these failed, exhausted measures for persistent social ailments, the voters might resort to flippancy as an automatic emotional defence mechanism. If so, when they study the poll results, Thatcher and Kinnock might have bigger problems than they think.

There is, however, one uncomfortable fact that spoils that attractive prospect. Socialists are distinguished by our political awareness; we understand capitalism, how it works and why it must operate against the interests of the majority. We understand that the only way the capitalist parties can affect this situation is by fading away before a growing movement for socialism. We are clear about these issues, and consistent; we do not change from day to day, nor year to year.

Yet pollsters, because we don't fit into any of their categories of opinion, enter us as Don't Knows. Which is very, very frustrating. Never mind about Thatcher and Kinnock; it can be hell being a socialist.

A village in Yorkshire

"Work for no wages - you must be joking!" How often has this been put to us when talking about socialism? "Without money, what's the incentive? You'll never get people to do it". Our argument that in a sane world work satisfaction and the knowledge that we will be performing useful work will be the incentive brands us as impossibilists and Utopians.

The opening sentence was, in fact, spoken by one Bob Furness on his first visit to Botton — a village in Yorkshire founded in 1955 by Dr Karl Konig, an Austrian refugee who, since his arrival in Scotland in 1939, had opened and worked in schools for mentally handicapped children. His stated aim was to found a community where work

  should be voluntary, without wages or salaries, so that whatever a person could manage to contribute to the life in the way of work, whether emptying dustbins or doing accounts, would not be valued by money but would be accepted as their full contribution to the community life, and all their needs should be met from the community, irrespective of their work output.

This is what Bob Furness had to say after a year in the village:

  When I used to make roads with Wimpeys 1 did it for the money, the job was the way to the money. Now I make a road because it's needed. 1 know who I'm making the road for, it's my road and I care a lot about it. I want the people who use it to feel it was built with love and care.

Of course there isn't socialism in Botton. The place has religious overtones and, although "unwaged" in the best sense of the word inside the village, they have to trade with the outside world, selling dairy and farm products, bread, toys, engraved glassware and production from their Camphill Press. Socialism cannot exist in isolated pockets but Botton and similar villages which have been founded since does answer some of the points made to us. One of these is "You must have leaders". We quote from one of their leaflets:

  It's often a problem when a visitor asks to speak to the manager — a request that always leads to a look of total puzzlement . . . The village is run by groups rather than the conventional director and underlings. There are many groups dealing with, for example, finances, the cultural life, the land, the reception of people into the village, production, and so on. Almost everyone is involved in a group. . .

The villages are witness to another important fact. People who, through their handicap. are unable to cope and are considered a burden on society in a competitive environment are finding that, with these pressures removed, they are able to lead useful and fulfilling lives.

The accusation that a socialist society will stifle individuality and that everything will have a dull sameness is also refuted in Botton:

  The essential core of Botton is the family life in the houses . . . There are no separate staff quarters . . . Each house is individual, there is no centralisation so the character of a house often depends on the houseparents (who) are of many nationalities, so you can imagine the differences. With so many diverse houses of different character it always seems possible to find a lifestyle to suit a particular person's needs.

Botton and the other Camphill villages were founded as a worthwhile environment for mentally handicapped people in a hostile capitalist world. The establishment of socialism, by doing away with that environment which is hostile to all workers will bring about a world fit for all of us to live in.

(Quotations from Botton Village Life and Botton Village, a Special Story).

CP death throes

A post-script to the article in last month's Socialist Standard about the death throes of the Communist Party. It seems that yet another split is likely to take place, with the old guard of the CP threatening to break away to form a new party in protest at the present leadership which, they argue, are deserting traditional Leninist principles in favour of jumping on the trendy band-wagon of "rainbow coalition" politics — courting environmentalists, the peace movement and feminists instead of the industrial working class. The dissident Communist Campaign Group centred around the Morning Star newspaper, disowned by the present leadership. is planning a New Year campaign to try to win support from among workers involved in strike action, such as print workers at Wapping and teachers. This kind of political opportunism is matched only by that of the CP leadership, which rejects the arguments of the dissidents claiming that their approach fails to attract support, hence their own focus on more popular issues.

Alright, John? (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Alright?'’ Every day, millions of people are greeting each other with this friendly enquiry. "Ça va?" "Wie geht's?". And every day, millions of people are giving a dishonest answer. Think how unpopular you would become if every time someone asked "how are you?'' you pointed out that your position as a wage or salary worker is insecure and degrading. "I'm alright, but what's going on around me isn't. Even if we survive the decade without a nuclear war (which is by no means certain) we're still living in a ridiculously outdated system of poverty for the productive and prosperity for the parasites . . ." Think what trouble you could cause, and what thoughts you could provoke, by interrupting the flow of small talk in this way.

In actual fact, if an individual person suffered from the same in-built contradictions and insanity as our present social system, they would be far from "alright". The present social system is based not on satisfying people's needs, but on producing a profit and capital accumulation. This increases the power of those who possess capital. As part of this process, the whole of human society has become enslaved by the world market. Every item, every service, even every human emotion and activity becomes turned into a commodity, an object of commerce to be bought and sold. In the September 1986 issue of International Management Alan Sugar, who owns the Amstrad computer company, stated: "If there was a market in mass-produced portable nuclear weapons, we'd market them too". A man who understands capitalism.

Within this world wide capitalist system of society nothing is ever produced or distributed unless it can be sold at a profit. And this means that if people s needs are not backed up by sufficient buying power  — "cash demand" — then the system dictates that those needs must go unmet. As a result, many thousands of human beings are starving to death daily, according to sources such as Oxfam. the United Nations and even the World Bank. When food is produced which is surplus to market requirements, it is stored or destroyed rather than being freely distributed, as free distribution would lower price levels and reduce profit margins. So we get the revolting spectacle of people starving to death on the one hand and on the other, so-called food surpluses being referred to as a “problem" to be disposed of and avoided in future:

  There are more than 20 million tonnes of unwanted food in the community's bulging stores, including 15 million tonnes of grain, around 1.5 million tonnes of butter and about 600,000 tonnes of frozen beef. . . The parliamentary inquiry was first mooted in September . . . The brief would be not only how to get rid of the food mountains, but also how to ensure, through price policy and production controls, that they never reappeared.

(Guardian, 1 November 1986).

This conflict between human needs and the needs of the buying and selling system can be seen throughout society today, together with the universal insanity which it breeds. There was a period of human history when time was just time: the fourth dimension. Now, it has become not only the means of measuring the "exchange value" of goods by the amount of labour-time embodied in them, it has even become a commodity itself. If you dial the talking clock ("Tim", as it used to be so affectionately named) you will hear the startling statement that: "The time, according to Accurist. is . . ."

Over the past few years, one of the few boom industries in Britain has been the service offered by personal telegrams. Again, there was a time when the communication of feelings between human beings was regarded as a personal and sensitive matter, to be approached delicately by the people involved. But the capitalist social system, in its fanatical drive for profit, continues to wipe away all discrimination or subtlety of feeling. Sentiment is made uniform, just like fashion clothes or indistinguishable pop records, in order to exploit a mass market more cheaply. So in the 19 May 1986 issue of Ms London magazine there is one page which contains adverts for as many as seventeen different "Kissagram" companies. For a cash fee ranging from £16 to £45. a message or greeting can be sent to a friend by one of these professional intermediaries, dressed up (or undressed) in the most bizarre range of supposedly shocking outfits. Those on offer include Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan or Prince Charles lookalikes (nice birthday surprise), as well as various sexual stereotypes. "Quasimodo", nuns and frogs. This kind of gimmick might be regarded as a piece of harmless fun but it is in fact another instance of the corruption of basic human relationships by the money god.

We are encouraged from an early age to have priorities which will enable us to put up with the insane social system we live under. At Northwood, in Middlesex, there is one of the biggest NATO bases in the country which, in the event of a nuclear war. would be a prime target. The local residents' association. whose members are kept awake at night by their deep but secret fears that Thatcher might really be a "wet", started campaigning a year or so ago on this issue. Had they finally decided to question the symbolic siting on their doorstep of one of the world's two biggest machines of mass murder? Had they felt compelled to discuss how we might rid the world of all war and all of its weapons? Not quite. The campaign was to oppose the building of a helicopter landing pad on top of the local NATO base, as the noise from the helicopters might cause some disturbance. And nowhere in any of the literature generated by this campaign was there any acknowledgement of the terrible danger and threat, the ultimate disturbance, represented by any large military base of that kind.

Workers in every country are being employed to build the weapons of their own destruction. Instead, technology could be adapted for useful purposes, to satisfy human needs in health, housing and food. The real choice in the world today is not between one power bloc and another, or one type of government and another, or one kind of weapon and another. International conflict is not like a football match in which the crowds of spectators must choose which side to support. People who want peace should not concern themselves with the question of whether nuclear destruction is worse than conventional destruction, or chemical warfare more palatable than biological warfare. The real question which faces us is how we can abolish all warfare.

The only way this can be done is by abolishing its cause. You cannot remove an effect permanently without getting rid of its cause. Religion spreads the fatal myth that the problem lies in the in-built wickedness of human beings. Because Adam, presumably bored to tears by the perfect paradise of the garden of Eden, took a bite out of the apple of knowledge, they say, we are on the verge of the most horrific destruction imaginable. Most people who talk about the innate aggression and violence of humanity are themselves servile wimps. The real cause of war, regardless of which weapons are used to fight it, is social. War is generated by the conflicts which exist in property based systems of society. But the property which is at stake does not belong to the millions whose lives are sacrificed on its altar. Wars are fought over the material interests of the powerful and parasitical elite which dominates in every country, including those like Russia where instead of shareholders, they are called Party officials.

Within the next eighteen months, there will be a general election in Britain. The Labour, Conservative and Alliance campaigns will each be at great pains to show how different they are from the others, and that only they possess the magic formula to solve the problems which continue to plague us. In reality, though, none of them even begins to confront the major issues of class and poverty, hunger and health, housing, energy, war and so on. They never will be able to, because they are all founded on a false assumption: that the profit system, in one form or another, must drag on forever. This belief is based on ignorance: the present social system has only lasted for a few hundred, out of the many thousands, of years of human existence. It will end. just like all previous social systems have ended, when they became outdated.

The other political parties all stand for the perpetuation of capitalism. The bankruptcy of their ideas is obvious from the basing of their campaigns on negative attacks on each other. They say they will, if elected, be not quite as terrible as their evil opponents. Not quite. They even seem to have realised that there is some limit, nowadays, to the number of lies that workers will let politicians get away with. For example, in the past, every Labour government came to power promising to solve the unemployment problem and every Labour government since 1924 left office with unemployment higher than when they went in. So now Neil Kinnock is making the half-hearted offer that if he is elected and if their plans all work, they might be able to make some reduction in unemployment, after some years. And even this tentative promise rests on Keynesian policies of increased state spending, which were tried and failed miserably during the seventies, when government spending increased from about £20 billion to £80 billion but unemployment virtually quadrupled as a result of the inevitable periodic recession in the trade cycle of the world capitalist system.

At election time, we are presented with the spectacle of stale and sterile ideas being sold to us by slick, hi-tech advertising agencies like Saatchi and Saatchi on the one hand and trendy bandwagons like Red Wedge on the other, with Neil Kinnock having made his pop debut some time ago with his appearance (only a cameo role) in a Tracey Ullman video of a song originally done by Madness (pure coincidence). Now. it appears, never far behind when there is a chance of some opportunist vote-catching, the SDP have decided to ditch their stuffy image and get hip. They have recently formed a youth campaign called "Sound and Vision" and the organiser has been quoted as saying that the reason for the name is that the SDP is "sound" in not making false promises, and has "vision" because "we reject the bitterness of confrontation between management and unions" (National Student, November 1986).

It may be true that SDP politicians make fewer false promises. Their way of achieving this is very clever: by making fewer promises, true or false. They must know the secret of how you tell when a politician is lying: because you can see his lips move. As for rejecting the bitterness of class struggle, that is simply a very old trick of persuading the exploited to link arms with their exploiters — very good for business. More entertaining, however, is the "Sound and Vision" promo video, which apparently features David Owen as "Max Headroom" (wonder if you could pay him to do it as a kissagram), complete with vocal distortion and trendy computer graphics in the background. Making some of those false promises which the SDP never make, he claims they will "improve" jobs, "help" the Health Service and oppose nuclear energy "unless it's safe" (better just drop a line to the CEGB then, and ask them). It seems that the script, as well as the pop image, was taken from the "zany" Max Headroom show.

These politicians are the jesters of modern society, the jokers and clowns. The last laugh will be on them, though, when a majority decide to reject their rotten social system, which has planted a policeman and a cash-register in every head and which sours all human relationships and productive activities. So next time your mate asks you, "Alright?", why not give a straight answer? We need to change the world; produce wealth to satisfy human needs, not for the market. We need socialism —now.

Clifford Slapper

Not what he seemed (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Harold Macmillan, who was also known as Supermac, or the Great Unflappable, or Lord Stockton, was said to be a complex character. Nothing is more beloved of political biographers; the simple characters, like the workers who allow themselves to be dazzled by a politician's reputation, never become famous, in life or death. Macmillan's role — ascribed to him partly by himself and partly by those who observed him — was one which he acted out almost to the end. Near death, he made his frail way to the House of Lords to depict Thatcherite capitalism in a style startling for its audacious affectations. He grabbed the headlines by telling us that the striking miners were the men who had beaten the Kaiser (Macmillan seemed to suffer a recurring difficulty in separating workers on the picket lines from those in the First World War trenches. He once negotiated his way out of a rail strike with tearful reminiscences of Passchendaele. Were the union leaders really simple enough to be impressed by such outrageous waffle?) At the time of that speech, the miners were engaged in a bitter struggle, not against some foreign power but in an effort to fend off the policies of the British ruling class. They were not able to do to Ian MacGregor what Macmillan thought they had done to the Kaiser. Another of his famous recent statements was his protest that the Tory plans to privatise nationalised industries amounted to selling off the family silver (of course, as a Conservative himself Macmillan should have been opposed to nationalisation in the first place) Workers who don't have any silver in the family, who perhaps rely for their houseware on collecting enough tokens at petrol stations, might have wondered what it matters if the industries where they work — where they are exploited — change hands.

Of course Macmillan's cosy and reassuring style did not match with reality. The England he casually depicted did not exist and never has existed. There was never a time when the two classes of capitalism amicably co-operated to guard a joint interest. There never was — never could be a joint interest, although it suits the purpose of people like Macmillan to pretend that there is. The two classes have always been, and must always be. in opposition to each other. Politicians try to hide the fact — Tebbit does it by prompting us to buy shares in state industries. Wilson did it through enthusiastic visions of capitalist prosperity through automated industry. Macmillan did it by treating us like the cared-for tenants of some benign country squire. However they try it, it amounts to the same thing — an attempt to deceive us into supporting a social system which by any humane or reasonable standards is unsupportable.

Macmillan replaced Anthony Eden as Prime Minister in February 1957, after the debacle of the Suez invasion, which is not one of the Tories' proudest memories. The nationalisation of the Suez Canal, by the Egyptian government under Nasser, was one of a series of steps in the decline of British power and influence in the Middle East. For Eden it was a sticking point; according to recently released Cabinet papers he was determined to use force (by which he meant ordering British workers to fight and die there) to overthrow Nasser and as the crisis developed, and with it Eden's painful and exhausting illness, the matter became a feverish obsession with him. The more hysterical newspapers wallowed in it; for them it was another case of Good (Eden) standing up to Evil (Nasser). The Egyptian government. led by a greedy maniac, were devious, grasping and untrustworthy while the British, led by an elegant Old Etonian, were frank, generous and utterly honourable.

It is no unusual thing for hysterical patriotism to swamp the truth, which in this case was that whole episode was based on a secret conspiracy between the British, French and Israeli governments. Eden sent his Foreign Secretary uncomplaining, pliable Selwyn Lloyd to France to work out a deal under which the Israelis would attack Egypt and so give the British and French a pretext for intervention on the grounds that they were defending the Canal as an international waterway. At the time, these honourable gentlemen of England denied that there was any conspiracy, or even collusion; they lied to the House of Commons and, according to the Guardian of 30 October 1986, Eden personally saw to it that the English version of the agreement which Selwyn Lloyd brought back was destroyed. But the facts were never in doubt. Some prominent Tories, like Minister of Defence Walter Monckton, made their opposition plain while others, like R. A. Butler, did so more discreetly. Macmillan was one of the hawks; perhaps he saw his chance for the future. He favoured, not just occupying the Canal but ". . . to seek out and destroy Nasser's armies and overthrow his government'' (The Times 1 January 1987) which, he argued, would deal with ". . . the whole problem of pacification (sic) of the

Middle East" (Macmillan, Riding The Storm).

It was that stand, more than anything, which ensured Macmillan's succession of Eden, for it offered the beleaguered Tories the hope that the distress and embarrassment of Suez would be wiped away and, perhaps, a new age of glorious British imperialism ushered in. Of Butler, the only other serious contender:

  There is no doubt that his attitude over Suez depreciated Butler's standing both in the Cabinet and in the Parliamentary Party. This was particularly true of the so-called Suez group, who criticised his assumed opposition to the military intervention in Egypt and his reputedly lukewarm support of action after it had been taken. (Nigel Fisher, The Tory Leaders).

In fact. Macmillan's support for the war was anything but consistent. At first he vowed that as Chancellor of the Exchequer he was prepared to pawn every picture in the National Gallery to pay for it but when the financial stress of the invasion became plain he abruptly changed his attitude and threatened to resign if there was not an immediate cease-fire. Macmillan himself described the affair in less than candid terms:

  It has been stated that as Chancellor of the Exchequer I made an urgent plea that we should submit to circumstances and acknowledge our virtual defeat. I have often been reproached for having been at the same time one of the most keen supporters of strong action in the Middle East and one of the most rapid to withdraw when that policy met a serious check. "First in. first out" was to be the elegant expression of one of my chief Labour critics on many subsequent occasions. (Riding The Storm).

But of this shrewd, cynical manipulation the Tories remembered only as much as they found comforting. Macmillan had done enough to convince them that he was the leader to unite them and to revive the imperialist traditions of British capitalism. He was, after all, another Old Etonian, he had been to one of the smarter Oxford colleges and an officer in the Guards. "An overwhelming majority of Cabinet Ministers was in favour of Macmillan as Eden's successor, and back-bench opinion . . . strongly endorsed this view" (Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, Political Adventure).

These hopes were soon disappointed, as Macmillan presided over the dismantling of much of what remained of the old British Empire. In Africa and the Middle East, in one state after another, the British ruling class had waged a long campaign against nationalist guerillas. They might have carried on in this way for a very long time — indeed one Colonial Secretary was stupid enough to declare that Cyprus, where one of the bitterest campaigns was being fought, would "never” throw off British rule. Macmillan had to face the reality that in the post-1945 world British capitalism could not undertake another Boer War. In addition the American capitalist class had long been working to end the system of Commonwealth Preference, which obstructed their access to valuable markets and sources of raw materials. When the British government signalled their defeat in Cyprus by allowing the exiled leader Makarios to return from exile, the Tories' arch imperialist, Lord Salisbury, had come to his sticking point and he resigned in protest. Macmillan seemed unperturbed: ". . . he had chosen an issue on which no strong public opinion would be aroused . . ." The Tories were bewildered that this man of such impeccable background should behave like any other politician, with actions which contradicted what he allowed them to think of as his principles.

It was his nonchalance in such situations which gave Macmillan the reputation for being unflappable; "father of the nation" he was called by David Steel when he died. Perhaps his most audacious claim, in 1957, was that ". . . most of our people have never had it so good," — were living in ". . . a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime nor indeed ever in the history of this country". At the time many workers had not adjusted to the wider ownership of cars, to watching television and using appliances like washing machines. Viewed through a car windscreen, capitalism to them had changed its nature to a sort of hire purchase debt which stretched into infinity. A simpler and more useful analysis of that time was that capitalism was in boom, not just in Britain but throughout the world. At such times workers are liable to look back on the slumps of the past and draw the wrong conclusion — that they are living at a time when many of capitalisms basic problems have been solved.

In fact, Macmillan's speech was a warning of possible recession to come and when it did come, in the early 1960s, and his government ran into a trough of unpopularity, his nonchalance deserted him. The hysteria which demanded a fight to the finish with Nasser was turned onto his own Cabinet and in July 1962 he sacked a third of them including his Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd ("so good and so loyal" Macmillan had written of Lloyd in 1958) who. as might be expected of one who would obviously do anything for British capitalism, went quietly and loyally. Macmillan's last mistake as Premier was to support Alec Douglas-Home as his successor, which helped the Labour Party's propaganda that, at a time when British capitalism needed to join the white-hot technological age, the Tories remained steeped in aristocratic complacency. One way and another, Macmillan must have driven numbers of people into support of the Labour Party and so helped Wilson's victories in 1964 and 1966. One of the last of his many insults to the working class was the choice of Stockton as his title when he went to the House of Lords for this town, noted for its chronic, grinding poverty, could not happily be linked with a capitalist in affluent retirement in a huge stately home in Sussex.

Macmillan's exterior was that of the charming, sincere amateur but behind it he was a ruthlessly ambitious politician. His advance to the Premiership was no accident and neither was his languid vision of an England where, as he put it after his 1959 election victory, "the class war is obsolete" — where the grimy, impoverished factory worker cares for the landed aristocrat, and vice versa, because each knows their place. He was said to have been savaged in mind as well as in body by his terrible experiences in the trenches but this did not prevent him supporting other, equally horrifying, wars. His protests against the ghastly suffering in Stockton-on-Tees would have been more impressive had he not been a member of a party standing so blatantly for the social system which produces such problems. One of his claims to fame was that, as Minister of Housing after the 1951 election, he was responsible for over 300,000 working class homes being built in a year. But in many cases the standards of design and construction were as gimmicky as a Premium Bond. Now, even the planners concede that the estates built at that time were a terrible mistake — for the people who have had to survive in those arrogantly conceived, badly designed, jerry-built deserts, not for the man in his stately home in Sussex who won popularity through them.

How do we assess Macmillan? When he became MP for Stockton unemployment there stood at 29 per cent. In the 1980s, as he approached the end of his life, it stood at 28 per cent. Capitalism has been through its cycles, of boom and slump, war and "peace" and has not changed in any significant way. It is an apt comment on the futility of his life, and on the lives of all the other apologists for capitalism and most of all on the political ignorance of the patient, vulnerable people who keep them in power.

Ivan

The poisoning of the Rhine (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the 9th of November 1986 a fire at the enormous Sandoz chemicals factory in Basle led to 30 tons of poisonous chemicals, including about 200 kilogrammes of mercury, being washed into the river Rhine as firemen fought to bring the blaze under control. The 40-mile-long wave of poison caused by the incident flowed along the Rhine from Germany into the Netherlands affecting the drinking water of 20 million people. In the upper reaches of the Rhine most plant life, thousands offish, water birds and a quarter of a million eels are estimated to have died and although most of the fish seem to have survived in the lower Rhine they face death from starvation because many insects and crayfish upon which they feed have perished. Such is the severity of the pollution that it could take up to twenty years before the ecological balance of the river is fully restored.

Pollution of the air, soil, rivers and oceans is not a new problem: the smoke-blackened older public buildings in most of Britain's major towns and cities (where restoration has not been carried out); the descriptions of polluted cities and rivers by writers such as Blake, Engels, Kingsley, Dickens, Carpenter, Gissing and Orwell; the terrible death tolls of the early 1950s caused by smog all bear testimony to the way in which industrialisation has ruined the environment and damaged workers' health.

There always have been, and always will be, incidents leading to results that are not foreseen or intended. These accidents may be caused by human error, circumstances beyond human control (such as earthquakes) or lack of knowledge to anticipate all the consequences of an action.

But many of the incidents which occur under capitalism are not, strictly speaking, accidents. The drive to produce profits leads to methods of production designed to ensure that the maximum amount of surplus value is derived from workers' labour power. Human error is much more likely to be increased where work is repetitive, boring and alienating or where the hours of work are long and exhausting. Often workers are kept in ignorance of potentially dangerous substances that they are working with and are consequently unable to take adequate safety precautions. In some instances safety equipment may not be supplied, or removed to increase productivity. Substances are used in agriculture, the drug and chemical industries often with little knowledge of their effects on the environment, the workers using them or. in the case of medicines, the patients consuming them.

But even when hazards are well known and documented the requirement of profitability overrides human needs and dangerous substances continue to be used. There are, for example, about 2000 asbestos-induced deaths a year in Britain although the dangers of using asbestos were pointed out in a Home Office report in 1906. Thalidomide and "Opren" continued to be used after it was known that they had caused deaths and deformities.

It is not unusual for safety standards to be inadequate or ignored altogether to cut production costs. In 1976 workers at the Life Science Products factory in Hopewell. Virginia were found to be working in an environment that was laden with dust from the insecticide "Kepone". The nearby James river also had to be closed because of the severity of the contamination. The pollution of the environment and the risk to workers at the Life Science Products factory (who suffered from severe headaches, tremors and, in some cases, sterility) was not caused by lack of knowledge of the risks to health of using "Kepone" but, as an investigation showed, a pollution control system had not been installed because it would have affected profitability.

The evacuation of Seveso due to a discharge of dioxin has not led to a curtailment of products which contain the poison. And the local population were not informed of the dangers to health for at least ten days after the incident although the manufacturers. Roche, were aware within forty-eight hours that dioxin had been released.

The disaster at Bhopal, where hundreds of cases of serious poisoning in the local community resulted, due to a discharge of poisonous chemicals demonstrates how multinational companies avoid health and safety legislation by switching production to underdeveloped countries where regulations are lax and, consequently, greater profits can be made. And the ease with which production can be moved emphasises the limitations of reforms, especially if attempted on a local or national basis, when workers' organisations are taking on the power of multinational corporations.

One feature of the poisoning of the Rhine has been the comparative lack of reporting of the incident: a major European river has been poisoned, creating an ecological disaster which has affected, and will continue to affect, most of the marine life; the drinking water of 20 million people has been polluted and there could be considerable problems in providing alternative supplies, particularly in years of drought. But newspaper coverage in Britain was, in many instances, relegated to the inside pages. The trivial activities of the parasitical royal family and the ratings war between the television soap operas continued to dominate the news instead. Perhaps the public has become so immune to news of industrial "accidents" that they have ceased to shock: the pollution of our environment has come to be seen as part of the "natural order" of things.

Only a week before the fire at Basle, a chemical plant explosion near the resort of Varna on the Black Sea coast is thought to have killed 17 people. The Bulgarian authorities failed to provide details of the incident and, therefore, the extent of the damage is not known, making it more difficult to protect the public.

It was also reported that the survival of Indian tribes in Brazil is threatened because BP's mining subsidiary working in conjunction with Bruscan, a Canadian company, had set up a local network of more than 100 companies covering 54 million acres.

Both of these news items took up only a paragraph in The Independent and were probably omitted altogether by some of the tabloids. And yet both of these items illustrate two features of capitalism: social needs are always secondary to the need to make profits and commercial interests are protected by secrecy even when this is detrimental to the well-being of the community.

As yet it is far too soon to be able to say with any degree of accuracy what went wrong at the Sandoz chemicals factory at Basle. It is important, however, to try to prevent such incidents happening in the future. But whilst capitalism remains, dangerous materials will continue to be used if they are cheaper, and the competitive nature of capitalism prevents information from being shared which would reduce the risk of accidents elsewhere.

In a socialist society information could be shared: a society in which competition gives way to co-operation would have no need for secrets. Dangerous substances would not be used just because they are cheaper — where possible safer substitutes would be found.

Socialists aim to establish a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community. In a moneyless, socialist society in which free access to goods replaces the artificial scarcities of capitalism, production can be planned properly and the world's resources conserved instead of being wasted or damaged for the sake of making a quick profit.

The lessons of Basle, Seveso, Bhopal and Chernobyl have taught the workers that under capitalism "accidents" will continue to occur. And, although enquiries are conducted, and scapegoats found, production continues as before. Indeed, in the aftermath of Chernobyl the Russian government has stated that it intends to increase its nuclear power programme instead of reducing it.

The risk to the world posed by the threat of nuclear weapons, nuclear power, dangerous industrial processes and indiscriminate waste of resources has never been greater in spite of all the efforts of reformists and ecological pressure groups Only the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism can halt the destruction. We must destroy capitalism before it destroys the earth.

Carl Pinel

50 Years Ago: The Spanish Civil War (1987)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The agony of Spain is only a matter of concern for the capitalists of other nations if any of them have interests involved or if there is any prospect of gain by fishing in troubled waters. For the rest it is a matter of minor importance to them that thousands of Spanish workers are losing their lives just because landowners and the Catholic Church want to keep intact their privilege to rob the wealth-producer of the product of his toil.

One of the spokesmen of the Spanish Government recently said that over a million lives had already been lost in the present civil war. It is a sad thought that in spite of the many and bitter lessons during the last hundred years, in which millions of workers' lives have been sacrificed, the mass of the workers of the world still fail to grasp the fact that capitalism offers nothing to them but toil and misery, and they still turn away from the Socialist message. Yet, in the advanced countries at any rate, the workers produce and distribute the wealth upon which all live. While the capitalists control this wealth they use their position to live in idleness and luxury. The workers can. and some day will, obtain control of the means of production. When they do so they can banish want and economic misery and the bestialities of the struggle between classes. The lesson is a simple one and so easy to learn if only workers would look facts in the face.

[From an article "Some Lessons from Spain" by G. McClatchie, Socialist Standard February 1937]

Obituary: Israel Renson (1987)

Obituary from the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to record the death of I. Renson. Although he never joined The Socialist Party, he did valuable work in our propaganda. organising classes and lectures about our case.

Perhaps most notably, he was joint author of the booklet Money Must Go (published in 1943) which was a simplified exposition of the capitalist economic system. how it exploits and impoverishes the majority of the population and why it must be replaced with socialism.

Money Must Go was effective propaganda for socialism; it rapidly sold out in this country and was especially popular in Canada and the USA, infected as they were at the time with the false theories of "Social Credit ". To those who knew him. 1. Renson will be missed with sorrow.

City Scandals (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Did you get your British Gas shares ok? What’s that, you didn’t bother? Well, neither did most other workers who had the chance, and no one knows how many of those who did buy the shares will hold on to them. It was estimated that on the day after the sale, around one tenth of the shares had already changed hands as small-time buyers sold out to the big institutions like insurance com­panies and pension funds. This is what hap­pened with British Telecom shares. When they were first sold in 1984 the number of individual shareholders was 2.3 million. By May 1986 the number was down to 1.6 mill­ion, a drop of over 30%, and this figure is cer­tain to fall still further as time passes.

Nevertheless, interest in the stock market is a lot higher than ever it was before. Until recently most people only ever saw the stock market quotations in the newspapers if they accidentally turned over two pages at once, but the saturation coverage by the media of the government’s privatisation programme has changed all that. Also, the fear of unemployment has ensured that many employees of quoted companies follow the share price of those companies as a guide to their job prospects.

However, the workings of the stock mar­ket remain a mystery to the vast majority of people and this helps preserve the silly notion that financiers, stockbrokers and the like who do understand it are brainier than the rest of us. Actually, it’s not nearly as difficult as it seems One of the main reasons why someone not involved in finance finds it baffling is the frequent use of several different words to describe one item. For example, government “stock , which pays a fixed rate of interest, is also called “gilts” (gilt-edged) or “consols” (consolidated) while “securities” is simply the a11-embracing name for stocks and shares of all kinds.

Different types of shares have different rights and rewards. The “ordinary” shares are the ones which actually own the com­pany. Holders of these have full voting rights and receive a variable dividend depending on the company’s profits, if any, and what the directors decide to pay out. These shares are also referred to (more confusion) as “equities”. “Preference” shares usually have no vote but entitle holders to a fixed dividend ahead of the ordinary shareholders assuming there is something to pay out. “Deben­tures” are loans made to companies by investors who receive fixed-interest whether the company makes a profit or not.

Until October 1986 members of the Lon­don Stock Exchange had to be British-born. And although they would angrily denounce “who does what disputes in factories, ship­yards, etc.. they had their own restrictive practice. This meant that only those who were brokers could buy and sell securities for the public and they made their money by charging clients a fixed commission. “Job­bers”, on the other hand, bought and sold on their own account but could only deal with the public through the brokers and made a living from the difference between the prices at which they bought and sold. So brokers couldn’t act as jobbers and vice-versa. Since October membership of the Exchange is open to other nationals and the difference between brokers and jobbers is abolished along with fixed commissions. Now the price on deals is negotiable

All of these changes, known as “de-regu­lation”, are the result of the Big Bang” we have all heard so much about. The idea is to make the London Stock Exchange more competitive with its main rivals in New York (Wall Street) and Tokyo. After all, if custom­ers can have their business carried out more cheaply in New York or Tokyo then that is where they will make their deals and the new computerised communications technology makes that easy to do. This new technology also means that dealers in London will now transact business in their offices and the Stock Exchange floor will be almost deserted from now on

Any stock market must protect its reputa­tion for honest dealing If investors think that they may be ripped-off then they will take their business elsewhere and this is why the New York and London Stock Exchanges are trying to curb “insider dealing”. The most notorious insider is the Wall Street speculator, Ivan Boesky, who for years had apparently anticipated the rise in price of var­ious securities which he bought on a huge scale. Hailed as a genius, Boesky had simply been using confidential information passed to him, for a cut, by people who were profes­sionally engaged in takeover bids which would push up the price of the shares involved.

It is hard to imagine that Wall Street didn’t know what Boesky was up to. No one can consistently tell in advance what the market will do. The anarchy of capitalist production sees to that. When every company in every industry is making its plans independently of all the others, and when all of them are sub­ject to forces beyond their control such as decisions taken by foreign governments or even their own, then how can future market trends be forecast with any certainty? The truth is that large-scale insider dealing has been the norm for a long time and will con­tinue in the future whatever steps are taken to eliminate it. So much for the claim fre­quently made on behalf of the capitalists that their high returns are justified because they are the risk takers”. Not if they can help it, they’re not!

What about the other claim that the capitalists are the wealth creators” because of their activities in the stock market? The real wealth of society consists of human beings using their physical and mental energies plus the resources of nature to produce the goods and services society needs. This wealth is legally owned by the owners of the enter­prises whose workers have produced it. All the workers receive in return for their efforts is a part of the total value produced in the form of their wages and salaries. The remain­der, surplus value in the form of dividends and interest, belongs to the owners of the various stocks and shares. These securities are merely legal title to this surplus and it is this title which is being traded when sec­urities are bought and sold. So capitalists create not a scrap of wealth and stock exchanges are only the places where surplus value is divided between them.

Even so, the enormous power of the capitalists makes them seem invincible and many workers, even against their wishes, cannot see how capitalism can ever be top­pled. But the power of the capitalists does not lie in the amount of pounds, dollars and francs they own. It lies in the fact that the vast majority of workers still see production for profit as the only possible method of produc­ing and distributing society’s wealth. If that idea should weaken due to the growth of socialist consciousness in the world’s work­ing class then the power of the capitalists would not look so invincible at all.

We can see today how easily stock mar­kets can tremble when investors get the jit­ters over, say, the mere rumour of a small increase in interest rates or some other trivial matter. Imagine what those jitters will be like when the socialist movement begins to grow. Who will be willing to invest then? Capitalism depends for its continued exis­tence on working-class support for it. When that support crumbles then so too will the power of the capitalists.

Vic Vanni

Letter: "With the frills removed . . ." (1987)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors.

May I comment on the review of the book on the Socialist Workers Party which appeared in the December 1986 Socialist Standard (pp. 231-32) While agreeing with the reviewer's criticism of the SWP's insurrectionary ideas and their adherence to Leninism, I cannot see what he finds wrong with the book's description of socialism which he quotes: "With the frills removed, it is people collectively running society, instead of being the prisoners of anarchic capitalist competition and the mad rush for profit at any cost, it is working together for the common good. Our tremendous co-operative power would be controlled, not by a ruling class in the search for ever greater profits, but democratically and for the fulfilment of human need". Surely this is a description that The Socialist Party would accept as well? And if so, it cannot be a basis on which to criticise the SWP. I agree that taken as a whole the SWP's ideas and policies do not add up to what is in the quotation — they add up to some form or another of state capitalism. But you can't use the quotation as your reviewer has done, to illustrate that. You've got to find others which, given the nature of the SWP's case, surely abound on the pages of a book written about them by one of their supporters.

Yours,

Alan Jones

Swansea

Between the Lines: Begging on the screen (1987)

The Between the Lines Column from the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Begging on the screen

The ethic of capitalism is pretty clear: if you need money work for it. if you cant work for it beg for it. That is why telethons, with all their gushing goodwill towards "those in need" and their righteous pleasure in “using TV to do good” are sickening events. Both BBC and ITV run them as regular events, no doubt because they pull the viewers in and clean up TV's image the channel that cares.

Terry Wogan and Sue Cook hosted the pre-Christmas BBC telethon Children In Need. With a few smiles and famous faces to keep the punters from pressing their off buttons, the object of the exercise is to persuade workers to donate pounds to charities for poor children. And some of the phone lines when you proudly call in to offer your ten quid are manned by famous names like . . . well. I didn't actually catch the names because I hadn't heard of any of them but just think, you could phone in to help a child in need and maybe talk to Bonnie Langford.

The show lasted for several hours, during one section of which Esther Rantzen actually brought on stage several exhibits — yes, children in need — to show to the viewers in order to prove how important it was to lift that phone and donate some of your huge income.

What sort of a system is it that can take a crippled child, or another who is dying of a terminal illness, and use them as TV exhibits because only by parading them as objects for begging can funds be raised to help them? As the evening went on Wogan and the team were becoming ecstatic with philanthropy: "My word, this is marvellous: we've collected over £2 million — that's more than twice as much as an hour into the programme last year". Then came the big push to make it three million. Come on, wage slaves, forget the fact that 16 million of you are living on or just above the official poverty line, phone Bonnie Langford or some other nonentity and do your bit.

In the end, amid ecstasy which would lead the innocent observer to believe that they'd solved the problem of poverty, the collective viewers of BBC 1 donated £6 million. "What a warm-hearted lot you all are" said Wogan. whose fee for each of his three-night-a-week BBC shows has made him a millionaire several times over. Of course, he was right: the workers giving to help needy children were being decent and caring and co-operative and all of the other things which at other times the people who defend charity tell us that human nature prevents us all from being.

The success of shows like Children In Need depends on the fact that the working class really does want to live in a world without impoverished and suffering children. But £6 million will not do the trick; it is pathetic — an indication of just how futile it is to ask the class which does not possess to give money to those who possess even less.

According to recent US research, the governments of the world spend £100,000 a minute on weapons to kill people. Children In Need was on the air for six hours: that means that on average £36 million was spent on preparations to blow up children (and the rest of us) during the time that a one-off £6 million was collected to help those in great need. After the show ended - and as you read this article the £100,000 a minute continues to be spent and you do not need to phone Bonnie Langford to donate your tenner.


Blinded by the light

American TV films about kids caught up in crazy religious cults must be second in popularity to ones about aircraft disasters It is a good theme for a film: "normal" American kid meets devious cult member who lures him/her into a movement which robs them of their freedom, funds and self- respect. Parents try to rescue them and the film ends with the de-programming scene wherein the innocent victim returns to "normality" with the aid of cruel but kind experts.

Of course, the reason so many of these films are being made is that so many American kids, especially in California and the seemingly affluent West Coast cities, are so discontented and frustrated with the capitalist rat-race that the security of crazy religions like the Moonies and Scientology appeals to them. Blinded By The Light (C4. 9pm. 6 January) was a not very well-acted film of this kind teenage son is won over to peculiar cult led by a sinister Father Adam, parents aim to kidnap him back to deprogramme him, sister infiltrates cult with a view to winning brother back to "normality".

Cults were shown to be totalitarian, dogmatic, uncaring, mind-damaging institutions — which, from all the evidence, they most certainly are. But — and this is the problem which such films never address — they are not that different from all religions. including the state-endorsed ones which "normal" wage slaves are encouraged to believe in.

The motto of Father Adam's cult was Joy Through Humility and it was made plain that disciples were expected to receive salvation through submitting and degrading themselves. Sounds a lot like Christianity to me. The cult members were told that they must work only for the cult, must live within it and renounce their previous lives, even to the point of giving up their old names. So what are monasteries and convents? But I've never seen a film showing how innocent young fools are conned into joining them.

Religion, by definition, is an organised form of dogmatic belief (as opposed to scientific knowledge) and hierarchical command: after all, what is god but a totalitarian dictator? Just as films like this one never explain why one form of crazy behaviour is good for the soul and another is a sign of indoctrinated madness, so they do not show why it is that young people are attracted in the first place to join such sickening cults. Can it have something to do with the phoney sense of community which they offer, as opposed to the extreme poverty of feeling and sense of alienation which characterises the so-called affluent lives of the American young?


Chinese puzzle

It is interesting to note how little TV coverage BBC and ITN have given to the quite significant protests in the major cities of China recently, as opposed to coverage they give to protest movements in Russia. usually involving far less people. Could this have something to do with the fact that state- capitalist China has now become a major Western trading partner and therefore the establishment here does not want to give too much encouragement to any movement to destabilise "our Communist allies", whereas state-capitalist Russia is still a military and trading rival?


What you think

In 1987 this column will be publishing a selection of the points which you send in about TV output. Write and let us know what has made you sick on TV recently or what has opened your eyes to an aspect of capitalism you hadn't recently thought about, Send your letters or postcards to Between The Lines, c/o The Socialist Standard. If none of your points appear you can assume that none have been sent in.

Steve Coleman

Observations: Nuclear nutrition (1987)

The Observations Column from the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nuclear nutrition

During the coming year it is likely that the government will announce that, in addition to permitting the contamination of the environment by radiation from nuclear power stations, it will also allow our food to be so contaminated. Since 1967 there has been a ban on the use of irradiation as a method of food preservation but it seems likely that that ban will soon be lifted — which should delight the food industry.

Submitting fresh food to short-wave gamma rays has the effect of killing off bacteria. thus enabling it to be stored longer without rotting. A committee of "experts" set up by the government claims that irradiation is safe and effective but others have argued that it can reduce the nutritional content of some foods and is also open to misuse since there is no way of testing whether or not food has been treated. Critics of the process say this is important since there is a risk that irradiation will be used by the food trade to "clean up" contaminated food so that it can be sold even though it has begun to rot. It is also feared that irradiated food will be treated as if it is sterile and therefore not refrigerated, even though radiation does not in fact kill off all bacteria. So the risk of food poisoning may actually increase.

It seems that once again people's health will be sacrificed so that the food industry can increase its profits still further by passing off as wholesome food which is rotting and contaminated.

Shareholders’ lesson

England's longest running industrial dispute, involving just 88 workers, has a lesson for the millions who bought shares in the privatised state industries and in particular for those who thought that thereby they recast their social standing.

For almost two years, the Silentnight company in Lancashire has been picketed by a group of increasingly beleaguered strikers. The dispute began over pay. it progressed to the sacking of 346 workers and now drags bitterly on, with that handful who have lost the support of even their trade union.

The company's founder, Tom Clarke, is one of Margaret Thatcher's favourite bosses. "Mr Wonderful" she once called him — perhaps because of the firm's family atmosphere under which Silentnight once tried to obscure the realities of class society, employment and exploitation. According to one of the pickets, everyone was once on first-name terms and if an employee was sick Tom Clarke would send a card and some flowers. Perhaps this chumminess was carried on when the crunch came:

  Sorry. Steve but you know how things are. I own this firm, you only work here. I can't have you laying down the law about what you're paid. There's plenty outside who'll be glad of your job. You're fired.
   I'm sorry too. Tom. And I'm not taking this lying down. I'll get together with the other lads and lasses and we'll all down tools together. The union will back us. I know that.

The point about this situation is that among the strikers are two people who own shares in Silentnight. One of them discussed the dispute with Tom Clarke at the last shareholders' meeting: "He was sorry at the way things had turned out, but that doesn't give us our jobs back” she reported.

Which brings us back to buying shares in British Gas and the like. Owning a few shares in some concern, perhaps winning a few pounds by buying and selling them at the right time, does not elevate a worker into the capitalist class. The class we belong to is determined by our economic interests, which means what we rely on for our living. In the case of the capitalist class, who are the real owners and the real shareholders, it means the monopoly of the means of production and distribution; in the case of the workers it means the sale of our labour power — working — for wages.

So the striking shareholders at Silentnight are not a contradiction in terms. They attest to the class division of capitalism, what it means and how it operates; they show the essential poverty of workers and of how deeply they suffer when they do not command a wage. And, shivering around their brazier in their lonely struggle, they do their bit to expose one of today's pernicious and popular fallacies.

Open houses?

One of the host of celebrities attending the UK launch of the UN International Year of Shelter for the Homeless was Rod Hackney. Prince Charles' mate, who is President of the RIBA. Hackney wants housing "to become the centre of public debate in what is likely to be an election year". Well that might provide an extra page or two in newspapers that the homeless can use as blankets when sleeping on the streets.

Hackney is also an advocate of "community architecture'. The idea behind this is that, given the right advice and access to resources, communities can build their own homes. This sounds like quite a good idea until you realise that it is precisely because people don't have access to resources that homelessness is a problem. Because local authorities and the government need, for political reasons, to be seen to be doing something about homelessness, then it's possible that a few highly publicised community architecture schemes will get off the ground as a token gesture. Community architecture, because of its “self-help" image, will no doubt appeal to many Tories — after all the labour power necessary to build the houses will be free — but it will not solve the problem of homelessness and slum housing. That will only happen when people have, not just access to resources to build and repair homes, but free access to those resources.

Students in revolt (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nineteen sixty-eight was a year that made a deep impression on the French capitalist class. For them, its "second repetition" in 1986 must have come as a tragi-comedy (though for the Chirac government, it was decidedly a farce). Students, in the 70s and '80s, had been tagged (with relief?) as so many recycled zombies from the '50s: cynical. apolitical, self-centred, concerned solely with making it. Flattened out into a manageable crisis, in short. That the media (who either invented or borrowed the notion) were only busy making another of their identity-myths has since become all too evident.

But it was not clear on December 4 1986 (and much less so on November 27. when the first big student-organised demonstration took place in Paris). Considering how much hype was circulating about the apoliticism of the young, it comes as no surprise that the students themselves believed they were doing something apolitical. They wanted nothing to do with any of the official parties, yet they sought to affect the policy of a government.

This renunciation of theory can be explained as a resistance action (not at all distant in character from a trade-union struggle) that grew up around ruling-class efforts to cut corners on the cost of maintaining the country’s educational institutions. Students were actually lampooned (Nouvel Observateur, 5 November and 12-18 December 1986) for revolting in favour of the status quo. And it is quite true that in 1986 most of the reformist assumptions of the soixante-huitards were simply taken for granted by the lycéens and university students. They were, in effect, rising up in defence of a specific ideological configuration of capitalism, what we might call post-Gaullism. There is thus less irony than there may seem in the fact that an old Gaullist like Chirac should have spearheaded a Reagan-style. toothless-ideologue assault on the students’ position.

The issue was twofold: the Devaquet bill (which was moving toward the final stages of enactment) set out to reorganise (privatise) the university administration; the controversy centred around questions of degrees, admissions policy, tuition fees and school autonomy. The minister of national education, René Monory, sought to heighten the government's general de-nationalisation euphoria by introducing a parallel set of reform proposals (not a bill at that point) for the lycées. The most important effect of these proposals would have been to block future access to the universities for a significant percentage of lycéens. Hence, the impulse to contradict the government was a powerful and immediate one. Although the initiative was sparked by UNEF-ID. which was PS and trotskyist in its leanings, the student movement at both levels defined itself, on the whole, solely with reference to with drawing the reforms. (UNEF-ID was the coordinating committee among the university students).

And so it happened that a large body of "apolitical" opinion suddenly coalesced in opposition to the government, became transformed overnight into the Spectre of 1968. to the panic of an entire government; forced a delegate minister’s resignation (Devaquet’s); caused the Prime Minister (Chirac) to announce the withdrawal of the whole reform package; knocked the wind out of the sails of the liberal-conservative coalition's pointless efforts to turn back the clock and thus ingloriously aborted its nine-month état de grâce. And now everyone is talking about "politicisation" again.

How a paradox like this could have come about can best be explained by looking at the context in which the movement arose, which involves decisions about capital accumulation reaching all the way back to the Marshall Plan. Postwar investments in economic recovery and a policy of stimulating expansion in the "poor countries" at length bore their predictable fruit in the form of increased competition from the new accumulators in the developing countries. This generated a tendency towards capital flight into those same areas (where working-class organisations either did not yet exist, were liquidated or severely repressed so as to achieve a systematically under-valued labour-power). This was accompanied by the steady decline of reinvestment in basic heavy industry in the developed countries (with a few exceptions) throughout the 1970s, and it gave rise to an ever-increasing pressure on the developed countries' respective balances of trade.

This in turn ignited fears among the capitalist class in each of the developed countries for its own competitive standing in the world's markets, which has led to a period of relentless budget-chopping. As a result the capitalists currently raise the issue of whether the educational system they have been paying for is really serving its purpose to provide inexpensive (if not cheap) labour-power to keep their profits respectable. If not, then they must shake loose enough free capital from the educational budget (without of course having to retool industry, rethink their growth strategies or — horrors! — axe their precious military investments) to (supposedly) raise profits back up to an acceptable level — given that austerity (for everyone else) must be the order of the day. Throughout the developed world, the 1980s thus began to resound with public-spirited attacks on "outdated" educational systems.

Things were of course no different in France, even though it was a party of the left (the PS) that was commissioned to carry out the hatchet-job. Touted as the reincarnation of May 1968. the new regime of May 1981 fairly gushed with optimism and succeeded in blinding just about everybody, for a short while, to its patent inability to dictate terms to the international crisis. But the real mandate of the Mitterrand-Mauroy/Fabius team was identical (mutatis mutandis) to that of the Reagan administration, the Thatcher government and the Kohl regime. More importantly, however, nobody really seemed to care that a "socialist" party like the PS should be proposing to make a go of bringing back profits and jobs to French capitalism in the first place. The PS/PCF's état de grâce took only a year to hit the reefs, after which it rapidly disintegrated, as the realities of international competition took their remorseless revenge.

The Savary law reforming education thus came on the books in 1984; aspects of it affecting the private schools, however, caused as much of an uproar as Devaquet-Monory which presaged the PS's subsequent defeat at the polls. But the Savary law was itself only a symptom of the PS's underlying shift to the right (its abject caving in to the realities of capitalism), the premise being that the French educational system had become 'uncompetitive'. And so, après le déluge, the earlier Savary legislation still continues to apply by default.

What the "apolitical" students were therefore colliding with was none other than that dehumanising old fogey, the capitalist class itself, bent on extracting candlestick economies out of the school system merely to salvage its profits — even at the cost of flushing a large proportion of the high-school students out of the university system altogether. The students came very close indeed to realising that what were scraps for the workers are scraps for them too. They are all future workers in the end. or most of them are, and the fact that the lycéens had the support and encouragement of their parents indicates another burst of class struggle was in the making. Worry over the prospect of this was one of the principal factors which ultimately triggered the whole chain of events leading Chirac to the microphone to announce the withdrawal of the reforms.

On the other hand, any inkling that life is actually possible — and good — outside the wages system was conspicuously absent from this revolt of the students: for all their rejection of the system's catalogue of evils, their ideas nevertheless remained imprisoned within it. They may hopefully take the opportunity they have created for themselves to do some deeper and more independent thinking on the system's structural tendency to generate emergencies: they at least got off to a good start.

Failing this. 1986 will not turn out to have been so different from 1968 as they thought it was.

Ron Elbert (Paris)