Seriously pretending (1994)

From the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

For a very serious reason, we would ask you to pretend for a moment. Just allow your invagination to take a short journey from where you are now and look at how your life would change if what you are pretending actually happened.

You are living in a world where money does not exist. When you want something you go to the store and take it. There isn’t someone to tell you what you can take or when you can take it; that decision is yours. And everybody else has the same right to avail themselves of what they need as you — so there are no criminals wanting to rob you.

Of course, all the things that people freely avail themselves of have to be produced. Food has to be grown and processed; things have got to be made and houses and other buildings have to be built; a thorough and efficient health service has to be run as well as emergency and other services. In the world where you are pretending to be there is plenty of work to do.

But because money and all other forms of ration tokens do not exist, millions of jobs that used to use the skills and energies of people no longer exist. There is no need for banks, insurance offices, advertising and promotion services, sales people of all the different sorts, mortgage services, dole clerks, security personnel, judges, lawyers and criminals. The list is a very long one and includes armed forces and all those munition workers, scientists and others employed in the killing industry — as the competition for markets, trade routes and other material interests that cause wars and conflicts would have disappeared. All in all, it would be safe to say that, in the world in which you are pretending to be now, there would be at least three times as many people to do the necessary work as there are in the world you are pretending to have left.

In the pretend world there is no government because there are no conflicting interests and no need for people to be controlled by a coercive state. Instead, there are democratically-elected bodies at local, regional and world level whose function is to organize production and distribution. You may be elected to one of these bodies. If you are you will not receive any special favours — of course, you won’t need to for, like everybody else, the things you need are freely available to you. Those elected to carry on public administration can be recalled by those who elected them and no-one is coerced into fulfilling any task.

In this pretend world, neither you nor any other person will ever endure poverty or insecurity; you will never be homeless or badly housed; you will not die in warfare or civil conflict for the basis of these evils will have been abolished and, since there is no need to steal, crime and offences against the person do not now exist. Automation and new productive processes, instead of creating unemployment, simply make necessary work easier for all and, like the fact that all the wasteful occupations of the old world have been abolished, give more leisure to those who wish to travel in a world where frontiers do not exist or to pursue other work, hobbies or interests.

Back to reality

Let’s stop the pretending there and deal with "reality”! Because reality is a world where everything carries a price tag, where millions die annually of hunger, millions more simply "get by" and only a relatively few people are wealthy or enormously rich, we think of this terrible and frightening reality as the natural order of things, as natural as the seasons.

In fact, we are told that this awful reality reflects our "human nature" and that this nature would not permit us to live in a world such as you were just now pretending to live in. In other words, that because we are human we cannot all have free and equal access to the abundance of everything that it is now possible to produce. On the other hand, despite us being human, we can accept a reality where the members of a minority class can freely avail themselves of their needs from the wealth we produce. It is not too difficult to see why the ruling class, who control our "education" and our social conditioning, tell us that our "nature" would not allow us to cooperate in the sane organization of society.

There exists now the economic potential to create a world where everyone has free access to their needs without wages, money or any other form of rationing. Unfortunately, the political will to establish such a world is absent largely because we have been conditioned to believe that the present capitalist system is, as we have observed, the natural order of things, despite its endemic problems and that there is no alternative to capitalism.

The world we asked you to pretend to be living in at the outset was the world envisaged by the early socialists. Unfortunately, that vision was deliberately corrupted by politicians acting in ignorance or in the interests of the ruling class. Thus, state capitalism, a brutal and anti-democratic form of capitalism operating in so-called communist countries, was claimed to represent the ideas of socialism as were the failed reformist policies of Labour parties.

But socialism has not failed; on the contrary, it has never been tried and the growth of a genuine movement to bring it about has been deliberately frustrated by Establishment lies and misrepresentation. It is because the case for socialism is so overwhelmingly logical that those who oppose it out of narrow self-interest use their wealth, their power and their privilege to distort its meaning and to deny valid arguments about its nature and its feasibility a place on the political agenda. These are interests that have successfully pretended to you that you have to put up with capitalism and its disgusting abuse of humanity because there is no alternative to that system.

Because socialism and democracy are indivisible, the task of the Socialist Party is to build the political means of convincing a majority to opt for Socialism. We do not pretend that it is an easy task but, confronted with capitalist reality, it is an urgent and essential one.

Richard Montague

Go for a million (1994)

Party News from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nationwide, the Socialist Party is putting up four candidates in the European Elections in May and June. This is unprecedented. Not many have heard of us; fewer will know what we stand for.

What we aim for is a practical — and ecologically viable — alternative to the market and the state, a new way of living in which we can all give according to our abilities, and take according to our needs. The means to achieve this must be in harmony with the end itself: democratic, peaceful and without leaders trying to run society on our behalf.

The fact is present-day society cannot be run in the interest of the great majority. It does not matter what government we choose, they must dance to the tune of capitalism. The problems they grapple with are self-evidently endemic to the system itself. They are normal and necessary features of how it operates. Why else are people homeless while, in this country alone, over 600,000 homes remain empty? Why else do people starve in shadows of the global food mountain?

Present-day society is massively wasteful and inherently destructive — not just of our environment and resources but of our hopes and aspirations. It is time to organize for a real alternative. Why not join with us to make this a reality?

The amount in our Election Fund is now £19,084. If you have not yet contributed please send your cheque (made payable to "The Socialist Party of Great Britain") to: Election Fund, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Is this the end of Socialism? (1994)

From the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The demise of national 
state capitalism as a 
credible political
 programme doesn’t affect 
the case for genuine
 socialism.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the American political thinker Francis Fukuyama proclaimed "the end of history". History, he argued, had now come to an end with the establishment over most of the world of a society based on a free market and liberal democracy. Apparently, this was the goal towards which we humans had been travelling ever since we first came down from the trees.

That a money-grubbing rat race run by businessmen and career politicians was the rational society to which some 19th century philosophers had thought History (with a capital H) was heading was never really a serious proposition. How could a society where some are privileged while others are deprived, and geared to making profits rather than meeting needs, even be considered as a possible rational society?

Deepest slump

Unfortunately for Fukuyama, at about the same time that the Berlin Wall came down the world capitalist economy entered its third, and deepest, slump in the relatively short twenty-year period since the long post-war boom came to an end in the early 1970s. Factories were closed, machinery was scrapped, food was dumped, millions more workers joined the ranks of the unemployed. Not because people’s needs for what these workers could produce had been met. but because the rate of profit had fallen. The supposedly rational market economy had once again created the irrational situation of poverty amidst potential plenty, of idle factories and workers alongside unmet needs even for basics like housing, food and health care.

In Russia the achievement of Fukuyama’s "end of history" has brought about the emergence as a serious contender for political power of a Hitler-type demagogue. As in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s the aggravated failure of the market economy to deliver what it promised has led to people blaming not capitalism but the liberal democracy that Fukuyama sees as its ideal political framework.

Apologists

Fukuyama’s "end of history" claim was an expression of the triumphalism of capitalism's intellectual apologists over what they saw as the defeat of socialism, their main ideological enemy. But it wasn’t. What had been defeated was not real socialism but a version of capitalism in which the state was all-powerful. Totalitarian state capitalism not socialism. Unfortunately, two generations of propaganda, by opponents and supporters alike, has misled many into identifying socialism with the old regime in Russia. As a result there is a widespread popular misconception that the collapse of totalitarian state capitalism in Russia represented the collapse of socialism.

The mistaken idea that socialism had collapsed was reinforced by parties in the West such as the Labour Party abandoning their paper commitment to achieving a state-run economy by democratic and constitutional means rather than the dictatorial ones used in Russia. They gave up proposing this even in theory as an alternative to the market economy and in fact accept the Fukuyama thesis that there is no rational alternative to the market. With the collapse of totalitarian "socialism" in Russia and of democratic ’’socialism" in the West no wonder the ideologists of capitalism felt so self satisfied and triumphalist.

There has indeed been a shift of opinion but the shift has been against the project of a state-run national economy as a solution to the problems created by capitalism. Which, if it had not been perceived as the rejection of socialism, we could wholeheartedly welcome. Since, for us, a state-run economy has never been the goal, has never been what we meant by socialism nor what we have seen as the alternative to capitalism. In fact, far from being an alternative to capitalism it was in our view merely a different, and not particularly desirable, way of running capitalism.

We have always held that socialism could not be established just within the framework of a single state, but only on a world basis. This was not because "socialism in one country" was necessarily a bad aim in itself, but because the development of a world economy under capitalism had made it a practical impossibility. Once capitalism had become an economic system dominating the whole world — as it did in the age of imperialism that culminated in the significantly named first world war — then the only kind of socialism that was possible was a world socialism.

Even within the context of world socialism we did not see a role for states, certainly not as coercive political institutions but not in the economic sphere either. There would indeed be a need for administrative and decision-making bodies at what today is called the national level, but these would not be "states” in the sense of a body exerting coercive political authority over a territory and its inhabitants. They would not be institutions ruling over people with the coercive force to impose their own will, but would be part of the institutional structure that would allow people to participate on an equal basis in the democratic running of their common affairs including the production and distribution of wealth. In short, genuine democratic control would replace rule by states.

The association of a state-run national economy with the idea of socialism has been one of the greatest illusions of the 20th century. Despite the protests of genuine Socialists like ourselves the word socialism came to be used to describe what was a real enough development in the capitalist economy: the increasing role of states in its operation at national level. The correct term for this would have been "state capitalism".

Now further developments within the world capitalist economy (the emergence since the last world war of a global manufacturing system dependent on the world market both for its inputs and its sales) are to a certain extent reversing this trend by limiting the scope for the state direction of the economy, and people are talking about the "end” or the “decline” or the "irrelevance” of socialism.

Genuine Socialism

But this demise of national state capitalism as a credible political programme doesn’t affect the case for genuine socialism. It does not mean that all we are left with, as the way of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services, is private enterprise, free market capitalism. Socialism — real socialism — is still on the agenda and, as a classless community of free and equal men and women cooperating to produce what they need on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the world’s productive resources, has a much better claim to being the rational society the 19th century philosophers hoped would be the goal which human history was moving towards.

Adam Buick

Letters: After Bulger (1994)

Letters to the Editors from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

"After Bulger"

Dear Editors,

A lot of what you say nukes sense. However, I’m afraid I disagree strongly with Steve Coleman in his article "After Bulger" (Socialist Standard, January), when he says that the British tabloid press are worse than James Bulger’s killers. As far as I know, the Daily Mirror and Daily Star have never abducted or killed anyone.

Steve Coleman writes "The boys played video games for hours.” Well, so did I when 1 was ten, but I’m not a murderer.

Don’t get me wrong, what you say about the capitalist system is quite true, but I think you’re wrong to try and make excuses for those two bastards. Being "confused and anti-social" is no excuse for murder.

And finally, I don’t understand why, under socialism, you would abolish the police, courts and jails. Surely, that would lead to lawlessness and anarchy?

Ivan Peters, 

Stockport

Reply:

In saying that we cannot endorse punishing those whose foul actions are a direct result of being brought up under this system, we are not making excuses, as if to suggest that it was acceptable for two boys to murder a smaller boy. In fact, our article stated clearly that we refuse either to blame or to excuse.

What we are saying is that these awful kinds of behaviour will inevitably happen in a social system which glorifies violence, gives medals to killers, corrupts the social environment in which young people grow up and denies us the right to be innocent by dragging us at an early age into the sordid priorities of an oppressively anti-social system. Attacking the effects might satisfy the anger which our correspondent is not alone in feeling, but only by eradicating the cause will we prevent it from happening again . . . and again

Police, courts and prisons are products of an oppressive social order which regards punishment as being the only response to wrongdoing. The problem is that the very laws which our correspondent is concerned about are only there to defend property relationships. Abolish property and we will not need laws; we can live co operatively as equals in a lawless society.

What about anti social behaviour which is not property based? In fact, much of that is really property related when it comes down to it: for example, rape is essentially about the right to take for free what is not yours; many murders occur in possessive relationships.

But even in those cases of inexplicable viciousness and sadism, what evidence is there that prisons do anything to cure such behaviour? Surely it would be far better for such people, should they exist in a socialist society, to be given help to understand their anti-social behaviour and to feel remorse for any harm that they caused others. Police and prison screw's don’t help that process.

Rather than put the pictures of these two boys on the front pages of the tabloids and call them names, would it not be more sensible for society to devote its efforts to teaching them to behave co-operatively? Of course, people need to be protected from those who are anti-social, but prisons only make the prisoners more resentful and anti-social.

In a capitalist society punishment is the cheapest response. Only in a socialist society can we not only remove the cause of gratuitously violent behaviour, but deal with the effects of it if it occurs in a way that is humane. 

Editors.

"When I was very young . . ."

Dear Editors,

When I was very young, I overheard the owner of an apple orchard say, "I’m letting them rot on the trees, it doesn't pay to pick them”. The year was 1922. I was bewildered, all those acres of luscious apples . . .

When I reached the age of 16 my father sat me down and tried to explain something that was apparently bothering me. He told me that he worked eight hours a day and only got paid for two hours. Once again 1 was bewildered. I could not understand why people agreed to do such a thing. I was told, of course, that they were not aware of the robbery.

In 1929 there was another event that was puzzling. The stock market crashed. Rich folks lost all their wealth overnight and some solved their problems by jumping out of windows located on the 10th floor.

Today, we read about millions of people dying of starvation because they cannot buy food. The owner of the apple orchard goes broke because he cannot sell his apples, at a profit.

Today there are mini-wars springing up all over the globe. In Russia they have not yet decided who is going to be top dog. It may end up in a civil war ... then there would probably be intervention by other nations?

There are people who have extreme wealth. They own private jets, fabulous homes all over the world and perhaps a large yacht in some secluded cove . . . Other folks are hunkered under an overpass for the night.

The culprit of course is the profit system, capitalism. The reason that it still exists is that folks just don't realize that the solution is Socialism.

Have a nice day. 

H.W.

Fascism

Dear Editors,

May I be allowed to respond to your reply to my letter, published in the December issue, on the subject of the emotional plague of fascism.

Confirmation of your fixation on "Economic Man” is verified (as with your general approach to other matters) by your vulgar interpretation of Marxism that purely socio-economic factors are responsible for fascism.

It is essential to repudiate that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality or of any ethnic or political group and to strongly deny that it as an exclusively socio-economic foundation. But to understand that fascism is the expression of the irrational character structure of the average human being whose primary biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years.

The social function of this suppression and the crucial role played in it by the authoritarian family and the church should be carefully analysed. Every form of organised mysticism, including fascism, relies on the unsatisfied orgastic longing of the masses.

The human character structure that creates organised fascist movements exists, dominating our present social conflicts. "Fascism" is not a political party but a specific concept of life and attitude towards man, love and work. Who has not met the black, Jewish, Indian or Oriental fascist and racist? Who has not met the materially comfortable and financially secure racist? Or the “red fascist"?

Who docs not remember the scenes of the 1930s of countless millions of workers overwhelmed with fanatical zeal with racist and fascist madness?

Who can ignore the mindless adoration of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin?

Once again we are witnessing that fast growing onslaught of the "fascist" emotional plague — worldwide.

The previously mentioned work by Dr Wilhelm Reich of The Mass Psychology of Fascism will help to reinforce the facing of the tasks, to combat these dangers, for today’s Marxists. We must all understand the emotional plague.

Lionel Rich, 

London NW6

Reply:

You keep saying we are "vulgar Marxists" and partisans of "economic man”, but what about our articles that take into account Marx’s theory of alienation (see previous reply and last month’s article)? 

Editors

Abortion

Dear Editors,

Unlike Ali Browning (Letters, December), I don’t think that abortion and contraception are completely separate issues. How about the IUD which prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the wall of the uterus? What about the ‘morning after"pill? Are these contraceptives or early forms of abortion, or both?

Also, for the women facing an unwanted pregnancy, when contraception has failed, or simply wasn’t used, abortion is one important option.

Ideally, there would not be any unwanted pregnancies, but there are, and I think that there will be, even in a Socialist world, with all the best sex education, access to contraception etc.

In the case of an unwanted pregnancy (distinct from "unplanned"), the woman should take into account the wishes of her partner and the advice of her doctors, but in the end the woman herself should have the final say. Not priests, doctors, nor even her partner should have more rights over her than she has herself.

As medical technology gets more and more sophisticated, and younger and smaller babies can be saved, are we to say that abortion should only be performed earlier and earlier in the foetus’s development?

I think that abortion should be performed ‘as early as possible and as late as necessary". I believe, as most Socialists do, that people should have a choice whether they want children or not. Thus I condemn the system in China, which limits family-size to one child and tries to force women expecting a second child to have an abortion, as much as I condemn LIFE and SPUC for trying to prevent women from having an abortion.

Perhaps it is best summed by by saying that I believe in choice. For Socialists still pondering the rights and wrongs of abortion, I found The Socialist Feminist by Janet Richards very helpful.

Veronica Clanchy, 

Poole

Between the Lines: A Question of Thought (1994)

The Between the Lines Column from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Question of Thought

1994 brought the news that the BBC has decided on a replacement for Peter Sissons as host of its flagship current affairs programme Question Time. The job has gone to David Dimbleby, the BBC's Election Night host and brother of Jonathan, chair of Radio 4’s Any Questions'? There’s nothing like keeping it in the family.

Though Sissons finished his stint on Question Time in a more assured style than when he started, he proved to be a rather tetchy host at times, bringing all the elan one would expect of a dour newsreader. He was certainly different from Sir Robin Day, though not necessarily better. Day himself was a generally rude and bad-tempered chairman who was saved on TV by his many idiosyncracies which made him appear to be more interesting than the politicians, something that shouldn’t have been too difficult. Sissons had little such advantage and tended to blend into the set rather than create his own distinctive style of chairmanship. Dimbleby could go the same way, though his previous experience of the format and his performances on Election Nights suggest he won’t.

The real key — as with Dimbleby’s producers — will be not just how he treats the politicians, but how he interacts with the audience. If the mood took them both Day and Sissons could stop the audience from questioning the politicians and their motives too closely, as some Socialist Party members found out. "Yes, that’s enough of that . . . now to the lady in the blue rinse" was not an uncommon reaction, particularly when dangerous words like capitalism and socialism were mentioned.

Intimidating a TV audience is not difficult for an experienced host, and as Ben Elton would say, it’s not big or clever. Day and Sissons both seemed far too satisfied to be up on the big table with the assorted "statesmen" to be seen to give the underlings much of a say. At times, the audience participation in Question Time has been reduced to the level where members of the public are invited not so much to think for themselves but simply to agree with the pronouncements of the various politicians: yea or nay. Conversely, the best editions of the programme have been those occasions when the studio audience has been able to get on the back of a particular politician and then pepper him or her with focused comments, questions and suggestions that the chair has been powerless to stop.

A Licence to Kill 

Sadly, the candidate for the Question Time post who would have proved the most interesting of all didn’t get the job — namely Jeremy Paxman, from BBC2’s Newsnight. Paxman is foremost among the rottweiler school of political interviewing, and his "yes, but isn’t that just complete bollocks" line of questioning has brought him a certain degree of admiration from those who consider themselves "anti-system" and a fair amount of disdain from those who are very much a part of it. With Paxman, politicians get away with relatively little. The big question mark would be over whether he could restrain his aggressive style with an audience. Paxman can sometimes resort to sneering, and that would be no use at all on a programme like Question Time. Indeed, it has been noticeable that when Newsnight has involved an audience panel the laid-back Francine Stock or Peter Snow usually make a better job of it than Paxman. who seems less effective when unable to directly bait politicians.

For whatever reason, viewers of Question Time are stuck with Dimbleby, but never fear, socialists can point him in the right direction. For one thing that would definitely improve the programme would be the actual presence of socialists. Given the BBC’s past record, a socialist member of the panel might be too much to hope for (though we note that the confusion-mongers of the SWP have had members on more than once). So "Between the Lines" recommends that readers of this column write in to the BBC for tickets to the new series of Question Time so as to make the genuine Socialist case heard on TV. You never know, we might at the same time be able to help turn Question Time from being a forum for posturing and prattle into a Programme for public information.

Dave Perrin

50 Years Ago: Soviet Millionaires (1994)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

A very great war produces, out of profound social tragedy, its mordant satirical humorists. This one is no exception: in addition to biting ironists of the Nat Gubbins school, "Yaffle," and others, we may now acclaim one Reginald Bishop as the wittiest cynic of the day. With elephantine solemnity, Mr. Bishop has turned out a little booklet on "Soviet Millionaires" ("Soviet Millionaires," Russia To-day. pamphlet. 2d.), in which he playfully pretends that he is "explaining" that they are the result of "the establishment of socialism in Russia in 1934" (p. 12).

The result is the funniest piece of satirical writing since this war broke out. For this we thank him very much.

How to do it! Mr. Bishop chides those who are shocked to hear of millionaires in Russia, and "to whom the very word millionaires represents an evil influence in society." He points out that Russian millionaires are "only" rouble millionaires: they do not possess the equivalent of a million pounds sterling (p. 3). "But even were a rouble millionaire possessed of as much money as a sterling one, it would still not be anti-socialist. . . . because in the Soviet Union the millionaire has acquired his roubles by his own toil" (p. 3) . . . 

We agree with the Daily Worker, wherein Mr. W. Holmes averred that Reg. Bishop has done very well in dealing with statements by "Hyde Park spouters." that in Russia to-day the social system is one based on wage-labour and capital. The "Hyde Park spouter" is the Socialist Party platform and Mr. Bishop's pamphlet is so good that it can be confidently recommended to any political sap who still swallows the guff about Socialism in Russia.

[From an article by "Horatio’ in the Socialist Standard. February 1944.]

Necessary Illusions (1994)

Book Review from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. By Noam Chomsky. Pluto Press.

Like other socialists, I was impressed by the Channel Four documentary on Noam Chomsky shown last summer. So much so that I bought this book. Its subtitle gives a good idea of its content. In closely-argued detail, Chomsky shows how the media reflects the interests of the capitalist system. Whilst he doesn’t declare himself a socialist his views on the media fit easily with ours.

Chomsky’s examples are taken from the American media but are applicable to Britain (or any other country for that matter). Basically the media reflects the interests of capital despite the media’s self-image of acting on behalf of the people. Whilst the press is often accused of being anti-government or anti-business, this doesn’t hold true on closer inspection. Views about the media range from it being anti-government (or left-wing) to it being independent and representing the public interest. There is no acknowledgement that the media might be pro-government. Anyone who makes this observation and attempts to engage in discussion on it is either ignored or marginalized.

Therefore the thought control is that of portraying the interest of big business as the "national interest". It doesn’t necessarily favour any particular government, as whoever is in power will act in the interest of capital:

    What is at issue is not the honesty of opinions expressed or the integrity of those who seek the facts but rather the choice of topics and highlighting of issues, the range of opinion permitted expression, the unquestioned premises that guide reporting and commentary, and the general framework imposed for the presentation of a certain view of the world.

This "certain view of the world" can be found in the media’s portrayal of, say, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan compared with US aggression in Indo-China or Central America. This agenda-setting helps to influence the population as conflicting views are not allowed air time, or if they are it is "a three minute stretch" in which "it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility".

In order to achieve true democracy, full informed participation from the people is required but this is dangerous to any government. Chomsky quotes a government study which urged "moderation in democracy"; his definition of this is "the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience".

His views on free speech led to him defending a neo-nazi historian. The excellent point Chomsky makes is that genuine free speech is hearing views you don’t agree with. A review of the Chomsky film by the SWP missed this point but if free speech is just what you agree with then one could say that Hitler and Stalin believed in free speech. This is worth remembering when the Left calls for censorship of the BNP (who would probably welcome such martyrdom).

A short review can’t do justice to Chomsky’s ideas so I would urge readers to explore his books for themselves.

Nigel Green

Back to what basics? (1994)

Editorial from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

No doubt between the time of writing this piece and its publication, the definition of "back to basics" will have undergone a few more changes at the hands of our dissembling Prime Minister. We should not be surprised at this since, for most politicians, "basics" seems to refer to a collection of essentially meaningless platitudes upon which they rely when nothing is going right and they have run out of excuses for everything that is going wrong.

This technique, when skilfully applied, can create a positive image remarkably independent of concrete evidence. For example, the Tories can still use tough law-and-order slogans despite the fact that their recent performance in this area has been pitiably inadequate. And Labour is seen as, among other things, the party of racial harmony on little evidence other than rhetoric.

We must admit it is galling for Socialists to witness the success of such transparent frauds, so it comes as something of a relief to see the likes of John Major making such a spectacular hash of choosing his buzz-words. First there was the "classless society". This should have worked, since the important class division in capitalist society — that between the capitalist class and the working class — is carefully concealed.

But to try to sell even the pretence of a classless society in one of the few countries where aristocratic political privilege survives as an institution was, shall we say, ill-advised. However, it seems this faux-pas will be dwarfed by the "back to basics" debacle. Once again it is an injudicious choice of issue which is at the root of the problem.

The "law-and-order" issue is perfectly safe so long as leading Tories are not overcome by a compulsion to rob banks or beat up OAPs. It can safely be assumed that this is unlikely to happen. No such assumption can be made, however, about the kind of behaviour for which Mr Yeo was forced to resign. Of course we have no particular opinion on the rights or wrongs of his conduct or of that of all the others but neither did we urge workers to vote for them.

Unfortunately for the ex-minister, the people who did urge workers to vote for him were people who genuinely believe that the country’s problems are due in large part to a decline in family values. This is a nonsensical belief which is easily disproved, but it is one widely held among grass-roots Tories and actively encouraged by their party’s propaganda.

A great many Tory Party members, especially constituency workers, would be likely to reconsider their position if they thought that their official party stance on moral issues was a pragmatic rather than a principled one. These are precisely the people to whom John Major is appealing in his "back to basics" campaign and it will be interesting to see whether they are considered more or less valuable to his party than his cavalier colleagues.

There is an important point here because many of the apologists for Yeo and his ilk come down firmly on the side of the latter. Indeed, they appear to be making the topsy-turvy complaint that the grass-roots are out of touch with the grandees.

Now, while it’s all very well to argue that constituency workers have no right to dictate an MP’s morals, this is to overlook the fact they have an absolute right to withdraw their support and no obligation even to give reasons for doing so. In other words, when we get "back to basics" it is Yeo who is reliant on their support and not they on his patronage.

These are the kind of "basics" which appeal to socialists, not for any moral reasons, but simply because they mean that, given the political will, the working class can at any time dump its would-be leaders. That’s the basis of democracy. In fact democracy means not following leaders at all but deciding for yourself. And that’s not going to be possible till we’ve got rid of the present system and the hypocritical politicians it spawns.

Sting in the Tail: Fine in theory (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fine in theory

What lay behind the desire of all those governments to bring about the recent GATT agreement? One of the main reasons was, we were told, "the need to stimulate competition".

In Australia a new football boot, "Blades", has been designed. It has diagonal rubber blades on the soles and heals instead of studs and the makers claim it will improve grip and reduce injuries. Eighty percent of Australian rugby league players now use it.

Glad cries all round then? No, in fact every obstacle is being put in the way of this competitor by the multinational football boot makers:

"A club sponsored by one took out a Supreme Court injunction to try to stop the Nine Network's "A Current Affair" programme showing its results of boot trials. It failed. In another incident subcontractors of a rival company stopped Blades' production by removing equipment from the factory. Power struggle and patent intrigues lie ahead." (Guardian, 11 December)

The fiercest opposition is what always faces those who try to put rhetoric about competition into practice.

Patching them up

An advert in the national press by the charity St. Christopher's Fellowship (31 December) announced that: "Christmas is over! In a few hours she'll be back on the streets." It told of a young woman who "is counting the hours until her temporary Christmas-time refuge is closed down".

She was not alone. Two thousand single homeless people in London hit the streets again after Christmas as temporary shelters closed. A week of being fed, given medical check-ups and even haircuts only highlighted for some the misery of the other 51 weeks and suicide attempts were reported.

And what did all this achieve? Crisis, one of the major charities, claimed:

"most of the homeless people who passed through its temporary hostels this Christmas emerged refreshed and better able to cope with life on the streets."

Could anything better demonstrate the utter futility of charity than this?

Segregated again
Remember the tremendous effort and sacrifice that went into the civil rights campaign to desegregate schools in the USA? Eventually schools were legally integrated.

But now a study by Harvard University reveals that 66 percent of black and 74 percent of Hispanic youngsters attend schools which have few white classmates. The prediction is that within 20 years half of US state schools will be predominantly black or Hispanic.

The Harvard report's director concluded:

"The civil rights impulse of the 1960s is dead in the water and the ship is floating back towards the shoals of racial segregation." (Guardian, 15 December)

What has happened is that poverty-stricken blacks and Hispanics have moved to the towns and cities and become concentrated in areas where those whites who can afford to have moved out.

So population drift has replaced overt racism as the cause of segregated schools: that may have changed, but the poverty factor remains constant and that is something the reformists can do nothing about.

The truth hurts
What politicians will do just to "get in" is exceeded only by what they will do to stay in. An example of this is the suppression of information which will be politically embarrassing.

The Black Report was commissioned in 1977 to inquire into inequalities in people's health. When it was ready in 1980 the Tory government did not publish it. Instead, 200 duplicated copies of the typescript were made available on August bank holiday in the hope that it would never be noticed.

The reason is clear:

"The report laid out a mass of evidence pointing out that social class and economic deprivation had a profound effect on health, with the inequalities of childhood persisting so that ill-health was worse, and death rates higher, at every stage of life the poorer the person was." (Guardian, 17 December)

London's yo-yo
London share prices have reached record levels - the FTSE share index rose by 22 percent in 1993 and another big rise is forecast for 1994.

What is causing this? Current low interest and inflation rates will encourage business to think they can plan ahead with more certainty. This, plus a feeling that the recession is now over, has pushed shares up, but there are other less rational reasons for the rise.

For instance, London prices usually follow prices on Wall Street and Far East markets and these have been rising (Tokyo is the exception). Then there is the fact that many investors buy on a rising market simply because they are afraid of being left out of what they think must be a good thing.

Of course, the last budget's tax rises may reduce consumer spending and the recession on the continent, which is British capitalism's biggest customer, may slow down the recovery and send the FTSE tumbling again.

The last emperor
Mao's centenary gave the media the chance to disclose some awful truths about the old tyrant. For example, on one TV programme his megalomania was on display. He saw himself as the greatest of China's Emperors and boasted how he had more power and killed more "enemies" than any previous Emperor.

And he was completely ignorant of even basic economics. His "Great Leap Forward" in the 1950s had an officially estimated 100 million peasants taken out of the fields to produce steel, of which they knew nothing, and resulted in tens of millions dying in the inevitable famine. Incidentally, Mao the "Marxist" had read very little of Marx's writings.

What, we wonder, were those British Maoists, past and present, thinking as they watched or read about the monstrous crimes committed by the man they so idolized?

That's them that is
"In this edition of 'History Today' Professor Lewis and I will be discussing the question 'Is there really a working class in contemporary capitalism?' Professor Lewis, what is your view?"

"See a boring old fart who thinks history is all about kings, queens, military commanders, politicians and other useless parasites?"

"I suppose there may be such a person."

"That's you, that is."

"Perhaps, Professor Lewis, but who are the working class today?"

"See those millions of people all over the world who must work for a wage or salary in order to live, who produce all of society's wealth and fight and die in wars which have nothing to do with them?"

"I have heard that there are such persons."

"Well that's THEM, THAT IS!"

(Acknowledgements to Newman and Baddiel)

Work - as in holic (1994)

From the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

I am unemployed at the moment, on a small retainer from a government which begrudges it heartily and doesn't miss an opportunity to remind me of the fact. Officially I am an IT trainer and (for the benefit of those at the benefit office employed to stop my benefit) I am actively seeking work. Information Technology, if you don't already know, is for those who think there is something seriously groovy about electronic filing systems and adding machines. I certainly do. In this heady world of techno fashion toys people like me describe new clever filing systems as "sexy", which shows you how disturbed we are.

It is interesting to note in passing that the CBI recently complained that Britain was going down the toilet because its workers are not trained in Information Technology. Anyone who knows anything about computers knows this is all bollocks, and that Britain will go down the toilet whether or not its workers know how to save a text file memo in dBase. I suspect the government takes the same view. I got made redundant, after all.

Being unemployed is of course a pain in the arse, but it has its moments. I'm pretty rich in freedom for one thing, although oddly I fritter that away in just the same way an employed person does money, wondering where it all went at the end of the month and thinking that it never seems to buy anything these days.

But I've had a dose of life in the Office, as a computer programmer, and by god that was like being on a different planet. Forty hours a week for forty years under forty-watt light-bulbs — that was a nightmare I had to get out of bed to experience. The cheery accounts department banter only made it worse. But what threatened to push me over the edge was that I was surrounded by workaholics. I developed a large rash of "attitude problems" and "under-motivation complexes" by being planted among individuals who all wanted to chalk up fourteen hours graft a day and no passes.

Chas was the accountant. Very nice chap, charming, friendly, lots of brains and charisma. One of the new breed of managers, who don't give orders but merely ask "personal favours", giving you the impression that they're your friends and not your employers. Chas works from seven a.m. till ditto p.m. virtually every night (and takes work as well). Then there's "owd Fred", who'd been there since they took all the railings away from the park for Spitfires, and he was putting in a solid ten hours a day. There's Arthur who would look at his watch and say "Christ, I'll get shot . . . " but still wouldn't go home.

Who you know
The Managing Director, a relation in the old family, would come in for an occasional gloat round the office but was usually out fishing in the afternoon, from what I could see.

So did I have the wrong attitude, I wondered? Is office work so exciting that people the world over just can't tear themselves away from it even to go to lunch? In extremis, I turned to friends for a little psychiatric help.

"Look here," I chattered through clenched teeth, manfully containing my hysteria, "is it me or is it them? Who's the nutter?"

"Oh, that's nothing," came the careless reply. "I worked at a place once . . ."

One morning I staggered into work after a particularly heavy night on the piss to discover that the mainframe computer had crashed because, get this, one of the staff had come back to finish some invoices at midnight. Unpaid, mind you.

And when you suggest that socialism could roll along quite happily because at bottom human beings quite like work and would do it paid or not, people look at you as if you're completely deranged.

"Oh no," they state flatly, "you can't have a society where everything is free and nobody is paid to work. No one would do anything. People are too selfish."

Working to rule
People think I'm cynical. Well now, let's not get the wrong idea. I'm not flatly knocking dedication to the job. I wouldn't want to be shovelled bleeding into Casualty one night after being bagged by some drunken bastard in a Volvo only to find that the staff were on their shift break and couldn't possibly be disturbed until halfpast two. I realize that working strictly to rule isn't always practical or desirable. But there are one or two basic economic considerations here that are worth pointing out. Unions exist, as everyone knows, to try to improve the pay and conditions of work. Many however have exactly the same attitude to them that we do to a commercial plumber. In other words, we treat unions like a paid-for service, to resort to only when our pay-packet springs a sudden leak, and not as organizations that require our constant attention. Union reps with hundreds on their books usually can't get double figures into the meetings. The fact that this is partly the movement's own fault for being undemocratic in the past isn't really the point. What is the point is that workers themselves, by opting out of a union which "charges eight quid a month and does sod all" and by agreeing to work extra hours for nothing, are not doing themselves any big favours.

Being an unemployed IT trainer myself, I could take the view that every IT trainer out there who is doing work for free is a traitor to the cause of my personal unemployment. The state won't come up with the funds to pay me, and thanks to them it doesn't have to. According to one researcher, "the cost of replacing the work of the voluntary sector would be well in excess of £20 billion — or some 12p or 13p on the basic rate of income tax." Since we're being so generous with our time, why don't we volunteer to run the NHS as a charitable endeavour and then we can put the nurses out of work too? (Half the hospitals in the country seem to be paid for out of collection as it is).

Meanwhile the Managing Director is presumably still pissing himself laughing down by the river. Whoops, another bite on the line  . . .

Joining the dog race
If you bred whippets for sale, you wouldn't feed them on smoke salmon and then sell them for half their value, would you? No, you'd buy the cheapest dog food you could get away with and charge the highest price you could get. Thus are fortunes made. It's not a matter of greed as some people seem to  think but simply of common sense. Gather ye profits while ye may, because of course the bottom might drop out of whippets at any moment. Not a pleasant thought.

In capitalism people's skills, like whippets, are a commodity. In fact, unless you're rich, it is the only commodity you've got to sell, so why sell yourself short? The selling process is nothing but the frantic pursuit of means to pay for the privilege of living. It's like being born with an overdraft that you can never clear off.

The labour market that we sell ourselves in works like any other market, in other words, on the basis of supply and demand. If you have trained for thirteen years as a doctor, you're a bit of of a rarity and in some demand, so normally you'll fetch a decent price. (Naturally they'll always try and pay you less, if they can get away with it — you have to learn to haggle, which is why unions were created in the first place). If you have trained for thirteen years as a Conquistador you will certainly be a rarity but no one is going to pay you large sums of money to invade Mexico. The labour market is quite ruthless. Some workers fetch good prices and other don't. What's more, like any other market, nothing is stable and demand is unpredictable. The buyers of labour wring their hands and sniff that the recession is ruining them, but they make a staggering profit out of this arrangement.

Just look for a minute at where the profit comes from. If employers were to pay you exactly what you're worth to them, they wouldn't make a penny out of it for themselves. So they pay you less than your labour is earning them and keep the difference, to save up and buy themselves nice clothes, politicians and continents. Ah but, you might ask, how do they know exactly what your labour is worth to them? After all, most workers are not employed to produce anything at seventy pounds a week that you can paint green and charge a hundred quid for. In the real world it's much more complicated than that. So they employ accountants like Chas to figure it out for them (and they don't pay him the millions he saves them either).

Why should a worker give ten hours to an employer when the contract says eight and they're only paying for seven anyway? Add to this the anti-union feeling which also exists, and one begins to see that really, until people start taking their own interest seriously, the owning class has got it made.

Paddy Shannon

Obituary: John Robertson (1994)

Obituary from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are saddened to have to report the death between Christmas and the New Year of John Robertson, a member of the Party for over fifty years.

John Robertson was born in 1914 in South Shields where his father had a butcher shop. After the General Strike and subsequent defeat of the miners the whole family had to move to London. His desire to do something about capitalism led him first to join the Labour Party which he soon left after the miserable failure of the 1929-31 Labour government. Later, after listening to Socialist Party speakers in Brockwell Park and at Hyde Park, he joined our Lewisham branch in 1938.

During the war his registration as a conscientious objector was turned down and he decided to go on the run. Naturally as a socialist he wanted no part in killing his fellow workers, and was prepared to suffer for his principles. It wasn't a very secure life but it was possible to survive on false papers and given the acute labour shortage in certain "non-essential" trades like hotels and catering. During this period "Robbie" was a member of our Hackney and later Islington branches but also spent some time in Oxford. It was here some time after the war that he eventually settled, running his own agency typing theses for students.

He was an active participant in the various activities the Party organized in the Oxford area over the years, including for a while a branch. He was always interested in current affairs and socialist theory. He and his wife Tessa were also keenly interested in music and were pleased that their son, Paul, came to be a founding member of the well-known Medici String Quartet.

John Robertson was not a member at the time of his death, but he remained a supporter of socialist ideas and meetings to the end.

The Socialist Workers Party and Trotwatch (1994)

Book Review from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why You Should Join the Socialists. By Paul Foot. Bookmarks. £1.00

Carry on Recruiting! Why the SWP dumped the "downturn" in a "dash for growth". by Trotwatch, AK Distribution, 22 Lutton Place, Edinburgh £2.95.

Whatever else can be said about Paul Foot, he's a good writer. The trouble is that he employs his talent in a bad cause: writing books to recruit people for the SWP, an undemocratic Leninist outfit which goes in for manipulative politics.

The SWP sees the mass of workers as just that - as a mass, capable only of being passive followers. On this analysis, politics becomes a struggle for "the leadership of the working class", between their present leaders - Labour MPs and councillors and trade union bureaucrats - and their would-be leaders, the SWP.

The strategy of the SWP is to discredit the Labour and trade union leaders so that the workers will desert them and follow instead the leaders of the SWP. The tactic is to call on the Labour leaders to "fight" on some issues of concern to workers and, when they don't, to denounce them as weak or bad leaders or as traitors and sell-outs.

All this presupposes that workers do follow the Labour leaders; if they don't, the SWP strategy doesn't make sense. So, at the same time as it denounces the Labour leaders as weaklings and traitors, the SWP calls on workers to follow the, and in fact actively carry out pro-Labour propaganda by blaming the problems of capitalism not on capitalism but on the Tories. In effect, the SWP's position is "follow the Labour leaders until you're ready to follow us".

Paul Foot's book reflects this approach though, to be fair, genuine socialists will find little to quarrel with in the first two chapters: "A World in Chaos" and "The Robbers and the Robbed". In fact, the first in particular is a powerful criticism of capitalism. The tragedy is that, to the extent that Foot's book does attract people who want to get rid of capitalism, it will divert them into the dead-end of Leninist politics.

Foot calls on people to join the SWP but he doesn't tell them what they will find if they do. For this, anyone impressed by his prose should get hold of the Trotwatch pamphlet. This is mainly devoted to describing the SWP's manipulative politics in relation to the anti-Poll Tax campaign and the protest against the recent (now largely achieved) pit closure programme.

However the final chapter "What's Wrong with the SWP" documents the undemocratic internal structure of the organization, where a self-perpetuating leadership dominates with the ordinary members playing the passive role of followers:

The party's line is handed down through the pages of the party's press from the Central Committee via the editors of the different journals. The branch cadre organise and deploy the new troops and orchestrate their activity. The bulk of the work involves simply selling the party's journals . . . A Leninist party simply reproduces and institutionalises existing capitalist power relations inside a supposedly 'revolutionary' organisation: between leaders and led, order givers and order takers; between specialists and acquiescent and largely powerless party workers.

Adam Buick

Blobby Culture (1994)

From the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard The new emblem of British culture has been unleashed. From the great system of dynamic enterprise which tried to sell us the Sinclair C5 and Charles 'n' Di mugs has emerged the ubiquitous Mister Blobby. Once a mere pseudo-personality to share a screen with the non-personality of Noel Edmonds, now Blobby has achieved the success of shooting to the top of the Christmas record charts and being mobbed by adoring fans wherever he appears. That he is not real (there is not even an out-of-work actor inside him, we are told by an official at the BBC) well reflects the condition of contemporary art. Like a glove puppet with no human hand to manipulate him, Blobby embodies - if not emblobbies - the emptiness of late-twentieth century market culture. Blobby was not invited to be a judge in the Turner Prize for the greatest art in Britain. His comments would have been about as meaningful and dynamic as the Snobbies from the art critics' enclosure whose task was to determine which piece of socially estranged exhibition art deserved the jackpot. It was awarded eventually to Rachel Whiteread whose dislocated semi-house structure beat the pile of rice with neon lights running through it which was another contender for the most vacuous piece of insignificance to stun the red-rimmed spectacled spectators. A pile of bricks in the Tate Gallery, a sack of neon-lit rice, an inside-out house, Mister Blobby booming from the radio ... is somebody trying to tell us something? Perhaps they are telling us this: that capitalism has run out of ideas. Just as its political defenders can think of nothing at all except to go back to basics which they can't define, those who write, paint, sculpt or dance to the tune of a social order which is increasingly socially fragmented and ideologically unconfident in itself will all too frequently produce nonsense. This is not to attack artistic modernity in defence of some romanticized memory of high art which was largely the production of pompous postures for the privileged. The art critic, Brian Sewell, whose arrogant dismissal of "the new" is a thinly-disguised fear of artistic expression by those previously excluded from "posh art" (women, non-Europeans and the non-rich), persists in defending a vision of artistic quality which means little more than the fading values of a worn-out aristocracy. Anyone tempted by the snobbish ramblings of Sewell should read William Morris's Art Under Plutocracy (1883) or Art And Socialism (1884) as an antidote. The issue is not really about art at all. It is about finding meanings in a world that has become meaningless to so many people. The old-guard defenders of High Culture seek meaning in a past where capitalist relations were still dynamic and able to offer some inspiration to creative minds. The new snobs invent ever more outrageous adventures in escapist and abstracted imagery in a bid to create meaning where nothing is meant. It is like a restaurant which has run out of recipes selling expensive bowls of boiled water which is coloured purple to make the punters imagine they are tasting something new. The problem of capitalism's current cultural crisis is that productive relations are so outmoded in relation to the potential for dynamic productivity of creative abundance that artists thinking and working within the belief-structure of the capitalist system are only likely to reproduce the stagnation arising from redundant relationships. Just as the late Roman Empire produced a decadent and dying artistic culture and the collapsing Ottoman Empire found itself artistically adrift, so "art" in the present stage of capitalism is increasingly divided between the commercial populism of cartoon video imagery which is pointless and often poisonous and fake innovations which impress only those who are paid to be impressionable. Living art must relate to people as we are and not to trained consumers of warmed-up relics by the dead or pretentious trash by the dead boring. The rhythm of art is social activity: productive work in its broadest sense (from wood-cutting to mixing paints). As Ernst Fischer explained in his very clearly-stated Marxist analysis, The Necessity of Art: Art... is a form of work, and work is an activity peculiar to mankind . . . Man takes possession of the natural by transforming it. Work is transformation of the natural. Man also dreams of working magic upon nature, of being able to change objects and give them new form by magic means. This is the equivalent in the imagination of what work means in reality. Man is, from the outset, a magician. But the magicians of our age are more like tricky conjurers pulling imitation rabbits out of their hats. For, the principal art of capitalism is the advertising industry and its insidious assault upon our tastes and desires does not reflect the rhythm of life but rather seeks to dictate it. Today's "artists" are the producers of ads for Renault and Guinness - the product is immaterial: drive it or drink it, but the boys in red-rimmed specs will make you buy it. Is there any hope for meaningful art in a society where money buys creativity, distorts wants and crushes hope? Is such a wretched social order capable of much more than Mister Blobby? And yet there does emerge subversive art. Sometimes it is appropriated by those it threatens. Just as armies defuse explosive devices, the artists who rebel are made safe by being given jobs and allowed to turn rebellion into a fashion. So it is that designer-made Anarchist symbols can now be purchased from the trendiest clothes shops and chinless wonders frequent the wine bars of Kensington wearing ripped jeans and expensive punk labels. Capitalism finds it easier to buy subversion than to fight it. Exceptions do exist. The photo-art of the Brazilian photographer, Sebastiao Salgada, whose images of the hellish lives of workers were recently exhibited in a remarkable free exhibition "Workers - An Archeology of the Industrial Age" at the Royal Festival Hall, shows just how much of an impact the depiction of the conditions of contemporary wage slavery can make. For the present writer (as for several other socialists who saw the exhibition) this was a refreshing glimmer of haunting reality within an art world usually inhabited by preciously insignificant artifacts. Without lionizing workers in the grotesque manner of the old "socialist realists", Salgada's pictures capture the essential dignity of productive creation while never flinching from the nightmarish wretchedness which characterizes so much daily labour. (A book containing some of the photographs has been published.) Here is art penetrating existing relations rather than retreating from them into the pseudo-inner-soul of the artist. Those who saw Tony Hancock's satirical depiction of the pretensions of the art world in his 1960 film, The Rebel, will recognize that with the Turner Prize art has come to imitate comedy. Likewise, readers of Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World, will detect in the recent superstardom of Mister Blobby the rise of a form of artistic expression only possible when its audience is being conditioned to the idiotic level of meaningless entertainment. Poverty takes many forms, and not the least of them is that which holds up an artistic mirror to the social ethos and reflects in it an abstract, ludicrous portrait of a system of social chaos. Steve Coleman

Class War in Mexico (1994)

From the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peter Newell, author of a biography "Zapata of Mexico", gives the historical background to the recent peasant uprising in the south of Mexico

The Mexican government appears to have been taken by surprise at the recent events in the state of Chiapas, three hundred miles east of Acapulco, in southern Mexico. Indeed, as late as October last year the Interior Minister was denying the existence of insurrectos in Chiapas.

Yet on New Year's day, hundreds of guerrilleros, calling themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army, captured the town of San Cristobal. They carried a variety of mostly old hunting rifles, home-made grenades and machetes. Many were women. On the same day, Canada, the United States and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The Land Question
When the Spaniards first arrived in Mexico, in 1517, the Indians still held the land in common. The idea of private property in land did not exist. The common lands were usually located on the outer edges of the pueblos or settlements. They were called "ejidos", which means exit or "way out".

New Spain, as Mexico was called, was largely conquered by private adventuruers known as conquistadors, who were firmly controlled by a group of agents of the Spanish Crown known as "gachupines" (Wearers of Spurs), together with the leaders of the Catholic Church. At first, the conquistadors numbered only a few hundred,and even after a generation only a few thousands. The conquistadors soon made the Indians work on their land, which in theory now belonged to the Spanish Crown, whilst the Indians, later called peones (People of the Earth), were expected to live on the produce of their ejidos.

As time went by, the Spanish Crown granted legal titles of ownership of the land. But since most of the Indian pueblos could not obtain grants, the conquistadors grad ually enlarged the boundaries of their estates, claiming that the land that they were occupying belonged, not to the peones, but to the Spanish Crown:

"By a slow process of attrition extending through generations, the relatively small holdings of the original conquistadors were gradually enlarged into enormous haciendas which covered most of the fertile lands of Central Mexico." (Henry B. Parkes, A History of Mexico).

Probably 40 percent of the Indian population were compelled to become labourers on the haciendas and large estates. They became debt-slaves, and their debts were inherited from generation to generation.

The hacienda owners, or "hacendados", were not generally interested in improving their methods of production. And the Indians were deprived of farm implements and domesticated animals such as oxen. Agriculture, therefore, stagnated. But early in the nineteenth century, a form of "plantation capitalism" slowly began to emerge. Within a still largely feudal economy the haciendas developed, whose aims were purely commercial.

After a long and bitter struggle, Mexico achieved its independence from Spain in 1821. Following independence, the Catholic Church was forbidden to own land; but it was paid compensation for its former estates. The Indian peones were unable to purchase the former Church land (which, before the Spanish conquest, was theirs anyway); only the already wealthy landowners could afford to. The result was to increase the concentration of land ownership on a scale hitherto unknown.

By 1889, twenty-nine landowners obtained 27.5 million hectares, or 14 percent of the total land area of Mexico. By 1900, about 50 haciendas comprised more than 100,000 hectares each. Meanwhile, the Indians continued to lose their common lands; and more and more of them were forced to work on the large estates.

Dictatorship
On November 21, 1876, Porfiro Diaz became President of Mexico. He was to remain virtual dictator until May 1910. Nevertheless, under Diaz, Mexico underwent profound change. He encouraged the flow of foreign capital into the country. Money flowed in from Britain, the United States and elsewhere. Vast sums were invested in the construction of railways, the mining of silver and, after 1900, the production of coffee, sisal and sugar. Between 1880 and 1890, foreign capital outpaced Mexican investment. Public works were undertaken, including harbours, canals, drainage works and telephone and telegraph lines. A new industrial working class was recruited from the former peones dosplaced from the land. Indeed, by 1907, there were 40,000 textile workers and 100,000 miners in Mexico.

Naturally, this emphasis on industrialization increased the already clearly defined differences between rich and poor.

Industrial capitalism was very largely imposed upon the hacienda system, under which half the population was bound by debt-peonage. Modern capitalism was developing within the shell of a buereaucratic, corrupt and decadent feudalism. In cooperation with foreign interests, Mexico's economy was tightly controlled by a small group of businessmen and financiers known as "cientificos".

But by 1904, there were signs, tenuous at first, of economic instability. Between 1907 and 1910, inflation was rampant. Yet there was no ascertainable rise in wages. Trade unions were banned or severely restricted; but in 1906, the first industrial conflict in Mexico broke out at Cananea, in the state of Sonora. The workers of Mexico had begun to move. Other strikers, in the textile industry, followed in 1908 and 1909.

Without quite realizing it, Porfirio Diaz began to lose support.

Revolution
The first to rebel against Diaz was Francisco Madero, the son of rich landowners in northern Mexico. Madero had a passion for education and radical reform. In June 1910 he challenged Diaz for the presidency; but first, he was arrested, then he was said to have received only 196 votes throughout the country. (Later on, in 1913, he was to be murdered by supporters of the by then deposed Diaz.) Madero, however, had begun a movement which would not only overthrow Diaz, and the ancient regime, but would result in a bloody and violent conflict lasting ten years. To the casual observer, the Mexican revolution seemed quite chaotic and purposeless. Small armies and guerrilla bands appeared to be rushing about in all directions; and the whole country seemed to be in a state of disintegration. But by 1911, a distinct pattern began to emerge. Mexico was, in fact, rent into three completely irreconcilable socio-economic classes.

The first was the deeply-entrenched hacendado, land-owning element, supported by the Catholic Church, a few home-grown financiers, and a powerful coterie of foreign concessionaires, chiefly British and American. Politically, they were Porfiristas; and they were looking for a new and yong dictator. The second was the emergent, rising bourgeoisie - the businessmen and small land-owning class, including a few propserous rancheros. They were generally nationalistic, which meant being anti-British and anti-American. And, like the bourgeoisie of seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France, they favoured a somewhat limited constitutional democracy that would free them from the fetters of a largely feudal absolutism,and give them a modern administration responsive to their needs.

The third was the great mass of Mexico's dispossessed - the peones and debt-slaves, the small rancheros, and the new class industrial wage-slaves, such as the miners and railway workers. Among these, there was a distinct, and very independent group, mostly confined to the state of Morelos and a few neighbouring states, who would later be called Zapatistas.

Zapata
Morelos lies just over 60 miles south of Mexico City. Since the sixteenth century, sugar plantations have dominated its life. Unlike elsewhere in Mexico, the great hacendados produced sugar-cane for profit and the market, and not for immediate consumption. After 1880, more and more of the Indians were forced off their common lands. Many of the haciendas developed into "company" towns, employing from between 250 and 3,000 workers. Such was the environment into which Emiliano Zapata was born, in San Miguel Anencuilco, in 1879.

Zapata was not a landless peon; his family owned a modest rancho, and his parents lived in a small adobe-and-stone house (the remains of which still exist, as I discovered when I visited Anencuilco). The Zapata family were poor, but, unlike most of the people in Morelos, not depressed to the verge of want. Emiliano also had a little schooling. And he became an expert horseman. He was a bad orator, but he became a good organizer. And soon came to hate the rich landowners. Nevertheless, he was far more patient than many of his companions, even after he had been elected Supreme Chief of the Liberation Army of the South.

Emiliano Zapata was, of course, not a socialist. Nor was he an ideologue. He wanted, and fought for, the return of the common lands stolen from the Indians; and, as time went by, he was influenced to some extent by the ideas of the anarcho-communist Ricardo Flores Magon. If anything, Zapata was a rather backward-looking utopian communist. But he could not be bought. He was offered almost anything to give up the struggle against the rich, the powerful and the Mexican state; but he never gave up, even after ten years. In 1919 he was lured into a trap by government agents and murdered.

By 1920, after ten years of struggle, insurrection and civil war, Mexico was in a very poor way indeed. The power of the hacendados had been largely broken; but the people were exhausted. Even the Zapatistas had had more than enough. But, as recent events have shown, Zapatismo lives on.

New Mexico
Between 1920 and 1933, almost eight million hectares of arable land was returned to the peones. But between 1934 and 1940, during the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas, more than twelve million hectares was distributed. He also organized an "ejidal" bank to give credit to new farmers.

However, with what was to be the slow, but irreversible, development of industrial capitalism in Mexico, the few existing, as well as newly-created ejidos, tended to become merely cooperative farms, largely financed by the government. Since 1940, more land has been distributed; but, in the main, the plots have been so small that they are economically unviable.

Feudalism in Mexico has gone. A new, bourgeois, capitalist class has emerged, as well as its opposite, a propertyless, working class. But there are still millions of peones and former peones often living in appalling poverty. Many are, in the words of Franz Fanon, the "Wretched of the Earth", waiting, if they are lucky, to be used as cheap, exploited labour in a increasingly capitalist economy. For decades following the end of the civil war, they had became apathetic, demoralized, even frightened. Meanwhile the Mexican government had become more powerful, efficient and, therefore, more repressive. Then, things began to change. In October 1968, on the eve of the Olympic Games, over 200 student demonstrators were killed by units of the army.

After 1969, numerous Zapatista-type groups began to operate in various parts of the country. There was considerable unrest in the state of Puebla, following land occupations. In the state of Guerrero, a guerrilla "party of the poor", another Zapatista-type organization, had considerable grassroots support in the vast, almost impenetrable mountain and jungle areas between Acapulco on the Pacific Coast and Morelos.

Still Active
Although its leader, Lucio Cabanas, was finally killed by the army in 1974, remnants of the "party of the poor" were still active in Guerrero when I was there in 1980. Throughout the 1970s, there was considerable unrest in at least five states. And hundreds of peones were killed by the Mexiacan army. In 1981, there were violent demonstrations against the state oil company, Pemex - in the state of Chiapas.

Chiapas
Chiapas is in the extreme south-east of mexico, and borders Guatemala, with which it has more in common than northern and central Mexico. It has the highest percentage of "pure" Indians, largely of Maya origin, in the country. Many of its people do not speak Spanish, the official language of Mexico, but up to 20 local languages.

Although capitalist relationships prevail in Chiapas, as elsewhere in Mexico, semi-feudal, conditions continue to exist. There are also still vast cattle ranches, controlled by a small clique, with the Indian villages administered by pro-government caciques or village bosses. Only about 65 percent of households have any electricity; and, particularly in the rural areas, there is little main drainage or running water. In a manifesto issued by the Zapatista Liberation Army, they claim" "we possess nothing, absolutely nothing, not land, not work, not education. Today, we say: enough". It is not surprising, therefore, that some at least have rebelled.

They have claimed up to 2,000 guerrilleros, but this is obviously an exaggeration. Most of their weapons have been stolen from army depots. Originally, they captured about six towns, including San Cristobal de la Casa and Guadalupe Tepayac.

The army have drafted in up to 15,000 troops. Over 200 people have been killed, much of them from bombing by the Mexican air force.

Modern State Power
It is obvious that such a movement will fail against the power of a modern state. Furthermore, it has no positive, forward-looking objective.

The people know what they are against, but that is about all. Now that, especially with the signing of NAFTA, Mexico is being integrated into the North American capitalist orbit, the workers of Chiapas, and elsewhere in Mexico, have no alternative but to organize with their fellow workers throughout the world, in order to abolish capitalism completely. Violent rebelling can achieve nothing of value, neither in the short nor the long run.

Peter E. Newell