Global Capitalism - The Facts (1996)

Party News from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party Research Department has recently been considering how, as a movement, we can be more organised in our effort to get up-to-date facts to support our case against capitalism. Our new project aims, to build upon the strong tradition of Socialist Party members and supporters conducting independent research into the many aspects of capitalist society and the case for socialism. Firstly, we are starting a more systematic way of getting information and secondly we will present the results in regular reports. The reports could be used by socialists as a source of facts for leaflets, posters, letters to the press, articles, debates, etc.

We have prepared a research plan which includes some of the most important themes that are touched upon by the socialist analysis of capitalism. On each topic there is the potential to find recent statistics and examples to illustrate the socialist case. If you are interested in helping please write to the following address for more information.

Research Department, Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Naming the Day (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Will he, or won’t he? Should he, or shouldn’t he? Can he or can’t he? All over the country millions of people will be asking these questions, agonising in sympathy with John Major as he grapples with a historically vital dilemma. Should he call a general election in the near future—this summer, for example—or should he wait until his government has run its full term in 1997?

Advice for him will come thick and fast, to Downing Street, Chequers, Huntingdon or wherever he may be. Some of it will doubtlessly come from Tory MPs who sit nervously on vulnerable majorities. There will be much reference to precedent—to Wilson’s misplaced confidence in 1970, Heath’s misreading of the political situation in 1974, Callaghan leaving it late in 1979 . . .  All of this will have a common theme. The timing of an election is all-important, in fact it can make the difference between winning and losing. People who vote are so fragile in their political knowledge, have such puny memories, are so pliant in their intentions, that they can be easily induced by promises and deceptions into changing their minds about which way they vote. So with a bit of clever calculation, some well-crafted bribes and a canny sense of timing, any government can win its way back to power—again and again and again. Even a government like John Major’s, which day-after-day is exposed for its impotence and cynicism and contempt for the workers.

Interest rates
For example the Chancellor of the Exchequer has recently announced some reductions in the base rate—the last one on 1 January. This is seen as good news, as a promise that soon the economy will boom, unemployment will reduce, everyone will be happier and more prosperous. There is no factual reason for workers to think like that; reality is that whether interest rates are high or low has no significant effect on our living standards.

But reducing base rates is seen as good news for the economy and so for people's welfare and so for the Tory Party. As the Guardian put it: "the intense political pressure on the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, to boost the government’s fortunes was underlined yesterday when he brushed aside Bank of England misgivings and cut interest rates for the second successive month.” Bank of England governor Eddie George is, said the Guardian, ". . .  plainly wary that it is the political timetable, of an election in the next 15 months, which is governing the Chancellor's monetary stance . . ." Another one to be wary was Labour's shadow chancellor Gordon Brown, who sulkily tried to play down the change in the rate. In fact, whichever side of this bogus argument they took, both Labour and Conservative were agreed that there are votes in the matter of interest rates and they both want to grab as many of them as they can.

Falkland factor
What is important about this bogus argument is what it tells us about how the parties of capitalism regard elections and the people who vote in them and how to manipulate the whole timing to their own advantage. The government of the day treats an election as a time to try to divert attention away from its obvious failure to do anything about the problems characteristic of capitalist society and towards what it represents as its successes That is why the government tries so hard to convince us that people who are suffering the more extreme poverty do so because of some intrinsic personal fallibility while at the same time they tell us about how many fraudulent claimants of state benefits their investigators have uncovered. That is why in 1983 the Thatcher government submerged the memories of the problems they met in 1981 in a neurotic, reactionary hysteria as Thatcher handbagging the Argentinians. (Of course at the time she did get some help from the Labour Party with its splits and its election of Michael Foot as leader . . .)

By the same token whenever Tory ministers review conditions in Britain in 1996 they do so on the assumption that all reasonable people know things are getting better and better, everyone getting more prosperous, more healthy, more secure. Crime is falling day-by-day. If we believe enough of this often enough the Tories will be encouraged to give us a chance to show how grateful we are for all they have done for us by voting for them in an election.

Stress
Except that it is not quite like that. For one thing Britain is fast gaining a reputation as the sweatshop of Europe, as workers are forced to put in longer hours under the stress of unemployment. This kind of pressure produces its own problems. apart from physical illness such as cancer and heart disease (according to the Health and Safety Executive, stress-related sickness results in 90 million days absence from work annually). There is also a human cost, in mental breakdown, broken families and. in some cases, suicide.

None of this will be highlighted by Major, when he finally tells us the date of the election. Neither will he address the question of why, if his government had been so successful, he has to worry about the timing of the election. Why can’t he just leave the success to speak for itself and let his government stay in power for its full term, confident that the success will bring in the votes?

Perhaps he knows how impotent his government—like any other—really is to affect the course of capitalism and it does to the lives of human beings. Perhaps he knows that the timing of elections is a massive exercise in cynicism, which reveals the contempt which capitalism’s parties have for the workers and the support they regularly give to this social system. There is an effective response this. The voters—the working class—can realise the power they hold to radically change society, to make parties like Labour and Conservative a sordid irrelevance. If that happens John Major will be relieved of the stress of choosing a date for polling, like a gambler hoping he’s on a lucky streak.

Ivan 

Letters: It is money that impedes everything (1996)

Letters to the Editors from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is money that impedes everything
Dear Editors,

I have been wondering whether to renew my subscription to the Socialist Standard for the coming year, for there are many differences between your views and mine on how to achieve a just and equitable society. For instance, the expressions that you use. such as capitalists, workers, class, are generally regarded as out-of-date concepts and are likely to lose support. Most of us have savings, however little, that have to be invested somewhere if they are not to lose value because of inflation, so we all are capitalists. Again, what is a worker? Few of us slave in a foundry any more. Are we to be excluded from your endeavours?

Even if elected on such a ticket, your parliamentary candidates are unlikely to have any effect on policy or public opinion, and they would only be endorsing the concept of government. Our aim, surely, is to achieve freedom from control by fallible leaders, whatever their ideology.

No-one is better or worse than anyone else. We are no more than the product of our heredity and of the environment in which we find ourselves. If humans are to change, if societies are to eliminate anti-social behaviour, the environment in which they exist must be changed first. That is our task, but change itself requires an atmosphere of reason, an education system that questions, that stimulates interest and enquiry and recognises that concern for our fellows is the greater self-interest.

Unemployment, capitalism, bureaucracy, poverty, are no more than effects. We need to look at fundamental causes. It is claimed that money is the catalyst without which the productive process would collapse in chaos. Yet in reality it is money that impedes everything that we aim to do. The amount of money that we desire to use, whether for education, health, transport or anything else has to be restricted in order to maintain its value. We are so conditioned by it that we cannot imagine society functioning without it. It is all-pervasive, all-corrupting. No socialist society, no conceivable economic or political system, could survive long enough for it to wither away, and since it creates deprivation as well as wealth, it must create conflict also. Only by first eliminating the money system will we achieve a just and stable society.

We need to recognise that we all differ from each other, have different desires and aspirations, so that what we think of as equality depends upon the view of the individual. To take from one to give to another— or even to the community at large—merely provokes confrontation. Such confrontation could be avoided only in an economy that did not impose an artificial scarcity on human and material resources, and in which production would have no limit.

We need to work together to eliminate the underlying fundamental concepts that impede us in everything we do. Fighting each other, allowing ourselves to be distracted by differences of approach and to quarrel over their effects is self-defeating.

Only by co-operation, reason, debate and listening to others rather than deriding or condemning them, are we likely to achieve our objectives.

So I shall be renewing my subscription not because I agree with all you say but because it is the better world that matters, not differences among ourselves.

Melvin Chapman, 

Bath

Reply:
We talk about class because this is the basic feature of present-day society. The productive resources of society are owned and controlled by a minority class and are run for their benefit

Figures (produced by the Inland Revenue and the Statistical Office) show that the ownership of income-yielding financial assets—which are ownership rights over productive resources—is concentrated in the hands of this minority. The top five percent own over 50 percent which is as much as the other 95 percent of us added together. Every one of them owns on average about twenty times as much as everyone else.

This enables them to live on the unearned income their ownership rights provide. Their wealth gives their children privileged access to the top posts in industry and the state, where they are enabled to enjoy bloated “salaries” which bear no relation to the work they do and are in fact a way of giving them a share of the profits produced by the useful majority in society. They are the Establishment, the ruling class, the capitalists.

The other class is made up of the rest of us, who are forced by economic necessity to seek an employer in order to get a living. This is irrespective of the sort of job or type of work we do or indeed irrespective of whether or not we are actually able to find an employer. So we are talking about office workers, civil servants, hospital workers, salespeople, even managers and supervisors, and the unwaged as well as miners, bricklayers and foundry workers—in all, well over 90 percent of the population in an industrialised and urbanised country like Britain.

There is no such thing as a middle class. The so-called middle class is merely a part of the working class. Having a small income from your savings to top up your pension doesn't make up a capitalist. For that you would need to own at least £250,000 in addition to your house—which is the capitalists’ own definition of a capitalist, being the requirement to be a Lloyd's Name.

We can’t see how you can deny that we are living in a class society and that this is the all-important social fact that those of us seeking social change must take into account. In fact, that the immense majority are excluded from the ownership and control of productive resources means that there is a group in society that has a material interest in ending this state of affairs by establishing a society of common ownership and democratic control, it means that socialism is not some ideal society to which all people of goodwill are somehow to be converted. It provides it with a basis in social reality, with a group of people—the overwhelming majority, it so happens—who have an interest in establishing it as the practical solution to the problems they face.

When the overwhelming majority—the working class, as we define it—take conscious democratic political action to do this, classes can then be abolished and a genuine community with a common social interest created. Production will be switched from production for sale on a market with a view to profit to production to satisfy people’s needs. Money—as a means of exchange, a means to buy things produced for sale— will become redundant and disappear.

The existence of money and the existence of socialism are incompatible, since the existence of money implies the existence both of exchange and of private property whereas socialism, as a society of common ownership and production for use, implies the non-existence of both and so also of the need for money.

This is why we don’t understand what you mean when you say that money would have to be eliminated before a viable socialist society could be established. Under capitalism money is very useful, indeed indispensable. Without it capitalism could not function; to try to abolish it would lead to chaos and economic breakdown. So we don’t stand for the abolition of money now under capitalism. What we stand for is the establishment of the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources; this will allow production to be geared directly to meeting people’s needs, so making money unnecessary.

A society dominated by money is one of the effects of capitalism, not its cause as you seem to imply. The only way to end the nefarious effects of money that you correctly identify is to establish socialism, where human values can flourish instead of the commercial and financial values that distort and debase our lives today. 

Editors

Reading the real thing

Dear Editors,

For years I believed I was a socialist, until I began to read socialist literature, the real stuff of course. It became increasingly obvious that I was a reformer.

The first discovery was that nationalisation was not common ownership. There's that old joke that when the coal industry was nationalised, the old lady went from the mining village to the pithead to fill her bucket up; she was promptly told to go and buy it the same as everyone else has to. Public ownership to her meant it was free. The previous owners still got their money through government bonds and the interest. Miners still had to fight for wage rises and safer and better working conditions.

The turning point for me was realising that capitalism cannot be reformed even if it wanted to. Its reason to exist is profit, without which it cannot continue.

When you read of people who say they have given many years of loyalty and have been made redundant, they of course do not understand the system they live under. They are a commodity and as such are expendable. When you hear the Opposition spokesman for education saying we must educate our children so as we can compete in an increasingly competitive world, it’s obvious he is talking about training a future workforce of commodities, not trying to get children to have a love of learning for its own sake. When you have a leader of a so-called socialist party who wants to send his son to a grant-maintained school rather than a state school, you realise what hypocrites they are.

That phrase “the manufacture of consent", or that even more apt phrase “the engineering of consent”, tells all where people accept long-term unemployment, repossessions, poor housing, going to the benefits office, plus of course wars where the unemployed are called upon to be patriots to look after the interests of capital.

In a stateless, classless and moneyless world society, from whatever angle you examine it, the problems that hitherto occurred would not happen. If only people would realise the power they have.

Gerry Geraghty, 

Colchester

These Foolish Things: One World (1996)

The Scavenger column from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

One World 
  “. . . A Brave New World is being created out there. Not, as one hoped, by one world idealists or UN diplomacy, but by the global corporations for the simplest of all reasons—profits. The state can either play along with them or have delusions of grandeur. The cost of delusions will be severe and will, be paid not by politicians but by the citizens.” Meghnad Desai, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics. Letter in the Guardian, 24 October 1995


Mine!
Over 100 million landmines have been laid in 64 countries. They are still being laid. Eight million old ones still lie buried. Five hundred people are being killed and injured by them every week. But mines are a very profitable product, so the likelihood of production and sales being halted in capitalism is rather small.


Top Gun
   “No amount of impassioned argument by lawyers and no predictions of the tragic human costs of possible conflicts can obscure the fact that international law simply does not prohibit per se the use of nuclear weapons.” Conrad Harper, legal adviser to the US State Department, said. The US held nuclear arms for self-defence and deterrence, he said. Reuters.


Up
Serious accidents in the mining industry are up by more than 28 percent, according to the first official figures since privatisation . . .  [At Thoresby] one worker died and seven were given hospital treatment after a huge outburst of oil and gas 1,000 feet underground. Guardian. 2 November 1995.


Down
   “I am one of the miners involved in the tragedy at Thoresby Colliery on October 12. Just 48 hours before the underground accident that killed Andrew Fielding, we were visited at the face by members of the management team and the safety engineer. We reported that the fumes gave us headaches, dizziness, nausea and some of our men were vomiting. The fumes were getting stronger each shift. The management’s attitude was that we would have to persevere. They told us: ‘The fumes are like dog shit—you might not like the smell, but it won’t hurt you.’ We were actually sent a bottle Olbas Oil to put into carbon masks to disguise the smell and 100 paracetamol tablets for our headaches . . . “ Peter Davies, letter in the Guardian, 2 November 1995.


Out
The report of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 15 November 1995, states that the number of refugees in the world being looked after by the Commission is now 27 million, but that contributions to the fund for improving their conditions are decreasing . . .


Social cancer
Booming sales of cigarettes to developing countries including China, Russia and Brazil have helped BAT Industries, Britain’s seventh biggest company, to record pre-tax profits of £1.8 billion in the nine months to the end of September.

BAT, whose brands include Lucky Strike, Kool, Kent and State Express 555, said the figures, up 22 percent on the same period last year, reflected an exceptional performance from its tobacco division. Guardian, 9 November 1995.

The Scavenger

The Scavenger thanks readers for items sent in. Regrets some will have to be held over to next month.

The Poisonous Press (1996)

From the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rarely has the devious, distorting, obscurantist role of news papers been more apparent than in the last few weeks. As agents of the capitalist class their function is to enslave the working class by peddling a corrupting diet of misinformation and prejudice: to focus on the trivial and the inane rather than the important and the life-enhancing, and thus to deny people access to insights which might allow them better to understand and to challenge the present organisation of society. Poverty, ill-health, bad housing, and crime born of alienation and hopelessness, are endemic in Britain, never mind the rest of the world. The ills and miseries of international capitalism pollute the planet and enslave its people. Life for the many exposed to war and the drudgery of exploitation is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short”. And yet in the past month millions of words have been written and millions of trees have been sacrificed as the public has been deluged with comment about Rosemary West, Princess Diana, and Leah Betts—the student who died after taking the drug Ecstasy.

Even the so-called quality press have been besotted with these three stories. The Guardian greeted the news of West’s conviction for murder by devoting seven pages to the story on the following day, and then showed a similar interest in Diana’s Panorama interview a week later. On the evidence of the national press and its preoccupations, a visitor from another planet must have presumed that humankind faced no substantial problems: that life on Earth was safe, even-tempered and secure, and the human race might thus be excused their salacious and indulgent interest in the lives of an apparent psychopath, a pampered royal and a sad student.

The day after its word-by-word account of the Panorama interview, the Guardian ran a story about the lack of beds for patients recovering from major surgery. Tucked away on page five came details of "the largest-ever survey of postoperative deaths in Britain ”. It turned out that people are seven times more likely to die after an operation than they are during one; in large part because of "the lack of high-dependency beds, a halfway house between intensive care and ordinary wards, where a high ratio of trained nurses can look after patients in the days immediately after surgery". Apparently 20,000 people died following surgery between April 1992 and March 1993, at least half of whom would likely have survived with better post-operative care.

The story rang immediate bells for me because I read it at the end of a long day spent watching my partner recover from major surgery. I had inveigled myself into the hospital to be close to my wife. I knew that temperature, blood pressure and pulse needed to be monitored every fifteen minutes following surgery, and they were. But I couldn’t help but notice that other patients recovering from similar operations, but without relatives sitting at their bedsides, were frequently left for more than half-an-hour by hard-pressed staff.

And in spite of my relief that my partner was well, I found myself getting very angry. People in their thousands die unnecessarily following surgery but the press pepper us with irrelevancies about three atypical women. Newspapers enslave the population by filling their pages with material which is light years away from the real interests of most of their readers. Most of the stories they carry do not inform, educate and enlighten but, on the contrary, they spread misinformation, prejudice and ignorance. Today’s newspapers should carry a warning: “Reading newspapers will damage your mental health.”

And I thought that our visitor from another planet might likely conclude that whilst Rosemary West may be insane, most of the rest of the population—so contemptibly preoccupied with the bizarre stories fed to them by corrupt newspapers—are as mad as hatters! Three ironic cheers for the free—distorting, deluding and damaging—press.

Michael Gill

Sting in the Tail: The C of E and reality (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The C of E and reality
A Church of England vicar in Hertfordshire caused uproar by telling children “that neither Santa Claus nor the Tooth Fairy was real” (Independent, 18 December).

The Rev’s job is safe, though, because his flock has forgiven him.

  “And there was support for him from the Right Rev David Jenkins, the controversial former Bishop of Durham who, writing in today’s Independent, agrees that the teachings of Christianity would benefit from the separation of fairytale from reality.”

Would it really? If all the fairytales about life after death, heaven and hell, virgin births, devils, angels, holy ghosts, etc. were separated from the teachings of Christianity what would be left?


AWL backs a loser
Like fleas on a dog, would-be Bolsheviks have for over fifty years been hanging onto the Labour Party.

The latest group is the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) which is totally obsessed with Labour which it sees, despite that party’s anti-working class history, as being worthy of support because they can “win significant support for socialist ideas inside the party”. What they mean by “socialist ideas” may be gauged from their approval of the misnamed Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MP’s.

At election times the AWL actively works for Labour to the farcical extent of delivering into working-class homes literature full of ideas and policies which they themselves condemn!

Of course, Tony Blair is their arch-villain and is denounced as a “grinning idiot”. Perhaps he is grinning because he is thinking “How can I lose when even opponents will be working and voting for me? With enemies like these, who needs friends?”

Shouldn’t each AWL member be asking themselves just who is the idiot there?


Circumstances alter attitudes
Francis Lee and Alan Ball, chairman and manager of Manchester City FC, have been complaining about “over-paid”, under-talented stars” (Manchester Evening News, 16 December).

Said Lee, “We are talking about people with Frank Sinatra’s tastes and Frank Spencer’s voice”, while Ball yearned for the days when managers could “hit players in the pocket” by dropping them.

So top players, and it is only those at the top, are taking advantage of a favourable market, but Lee and Ball must know that British football’s biggest stars were paid a pittance until the abolition of the maximum wage, and they should remember how short players’ careers can be, so why shouldn’t they cash in while they can?

Anyway, football’s chairmen and managers were saying much the same about players when Lee and Ball were in their prime in the 60s and 70s, but did that stop the pair going for the best possible deals they could get?


“Dearer” means “cheaper”
For years the package holiday industry has been increasing and then decreasing the prices and the number of holidays in its brochures in futile attempts to anticipate the market.

Last summer’s heatwave helped make 1995 a disaster, and the industry engaged in a ruinous price-war which sent profits into a tailspin. To avoid a repeat of this, the industry’s giants, Thomson’s, Airtours and First Choice, have cut summer ’96 holidays by 10 percent and upped brochure prices by around 17 percent.

First Choice’s chief executive Francis Baron claimed that this means the industry is “set for a bumper year”, but advance bookings are 30 percent down on 12 months ago, and in a desperate move to drum up business the big three have announced discounts bigger than the price increases!

Yet another price-war is underway, and the package holiday industry remains a prime example of the anarchy of the market in action.


A ducal visit
Those sanctimonious old Tories who prate on about “Victorian values” must have been touched by the Duke of Westminster’s proposed Xmas visit to the Liverpool as reported in the Observer (24 December).

The Duke, reported to have a £2 billion fortune, will take his wife and two eldest daughters from his Eaton Hall estate near Chester to visit drug addicts on the streets of Liverpool.

It is not only backwoods Tories who are impressed by this. Dr Sue Ruben of Liverpool’s Drug Service also applauds the visit:

“Many of my clients have very low self-esteem and anything that gives them a sense of worth, even a short visit by a Duke, is worthwhile.”

How a visit by one of the richest men in Britain will give a “sense of worth” to desperate workers living in hostels is beyond our comprehension. A “sense of rage” should be nearer the mark.


Causes of war
Socialists are forever pointing out that all modern wars are fought over markets, trade routes, military bases and other economic concerns. Defenders of capitalism, on the other hand, like to imagine that wars are fought over ideologies like, freedom, democracy, self-determination and other high-sounding ideals.

Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, commenting on the recent “peace” deal is quoted in the Independent on Sunday (31 December) as saying:

  “I can say we achieved half our goal— we have half of Bosnia, more than 40 cities and some good land.”

Well, who has got it right? The socialists or the defenders of capitalism? And how much of a “peace” deal is it, when half of Bosnia is only half of Karadzic’s goal?

Trade Unions and the Labour Party (1996)

From the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party leaders are so desperate to win the next general election that they have virtually banned any mention of trade unions. If Labour does win the election they are in for a nasty shock — and so are the trade unionists who helped them to power!

There was recently a postal workers’ strike in Scotland. An unofficial strike. What the word “unofficial” might mean was never entirely certain, since union officials were very much involved in negotiations for the strike’s resolution. It would seem to mean that the workers acted of their own accord, possibly spontaneously though not necessarily without consulting, or rather asking the permission of, their “leaders”.

One tiling was obvious; part of the significance of this word “unofficial” lay in the union officials’ “official” disapproval of the workers’ actions Seemingly facing both ways at once, union officials continued to represent the workers, but with a certain embarrassment and even bad temper. This disapproval might have two possible causes; the feeling that the workers had themselves in some way usurped the hierarchical prerogatives of the leadership and the officials, or (more likely) fear of the embarrassment that might be caused to the Trade Union movement’s “parliamentary representatives”, the Labour Party, with a general election coming up in the next year or so.

As everybody knows, because the media continually tell us, the Labour Party is “in the pocket of the unions”. The unions pay Labour’s bills, the unions have 50 percent of the votes at the Labour Party conference, the unions sponsor individual MPs. It is obvious, “he who pays the piper calls the tune”; but who actually pays who? Do the unions pay labour for its support, or does the Labour Party buy industrial peace by promises of “faimess”, “workers’ rights”, “union rights” and the rest? It seems a mutually beneficial relationship, all very cosy and enough to have the bosses howling with rage.

B-team

The bosses, though, don't actually howl. The Tories howl occasionally, as do the press, in a fairly anodyne, stagy sort of way, especially as elections approach. The bosses worry, they worry about this relationship. They worry at this relationship, they’re not sure whether to believe in it or not. However much Tony Blair tries to convince them that he is their natural and greatest friend, they worry about the unions. In fact, Blair is right, he is a great friend and ally of the bosses, as is the Labour Party as a whole. In a general sense labour is the employers’ ally as the B- team of UK capitalism, helping keep the lid on dissent in this country when the Tories foul things up so much as to become a liability.

In a related way, Labour helps the bosses by being a regulating, calming influence on the unions, whether in or out of office. In office, they tell trade unionists not to cause trouble or kick up a fuss, be good or you’ll upset our great progressive project from which you will benefit. Be nice boys and girls or we won’t be able to give you the presents we’ve promised. Out of office they say much the same thing, with the added incentive that patience brings its rewards—’’wait till we come to power and you’ll get justice”; which carries like a parasite in its hair the warning: “if you won’t be good we won’t get power and you’ll get nothing”.

“You’ll get nothing if you don’t calm down and shut up.” Does this sound like a relationship of equals? Mutual benefit?

The union movement is treated like an errant child by the Labour Party, and not only that but a poor and disadvantaged child offered the occasional scraps from the Big House (of Commons). The working class is a charity case; the Labour Party a patrician “charitable organisation”.

Obviously there are still disputes and strikes, whether Labour are in or out of office. In 1945 there was the dockers’ strike, in which the Labour government, the most radical government this country has ever seen, threatened the workers with the sack if they didn’t return to work. There was an acrimonious dispute over the Labour government’s union-bashing policies in its document In Place of Strife (an unfortunate title if ever there was one) in 1969. Then, of course, a decade later, there was the still infamous “winter of discontent”. These are just three occasions when unions came into direct conflict with Labour governments. Obviously there have been many more over the same period when workers have been forced to confront their employers, whether private or State.

There are two main points to be made here though; firstly, that whatever the intentions of those involved, a Labour government is a government of the capitalist system and will be forced by that system to act against the interests of working class people. Secondly, whether the government is Labour or Tory, and whatever else may be the case, under capitalism there is still always the irreparable faultline between the workers and the bosses, between the creators of wealth and the owners of wealth. As long as there is capitalism there will be class struggle, and the unions are still the most effective vehicles for working class people to organise for themselves in that struggle to defend what meagre benefits have already been gained and win what can be won. For themselves. Not for the realisation of the dreams of power for Tony Blair and his mates.

Break the link

The long-term, and finally the only real, interest of working-class people is no longer to be working class—i.e., for there to be no working, or any other, class at all. In other words, to replace capitalism with socialism; but that is not strictly the business of trade unions but of the, or a, Socialist Party—in other words, of the whole working class organised politically. In the meantime, however, it should be clear that the short-term interests of workers generally and organised labour in particular are damaged by the link between the unions and the Labour Party.

The unions continually rely on the Labour Party to represent their interests only to find that a Labour government always finally represents the interests of capital, while all the time their misguided faith encourages the unions, particularly the leaders, to tread softly, keep their heads down and wait for handouts. The trade unions were founded on the realisation that, to advance their interests even slightly, workers must organise collectively for themselves and act for themselves to force concessions from employers and the representatives of capital. Largely because of their links with the Labour Party, they are fast becoming little more than purveyors of insurance policies, cut-price holidays and empty rhetoric.

Over the summer of 1995, there were accusations of Stalinism thrown at the Labour leadership. Such accusations were not entirely inapposite, though perhaps the accusers didn’t have in mind quite the same things socialists have. What we have in mind is the way in which Labour both uses and ignores the working class, taking the support of workers for granted and subordinating their needs to those of the party (or should that be “Party”?). Subordinating the unions and the union members’ interests to their own, denying the existence of class struggle and trying to replace it with the struggle of the Parliamentary Labour Party for power; there is a great deal of common ground between Leninism and Labourism in their attitudes towards working class people and trade unions. It’s high time the unions realised they are getting the poor end of a bad deal. Instead of relying on handouts from the leaders of just another capitalist party, the unions should regain the initiative and fight once more for themselves and for each other. They should cut their losses and, once and for all, cut all their links with Labour.

Jonathan Clay

50 Years Ago: Labour Foreign Minister Bevin and his Predecessors (1996)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now that the Labour Party is in power its promise to introduce Socialism at home and to pursue the “brotherhood of man" abroad is being put to the test. Instead of attempting to introduce Socialism (for which it did not receive or even seek a mandate at the election) it is extending state capitalism by nationalising various industries while retaining all of the basic features of capitalism—the wages-system, production for profit and the exploitation of the workers for the benefit of the owning class. The only difference is that some of the owners are in future to hold Government Stock instead of company shares and are to have no hand in management of the undertakings.

Being thus confined within the limits set by capitalism their foreign policy is likewise pre-determined in all its broad lines. With the "brotherhood of man" on their lips they are engaged, like all their Liberal and Tory predecessors. in a high-powered drive to capture foreign markets for British exports. On taking office as Foreign Minister, Mr. Bevin was reported to have said: "British foreign policy will not be altered in any way under the Labour Government" (Evening News, 26th July, 1945). This continuity means carrying on the centuries-old policy of controlling trade routes, holding down colonies and protecting foreign investments.

(Article from Socialist Standard, February 1946)

Elementary Union Rights (1996)

Book Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

For Our Freedom and Yours, A History of the Polish Solidarity Campaign 1980-1994. (PSC. £5.)

No one committed to the interest of the working class could have failed to have been moved by the events in Poland of August and September 1980. Here, under a dictatorial regime which had not hesitated to shoot down striking workers in the past, hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike to obtain elementary trade union rights, formed their own inter-workplace liaison committees and eventually forced the leaders of the dictatorship to come and negotiate in public, with loudspeakers relaying the negotiations to the assembled workers outside.

We, naturally, were moved and immediately issued a statement on "The Class Struggle in Poland" which began:

  “The Socialist Party of Great Britain applauds with sympathy and admiration the courageous stand of the Polish strikers in their struggle to independently organise and negotiate over the wages and conditions. Their action bears out what we have consistently claimed and what no amount of repression, censorship. and pretence can indefinitely conceal. Poland is no "workers state on the road to socialism’’ but a state capitalist, one party regime, where the working class inevitably comes into conflict with those who control the means of wealth production and distribution."

Others who were moved were some ex-Trotskyists who took the initiative to set up a Polish Solidarity Campaign in September [1980]. This book is a detailed. almost blow-by-blow history of that organisation. Its original aim was to get the TUC and the Labour Party to withdraw their "support” and recognition from state employer-run puppet organisations" as they correctly described the official so-called trade unions in Poland.

Believe it or not, they had some difficulty in achieving this, with the TUC and other unions continuing to invite representatives from the official state "unions” to their conferences, and with Tony Benn, for all his talk about the need for more democratic and trade union rights in Britain, playing a particularly shameful role as what Lenin once called a "useful idiot".

After General Jaruzelski imposed martial law in December 1981 the PSC had more success but another problem arose. Two separate Trotskyist groups tried to take the PSC over. They failed and the sort of manoeuvres they resorted to—and still resort to with regard to other organisations—are well-documented and exposed in this book. One reason they failed (apart from the fact that the ex-Trotskyists in the PSC knew from their own Trotskyist days exactly what was going on) was that they weren’t wholeheartedly opposed to the Polish regime. They regarded it as a “deformed workers state" but a workers state nevertheless. A "workers” state that oppresses the workers—such is the absurd position of orthodox Trotskyism.

In the following years the PSC's emphasis shifted from supporting working-class struggle in Poland to supporting the demand for an independent (of Russia), democratic Polish State. In other words, Polish nationalism replaced working-class solidarity. In fact, the PSC became little more than a publicity organisation in Britain for Solidarity, even after it evolved into the right-wing Catholic trade union and political organisation it is today.

We in the Socialist Party didn’t make this mistake since we never supported Solidarity as such but rather the workers’ struggle against their state-capitalist bosses. And our solidarity was with our fellow workers in another geographical part of the world struggling to establish elementary trade union and democratic rights, not with the "people of Poland" trying to establish a capitalist democratic state. 

Adam Buick

Hands up for the Enterprise Culture (1996)

TV Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

This column noted a couple of months ago the peculiar phenomenon of non-employment at large in Roy Clarke’s BBC TV sitcoms Last of the Summer Wine and Keeping Up Appearances. Now, it appears, the soap operas are at it too. There has always been a disproportionately large number of shopkeepers and stall-holders in EastEnders (though given its focus on Albert Square street market this can be forgiven) but for the denizens of Brookside Close, Liverpool, non-employment seems a more unlikely proposition, obviously barring unemployment, of course. This has not deterred the scriptwriters, though, who seem to be carrying a bizarre torch for Thatcherism.

When Napoleon said that England was a nation of shopkeepers he couldn’t have had Brookside Close in mind, could he? The only family in Brookside whose principal income is from employment is the Banks family, the Close’s current token trade unionists with a penchant for scabbing, and sometime lottery winners (!). Virtually every other adult in this programme is either a capitalist or. as is more often the case, an aspiring one. An entire parade of shops has been built behind the Close in recent years, ostensibly so that all the local Alan Sugars can achieve their lifetime’s ambition of moving out of the working class. In Brookside there is only one factory worker and nobody at all who works in an office. There is, though, a restaurateur, several shopkeepers and food retailers, a taxi firm owner and freelance drug-dealer, a night-club owner, and at the bottom of the pecking-order—and somewhat more realistically—a window cleaner. And yet Brookside is supposed to be famous for its “social realism". In what kind of society are workers able to turn themselves into successful shopkeepers at the drop of a hat? Certainly not this one. Last year Jackie Dixon was a swimming pool attendant. This year she owns a top hairdressing salon and dates a famous Australian soap star who comes knocking mysteriously at her door. Pass the smelling salts.

Most adults in Britain are wage and salary earners or their dependents, or alternatively live on benefits. Those who try their hand at self-employment do not, on average, last long. If Phil Redmond and his scriptwriters care to take a look at the income statistics published each year by the Central Statistical Office they will find this borne out They will also discover that Brookside Close must be one of the most unrepresentative areas in Britain, let alone Liverpool. No unemployment, nobody on benefits, hardly any wage and salary earners and an apparent boom in the enterprise culture. A more out-of-touch scenario is difficult to picture. The soap that brought us the gritty drama of the Jordaches is, it seems, capable of losing touch with the real world like any other soap.

Gritty but bitty
While Brookside has often provided examples of excellent drama and its coverage of contemporary issues has probably been unequalled, its “social realism” has always been much more selective, despite its reputation. Let us, as they say, look at some of the other evidence. While there is no unemployment there are two lottery winners on the Close—nice and topical it has to be said, but realistic? And what about all those unnatural deaths? Nobody has died from natural causes in Brookside for years. Meanwhile virtually every house on that tiny close has experienced a murder of some kind. There have been stabbings (more than one), shootings, sieges (again, more than one), bombings. mysterious killer viruses, drug overdoses, rapes and various forms of tortures and beatings. to name just the ones that spring immediately to mind. If this is what Liverpool is like in the leafy suburbs, hell knows it must be bad in Toxteth.

In some ways, this could all be said to be unavoidable—social realism, after all, is always likely to take second place to drama and entertainment, especially in today’s media environment which understandably encourages people to forget about their lives, not re-live them. But perhaps in future media commentators might care to toss around phrases like "gritty social realism” with less abandon than they do presently, especially if the extent of that social realism is a glorification of a long-dead “enterprise culture" among the working class on the one hand, and the tabloid titillation of mass murder in the suburbs on the other. They must know that Brookside should and can—if past performances are anything to go by—do better.

Dave Perrin

What do you do with an unemployed devil? (1996)

Graphic by David Drew.

The A Word in Your Ear column from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The news hot off the press from the Church of England that Hell, as a real place, no longer exists, is hardly the kind of startling revelation that intelligent people have been waiting to hear. Who in their right minds ever believed that an infinite afterlife of burning in flames was a realistic option? According to the clergy, such punishment was the sentence determined by the (all-loving, all-powerful) God for those of us who refused to follow him. In short, unlike more compassionate sadists like Adolf Hitlcr, God took the view that to burn someone alive a mere once was too lenient; better let them roast for eternity. Such hateful scaremongering worked wonders at keeping countless generations of peasants, and millions of wage slaves, in their places as morally submissive victims of manmade laws such as those which defend the law of property.

Although the Church of England has changed its crazy little mind on this burning issue of our time, the Church of Scotland still maintains that Hell is a real place. Which must cause no end of trouble for the Queen, who is head of both; as she travels on her parasite’s railway carriage up the track to the north of England she is God’s representative on Earth of a religion which has abolished physical Hell, whereas as soon as she arrives in Scotland she is theologically committed to a religion which believes that Hell is as fiery and torturing as ever it was. Perhaps the only way she will be able to make up her mind on the matter will be to pay a personal visit there herself—with the rest of her class, preferably.

Who the hell gives a damn about Hell? (Except for Robert Maxwell, one presumes, for whom the issue must be of some direct significance.) As an issue it is not worth the time of intelligent thinkers. The Church of England’s babble about hell now being not a place but a condition of non-being (rather like being an activist for the Labour Party) is the metaphysical ranting of ideologists who are embarrassed at the extent to which they have been able to delude people with cruel fantasies. No, the real issue is not what these useless clerics think, but how it is that people make up their minds what to think.

For example, most people these days find it hard to believe that an invisible power-figure above the clouds controls their life. The experience of living in an increasingly scientifically-understood universe makes it hard to sustain such a belief. If you ask people whether such a supernatural power exists a minority will say that they are sure it does and the rest will be divided between non-believers and doubters. (Agnosticism always seems a rather odd position: it’s like asking someone whether there are fairies at the end of their garden and hearing them say “I doubt whether there are, but I believe there may very well be”. What a confused way to live one’s life!) The main thing we can say about what people believe is that understanding subverts belief; once something is scientifically explicable the days for believing silly stories about it are numbered. This accounts for the slow decline of the Church of England, which is much more interested in hanging on to its property than defending the old tripe of the past. It will account in due course for the death of Islam and the rest of the bogus faiths.

All of which leads to news of an encouraging report. In November of last year Gallup published the result of a nation-wide opinion poll asking the question “Do you think there is a class struggle in this country nor not?”, 81 percent responded that there is; 12 percent said there is not; and 6 percent didn’t know. Which compares with an identical poll conducted in March 1981 in which only 66 percent said there was a class struggle, 25 percent said there wasn’t and 9 percent didn’t know. Proof perhaps that experience has left workers less removed from the socialist analysis than pessimists might believe. And when those four out of five people get themselves organised to end the class struggle by ending class society, may we suggest that the millionaires and billionaires who currently monopolise the Earth and its riches prepare themselves for an age of non-being? (In short, they can go to hell).

Steve Coleman

Obituary: Johnny Edmonds (1996)

Obituary from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jonathan Edmonds was born during World War I into an Anglo-Irish Catholic family, somewhere in the middle of ten children, dominated by a devout mother. When he joined the SPGB in 1940, relations became estranged; when he became a Conscientious Objector she excommunicated him.

Under direction he worked on farms in East Anglia during the War, fortunately in the company of other socialists.

After the war he returned to the building trade and was general foreman for a firm that converted an old country house into what became the headquarters of the Electrical Trades Union, in Hayes, Kent. He moved to them as Estates Manager for the rest of his working life, starting with the converting of a hotel in Rottingdean, Sussex into a nursing home and a larger one in Esher, Surrey into a college.

When I first met him at Lewisham Branch in January 1948, he was one of two members who said nothing in the branch because they both stammered badly. The other member was the late Mick Miller. But gradually and with great determination. Johnny overcame this impediment and became a branch delegate at Conference and Delegate Meetings, and eventually sat as Chairman at these proceedings. He served on the Executive Committee for a number of years and was General Secretary in 1955. He was also a member of the Premises Committee that found us our Clapham office when the Party was forced to leave Rugby Chambers.

Outside of the Party. Johnny's main interest was music, both jazz and opera. Yesterday he would have played Jussi Björling and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, today would be the turn of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, of whom he could give a fair imitation. I still owe him for introducing me to Erroll Garner. He and his first wife Betty were skilled ballroom dancers at which they earned medals and won competitions.

Possibly, due to his previous speech impediment, Johnny tended to speak loudly and forcefully, and some people misunderstood this. Underneath he was a caring and generous person. The sort of person who would have given his all to make Socialism work. After all, he spent his life in trying to achieve it.

Unfortunately his first marriage ended in divorce; a couple of years after which he married Sylvia Lawrence, who died a few years ago. They had no children. It is to the son and daughter of the first marriage. Karl and Frances, that we extend our condolences.

Ray Guy

Crooked in every direction (1996)

Book Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Straight Left by Paddy Devlin (Blackstaff Press, £8.95)

The vanity that induces someone to think that the public wants to know about their life is well to the fore in this autobiography. The story of a ghetto kid who saw a future in ward healing politics — which, for some undisclosed reason he associates with socialism — is told in a tidal wave of personal pronouns.

There is usually a story in the life of every working class youngster who finds diversion in cheating the reality of poverty and privation. When that life is lived in a Belfast sectarian ghetto, an extra dimension of religious bigotry and strife is added to life’s miseries which, in turn, heightens the need for those forms of escapism which Devlin’s portrayal of his formative years illustrates so well.

But bigotry is no joke and, in Northern Ireland, it frequently carries a gun or a bomb. Here it is composed of the naked viciousness of a primitive Calvinism which, while most reflected in the crude politico-religious vapourings of Paisleyism, has to some extent infiltrated all the Protestant denominations, and that particularly virulent strain of Catholicism which is essentially Irish.

Both, after the fashion of mainstream religion elsewhere, are on the march to what is effectively their end. In Northern Ireland, however, legend, tradition and very deliberately inculcated ignorance artificially respirates these evils into an ugly tribalism that represents the politics of the province. The inadequacies of capitalism, especially in housing, employment and education, act as a convenient catalyst for these malignant forces in the hands of bigots like Paisley and Adams and their religious or political fundamentalist cohorts — who. if local politics demanded any degree of intellectual integrity, would have long since been marginalised.

It is the consequences, political and economic, of this politico-religious mishmash that has formed the background to the mayhem that has given Northern Ireland a central place among the world's trouble spots over the past twenty-five years. Devlin played a central part in the events that led to the present troubles and, while he relates faithfully the bigotry and intransigence that made the Unionists into destroyers of their own cause, he fails utterly to appreciate the part which the false analysis of the Civil Rights movement contributed to the Northern Ireland tragedy.

The leaders of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NiCRA). rightly accused the Unionist government and party of maintaining a regime that discriminated against catholics in the distribution of jobs, housing and local government votes. The inevitable assumption among working class protestants was that they were privileged in these areas — which they were not — and that the demand for a fairer distribution of these needs with catholics represented a threat to their alleged protestant privileges.

Socialists see the imposition of poverty in any of its aspects (jobs, housing, education etc.) on any grounds whatsoever — even when it is given apparent legitimacy by being called ’selection’ — as a feature of capitalism. Within the ambit of that system’s production for profit ethos, scarcity is an inevitable feature. Capitalism cannot exist without poverty, without unemployment and without penalising those who, for whatever reason, do not offer the profit system the maximum surplus value.

However Devlin may protest his ’socialism’, he was at one with those in the NICRA who identified the problems in religious terms; the problems were, they argued, caused by Unionism. Certainly, corruption and maladministration resulted in the uneven distribution of capitalism’s miseries but the miseries themselves were the political and economic consequences of capitalism. Unfortunately, the NICRA analysis led to conflict on religious lines within the working class when an essential part of the solution lay in the unity of the working class.

Like many pseudo-socialists, Devlin has a recidivistic contempt for the lessons of history. The failure of good intentions, Keynesian 'magic' and reforming zeal to remove the social ugliness of capitalism should drive him to consideration of an alternative form of social organisation, such as socialism — defined as it was before its wilful perversion by earlier groups of ward healers who thought they could make a system based on exploitation of the working class function in the interests of that class. Such consideration would, of course, be an admission of failure and acknowledged failures do not write autobiographies.

If you can stand the dreadful political ignorance of someone who suggests that the SDLP is/was associated with socialism, that the Northern Ireland power-sharing Executive of 1974 is a model for the (socialist?) future and that the Workers Party is a Marxist organisation, then the rest is interesting and factually instructive about events in Northern Ireland especially since 1968.

Richard Montague

Familiar murmurings from Turkey (1996)

From the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

As had been widely forecast, the radical Islamic Welfare Party, or Refah, won the Christmas Eve general election in Turkey with 21 percent of votes cast. And, as many had anticipated, no sooner had the election result been announced that the outgoing True Path Party and the nationalist Motherland Party met for talks to discuss the possibility of forming a coalition to oust the islamists. The True Path Party and the Motherland Party had between them secured 38 percent of the vote.

Tansu Ciller’s True Path Party had believed they would romp home in the election, capitalising on their surge of popularity following the previous week’s endorsement by the European parliament of a customs union between Ankara and the EU.

Ciller apparently forgot that much of her opposition is in the growing rural communities, strongly islamic traditionalists, and in Ankara and Istanbul (combined population of 14 million) where islamists won the mayorships in 1994. Evidently it is here, among the lower echelons of the working class that her austerity programme, aimed at curbing Turkey’s 83 percent inflation rate and $4 billion budget deficit and targeted chiefly at the 11 million unemployed, is most strongly felt.

While the West would have welcomed a pro-European Ciller government of free marketeers, hell bent on privatisation, it was Necmettin Erbakan’s (Rafah’s leader) promises that carried the day.

Refah, for instance, believes in creating interest-free banking, ending Turkey’s dependence on IMF loans, an Islamic common market and an Islamic currency, a renegotiation of the customs union deal and the removal of allied war planes from Turkish soil.
Like every other party in Turkey, though, Refah does not believe an end to the capitalist mode of production will be a step forward. Indeed, Refah gets support from Turkey’s capital-owning fraternity, including technocrats like Erol Yarar who fronts a pro-islamic business association that represents some 6,000 companies, all oddly enough, in business to make a profit.

Erbakan’s promises of creating a "just order" for the poor and alienated, therefore, might as well have been whispered to the wind, for with victory came the frightening away of foreign investment, upon which the Turkish economy is highly dependent. The cause? Political instability, or rather the threat of it.

Political instability is indeed a possibility in Turkey, and something perhaps that was anticipated by Tansu Ciller before she left office. Why else would she expel 50 officers from her army—all linked to pro-islamist organisations—a week before the election? The fear of a military coup broughtabout by unrest, as in 1960, 1971 and 1980?

This is the scenario that many Turks now fear should no workable coalition be formed within the stipulated 45 days following the election. Some of the ingredients are already there: secular/religious tensions; little political consensus; an economy worsening by the day; human rights abuses, inclusive of disappearances from police custody and the imprisonment of political dissenters and the unpopular and ongoing “scorched earth" war against the Kurds.

In the weeks ahead Refah will have to convince the populace that the economy is in safe hands. This means responding to questions regarding Turkey’s relationship with the West—important trade, investment and defence partners—and with Iraq—once Turkey’s biggest trading partner and with whom economic ties have been severed since the Gulf Far.

In the meantime, while the West watches from the sidelines, wondering if there are still profits to be made from an Islamic Turkey, and Turkey's sundry nationalists, free-marketeers and religious confusionists argue amongst themselves as to which coalition can best run capitalism, it is the masses, the Turkish working class which have the most to lose whatever the outcome. It is they who will continue to exist as wage slaves in a class society, imbibing and perpetuating the nationalistic and religious rantings that keep them oppressed. It is they who will face hunger, mass arrests and arbitrary executions should the system fall apart.

Why not the West End? (1996)

From the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

A member of the Socialist Party asked me recently why my visits were usually to the subsidised theatre and, specifically, to the National and the Barbican complexes? Why, my questioner wanted to know, didn't I go more frequently to the commercial theatre and. since I live not far away from London, to the West End?

Now I have to admit that as a fan my tastes are wide and eclectic. I enjoy the frisson which comes with public performance: that strange interplay between actor and audience which means that every night is a once-for-all occasion. I respond to the immediacy of actors, the sense that one is able, almost voyeuristically, to spectate as private passions fill a public arena. And I would as happily spend an evening watching the great Ken Dodd— who works an audience until it is literally helpless with laughter— as I would attend one of Shakespeare's great plays (especially, perhaps, the last three with their inspiring messages about forgiveness). But go regularly to the commercial theatre? I fear not.

It isn’t that the seats arc dearer—although they are. £25 for good seats in the West End, as against £12-18 for something comparable in the subsidised houses. It isn’t that standards of performance and production are wildly different—although the subsidised theatre with more time to rehearse etc., generally wins hands down. The trouble is that much commercial theatre is either escapist (in the worse sense), trivial or patronising. Sometimes it is all three.

In the past twelve months I’ve seen only four shows in the West End: Beautiful Things (widely praised but, as it turned out. a nauseating "EastEnders" lookalike); Taking Sides (because of a personal interest in music and the life of the conductor William Furtwangler); Hamlet: and Indian Ink (Tom Stoppard's latest which seemed to me much better as a radio play). I hope to have time to see Three Tall Women (still at Wyndhams) and Burning Blue (Ambassadors), but the rest hold little appeal.

Look at what is currently available. Musicals by the bucketful: seventeen currently advertised. of which several have run for more than five years. Many are “technology musicals", in which character and story play second fiddle to large production effects: the helicopter arrival in Miss Saigon; the barricade scene in Les Miserables; the central ten minutes in Phantom of the Opera.

Musicals like this vividly reflect the way in which in capitalist society people are often less important than machines. They also reek with sentiment; inducing feelings spuriously and synthetically, and trivialising human emotions. I remember seeing Les Miserables over then years ago— long before its transfer the to the West End. Having read Victor Hugo’s book and knowing a little about the history of the time I was appalled. And the pseudo-operatic score—all pretence and little substance— added to my sense of woe. Yet all around me were going wild, claiming a definitive masterpiece. It was unnerving. Later I reflected that Chou Chin Chow was greeted in similar fashion nearly a century ago.

What of musicals which engage the heart and mind, that—to use a cliché—illuminate the human condition? I remember a story about the agricultural working class, The Hired Man (book by Melvyn Bragg, music by Howard Goodall) several years ago, and one about the Spanish Civil War which I caught on tour. For the rest it’s compilation musicals (Buddy, Jolson, Roy Orbison, etc.), turgid synthetic confections (like Oliver), and shows by the ubiquitous Andrew Lloyd Webber. If Phantom doesn't please try Starlight Express, Cats or Sunset Boulevard or, my particular nominee. Aspects of Love. This last-named ought properly to be called Aspects of Self-Gratification. In it Webber demonstrates without a touch of satire, irony or self- awareness, the way in which contemporary society has transformed a powerful, generous, often selfless emotion, into a chilling counterfeit of "I’m all right” self-interest.

I would argue that much of the commercial theatre reflects, usually superficially and uncritically, the world in which we live. In doing so it reinforces the messages of the other media. It offers not so much a window on the world as a self-referencing picture of all that is usual, normal (sic) and acceptable in society. From most of the commercial theatre the message is clear: this is the world as it is. The implication is also clear: this is the world as it has to be.

In contrast much that is available in the subsidised theatre questions and challenges. There are currently twelve shows in repertory at the National and the Barbican. At least four of these shows—A Patriot for Me, Skylight, Volpone and The Machine Wreckers—are enthralling, entertaining and edifying. All are worth visiting. I have mentioned several in recent months. In them experience and comment provide the dry tinder for revolutionary feelings and insights. They have few parallels in the West End.

Michael Gill

Indefatigable socialist (1996)

Book Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

William Morris in Manchester and Salford by Edmund and Ruth Frow, Working Class Movement Library, Salford. £2.50.

William Morris was an indefatigable speaker and writer for Socialism over the last thirteen or so years of his life. Many of his speeches were reproduced as articles or pamphlets, and essays such as Useful Work vs. Useless Toil and How We Live and How We Might Live (the latter republished by the Socialist Party) are well worth reading today. Manchester was one of many towns he visited as a speaker for the Social Democratic Federation and Socialist League.

Morris’s first visit to Manchester was in 1882, but as a businessman not a Socialist. His first furnishing and designing company took part in an exhibition, and this was successful enough for them to open a shop, first in John Dalton Street and later in Albert Square, though this did not last long. By the time he came in 1883 to speak at the Manchester Royal Institution, Morris was a Socialist, and his theme, that riches meant corresponding poverty and slavery, was not popular among the local capitalists. His subsequent visits were to speak to working-class audiences, especially in Ancoats, the world's first industrial suburb. From 1884 to 1894, Morris spoke almost every year at the Ancoats Brotherhood, an institution founded to provide leisure and educational opportunities for working people. He spoke out of doors too, in Albert Square, and, on what was almost his last visit, to a crowd of two thousand at Trafford Bridge in Salford. His favourite talk, apparently, was on "Monopoly", an explanation r of the labour theory of value.

This pamphlet, though expensive at 28 pages (9p a page!), is well illustrated, and gives a useful and vivid account of Morris’s activities in the north-west.

Paul Bennett

No wonder they hate him! (1996)

Book Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Which Way for the Ecology Movement? by Murray Bookchin, AK Press, £4.50.

According to Bookchin, the ecology movement has a choice: either it can realise that capitalism is the cause of ecological damage and work to end capitalism or it can retreat into "ecomysticism" blaming science, technology and reason as such, calling on individuals to adjust their personal lifestyles so as to better attune with “nature”.

Bookchin takes up basically the same position as us that, for humanity to produce and consume in ecologically acceptable ways, it must first replace capitalism and its drive to make profits with a system of common ownership, democratic participation and production for use, which can make full use of modern science and technology but for ecological and human ends instead of profit.

Bookchin is a good polemicist and it is a pleasure to read him berate the “deep" ecologists (who say a fly is of equal worth with a human), the ecofeminists (who extol “feminine intuition” as opposed to "male” rationality), the Earth Firsters (or People Seconders), the population bombers (like Paul Ehrlich), the Gaia worshippers and the rest of the New Age irrationalists. No wonder they hate him! But they deserve it, since what they advocate is not just a diversion from the real solution but, in attacking technology, science and reason, is also a rejection of the body of knowledge and mode of thought that, once capitalism has been ended, would have to be used to clear up die ecological destruction wrought by capitalism. 

Adam Buick

What makes a socialist? (1996)

From the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists are not fabricated. They are people who have reached a state of understanding about the society they live in, known as capitalism, and all its attendant problems and iniquities. Out of understanding arises the desire to forge an alternative, a new society free society from poverty, oppression, war, apathy . . . So what does make a socialist? What makes a mind reject the disreputable and repugnant basis of capitalism and opt instead to follow the course of sanity and logic in committing itself to the ideal of socialism? So let's hypothesise for a moment.

Let's take the case of a young person, newly enfranchised, who in 1983 decides to vote Conservative. Within the narrow scope of capitalist thinking this may seem to be a sensible option, the Tories ostensibly being the party most likely to run the economy efficiently, with their free-market philosophy and sound business policies. Labour of course are simply out to disrupt industry and nationalise anything that isn't growing wild, and on top of that they're in the pocket of the unions.

So our new voter is quite happy with his choice, apart from one or two niggling doubts. Being a fair-minded person, he is perturbed at the great variations in the amounts of wealth that accrue to different levels of society, but of course enterprise and hard work are always rewarded.

The miners' strike

Then in 1984, comes the miners' strike, the last great showdown between organised labour and the capitalist establishment. Our voter is partisan, and condemns the reckless behaviour of the striking miners while praising the actions of the strike-breakers. The strikers have of course been duped by NUM leader Scargill's spurious claims of a few pit closures; the idea that the government had any plans for the decimation of the coal industry was of course preoposterous.

Then comes a turning point. Our voter (who let's say lives in a coal-mining area which is fully in support of the strike) is involved in a discussion about the strike between a few colleagues at work. One of the contributors, a union representative, defends the strikers against criticism regarding tactics used against the police. He points out that with the threat of pit closures the dispute differs from many others because it is an attempt to defend the livelihood of miners and their families, and to protect the communities they live in.

If there can ever be an equivalent for an atheist of "seeing the light", then this is it for our voter. he begins to realise that his support for the Conservative Party is misplaced, and to think that only the unions and the Labour Party will fight for his interests. Having diverted his thinking on to a new track, he begins to ask more and more pertinent questions, the principal one being "why do we need money?" Why indeed. It is gradually becoming clear that society isn't merely flawed, it is utterly insane and full of paradoxes. Our voter concludes that money has become a barrier to equal and free distribution of wealth. Why else would there be people starving when the EC destroys or stores food it can't sell? Why else are there unemployed builders and yet thousands of homeless people? Why are people dying of curable diseases when there are ample resources and workers to help the,?

Our voter, now turned sceptic, hasn't quite arrived at the answer to these questions, and in the meantime inquires about joining the Labour Party. Fortunately before he does so, he spots a small advertisement in the back of a magazine. The advertisement is offering free literature published by an organisation unknown to our sceptic—the Socialist Party. He replies to the ad, and is astounded to find that the ideas espoused by the Socialist Party precisely coincide with conclusions he has reached independently.

That is but one example of how a person may become a socialist. As you've probably guessed, the story is not hypothetical; it was my own experience. I thought it worth recounting here to demonstrate that even someone as dogmatic as an electronic rottweiler can grow to understand what and who is really calling the shots in our lives.

Hope and understanding

What really makes a socialist is not wool (thought wool is often applied in the visual region to deceive us), or indoctrination, or deception, or proselytisation. The making of a socialist can be attributed only to the utilisation of one of the most fundamental faculties of the human brain: the ability to reason—to ask "why?" Why do things have to be this way? And by simply asking the question, you have already partly answered it: things are the way they are not because it is unavoidable but because we, the dispossessed working class, allow them to be.

Nick Brunskill  

Ecology and Science (1996)

From the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

We conclude our criticism, began last month, of Sandy Irvine's pamphlet "Red Sails in the Sunset? An Ecopolitical critique of the Socialist Inheritance"

As a science — the study of the inter-relationships between living organisms and between them and their non-living environment, ecology has no particular political or ethical lesson to teach. Its essential role is to explain and predict. It is true that implications for human behaviour can be drawn from its findings. Humans are living organisms and as such are part of particular ecological systems and of the whole biosphere; so human behaviour does have ecological implications. In fact ecology as a science has identified particular forms of human behaviour (without going into their causes, which fall outside its field of study) as the major disturbing force upsetting ecological balances, the result of which is pollution and environmental destruction.

The implication that can be drawn from this is that, if pollution and environmental destruction are to be minimised then human behaviour — human productive activity, to be precise — must change, in such a way that what humans take from nature, the amount and the pace at which we do so, as well as the way we use these substances and dispose of them after use, should be done in such a way as to leave the rest of nature in a position to go on supplying and reabsorbing them.

It's a tall order, but it is also a very general statement that leaves open the question of what specifically should be done. It can't be otherwise since ecology as a science is concerned with analysing the effects of particular forms of human behaviour on ecosystems without going into what causes those forms of behaviour. That is a matter for other fields of scientific research, such as sociology and economics.

Here Socialists have their point of view and people like Irvine theirs. We say that the ecologically-unbalanced behaviour that humans at present engage in is due to the socio-economic system under which we live, namely the profit system, or capitalism. He attributes it to something else: human greed or permissiveness or a wrong attitude to nature or an unreasonable desire to have too many children. We call for a change of social system. He calls for "changes to human values and lifestyles", without a change of social system. (Actually, it's not quite as simple as this, as the predominant values in society tend to reflect the needs of the socio-economic system, so a change of system will involve a change of values too.) But ecology has nothing to say on this particular argument. Which is why Irvine's appeal to it to back his view is as invalid as would be an appeal to it by us to back our view.

Socialism is human-centred
Irvine goes further and, again accuses Socialists of a human-centred approach as opposed to an Earth-centred one which he claims derives from ecology:

Socialist theory has been deeply embedded in a thoroughly cornucopian and human-centred view of life. It has never got to grip with the realities of 'limits-to-growth ', believing instead in the existence of Aladdin's Lamp which, if rubbed by the right people, can release a cornucopia of goods and services. Indeed, in some classic socialist texts, notably Robert Tressell 's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, it is suggested that under socialism, people would simply take whatever they wanted from gigantic warehouses. Amongst the radical groups that blossomed in the wake of the May '68 events in France, a popular slogan was: 'What do we want? Everything! When do we want it? Now!' The Marxist tradition has been little different promising an open cheque marked 'to each according to his needs'.

We plead guilty to this charge of being human-centred We do have a human-centred approach: we want a socialist society primarily because it will be good for human beings. It will also be good for the biosphere but, then, what is good for the biosphere is also good for humans. Oddly, since it is a human-centred argument, Irvine also makes this last point, arguing that unless humans take into account the good of the biosphere things will be bad for them too ("the Earth must come first for, without the planet's life-sustaining eco¬systems, all human aspirations and goals are doomed").

We have indeed spoken of socialism in terms of abundance, less so today perhaps than in the past. Irvine — influenced no doubt by the falsehood taught by conventional economics that human wants are "infinite" — interprets this as meaning that socialism will be a society of ever increasing personal consumption, of people coming to consume more and more food, to take more and more holidays, and to acquire more and more material goods.

If humans wants were "infinite" then this would be the result of a society based on free access and geared to meeting human needs, but human wants are socially-determined and limited. Humans can only consume so much food, for instance, and only seek to accumulate more and more material goods in a society of economic insecurity like capitalism. In a society, such as socialism would be, where people could be sure that what they required to satisfy their needs would always be available in the "warehouses" then we would soon settle down to only taking what we needed and no more.

This is all we meant by talking of socialism as a "society of abundance": that enough food, clothing and other material goods can be produced to allow every man, woman and child in society to satisfy their likely material needs. It was not a reference to some orgy of consumption, but simply to the fact that it is technically possible to produce (more than) enough to satisfy everyone's material needs, thanks, we might add, to industrialisation. Despite Irvine's claim to the contrary, industrial processes of production are not in themselves the cause of pollution and environmental destruction; it is their application under capitalism in the pursuit by separate, competing firms and states of relatively short-term monetary profit that
is the cause.

Increased consumption
Meeting everybody's likely material needs will indeed involve in many cases an increase in what people consume. This will certainly be the case for the one-in-five of the population of Britain who need state handouts to bring them up to the poverty line; it will also be the case for about the same number who live without state handouts not far above the poverty line; and it will obviously be the case for the millions and millions of people in the so-called Third World who are suffering from horrendous problems of starvation, disease and housing.

So, yes, Socialism will involve increases in personal consumption for three-quarters or more of the world's population. Impossible, says Irvine, this would exceed the Earth's carrying capacity and make environmental destruction even worse. Not necessarily so, we reply.

Irvine's mistake is to confuse consumption per head with what individuals actually consume. To arrive at a figure for consumption per head, what the statisticians do is to take total electricity or oil consumption or whatever and then divide it by the total population. But this doesn't give a figure for what people consume as, in addition to personal it includes what industry, the government and the military consume. It a grossly misleading to equate consumption per head with personal consumption since it ignores the fact that consumption per head can be reduced without reducing personal consumption and that this is in fact compatible with an increase in personal consumption.

This in effect is what Socialists (real Socialists that is) propose: to eliminate the waste of capitalism, not just of arms and armies but of all the overhead costs involved in buying and selling. It has been estimated that, at the very least, half of the workforce are engaged in such socially-useless, non-productive activity (some estimates go higher). In a socialist society all this waste will be eliminated, so drastically reducing consumption per head.

This will allow room for the personal consumption of those who need it to be increased to a decent level. Diverting resources to do this — and ensuring that every human on the planet does have a decent standard of living will be the primary, initial aim of socialism — will put up consumption per head again, but to nowhere near the level now obtaining under capitalism.

When socialism reaches cruising speed, after clearing up the mess inherited from capitalism, then both consumption and production can be expected to level off and something approaching a "steady-state economy" reached. In a society geared to meeting human needs, once those needs are being met there is no need to go on producing more.

It is true that this assumes that population levels will stabilise too. This is a reasonable assumption, and is already beginning to happen, even under capitalism, in the most developed capitalist parts of the world of Europe, North America and now Japan. Population growth is a feature of the poorer parts of the world, suggesting a link between it and poverty and the insecurity that goes with it (the more children you have the more chance there is of someone to care for you in your old age). If this is so, the way to end population growth is to eliminate poverty and economic insecurity, which in practice can only be done by socialism.

Irvine vigorously disagrees with this analysis. But he himself has no answer to the problem since he is against increasing personal consumption levels as in his view this would overload the Earth's carrying capacity. But, unless the personal consumption of the people in the poorer parts of the world is increased, then population growth there won't slow down. If you reject socialism all that is left is to envisage either compulsory sterilisation or letting starvation, disease and wars take their course (as Malthus advocated).

Socialists emphatically reject such an anti-human approach. If that's what an "Earth-centred ethics" teaches then we want nothing to do with it. We'll stick to our human-centred approach, which embraces the view that the balanced functioning of the biosphere is something that humans should try to achieve since, as part of the biosphere, it is in our interest that it should function properly. There is in fact no antagonism between the interest of humanity and the interest of the biosphere.

In adopting an anti-humanist stand (Irvine calls it "post-humanism"; it used to be called misanthropy) people like him are in fact doing damage to the cause of finding a solution to the current ecological crisis. They are undermining any good work they might be doing in drawing people's attention to the need for a sustainable relationship between humans and the rest ofthe biosphere. They put people off and they give ecology a bad name. And they impede the growth of the understanding of what social and economic changes are needed to create the framework in which the mess can be cleaned up and a sustainable balance with the rest of nature created.

Adam Buick