A disaster waiting to happen (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard 

When the global economic crisis hit, first, the Pacific Rim countries and, later, Latin America and elsewhere, just over a couple of years ago, Venezuela was, as we noted (Socialist Standard, October 1998), particularly vulnerable. It had been economically and politically unstable for at least two decades, and corruption was rife (see Socialist Standard, September 1999).

In February last year, Hugo Chavez, the former paratrooper who had led a failed military coup d’état seven years previously, was elected president; and in August, he and his left-wing coalition won an overwhelming victory (but on a 53 percent turnout) in the elections to the National Assembly. He had proposed a complete rewriting of the constitution, the draft of which went before the new assembly, and was passed on 16 December.

According to his mainly right-wing critics, President Chavez has become a virtual dictator. He has increased, against the general trend worldwide, state intervention and control of the economy, reduced civilian control of the armed forces, and has probably secured the presidency for himself until 2012. He says that he needs such powers in order to “root out corruption” which, of course, he blames on previous governments. And, said Chavez, he would solve Venezuela’s economic ills. Nevertheless, between February last year, when he became president, and the beginning of December, unemployment had increased by a massive 700,000.

On polling day, last August, there was heavy rainfall throughout much of Venezuela, causing a number of landslides, 37 deaths, and the destruction of up to 2,000 homes. But worse was to come.

Beginning around 10 December, almost a year’s average rain fell, outside the usual rainy season, in five days. Torrential rain continued for another five days. The worse affected area was the tiny Vargas state bordering the Caribbean Sea in the north-west of Venezuela. Much of the country is flat; but there are hills and mountains, such as Mount Avila, inland and parallel to the coast, from Guacara in the west to the east of Caracas, the capital.

By 15 December, huge amounts of mud as well as large rocks and boulders began to slide down towards the coast. The soils, have, moreover, suffered constant erosion over the years; and when the natural dykes broke rivers formed, sending floods of muddy water onto the low-lying areas. Large swathes of the northern coast were swept into the sea. One of the towns to be worse hit was Carmen de Uria. It only had dirt roads; and it straddled what had been a small river, which had no proper embankment. After 10 days of rain, the river overflowed, cascading through many homes. Shortly after, Carmen de Uria was entirely buried under mud.

Floods like these claimed 100,000 lives in Venezuela

“It was,” said Piero Feliziani, an Italian geologists, “a holocaust waiting to happen.” But it need not have caused so much death, destruction and misery, even if it was a “natural” disaster. (The Archbishop of Caracas said that the rains “were divine retribution” for President Chavez’s radical policies!)

The basic cause, however, was the rapid development of a commodity-producing, capitalist, market economy from the early 1950s. According to Michael McCaughan in the Observer:

  “Venezuela, like neighbouring Colombia and Peru, was a largely rural society with strong family community ties until the fifties, when civil unrest and depressed crop prices forced millions into misery belts around the cities, where they piled high in precarious dwellings” (26 December).

For decades, there has been rapid, uncontrolled, unregulated immigration from the rural areas of extreme poverty to, and around, Caracas and other cities seeking employment, first, in the expanding oil industry and, then, in tourism. Indeed Venezuela’s weak economy depends almost entirely on oil and tourism for its foreign revenue. Vargas state has 500,000 workers who service the tourist industry, or commute each day to Caracas from the shanty towns and ranchos in the hills surrounding the capital. “Corrupt politicians and planners” turned a blind eye to such developments, where up to 350,000 workers existed, often without electricity, running water or main drainage.

This urban overpopulation is, according to Luisa Romero, an investment broker based in New York, “one more effect of the globalised economy”. It has also resulted in the death, disappearance and loss of habitation of hundreds of thousands of workers. Indeed, at the time of writing these lines, the numbers are not known, and may never be known, but have been estimated at more than 450,000, then times the number killed in Venezuela’s previous catastrophe, the earthquake of 1812.

Surely, if nothing else, the events and disaster in Venezuela at the end of 1999 demonstrate the need to replace capitalism by a new, democratic society of production, not of profit, but of use and the satisfaction of people’s needs; a socialist society of common ownership of natural resources (including Venezuela’s oil reserves if still required) and the means of production.

Peter E. Newell

Putin raises nuclear stakes (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard 

In December’s Socialist Standard, we commented on the decision by the US Senate not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the promise by the more hawkish Republicans to scupper the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which outlawed “Star Wars” defence programmes, and suggested that such steps, at the dawn of a new millennium dampened any hopes the more optimistic workers held for the 21st century.

We did not have to wait long for further confirmation of the troubled century that awaits us. Two weeks into the new millennium, the Guardian reported on Moscow’s newly published security strategy doctrine which aims to raise the nuclear stakes by lowering the threshold at which Russia can resort to the use of nuclear weapons:

“Mr Yeltsin’s strategy, decreed in December 1997, declared that nuclear weapons could only be used ‘in the case of a threat to the very existence of the Russian Federation as a sovereign state’. The new document states that the use of nuclear weapons is necessary ‘to repel armed aggression if all other means of resolving a crisis situation have been exhausted or turn out to be ineffective’ “(14 January).

At the peak of the Cold War, the former Soviet Union had a force of 5 million under arms and was an acknowledged superpower. Since 1989, it has seen its armed forces shrink to almost a fifth of that number and has suffered humiliation after humiliation—the withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the first botched war in Chechnya, for instance. As well as morale in the armed forces being low, their combat readiness, according to Putin himself, is in a critical condition, with training and maintenance reported as being grossly inadequate. While a contingent of 300 Russian soldiers serving in Kosovo as part of the peace keeping force have been returned home because of alleged drunkenness, drug-taking and a general inadequateness, the higher ranks are becoming notorious for their infighting, with the defence minister constantly arguing with his generals.

With the above in mind, one can well see the method in Putin’s madness. He has after all the job of protecting the interests of Russia’s capitalist elite with faulty tools. Moreover, he is faced with the stark realisation that he exists in a unipolar world increasingly dominated by the US. Putin’s attempt to make the world once again bipolar can also be seen a response to NATO’s New Strategic Concept which, like Putin’s proposals in his 21 page document, suggests the early recourse to the use of nuclear weapons.

That the world’s leaders are still prepared to carry their nuclear logic into another century, that they are continually prepared to wipe out millions of their fellow humans to further the interests of a minority at the end of a century that witnessed the deaths of 220 million in conflict, should shatter any illusions we have that this century will proceed on a different course to the one we have stepped out of. While we contemplate the wars, the conflicts and the horrors our masters have in store for us this coming century, it is also important to remember that we as a class hold the power to prevent the same from coming about.

We are not ruled by force or coercion, but by consent. The Putins and Clintons of this world can only do the things they do because we vote them in, thus legitimising their actions, however detrimental they may be to our interests. War and conflict and all the terrors we dare to imagine only come to pass because we refuse to join together as a class to express our class interests. Once we recognise that as a class we have shared basic needs and desires, suffering the same privations because of our less privileged position in the relations of production, and unite in defiance of that minority intent on maintaining the status quo and its nuclear insanity, we need never fear the horror of war again.

While you muse on the aforementioned, remember the argument is not that complicated. This is your world as much as anybody’s and requires your active involvement to protect it. Are you for socialism or against it? Don’t take too long to make up your mind—we may not have that much time.

John Bissett

Nothing New Millennium (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

If there was a sense of relief when the twenty-first century finally dawned it must have been partly because we would no longer have to endure those comments about society which unfailingly began with the words: “With the approach of the Millennium”. It seemed that any plans to do anything about the crisis in the NHS, or about making rail travel safer, or reducing pollution, were given an added urgency because we were approaching a new century. By the year 2000 we had to get it right.

This was irritating enough, especially as those making the comments were usually trying to impress us with the historical sweep of their intellects. It might have been hoped, that the first of January would have brought some relief, the nonsense would have stopped and we would be back in what is called normality, when social problems and deficiencies are described in more commonplace terms, without any added significance by the turning of another page in the calendar. But it was not to be. The celebratory fireworks had hardly died away when we were being assailed with comments which began with such words as “Now that we have entered the new Millennium . . .”

Perhaps enough people were deceived by this into thinking that the arbitrary process of passing from one year to another—or in this case one century to another—would really affect how the world is organised so that the new millennium would bring evidence that people were becoming safer, healthier, more optimistic about their future. If so, they were critically deluded. They would have forgotten that we are treated to the same kind of nonsense every December, when the first seconds of a new year are a time to assume that the next twelve months will be better than the last when reality encourages the conclusion that if anything they will be worse.

Harold Wilson 

We have been here before. As the year 1969 drew to a close the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson made several references to the approach of the 1970s, rather in the same style as all those hopes and plans for the 21st century. The Seventies, Wilson assured us, would be better than the previous decade. He was, in fact, in difficulties because by then his government, which had been elected on the promise to oversee the blossoming of a great new age in which technological advance and planning would solve problems like poverty, disease and poor education, had been largely discredited. Such was the disillusion among his supporters that at one stage it was reasonable to speculate on whether the Labour Party was about to disintegrate. Wilson was desperate; by encouraging us to look forward to a new decade of the Seventies he hoped to deter us from inconvenient memories of the Sixties.

Well of course it did not work out as he had hoped. The Labour government staggered from one crisis to the next. Soon after the dawn of the new decade they were ousted from power, then a few years later returned in the wake of Heath’s calamitous three-day week. By then the much vaunted technological revolution had faded into the disreputable history of politicians’ promises. It was replaced by Labour’s assurance that its special relationship with the unions could smooth the way for their policy of forcing down our living standards which, by some mysterious process, would make us all better off. A few of the party’s more deranged supporters believed this but a lot of them did not—particularly those trade unionists who got fed up with the constant struggle to prevent their standards declining and defended themselves with the strikes which were later damned as the Winter of Discontent. This was followed by glorious spring for the Tories, as Thatcher romped into power, consigning the Labour Party and all its blather about a new decade into the wilderness for almost twenty years.

NHS

And what about now, with a New Labour government and its promises of a new society with new values, new priorities, new achievements . . .? Well there is nothing new about the NHS being in crisis, with nurses and doctors worked into the ground and sick people having to wait for months just to be examined so that they can be allowed onto another waiting list. There is nothing new about this deplorable experience existing at the same time as the rapid and effective treatment available to anyone who has the kind of money needed to pay for a team of the best doctors and a stay in the most exclusive hospitals. There is nothing new in the situation recently summarised by Alistair Darling, whose job as Social Services Secretary is supposed to make him responsible for alleviating poverty: “. . . a child can still be born poor, live poor, die poor”. He did not also say that a child in another class will be born rich, live rich, die rich.

What about other ministers? How are they grappling with the problems of the new millennium? Well Home Secretary Jack Straw plans to prove how tough he is on crime by threatening the legal rights of people charged with minor thefts while he protects the welfare of General Pinochet, who is not one of those youths washing your windscreen at traffic lights without you asking for it but a man who, as dictator of Chile, oversaw the murder of thousands of people there. Straw has bent the rules on admissible immigrants to allow Mike Tyson into this country although he should be disqualified by reason of his prison sentences for rape and assault. The reason for Straw’s generosity was clear: Tyson was due to fight here and if anything was allowed to stop that happening a lot of money would be lost, particularly by the fight promoters and the owners of the TV rights, who are such close buddies of Tony Blair.

Sheffield Wednesday

And as Straw was engaged in grabbing the headlines for his battles for his version of a better life for us all in the 21st century he was in competition with Sheffield’s Labour MPs, among them Education Secretary David Blunkett. Since his days as leader of Sheffield City Council Blunkett has undergone something of a change. He is no longer the challenging left-winger but a man who wants to hound out teachers who display any human frailty in overcoming the difficulties of teaching kids whose extreme impoverishment has extended into their conduct in the classroom. Blunkett has begun the new century by showing that his zeal for sacking people will not stop at schools. With the other MPs, he has demanded the head of the manager of Sheffield Wednesday because the team are stuck at the bottom of the Premiership. Blunkett is pitiless to the idea that, after all, some team has to come last and it does not seem to have occurred to him, that campaigning against a football manager is hardly revolutionary activity for an ex-firebrand of the left.

Nothing new about poverty then, nor about avoidable sickness. Nothing new about class-related degrees of access to wealth. Nothing new about capitalism and how it degrades and represses the very people who are useful and productive while it nurtures its parasites. Nothing new about Labour ministers trying to hide their impotence in smoke screens of deceit.

Ivan

Is Britain being abolished? (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Abolition of Britain’. By Peter Hitchens. (Quarter Books)

It certainly is according to rabid right-wing Daily Express columnist Peter Hitchens. Hitchens, who is critical of Mrs Thatcher and regards Michael Portillo as being too liberal, has set out his stall in a book which argues that the post-war period (especially since the 60s) has seen the gradual erosion of everything that once characterised Britain as a great independent Empire nation.

According to Hitchens, Britain’s political, economic and social institutions have been taken over by “cultural revolutionaries” whose clear aim has been the abolition of Britain by stealth. This has resulted in some of the following: the decline of religion, morality and family life; the ruination of a perfectly good education system with comprehensive schooling; the legalisation of homosexuality and the rise of permissive sexual practice, and the abolition of corporal and capital punishment. Underpinning all of the above has been the general decline in respect for authority and patriotism. For Hitchens, this has led to a Britain which is no longer at ease with itself and one which has closed its eyes to its own history which is held in contempt.

Needless to say, with the arrival of Tony Blair and New Labour on 1 May 1997 the final nail in Britain’s coffin was hammered home:

  “1st May 1997 really was the start of a new era. The new Prime Minister’s triumphal progress to Buckingham palace and Downing Street was filmed from the air by sycophantic broadcasters as if a dull cortege of motor cars were a rebel army finally emerging from the sierras to occupy a conquered city.”

And we are all aware of what has subsequently followed. Devolution for Wales and Scotland, House of Lords reform and of course plans to join the single European currency and merge Britain into a federal European super-state. For Hitchens, all this is tantamount to treachery.

For socialists, Hitchens’s entire concept of “Britain” is wrong. All capitalist societies are divided along class lines—capitalist and worker—therefore any talk of “nation” or patriotism is palpable nonsense. Capitalists and workers do not share a common identity nor do they share any interests in common.

Given this, it would be easy to dismiss Hitchens’s views as the ramblings of a mad reactionary “golden-age” theorist who presupposes that the 1950s represented the last bastions of a perfect society. Hitchens, however, has identified certain negative trends in society but has drawn the wrong, reactionary conclusions.

The real materialist backdrop to Hitchens’s entire argument is Britain’s comparative economic decline as a world power and the profound social and political changes that this has undoubtedly brought about. However, Britain’s decline started way before the second world war (as far back as at least the latter part of the 19th century) so there is a historical qualification to Hitchens’s argument. His basic error lies in his uncritical support for Britain’s imperial past whilst at the same time condemning Britain’s rivals for having similar ambitions. His understanding of the nature of capitalism is clearly inadequate.

Clearly there is much wrong with modern society but it is not the result of the so-called “Liberal Revolution” of the 1960s. It is due to the decline of capitalism and the subsequent social havoc which has been created. Of course, Hitchens is really on a Christian/moral crusade against homosexuality and the rise of sexual freedoms which has threatened the sanctity of the traditional nuclear family as society’s cornerstone.

It may be argued that Hitchens’s obsession with morality is a cover for the increasing gap between rich and poor with the obvious social consequences: poverty, frustration, alienation, family breakdown and violence. However, Hitchens is slightly more sophisticated than this. He decries not only both main political parties for presiding over Britain’s moral downfall but also the legacy of Thatcher:

  “The apparent rebirth of Conservatism in 1979 was a false dawn because the Thatcherite movement was not interested in morals or culture. It believed mainly in the cleansing power of the market, which has much to be said for it but which has no answers to many fundamental questions—and which cannot operate properly unless honesty and stability are enforced through both ethics and law. Worse, the Thatcher government unwittingly helped to destroy many of the things Conservatism once stood for. In eighteen years of power, an immense time, the Thatcher-Major government was unable to reverse a single part of the cultural revolution, not least because it barely tried, and did not understand it.”

There is always a certain irony when a staunch defender of capitalism starts to invoke a moral code for human behaviour but in a way it is quite refreshing. At the very least, Hitchens believes that humans are capable of behaving decently (although some of Hitchens’s views can hardly be described as decent). However, he is likely to be disappointed because a social system based upon production-for-profit instead of production-for-need is almost by definition anti-social and amoral.

Dave Flynn

50 Years Ago: Fifty Years Mark-Time (2000)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Francis Williams, one-time Editor of the Daily Herald, has written a history of the Labour Party. “Fifty Years’ March, The Rise of the Labour Party”, published by Odhams Press, Ltd. We suspect that Mr. Williams wrote with a distemper brush. He has certainly given the Labour Party an unblemished white-washing. The main theme of this history is summed up by Mr. Attlee in the foreword to the book. He says:-

  “It is a story very characteristic of Britain, showing the triumph of reasonableness and practicability over doctrinaire impossibilism.”

(. . .) One thing the author does make clear, although possibly without intending to do so. That is, that the founders of the Labour Party wanted to build a Political Party with a substantial numerical strength and they were quite prepared to sacrifice their respective “Socialist” principles at the altar of a large membership. He tells that most of the prominent early workers in the Labour Party were far-seeing enough to build an organisation with numerical and financial strength and a firm foundation of mass support. He proceeds to show us throughout the pages of the book, how the so called Socialists of the Labour Party have had to compromise, twist, wriggle, turn, betray and mis-lead the non-Socialist mass support in order to hold it together. And after studying that sort of thing for years, seeing the struggle between the mass support and the leadership, the desertions, the betrayals, the collapses, and the failure to prevent the evils of capitalism, Mr. Williams still thinks that the Labour Party is a Socialist Party. He still has not learned that the strength of a working-class Party lies not just in its numbers but in its understanding of its objective and its determination to achieve it.

(From an article by W. Waters, Socialist Standard, February 1950)

Tory chickens come home to roost (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Explaining Labour's Landslide. By Robert Worcester & Roger Mortimore. Politico's.

Opinion polling has been a feature of British political life since 1938. (57 percent of people were satisfied with Neville Chamberlain's performance as Prime Minister). By the last general election, however, the pollsters were on trial as never before. They had, horror of horrors, got the result of the 1992 election wrong.

In the end, their predictions of Labour's victory in May 1997 turned out to be creditably close to the mark. The Tories lost 177 seats. Labour won its highest ever number of MPs, and had a majority of 179. Worcester, who founded the MORI agency in 1969 and has been closely involved with political polling ever since, and Mortimore tell the story of that election through the data the polls provided.

The Tories were doomed long before the campaign began, they argue, because of problems almost entirely of their own making. To any socialist, this is deeply uninteresting stuff. The high point of this part of the book, as it was of the campaign, is the man the Tories paid to dress up as a chicken and follow Blair around. Which of them talked more sense is still hotly debated.

And yet, this is not a boring book. It argues strongly from a position of hard facts supplied by the polls that bias in the press does swing votes. During the 1979 election, two thirds of Sun readers didn't know its political allegiance. (Its front page on polling day consisted of two words: "VOTE TORY"). By 1997, "the print media did . . . have significant influence on the voting behaviour of their readers". In this case at least, greater political awareness seems to be a handicap.

The authors are suitably cutting about the cynical and meaningless astrological "predictions" spouted by several papers. The Express, for example, claimed that "a Tory victory is written in the stars . . . Tony Blair is doomed due to the poor positioning of something called the planet Rahu". Shelley von Strunckel in the Evening Standard was cleverer, taking a whole page to hint at a hung parliament without actually committing herself to anything at all. This under the headline "Forget polls, the result is in the stars".

Most interesting for socialists though, is the section What is public opinion? Clearly for anyone concerned to see a huge shift in human consciousness, this is an important area. The book gives much food for thought. "Public opinion", it maintains, comprises three things. There are "opinions: the ripples on the surface of the public's consciousness, shallow and easily changed; attitudes: the currents below the surface . . . and values: the deep tides of public mood, slow to change, but powerful". Political convictions generally (we are told) come from this third element. To dump our upbringing for capitalism frequently entails a shift in these deep values. It is possible, as the existence of the membership of the World Socialist Movement proves. But it may not always be easy.

The book of course was not written to give us ideas about how to speed up this process of human change. But what is the alternative? A man dressed as a chicken, pecking at the heels of another man who would soon be sending bombers round the world to serve British capital's interests. Pathetic, maybe; but nine out of ten people think it was childish too—the chicken bit, at least.

Toby Crowe

New Labour: forward to the past (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard 

Blair has claimed that this century the battle will not be between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and conservatism. But his concept of a non-socialist party of progress is a throw-back to the 19th century.

At the Labour Conference last October Tony Blair delivered a messianic oration. He spoke with great fervour about the fact that he and his party are on the side of progress, identifying the progressives as a vast political movement of high-minded and fair people, who believe in the future, and against the dread-hooded minions of conservatism. Or, as Peter Sellers, put it, that we must go onward in a forwards direction to the future, because time waits for no man, and onwards is the way forward to the place in which we will one day arrive. Or some such.

Blair declared that the Labour Party had thrown aside Ideology, but would stay true to its values. Quite how he thinks values and ideology are dissociable is anyone's guess, specifically since he uses ideology in its meaning as a system of ideas or creed, which is exactly what one should have thought values would mean. Then again, political speeches are not about logical intellectual rigour, nor about clarity or sense. Blair was pulling the biggest ideological dodge in the book (one much beloved by pre-Thatcher Tories) that he is being pragmatic and free from ideology doing what is "objectively" right for the national interest, while his opponents are blinded by their ideological commitments. What matters is not the substance of what is being said, but the appearance. No-one wants to think of themselves as an unreasoning fanatic, which is what ideologue is code for, nor would they wish to vote for one.

Tony Blair also deployed other, simple, logical fallacies in order to try to bolster his political position. Most notably, he baldly deployed the logical fallacy of bifurcation: the presentation of a false set of options, an exclusive either/or option when that isn't necessarily the case. In this instance he has been trying to portray the choice as being solely between a Labour government (of nice sensible progressive types) and a Tory government (full of evil lunatics who drink babies' blood, etc), insisting that the only choice for people who dislike Tory rule is to vote Labour and join his movement of lukewarm progressives.

Lukewarm progressives

Progress does have a warm, fuzzy feel to it, though. The feel of things becoming better, of rational people making sensible decisions, without being shackled by tradition or history. Progress, also, is indissolubly linked to the mindset of the industrial revolution, and the ideas that it spawned about an ever-upward increase in wealth and quality of life. Such ideas were closely linked with the Radical movement of the 19th century; and Blair and his cohorts have repeatedly linked themselves in with that 19th century Radicalism. Gordon Brown styled the labourites as "Credible Radicals", and Blair repeated the word in his speech unto inanity. Indeed, Blair stated that the 20th century had been dominated by the Tories, precisely because the Labour Party had split the moderate-progressive bloc that existed in the Liberal Party of the 19th century.

Blair seems to feel a great affinity for the 19th century radicals. A curious attitude for a moderniser to be trying to resurrect a political movement that died over 100 years ago. For much of the 19th century, Radicalism was closely linked with "middle-class" political agitation, and took place very much in the shadow of the French Revolution. Within the Liberal Party, formed officially in 1859, the Radicals were drawn from the commercial classes, with Richard Cobden and John Bright, of the famous Anti-Corn Law League, among its free-trade luminaries. At certain points of the century Radicalism had some popular support, but there was always a distinct split between its necessarily well-heeled parliamentary leaders (MPs, being unpaid, needed to have substantial private incomes) and its supporters on the ground. By the late 19th century, the Radical formed a distinct camp within the broader movement of Liberalism, and early socialists held out hopes of those Radicals coming over to their side.

The maximum programme of the Radicals was one of political reform: enlargement of the franchise, abolition of the House of Lords, the rule of law and contract, and the abolition of trade protection. The Radicals were largely committed to the market, and laissez-faire capitalism, and their programme was largely about freeing up the power of capital to exploit labour without the old social-restrictions imposed by feudal power and, as with Tony Blair, they deployed a bifurcating argument of the middle and working classes uniting against the aristocracy. Indeed, the Liberals under Gladstone (the idol of Roy Jenkins, the ideological soul-mate of Tony Blair)—who was the political leader most instrumental in bringing about the nearest thing to laissez-faire to Britain—were a disparate group, often only united in their opposition to Toryism.

What is noticeable about their programme is that it bears more than a little resemblance to that of Thatcherism—as do the values and programme set forth by Gordon Brown fighting monopolies (what greater monopoly than a nationalised industry?), fighting fraud and rip-offs, protecting people from unscrupulous bankers; in effect: trying to make the market work properly. Blair is, then right that this is entirely in keeping with the history of the Labour Party.

Branding of identical products

The clear reason for Blair's risible sophistry is that the Labour Party has become concerned that people do not feel an attachment to it. Labour are worried about the next election. The false choice of Tories or Labour is a way to try to fool voters into trooping into the ballot booths to give assent to spinach over cabbage. When there is little discernible difference over policy, then the politicians have to appeal to feeling, and attitude: we cut welfare out of "tough love", they cut welfare to be mean and spiteful. It's like the differences in branding between two almost identical soft-drinks.

The Labour politicians are worried that they may have to work hard to win the next election despite the contemptible and patronising sophistry applied by spin doctors; as the Labour Party has been stung by the low turn-out in recent elections. Their pretence that the voters are just too satisfied with them to vote holds no water—satisfied voters turned out in the 70s percent range in the fifties and sixties at by-elections.

It's clear that the reason voters are not turning out is because they think it's pointless. This is an inherent flaw of representative democracy: voters are infrequently called upon to cast a vote, which seems to be far removed from any action or result; there is no immediate reward for the vote. The voters thus feel, correctly, that their influence is slight. Traditionally this was overcome by political parties being closely attached to identifiable social groups, with the members of these groups being able to feel a part of the ongoing political process. The party represented, in one way or another, the aspirations of that group; thus they would turn out to vote with a strong feeling of involvement.

Once the political structure is unable, as now, to accommodate any semblance of reforms so as to be able to give any vent to the aspirations of more dispossessed sections of society, then politicians can no longer rely on that sort of support. They have to resort to trying to scare the electorate into supporting them, into fooling them into voting for them. They know that to keep the system functioning, they have to persuade people to turn up, and give their support for it. That is the politicians' job; since they cannot actually make or change events, they have to work hard to pretend that they can. Their function is to win and maintain public confidence. At the end of the day they are merely actors, and our modern media-driven politics could be easily called a thespocracy, rule by actors.

This is also the reasoning behind Labour's new-found devotion to local mayors: a single person contest, wherein the personality of the candidate will be all important, and which will be more of a media event. It's about trying to return public interest to a system where there are no significant policy differences.

Moderate party of obstruction

We need only look across the Atlantic to Canada or America, where the Liberals (or Democrats) did not suffer the same collapse in the 20th century as their counterparts in Britain, where they have held power for proportionately more of the century than Labour has managed, to see that no real gain is to be made by building the grand-movement of progress. Rather, such a force would be solely a pretty bulwark by which the current corrupt system is defended, a Great Moderate Party of Obstruction, to appeal to rational people who want to see change, and direct them off into the hopeless quagmire of personality politics.

So long as the press continue to look into whether Tony wants to block Ken, or how Gordon and Tony might be having a tiff, or whether Peter Mandelson has been brought back too soon, they continue to ignore the desperation of poverty, the wanton and authoritarian cruelty of the government, and ignore the unspoken iron-rule of the dogma of capital.

There is, though, hope to be drawn from Blair modernising the country back to the 1890s. It shows the real face of the Labour Party, how it is still, how it has always been: how many Labour governments have called for partnership from the unions, or have seen making the market work as the way to improve people's lives? All of them, only now this one is dropping the façade of socialism—leftists no longer have any justification whatsoever for asking us to follow these insulating sophists. Labourites who think themselves to be socialists have had their illusions thrown back in their faces with a rude wake-up call. 

                                                                                                                                                  Pik Smeet                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

The birth of Labourism (2000)

From the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Labour Party was founded it did not even claim to stand for Socialism, but only for the election of trade union and pro-trade union MPs to Parliament to press for reforms within capitalism.

The Labour Party is claiming that it was formed a hundred years ago this month. Actually it did not come into existence until after the 1906 General Election when a separate parliamentary group, with its own officers and whips, was constituted.

What happened a hundred years ago, at a meeting in London on 27 February 1900, was the establishment of the Labour Representation Committee. This was a body, made up of representatives of a number of trade unions and of three political bodies (the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Fabian Society), with the aim of securing "Labour" representation in the House of Commons so that a parliamentary "Labour Party" could be formed.

The meeting had been called by the TUC as a result of a resolution carried at its congress the previous September. It was an expression of what Lenin (right, for once) called "trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass labour legislation, etc" (Lenin's mistake was to argue that, left to themselves, workers could not evolve beyond such a trade union consciousness.)

Various motions were put before the conference, the one which was carried being:

"That this Conference is in favour of establishing a distinct Labour Group in Parliament who shall have their own whips and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to co-operate with any party which, for the time being, may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interest of labour, and be equally ready to associate themselves with any party in opposing measures having an opposite tendency . . . "

The SDF, which was an organisation which sought to model itself on the continental Social Democratic parties which were committed to the class struggle, socialism and Marxism (and of which most Socialists in Britain were then still members), tried to commit the new organisation to socialism and the class struggle, but not even Keir Hardie's ILP supported them. In fact, Hardie always explicitly repudiated the class struggle.

The LRC didn't even pretend to stand for Socialism. The conference was chaired by a trade unionist who was also a Liberal MP, W. C. Steadman, and many of the trade unionists involved were Liberals. According to the official Conference report, one of the delegates to the Conference, John Ward, from Newcastle, declared that "they wanted to get their feet on the floor of the House of Commons, and would not be particular how they did it", which has remained Labour policy to this day.

The LRC faced its first test later that year in the General Election in October. Only two of the candidates it endorsed were elected, Keir Hardie and a Liberal trade unionist, Richard Bell, not enough to constitute a parliamentary Labour Party. This had to wait till after the next General Election in 1906.

At the 1901 LRC conference the SDF again tried to commit the organisation to only supporting candidates who agreed (in the words of an ILP resolution) with "the creation of an Industrial Commonwealth founded upon the common ownership and democratic control of land and capital and the substitution of co-operative production for use in the place of the present method of competitive production for profit" and (the SDF's addendum) who "recognise the class war as the basis of all working-class political action".

Due to a procedural manoeuvre this was not even voted on, and at its own conference that year the SDF decided to withdraw from the LRC. The report of the discussion in the SDF paper Justice (10 August 1901) brings out the arguments for and against and also that those who within a few years were to break away to form the Socialist Labour Party in Scotland and the SPGB in London supported the Executive Council on this issue against the more reformist members of the SDF (Yates was to be a founder member of the SLP in 1903 and Fitzgerald of the SPGB in 1904):

The following resolution was moved by H. Quelch on behalf of the Executive Council:

"That this Conference of the SDF decides to withdraw from the Labour Representation Committee."
He said that when we joined this Committee we hoped the trade unionists as a body would also join, and that we could do something to bring them along our way. But the bulk of the trade unions had not joined. He wished to make it quite clear there was no antagonism between us and trade unions. It was simply that we were on different lines. It would be a mistake to antagonise the unions.
Lewis (Blackburn) seconded.
Deasey (Accrington) thought it foolish to withdraw. We should stay and endeavour to permeate and capture the trade unions. J. Hunter Watts was against withdrawing, but thought our members should remain and hold a watching brief. Steer (Battersea) said the SDF had urged the working class to use the vote and he thought we should take part in the political organisation and have a say in the matter.
J. Fitzgerald (Central) on the contrary thought we might be dragged back by the trade unions. We could do more effective work when not entangled with them. W. Gee, L. E. Quelch, J.J. Kidd, Lewis and McGlasson continued the discussion.
G. Yates said they in Scotland had joined a committee formed three years ago, and they found themselves tied to a party which could preach any nostrum that came along. Our proposals were systematically voted down and intrigued off the programme. It was an experiment and they now ought to withdraw.
Leggo (Plymouth) and Lloyd having spoken, the resolution was carried by 54 to 14.

Since the leadership of the SDF (and it was a leadership) was not against the principle of independent Labour (as opposed to purely Socialist) representation it may seem strange that they should have recommended withdrawal. However, they felt that the LRC was turning out to be another front for obtaining trade union support for the Liberal Party and so was not genuinely independent Labour representation.

Although, twenty years later, the Labour Party did become independent—organisationally, if not in terms of ideas and perspectives—of the Liberals and in fact eventually came to replace them as the Tories' alternate, at the time there was a great deal of truth in this, as the 1906 General Election was to show. This resulted in the return of 29 MPs endorsed by the LRC who constituted themselves into the parliamentary Labour Party. However, most of these were elected with the help of the Liberals. At that time many constituencies returned two members, so each elector there had two votes. As emerged later, Ramsay MacDonald, who was the Secretary of the LRC, had secretly negotiated a deal with Herbert Gladstone, the Liberals' National Agent, under which in a number of these two-member constituencies there would be one Liberal and one Labour candidate and that each would recommend their supporters to give their second vote to the other

Even the ILP candidates running under the auspices of the LRC went along with this deal. "In several cases", commented the Socialist Standard (March 1906) in a detailed analysis of the votes, "they contested double-member constituencies, and not only got in by Liberal votes, but made arrangements with the Liberals to work and vote together". One example given was that of MacDonald himself (an ILP member) who was elected for Leicester along with a Liberal. He obtained 14,693 votes, of which 13,999 were split with the Liberals, 260 with the Tories and 426 were "plumpers" (i.e., only voted for him).

In Parliament the Labour MPs generally voted with the Liberal government. It was only after the first World War that the Labour Party became more ambitious and began to think of developing from a mere parliamentary pressure group for the unions into a party that could take over the government of British capitalism, replacing the Liberals as Tweedledum to the Tories' Tweedledee.

In 1919 Labour adopted a new constitution allowing individuals to join directly instead of via a trade union or an affiliated political group and adopting the famous Clause IV as its ultimate aim, so committing itself to "socialism" (in reality, full-scale nationalisation or state capitalism). The Socialist Standard of the time (May 1918) was not impressed and set out a criticism of Labourism that has stood the test of time:

"The new constitution of the Labour Party does not make that party any more of a working-class party in the real sense than it has been heretofore. As has frequently been pointed out in these columns, its policy is, for the following reasons, opposed to the best interests of the working class, and calculated to hinder their emancipation.
(1) The Labour Party is not a Socialist party, and consequently is not concerned with the abolition of capitalism and wage-slavery.
(2) The time and energy of the Labour Party are spent in advocating and pleading for reforms, which cannot materially improve conditions for the working class, but which confuse the minds of the workers, leading them to expect benefits they never obtain, thus causing disappointment, disgust, and apathy.
(3) The avowed aim of the Labour Party is to get members into Parliament, in the belief that those members can legislate in the interest of the working class, whereas they are powerless to do so because they are dependent upon a capitalist party for constituencies in which to run their candidates, and the electorate of such constituencies merely vote them in because they stand for a Liberal programme and policy.
(4) By claiming to have a Socialist objective the Labour Party perpetuate the false notion that Socialism will be established, not as the result of an organised and conscious effort of the working class, but by a series of political reforms concurred in by the capitalist class.
(5) The Labour Party deny the class struggle: the antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class. Recognition of this antagonism is, quite obviously, the fundamental principle which forms the basis of a genuine working-class, or Socialist party."

Adam Buick

The Virtues of Reflection (2000)

Theatre Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Candide. National Theatre.

One of the characteristics of turn-of-the-millennium capitalism is that people rarely reflect about life. True a lot of people will wonder about how they are going to survive in the next few weeks and months, whilst most of the rest of us will worry about coping with the stresses and strains of everyday life. But such actions are a million miles away from what I have in mind. I'm thinking about standing back from the ordinary and the commonplace, and trying to look at the world, and the lives that people live, in a larger, more objective way.

I had occasion to think about such matters at the end of Candide, the wonderful musical—music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics Richard Wilbur, book adapted from Voltaire's famous novel, by John Wheeler, in a new version by John Caird—which has been marvellously revived by the National Theatre. As I wandered out of the Olivier Theatre after a second visit, I couldn't but become aware of the favourable audience comment. "That was marvellous," said someone. "Wasn't that wonderful?" said someone else, rhetorically, and when I joined the queue for a drink just about everyone seemed to be saying much the same thing. But no-one was prepared to offer anything more substantial. No-one sought to justify why it had been wonderful or marvellous, or whatever, and when I joined my three companions to drink our cups of tea, the conversation quickly moved to other matters.

Voltaire, were he to be about to witness such things, would probably have been amused, but saddened, by the audience's reaction. By inclination an amateur philosopher, he cast a sardonic eye on the musings of the world's supposed best thinkers. And he would have been no doubt registered, with deep irony, that although by the end of the 20th century the human race had unlocked many of the secrets of Nature, and deployed the resultant knowledge in ways that would barely have been conceivable when he was alive, most people seemed still locked in an almost prehistoric mindset.

Voltaire published Candide in 1759, and like all works of literature it can only properly be understood in the context of ideas of its time. Voltaire was a sceptical, Enlightenment figure, and Candide examines two ideas which were prevalent at the time. One was Optimism, a crude extrapolation based on Leibniz's "Principles of Sufficient Reason". The other the idea of Rousseau that in the state of Nature people are naturally good: a notion which seems to suggest a genetic predisposition to goodness, rather than goodness being learnt.

Leibniz held that since god could have created any kind of universe, the fact that he chose the universe we now inhabit can only mean that since god is good this must be the best possible universe. It follows that, "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds", a uniquely optimistic point of view which is elaborated by Dr Pangloss in Candide.

Not that Voltaire was an Optimist. Indeed the terrible earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 which had killed tens of thousands of people, many of them whilst sheltering in the cathedral, had persuaded him that not only was Leibniz's theory incorrect, but that such events challenged belief in the existence of god and any necessary coincidence between god the creator and god the source of goodness. And if "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds", the consequences of all human actions is already determined, and with it the possibility of morality based on choice.

The wild, helter-skelter adventures of Candide, a student of Dr Pangloss, are at the heart of Voltaire's novel. And by the end Candide has learnt that neither goodness nor malevolence are natural or predetermined. At the end Candide migrates to a hospitable location which he describes significantly as "Like Eldorado but without the gold". Voltaire, the humanist, lays before us a tale characterised by war, pillage, arbitrary cruelty, rape, starvation and deprivation. The corrosive impact of religious certainty tied to metaphysical justifications in a class-riven society are examined, and rejected. Rather Voltaire suggests that we attend to the facts of the case, in a spirit of co-operative endeavour, and seek to the best we can for all humanity.

Yet on the evidence of my two visits, contemporary audiences have been so successfully taught by the ideological apparatus of society as not to wonder about the lessons of Voltaire's tale for themselves. Could they, too, be the unwitting victims of thousands of present-day Dr Panglosses? Have they so lost the capacity to reflect that whilst recognising the absurdities of the 18th century beliefs which Voltaire parodied, they might also unwittingly believe that "All's for the best in the best of all possible worlds"? What irony that we can even pose the question.

Michael Gill

From Bad to Worse: A Short History of Labour (2000)

Editorial from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party, like Russia, is another issue over which history has done our job for us. In the past we had to argue that the Labour Party was not a socialist party and that its policy of step-by-step, piecemeal reform could not lead to Socialism.

Today, nobody thinks for one moment that the Labour Party has anything to do with Socialism. They see them, correctly, as just another bunch of politicians out to run the present system at national and local level.

In a sense, then, this editorial is redundant. We are pushing at an open door. Even so, on the centenary of the conference at which the Labour Party was conceived, it is worth recalling why the Labour Party has been the failure—in terms of transforming capitalism into something better—that it has been.

This has not been because its leaders were traitors or corrupt or incompetent—though some of them were—but because the task that the Labour Party set itself after the First World War (up till then its aim had merely been to get trade union bums onto the benches of the House of Commons), of gradually changing capitalism by social reform legislation into a new and different society based on co-operation, equality and meeting people's needs instead of on competition, privilege and profit, was an impossible one.

But, instead of Labour gradually changing capitalism, the opposite happened. Trying to reform capitalism changed the Labour Party into the out-and-out capitalist party it is today. Elected by a working class that only wanted improvements within capitalism, Labour governments found they had no choice other than to administer capitalism. But capitalism can only function as a profit-making system in which priority has to be given to profits over all other considerations.

Even Labour politicians learn by experience, and the experience of governing capitalism taught them to be "realistic" and accept capitalism's priorities. Under every Labour government ministers ended up defending profits. Blair and Gordon Brown only innovated by doing this before they came to power. All they did in openly proclaiming that Labour is a pro-business, pro-profit party was to bring Labour's rhetoric belatedly into line with its consistent practice when in office.

As Socialists we don't blame them for this. In fact, we can appreciate their honesty since, in putting the final nail in the coffin of the idea that Labour has anything to do with socialism, they have saved us having to spend too much time making this point ourselves.