50 Years Ago: Looking at Football (2005)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sport for profit

Once competition was on its feet, professionalism was the inevitable outcome. Watching competitive games became a popular recreation in the northern industrial towns, and success-hungry teams used the obvious means to get good players to join them. In 1885 professionalism was recognized; in a few years football meant Preston, Blackburn and Sheffield instead of the Wanderers, Royal Engineers and Carthusians ( .  .  .) .

The biggest changes were still to come. However skilful its play, a losing team has few followers—that is, its income falls. The huge partisan crowds at football matches in the ‘twenties were prepared to see only their own sides win, and applaud any sort of play to that end. The Arsenal introduced the “stopper” centre-half, a player whose business was to obstruct the opponents and nothing else. The method caught on because it was successful; it still dominates football. The units in the pattern of today’s teams are the rough, destructive centre-half, the fast-chasing wingers and the hard-kicking, opportunistic centre-forward ( .  .  .).

A footballer’s maximum wage is fifteen pounds a week in the playing season (many clubs pay nothing like the maximum). Players receive bonuses of two pounds for a win and one pound for a draw, and a few of them are famous enough to make a little more by writing newspaper columns or advertizing. Thus, a first-class player is lucky if he take £700 in a year. Certainly his earnings are not to be compared with a jockey’s, and his playing career usually ends before he is thirty-five (though every footballer understates his age). A small number become managers, coaches and so on, but obviously there is not room for more than a few to do so.

Football combines some of the best things games can offer—physical exercise, skill, co-operation with others. Commercialism has shaped it along certain lines, making success more important than enjoyment. Watching it played well can give us much pleasure as a ballet or a symphony. More often, however, it is a weekly relief from tedium or a source of vicarious satisfactions ranging from dreams of fame to revenge fantasies. Nor can too much be said for commercial football from the players’ point of view. It would be wrong to suppose they do not enjoy it (even the ones who say they play just for money). All the same, it is their bread and butter, and only the exceptionally skilful plays can afford not to help the fair means with some of the other sort (so you can see the same nasty little tricks aped in schoolboy games, too). A professional footballer has several years with play instead of work and a great deal of adulation, and afterwards he is turned into a workaday world almost completely unprepared for it.

It seems a pity that a good sport should be tarnished by the profit system. But then, what isn’t?

(From an article by R. Coster, Socialist Standard, February 1955)

Ups and downs (2005)

Book Review from the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital Resurgent. Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. By Gérard Dumenil and Dominique Lévy. Harvard University Press. £35.95.

The first parts of this book are filled with graphs and tables which deal with categories Marxists can recognise, such as the rate of profit, the rate of capital accumulation, and the share of wages and of profits in value added. Dumenil and Lévy argue that what drives the capitalist economy is the rate of profit and that this had begun to fall even in the 1960s. They explain this by the slow-down in the technological progress of the previous two decades which had provided an expanding market for producer goods and so had driven the whole economy forward; this resulted in a fall in the rate of capital accumulation and consequently in the high level of unemployment that was a feature of the 1970s and 1980s. This is one possible Marxian explanation.

But then the approach changes. In the 1970s double-digit inflation benefited industrial capital at the expense of finance capital as loans could be repaid in depreciated money. According to Dumenil and Lévy, finance capital fought back by staging what they call a “coup” on 1979 – a sudden rise in interest rates as a way of trying to stop inflation. This put the boot on the other foot with, again according to the authors, firms having to use their profits to repay loans rather than re-investing them, so penalising growth and sustaining unemployment. This marked the beginning, they say, of the current period of “neoliberalism”, of deregulation and return to “free market” economics, as practised by Reagan in America and Thatcher in Britain.

Dumenil and Lévy see this as a deliberate policy choice, imposed by finance capital and its representatives in government rather than any government’s reaction to a particular set of capitalist conditions. Their position can be summed up as “another policy is possible” (rather less ambitious than “another world is possible”, but a more accurate reflection of what the movement whose slogan this is actually stands for). This other policy turns out to be the sort of monetary, financial and tax measures favoured, and applied in the 1950s and 60s, by the Keynesians which, according to the authors, worked acceptably enough, as far as this sort of thing is possible under capitalism, until the rate of profit dropped for other reasons and finance capital staged its coup.

A rather odd conclusion for writers claiming to be in the Marxist tradition, but even odder is their analysis of the 1929 crash and 1930s slump in purely monetary and financial terms, even suggesting that these could have been avoided if the right policies had been pursued.

Adam Buick

Bolsheviks as history (2005)

Book Review from the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution in Petrograd. By Alexander Rabinowitch. Pluto Press. £12.99

When this book was first published in 1976 it had some contemporary significance. The regime established by the Bolsheviks in November 1917 was still extant and many young people, dissatisfied with capitalism, were discussing Bolshevik tactics and forms of organisation as a serious way to overthrow it. Today, republished nearly thirty years later, it is a work of history much as would be a study of Robespierre and the Jacobins in 1793.

Studying history is not a waste of time of course and Rabinowitch’s research does bring out some interesting points, in particular that the Bolshevik Party in 1917 was not a monolithic bloc under Lenin’s thumb. He shows how in fact Lenin’s views were often ignored by other Bolshevik leaders in closer touch with the feelings of soldiers and factory workers in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then called). It also emerges that Stalin played a rather more significant role than Trotskyists attribute him in their polemics.

Lenin favoured a naked seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party; most of the other Bolshevik leaders were more circumspect; they realised, as Rabinowitch documents, that while most of the workers and soldiers wanted “peace, land and bread” and, by November 1917, were in favour of the overthrow of the Provisional Government under Kerensky because it sought to continue the war, they wanted to see it replaced by a government made up of all the “socialist” parties of Russia, i.e. of the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries as well as the Bolsheviks, that would emanate from the Congress of Soviets and which would take Russia out of the war. The Bolsheviks, therefore, followed the more subtle approach of disguising the seizure of power advocated (sometimes hysterically) by Lenin as an assumption of power by the Congress of Soviets.

Thus the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 looked to be a “Soviet” revolution, with power appearing to pass into the hands of these makeshift representative institutions (the Russian word “soviet” means simply “council”) that soldiers and workers had formed to give expression to their political views. In fact, power had passed into the hands of the minority Bolshevik Party which was determined to hold on to it, alone, come what may. But that’s another (hi)story.

Adam Buick

Reforms, Revolution and the Left (2005)

From the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most people can think of aspects of  capitalism that they'd like to change.Individual changes can theoretically be made, but does reformism work as an overall strategy for real change?

Socialists are revolutionaries: we believe that the establishment of a Socialist society will involve a fundamental change in the way people live, and will necessitate the capture of political power by the Socialist working class. As revolutionaries, we do not advocate reforms, that is, changes in the way capitalism runs, such as alterations to immigration policy or the health service or the tax system. Reforms, however ‘radical’, can never make capitalism run in the interests of the workers. Nor should supporting reforms be some kind of tactic pursued by Socialists to gain support from workers, for workers who joined a Socialist Party because they admired its reformist tactics would turn it into a reformist organisation pure and simple. Socialists must reject reformism as a distraction from the revolutionary goal.

The reform–revolution issue is a long-standing one that has occasioned much debate over the years. In 1890 William Morris wrote an essay ‘Where are we now?’, as he left the Socialist League and looked back over his time in that organisation and the Social Democratic Federation. He saw two ‘methods of impatience’, as he termed them. One was futile riot or revolt, which could be easily put down. The other was, to use the then-popular label, ‘palliation’, what we would now call reformism. Morris resolutely opposed both, since they would be carried out by people who did not know what Socialism was and so would not know what to do next, even if their efforts were successful on their own terms. Instead he advocated propagating Socialist ideas:

"Our business, I repeat, is the making of Socialists, i.e., convincing people that Socialism is good for them and is possible. When we have enough people of that way of thinking, they will find out what action is necessary for putting their principles in practice. Until we have that mass of opinion, action for a general change that will benefit the whole people is impossible."

Morris thus rejected the reformist ideas that permeated the SDF and prefigured the Socialist Party’s view on this issue.

Another important discussion took place a few years later in the German Social-Democratic Party (the SPD). Eduard Bernstein, who enjoyed the prestige of being Engels’ literary executor, argued that reforms were all that should be aspired to: ‘The final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything’. This was partly because Bernstein considered that some of the unpredictability of production under capitalism could be mitigated by the provision of credit and the founding of employers’ organisations (cartels and trusts). He also envisaged reformist politics and trade unions as gradually eliminating capitalist exploitation and ushering in Socialism.

 Bernstein’s main critic at the time was Rosa Luxembourg, in two articles reprinted as the pamphlet Reform or Revolution. Damning his work as ‘opportunist’, she pointed out that trade unions could only," limit exploitation, not abolish it", and claimed that his views were tantamount to abandoning Socialism. Certainly we can agree that reforming capitalism will not turn it into Socialism. But even Luxembourg did not oppose reforms.

"Can the Social-Democracy be against reforms? Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal — the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour. Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the Social-Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means: the social revolution, its aim."

And she made no real attempt to relate reformist policies to the final goal, other than in statements such as: " as a result of its trade union and parliamentary struggles, the proletariat becomes convinced of the impossibility of accomplishing a fundamental social change through such activity and arrives at the understanding that the conquest of power is unavoidable. "

This, however, offers no reason why a revolutionary organisation should advocate reforms. And how has the reformist argument fared over the last hundred years? Have reformist movements and reforming governments made any contribution to Socialism? The answer to this question is a resounding No! Reformist governments, like all governments, do what they have to do: they administer capitalism in the interests of the ruling class, though they do make some effort to claim that their actions benefit the whole population. The Labour Party, for instance, has abandoned any pretensions about fundamentally changing society, and is now unashamedly the Tory Party Mark II.

Reformist movements try to get elected to government or attempt to influence the government of the day, all with the aim of carrying reforms into practice or of defending the status quo against some ‘anti-reform’. For the reformer’s work is never done under capitalism, which continually throws up new problems which need the reformer’s attention and constantly undermines any existing ‘gains’, however feeble. The list of potential reforms is as long as your arm; in the course of just one recent week in Manchester, there were meetings/campaigns dealing with ‘rights’ for homeworkers, the new Immigration and Asylum Act, the police ban on a picket outside Marks and Spencer, flood relief in Bangladesh, and the pollution caused by urban 4x4s. Which of these and many other worthy causes should the committed reformer give priority to?

The ‘Left’ may claim that it enjoys the best of both worlds, both supporting reforms and advocating revolution. But in fact its revolutionary posturing is just a matter of words, for its practical policies are purely reformist. Take the biggest Left organisation in Britain, the Socialist Workers Party, for instance. The 18 December issue of its weekly paper Socialist Worker carried an article on the pension myths being peddled by the government (for the Socialist take on this, see the November Socialist Standard). Here is part of the SWP’s ‘solution’ (from their website at http://www.socialistworker.co.uk):

"We don’t want the present miserly level of pensions and care, we want better.
So say we did want to increase the share of GDP spent on the old by 5 percent of GDP or more. This only means increasing the tax rate by 0.1 percent of GDP a year for 50 years, a tiny amount.
It might mean returning top tax rates to closer to the ones which Margaret Thatcher’s governments used for most of their time in office.
Or it might mean taxing private pensions of the rich, or returning corporation tax rates on big business to a decent level".

It is obvious that, in speaking of the rich and tax rates, the SWP envisage the continuation of capitalism, rather than its abolition. It might be argued that they are only trying to attract support on the basis of reformist policies but that they really aim at revolution. But firstly, it would be quite dishonest to do this, to get workers’ support on the basis of saying one thing while really wanting something quite different. Secondly, there is no reason why anyone who goes along with increasing corporation tax should, as a consequence of supporting this, somehow be won over to Socialism. And thirdly, the SWP are utterly silent about revolution and Socialism, suppressing all mention of ‘the suppression of wage labour’. Rosa Luxembourg, as we saw, viewed reforms as the means and revolution as the aim. Like the rest of the Left, the SWP have effectively embraced Bernstein’s view, abandoning revolution for reformist measures.

The Socialist response to all this is straightforward. If you want to get somewhere, aim for that destination directly, rather than going on detours and trusting that you will eventually, by however roundabout a route, arrive at where you want to be. There is, and can be, no reformist road to Socialism, nor can there be a mixture of reformist and revolutionary policies. The Socialist Party has just one aim, the establishment of Socialism.

Paul Bennett

Should the Left consider Socialism? (2005)

From the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The question arises through a controversy in my local newspaper which started with a letter headed “Ireland breeds strange brand of socialists”.  The writer alludes to Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, both of whom claim socialist credentials, and argues that both are sectarian organisations – in the politico-religious sense of that term. As evidence, the anonymous writer cites the fact that the two organisations concerned are overwhelmingly Catholic in membership and, thus, “unlike other socialists throughout the world” and leftist parties and governments, they are unable to make pronouncements and formulate policies concerning abortion, IVF screening, stem cell research and euthanasia.

Whatever might be said about the accuracy or otherwise of this view, it reflects the fact that ‘the Left’ in its multifarious facets is usually associated with ubiquitously ‘progressive’ causes, which, whatever their merits, do not amount to socialism. Factually, both ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ attitudes to social or ethical issues are focused on the question of how the existing form of society, capitalism, should deal with such questions.  What is more, support for and opposition to such issues is rarely the preserve of a particular political tendency.

That of course is not true of the Left’s claim on socialism. Here there is general approbation within the diverse organisations of the Left: their common objective is “socialism”. The problem is that socialism has become simply an indivisible but undefined catchword. Ask the question, “What is socialism?” and you get a multiplicity of answers. As far as the public-at-large is concerned, it is probably true to say that it really does accept the idea that socialism is what the Labour Party does when in office. 

That raises more questions than it answers. Currently, what Labour is doing in office is breaking the sacred tenets of what earlier Labour governments did, much to the ire of Old Labour supporters. Back at its roots, when the Labour Representation Committee became the British Labour Party, in 1906, Labour was truly “a broad church”. Its backbone was the Trade Unions seeking political clout for workers then, as now, living within capitalism.  Additionally, there were the myriad interests of supporters of many commonly regarded ‘progressive’ causes. These, probably the numerically superior members of the new party, saw in Labour the means to redress problems or advance causes within the framework of capitalist society.

To suggest today to a member of New or Old Labour that socialism involves the abolition of the wages system, and the production of goods and services solely for use in a world of common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production, would surely invite derision. But, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries such a definition would not have raised an eyebrow within the ranks of those who regarded themselves as socialists.  What did divide them was the means by which socialism could be obtained. 

On one side of that division were those who claimed that, because socialism could only be established on a foundation of human co-operation, its achievement necessitated democratic political action to bring about a conscious majority dedicated to its achievement.  Given that majority, delegates could then be elected to parliament mandated to abolishing the legal structures of capitalism and formally empowering the establishment of socialism.

But others long-fingered socialism on the grounds that the achievement of a majority would take too long.  Instead, this element opted for a policy of immediate demands aimed at the amelioration of the worst excesses of capitalism and gradually changing that system by a process of piecemeal reforms until over a period capitalism would evolve into socialism. How has this policy fared?

There have been nine Labour governments, covering seven periods of Labour rule, since the party emerged out of the Labour Representation Committee. Central to Labour’s programme from the beginning up to the mid-1960’s was a programme of nationalisation of basic industries. But it wasn’t until the period of the all-party government of WW2 that aspirations of general social reform directly affecting the citizen were firmed up in the all-party report drafted by the Liberal peer, Lord Beveridge. It was another Liberal, John Maynard Keynes, who gifted Labour what it perceived to be a certain economic formula for successfully underwriting Beveridge’s “Welfare State”.

          

It fell to Attlee’s Labour government in the aftermath of the war to introduce the legislation establishing the various schemes of social welfare agreed by the wartime coalition government.  In each instance the case for the various reforms was argued on the logic of capitalist efficiency and control. Indeed, rather than presenting a case for the abolition of poverty, the new schemes of social welfare were effectively structured to deal with the in-built and permanent nature of poverty within capitalism.

That said, it would be churlish not to recognise the merit in, for example, the National Health Service.  True, it was presented as, and intended to be, more efficient than the myriad disorganised group and panel schemes then prevailing but, at the outset especially, when it provided wholly free health care, it undoubtedly proved a boon to many people. Ironically, it was the Labour Party that soon after the establishment of the NHS first legislated for prescription charges. The service has undergone constant erosion and its decline would support the argument that capitalism cannot sustain meaningful reform.

Today, the excitement, the fervour and the hope that the early Labour Party engendered has gone and there can be no challenge to the assertion that it is a party of capitalism.  Factually, Labour’s claim to the support of the working class is based, and can only be based, on the argument that they run the affairs of capitalism better than their opponents.  That may or may not be true but it is a far cry from the early argument that the problems of society arose from the nature of its economic system and not the manner of running that system.

In fact ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are today just points on the administrative spectrum of capitalism, and while the lot of the working class has advanced materially, due to factors unconnected with the policies of the Left, real poverty, mere want and growing insecurity and fear still plague the land.  The rotten values of “yours” and “mine” have advanced social alienation and fuelled crime and violence while the world outside has become immeasurably more frightening and hostile to the values that motivated many in the early Labour Party. The Labour Party has become a fertile field for careerists many of whom share the contempt of their competitor colleagues in the Tory Party and ‘the business community’ for the working class, the real wealth-producers.

And what contribution has Old Labour and the Left in general to the dilemma of a working class robbed now of even hope?  Well... get back to the policies of Old Labour. But the problems of today are the logical result of pursuing the notion that capitalism, a system based on the exploitation of the working class, could by means of political alchemy be made to function in the interests of the working class.

One can understand the thinking of the early Labour reformers; they had what they believed was a good theory, but history has now demonstrated that their theory was built more on hope than a knowledge of the real nature of either capitalism or socialism. The so-called extreme Left might agree: Yes, let’s get back to socialism, they will say.  But it is a political conjuring trick for when they set out their stall they simply offer a plethora of the old, failed reforms.  They will talk about socialism but, as though it was a family skeleton, they will not tell you what socialism is.  Not that they know what it is, for just like the liberal Left they would treat with surprised derision Marx’s advice to the working class to remove from its banners the conservative slogan of a “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” and inscribe instead “Abolition of the wages system!”.

Should the Left consider socialism, rather than arguing that reform of some aspect of capitalism will prove attractive to the working class and is worthy of struggle? If so, then how good is the argument for promoting socialism?  Well, for a start, it is the only system of social organisation that can underwrite real democracy; it is the only means by which poverty in all its aspects, from mere want to Third World syndrome, can be banished; it is the only way by  which we can eliminate those awful conflicts of interest that necessitate armaments and cause wars; it is a compelling and urgent answer  to capitalism’s appalling destruction of the ecosphere. 

Finally, it can be the restoration of hope to a sick, visionless humanity and a challenge to the terrifying threat of bourgeois liberal “philosophers” who saw in the squalid demise of authoritarian state-capitalism in Eastern Europe the end of history and the spectre of eternal capitalism.  

Surely that is enough to gain genuine socialism a hearing, to open debate and start the process of consideration.

Richard Montague