Notes by the Way: The Purchasing Power of the Pound (1948)

The Notes by the Way Column from the October 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Purchasing Power of the Pound

At the T.U. Congress, in order to lead the delegates away from the policy of repudiating “wage-freezing” and pressing for higher wages, members of the General Council laid emphasis on the idea that lower prices would be more advantageous than higher wages. Mr. Arthur Deakin crystallised the view in the remark “I want to see £1 buy a pound’s worth of goods.” (Daily Express, 10/9/48.) Accurately speaking, the statement doesn’t mean anything, because what a £1 will buy is “a pound’s worth of goods” ; it can’t be anything else. The delegates, however, knew what he meant. It was a way of saying that he wants prices to stop rising and if possible he wants them to be reduced. Many workers think the same but what they have in mind is that they would like to see prices back to the level of 1939, or better still back to 1914, but without any fall in wages. If they kept the present level of wages and could spend them on goods at the much lower 1914 price level they would indeed have got something. It will, however, not happen, and the Government has never even suggested that they have any hope of seeing it happen. If prices came down by half, wages would soon follow, closely enough.

If the question is asked why are prices so much higher than in 1914 the greater part of the increase is easy to explain though the explanation is overlooked by many people.

In 1914, and again from 1925 to 1931, the British pound represented a certain weight of gold (113 grains of fine gold) and it was kept at that level automatically because, by law, Bank of England notes were convertible into gold or gold into notes. The American dollar also represented a fixed amount of gold, and the relationship of the weight of gold in the pound and dollar respectively was such that one pound equalled about 4.86 dollars. Now there is no convertibility of the pound into gold but, by agreement between the two governments, the pound is fixed at 4.03 dollars instead of the former 4.86 dollars. Also, since 1914, the dollar has been devalued and it too represents a smaller weight of gold than formerly; 59 per cent. of what it was in 1914.

The effect of these two changes taken together (i.e. that the dollar represents less gold, and that the pound represents fewer dollars) is that the pound now represents just under half the weight of gold it represented in 1914.

If we assumed that the value of gold itself had kept unchanged and therefore one ounce of gold would buy as much as in 1914. the effect of reducing the weight of gold represented by the Pound to one-half of what it used to be would naturally be that the pound would purchase only half as much as it did in 1914. There have been other factors also at work but by comparison with this they are of relatively small importance.

Incidentally it is worth noticing that those who believe that “we are no longer on the gold standard” are very wide of the mark.

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The Russian Concentration Camps

Two exiled opponents of the Stalin Regime, Dallin and Nicolaevsky, wrote “Forced Labour in Soviet Russia,” giving a terrible picture of the conditions they allege exist in the Russian concentration camps. In our February issue we published a comment made by the Manchester Guardian in which the editor, while questioning some statements, accepted the description as convincing evidence of the inhumanity of the system of forced labour imposed on political and other prisoners. The Communists and their supporters deny the truth of the allegations. The Anglo-Russian News Bulletin (June 28th) published a review of “Forced Labour in Soviet Russia” by Mr. Rothstein, who is Lecturer on Soviet Institutions at the University of London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Because Mr. Rothstein is presumably familiar with conditions in Russia, and able to obtain whatever information the Russian Government makes available, his review is interesting—but chiefly for what it does not say. He argues that the book contains contradictory statements and figures, that the authors are weak on arithmetic, that their estimates of the numbers in the camps could not be correct, that they make some statements “without a shred of evidence,” that they are guilty of distortions and malicious gossip and so on. The obvious intention of this line of attack is to cast such doubts on the reliability of Dallin and Nicolaevsky that the reader will conclude that he cannot believe anything they say. But before coming to any such conclusion it is necessary to notice that Mr. Rothstein stops short just at the point where he should be telling us something positive. We naturally expect him to tell us that there are no forced labour camps, or alternatively, give us some evidence that conditions in them are not inhuman. Why this silence on the part of Mr. Rothstein? Can it be that this “authority” on Soviet Institutions does not know about the institution of forced labour?

Further examination raises other doubts about Mr. Rothstein. He starts off by dismissing the whole book as being “largely a rehash of what Mr. Dallin . . . was writing in 1921, with some recent ‘documentation’ which will not stand up to serious analysis.” Later he brushes aside charges about contingents of forced labour raised since 1930 from the collective farms. Then he ridicules the idea that forced labour could have been used for the purpose of accumulating gold, on the ground that in the years 1934-1938 Russian foreign trade showed a huge favourable balance ”and therefore did not depend in the least on such accumulation.” The whole trend of Mr. Rothstein’s phrasing is to convey that at no time, from 1921 onwards, were the charges true. Unfortunately for him, those admirers of the Soviet regime, Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their “Soviet Communism” admitted and deplored the existence of concentration camps in which political prisoners, and peasants who resisted being forced into collective farms were “set to hard labour in return for a bare subsistence.” The Webbs were often eulogised by the Communists and as recently as 13th July, 1948, the Daily Worker praised their “power of objective observation and judgment” shown in another book on Russia. This is what the Webbs wrote in “Soviet Communism” (1937 edition, p.581) about one of the concentration camps :

“The miseries of a rigorous climate were aggravated by a cruel administration by brutal jailers, in which every kind of torment seems to have been employed.”

The matter was placed beyond question by the fact, as related by the Webbs, that after an outcry outside Russia, an official inquiry took place by the Russian authorities which resulted in the shooting or dismissal of many of the jailers. The camps were reorganised, but even then, said the Webbs, “the conditions, we fear, continued to be inhuman” (p.584).

So it seems that although Mr. Rothstein scoffs at the charges they were so well-founded up to 1937 that they convinced the Webbs.

About gold production Mr. Rothstein’s curious argument can be shown from official Russian figures to be entirely wrong. He argues that it cannot be true that forced labour was needed for gold production, because Russia at that time, 1934-1938, had no need of gold for foreign trade. Mr. Rothstein should tell this to the Russian Government, they would he surprised. In the Moscow publication “U.S.S.R. in Construction” (May, 1937) it is shown that gold production in Russia was rising at a stupendous rate during the years in question. Whereas in 1934 production was 157 per cent. above the 1930 level, by 1930 it had reached 340 per cent. above 1930.

So much for Mr. Rothstein. As his implied denial of the existence of forced labour camps in the years before 1937 is found to be worthless it is not unreasonable to be very suspicious about anything he says of present conditions.

* * *

What Nationalisation does for Tilling’s Shareholders

Thomas Tilling, the bus and road transport firm, with an issued capital of £4,420,000, have agreed to sell out to the Government for £25 million, and the purchase price ”will be paid in Transport stock, or cash, or partly in one form and partly in the other.” (Daily Mail, 9/9/48.)

A year ago the Company’s £1 shares were selling at 53s. 3d. When negotiations began they jumped to 75s. 3d., and when the agreement was announced they rose to nearly £6. As the City Editor of the Daily Express remarks (9/9/48), “For shareholders—State ownership with a smile.”

The Daily Herald’s City Editor (10/9/48) writes: 

“The generous purchase price of £24,800,000 offered by the Transport Commission for Tillings road transport and haulage interests started a boom in bus shares in the Stock Exchange yesterday. Prices soared to high record levels which added about £10,000,000 to market values.” 

The Daily Mail (9/9/48) still thought, however, that it was a hard bargain for the company and that the price agreed upon "is probably well below the real value.”

The company will still continue in business as it has other interests in addition to those sold to the Government.

* * *

The Law says it is preposterous

A man who took seriously the statement that under nationalisation the railways become “our” property was fined £1, with 15 guineas costs. He had refused to leave Kings Cross Station and was charged with trespassing. The magistrate said:

“The proposition that the railways are now nationalised and that any member of the public is entitled to go on their property and cannot be requested to leave is really a preposterous one and one that cannot be accepted for a moment.” Star (18/9/48).

* * *

The Lucky Tories

The following report of a speech by Mr. Cyril Osborne, Conservative M.P. for Louth, at Castle Donington on Saturday, 11th September, was published in the Star (12/9/48) :

“Fate has played a dirty trick on the Socialists. They have come to power just at the worst time; instead of being able to give everybody more the war has so impoverished us that they are compelled to force austerity down our throats. Soon they will have to enforce industrial discipline, harsher than the Tories ever dared in pre-war days. It will be bitter medicine for their supporters, but it will do them good. The Conservatives are lucky to be out of office during these days of bitter pill-taking, and the nation should be grateful to the Socialists for having provided such a willing doctor in Sir Stafford Cripps to administer such unpalatable medicine.”

Mr. Osborne here says that impoverishment due to war compelled the Labour Government, to do as they have done; but this certainly won’t prevent the Tories from trying to catch votes at the next election by laying the blame on the Labour Government and claiming that it would have been better under the Tories. We also remember that under long years of Tory Government there was always some excuse to hand to explain working class poverty and unemployment and we never remember any Tory Government that gave anything to the workers.

The truth is that capitalism run by Tories and capitalism run by the Labour Party are both unlucky for the workers.

* * *

Communist Defence of Russian Dictatorship

In the Daily Worker (24/8/48) Mr. J. R. Campbell answered a letter from a correspondent who wrote pointing out that Russia is “without democracy, without the right of criticism, ruled by a single party. You call this freedom. I call it slavery.”

In his lengthy reply Mr. Campbell does everything except meet the real criticism, which is that the Russian workers are forbidden by law to form political parties of their own choice. Unless they are members of the Communist Party they cannot belong to any political party. At elections, unless they want to vote for the candidate approved by the Communist Party, all they could do would be to vote against him; they are prevented from running opposition candidates. The membership of the Communist Party is only a very small minority of the population, and the overwhelming majority are not in a political party and cannot be.

What Mr. Campbell does is to argue as if the critics of the dictatorship are concerned solely with the right to form avowedly capitalist parties. He confines his statement to giving reasons why the workers in Russia do not need parties of the “capitalist opposition.” It may look to Mr. Campbell that this is a clever way of dodging the issue, but it only lands him in another awkward spot. The Russian Government doesn’t have to forbid the formation of capitalist parties like the Liberals and Tories unless there are in Russia people who want to form such parties. Now who would want to form capitalist parties in Russia today? and why would they want to form them? Obviously the capitalists would want to form parties of their own ; but are there capitalists in Russia? Here Mr. Campbell is in a dilemma. For the purpose of claiming that Socialism has been established in Russia he would have to maintain that there are no capitalists there; but in order to justify forbidding them to form political parties he would have to maintain that they do exist.

If he plumps for the former position and denies the existence of capitalists in Russia, then he is left to explain that it is some other groups of people who want to form capitalist parties and have to be prevented. So we have to assume that it is peasants or workers, who, knowing all the benefits of life in the Soviet paradise nevertheless want to organise Liberal or Tory capitalist parties and would do so if the law did not forbid it.

Having thus got himself into difficulties by pretending that it is only capitalist parties that are illegal in Russia perhaps Mr. Campbell will try to find time to deal with the real question which is why the workers are forcibly prevented from forming their own political parties; and how this can be squared with the claim that it is democratic.

Incidentally Mr. Campbell should take his courage in both hands and offer to tell British workers why he thinks it would be good for them, too, if they were allowed to belong to a political party only by permission of the Executive Committee of the C.P.G.B. and be thrown into concentration camps if they objected.

Edgar Hardcastle

"Nor Prison Bars a Cage?" (1950)

From the February 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since Russia became the main rival to Western Capitalism, the capitalists of the West have seen fit to acknowledge, indeed to publicise, the vicious acts of their counterparts in that country. Their purpose, as we shall see, is not in the noble cause of truth, for they could have told that at least fifteen years ago, but the far more practical reason of getting the workers “at it.” And. many of the workers who four and five years back were wearing hammer and sickle badges in their lapels and cheering the mention of Stalin, are now prepared or even eager to fight their ex-allies. Not so the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Just as we took the line in both 1914 and 1939, that the workers of this country had nothing to gain by slaying fellow workers in Germany, so do we point out that a future war with Russia will benefit neither British nor Russian workers, but will be no more than a further dispute between the capitalists of these countries. But in the meantime it is our bounden duty to lay these distortions of the truth and show up this propaganda for what it is really worth.

A few months ago the Daily Express carried the headline, “Britain publishes Russia’s forced labour laws," the Evening Standard, "Soviet slave laws revealed," and the Daily Herald, so different from the days of not so very long ago had the biggest headline of the lot saying, “Soviet slave camp code shown to world." Many workers, who previously sympathised with the system of administration in capitalist Russia, rapidly changed their ideas. Those who looked just a little farther than the news put right on their plates by their masters, were not surprised. As long ago as 1935, a translation of the “Corrective Code ” was obtainable in Britain. It has taken the capitalist class a long while to find it!

Anyway up to this time, far from deploring this penal code, various spokesmen and apologists of Capitalism, both British and Russian, were quite vehement in applauding it. Sir Montague Burton said, “A better opportunity for prisoners to become useful members of society" (Yorkshire Evening News, 25710/35). Canon F. J. Shirley, in a sermon in Canterbury Cathedral, preached "Russia is reclaiming the criminals; the system is redemptive and men are restored to good moral life, assets once more to the community” (Kentish Gazette and Canterbury Press, 7/9/35). In March, 1937, the A.E.U. delegation published a report applauding the system, as did the Quakers in 1933. So we see that there has been a great deal of change in their ideas; there has been none in the Russian penal system.

But in slating the propagandists of Western Capitalism, we must not allow those of the East to escape scot free. Equal trickery comes from such Moscow henchmen as the Communist Party and its subsidiary Anglo-Soviet Society. While one group attacks the Russian system, the other attempts to defend it.

In its pamphlet "The Forced Labour Swindle” the British Soviet Society try to smooth over these revelations and get into such deep water that if their words were true the Russian worker would be better off in prison than out of it.

They begin by trying to establish a wealth of difference between the words "corrective” as used in the Russian text and “forced" in the newspapers. Surely this treatment is not voluntary?

Prisoners have much more freedom, we are told. When they are not performing their tasks, they are free to indulge in “political” education. In a country which recognises the need for only one political party, we can well imagine what form that education takes. Incidentally political prisoners are treated exactly the same as criminals.

Apart from these points it seems, in theory at least, that the conditions in Russian prisons are similar to those in the rest of the capitalist world so far as material conditions are concerned. In accordance with modern ideas they may attempt to rehabilitate the recalcitrant worker as an honest and servile wage-slave, but as a recent report by several psychologists pointed out, such systems are doomed to failure, for no matter how ideal the conditions in one of these centres may be, the subject must eventually return to the environment which was the cause of his misdemeanours.

The right of exile is excused by the author of this pamphlet and made to sound as if it doesn’t really matter. The exile is allowed to take his family with him and pays "only” five to fifteen per cent, of his income as cost. They are allowed twelve free days per year. They fail to emphasise the vast climatic and geographic difference between, say, Moscow or Kiev and the frozen wilds of Siberia.

It is, by the way, possible to imprison without a trial in Russia, and the writer compares this law with Defence Regulation 18B. Countering the argument that this Regulation is only enforced during a war, he says that Russia has been in peril for the whole thirty years of the Communist Party’s regime. But if the conditions in that country are as rosy as he would have us believe, who on earth would want to sabotage them?

As a conclusion the pamphlet points out that forced labour exists in many parts of the world, and cites the forced porterage in Tanganyika, Papua, Indonesia and Malaya. Attack, they say, is the best form of defence. But we know all this, and expose it wherever it exists, whether in Russia or Timbuctoo. And furthermore we know that wherever slaves exist there must be a class of masters, in other words, Socialism does not exist.

In 1917, the Russian revolution and what followed, transformed a semi-feudal society into an effective capitalist state. The fact that the particular organisation of Russia is worded with a hotch-potch of "left- wing” jargon counts for nothing. In Russia wage-labour exists as the counterpart of capital: there are armies, navies, airforces, police and prisons. All are hall-marks of Capitalism. That being so, the task which faces the Russian worker is similar to that which faces the workers throughout the modern world—the casting off of the yoke of exploitation and the establishment of Socialism.

Ronald.

World View: Sent to Siberia (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been called the Frozen Hell. There are no trees. Nothing but rock and tundra. In the winter, which lasts from mid-September until the beginning of May, when the snow begins to melt, the temperature goes as low as –75oC, with blizzards drifting the snow eight-storeys high. The spring and summer last a brief three months; and for two months, in mid-winter, the sun never rises above the horizon. Sixty five miles to the west, the estuary of the Yenisey-Angara river (3,445 miles long) flows, during the short spring and summer months, into the Kara Sea and then the Arctic Ocean. For nine months of the year, it can only be reached by air or by a nuclear-powered icebreaker from Murmansk, docking at the estuary port of Dudinka.

Such is the location of Norilsk, the world’s most northern industrial city, with a population of 200,000 inhabitants.

In 1930, there was nothing there, except a few reindeers and reindeer-hunters. Nevertheless, in that year, Stalin proposed the Angara-Yenisey Combine for central Siberia, similar to the Kuznetz Combine planned for western Siberia. Shortly after, nickel and other metal deposits were discovered. And in 1935¸ construction of what was to be the city of Norilsk and the Norilsk Metallurgical Combine began. The problem, however, was, as elsewhere in Siberia: where would the Soviet state find the hundreds of thousands of workers it needed in such an inhospitable place? Few would volunteer to go there.

The solution was the collectivisation of agriculture and the dispossession of the kulaks, and other peasants, in Ukraine and south-western Russia. Together with “Trotskyists” and other “enemies of the people”, they were rounded-up and shipped off to eastern Russia and Siberia the Soviet Union’s era of what Marx called the “primitive accumulation of capital” had begun.

Responsibility for the administration of the Norilsk Combine was the Glavnoye Upravlniye Lagerei, or Gulag, the Chief Directorate of Labour Camps, a department of the Narodny Kommissariat Gosudarvetvernoy Bezopasnosti, or NKVD, the People’s Commissariat of State Security. After the Second World War, when the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states, eastern Poland, hundreds of thousands of Balts, and thousands of Banderisti¸ Ukrainian Nationalists, were arrested and sent to such places as Vorkuta and Norilsk. Just how many prisoners passed through the Norilsk Combine is not known, as even the present Russian authorities in Krasnoyarsk, where the records are still kept, refuse to permit anyone to see them. Between 1935 and 1955, it has been unofficially estimated that 500,000 prisoners passed through Norilsk. Most died there, buried in unmarked graves or in holes in the ice.

Stalin died on 2 March 1953. Following his death, there was general unrest in many of the Soviet labour camps, including those in the Norilsk Combine. The strike began in zone 5 on 25 May. It soon spread throughout the camps and mines. Thousands of prisoners refused to work. The strike, which lasted about two months, was finally suppressed with many killed by the NKVD guards. After the strike, conditions for the prisoners were, for some time, considerably worse. But 1956 saw the beginning of the end of the vast Gulag system. The rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union required a more sophisticated workforce of “free” wage-slaves. Not that that made a lot of difference to the surviving ex-prisoners in Norilsk! Nevertheless, some returned to western Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere.

But for many, after ten or fifteen years imprisonment, and five years “administrative exile”, there was nowhere to go. Some of the women married former guards and NKVD (later KGB) officials. All became state employees, or were pensioned off. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, ever-increasing inflation ate up their modest savings. Today, the Combine is no longer a state-run enterprise. No longer are the workers exploited by the state. It has been privatised; and according to James Meek (Observer Magazine, 4 July), “it was bought for fraction of its commercial value in 1995 by Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s richest industrialists, a man made very wealthy now by the old slavery and the new freedoms, and a business partner of George Soros”. Private capitalism had replaced state capitalism.

Yenseisk lies on the banks of the Yenisey river, 800 miles to the south of Norilsk. Trees grow here, and it is less cold. Indeed, global warming has been noticeable in Yenseisk. It has become milder, with the minimum winter temperature rising from –52oC to –40oC. Even vegetables can be grown under glass. Nevertheless, the ice only melts on the Yenisey in May, when boats from Dudinka arrive, or pass south to Krasnoyarsk. And over the last couple of years, a few thousand workers have managed to escape the frozen hell, and the smog and pollution, of Norilsk, downstream to Krasnoyarsk.

There is a road between Yenseisk and Krasnoyarsk, but no railway; and, furthermore, the local airline, which links such towns and cities as Norilsk, Yenseisk and Krasnoyarsk, is in deep trouble as it has lost most of its pilots. In fact, according to a local priest, Father Grigory, interviewed by the Guardian (3 December 1997), Yenseisk is “a dying town that lived in the past, by subsidies. There’s no industry. Now, it’s thrown back on its resources. The teachers and doctors haven’t been paid for months”.

Krasnoyarsk, a city of 900,000 inhabitants 200 miles south of Yenseisk, is the administrative centre of the area, and is situated on the Yenisey where it is crossed by the Trans-Siberian Railway. It has factories manufacturing equipment for Siberia’s mining industries, a timber combine and a food processing industry. But like Norilsk and Yenseisk, it too is depressed and probably in terminal decay.

One hundred miles to the west of Krasnoyarsk, also on the Trans-Siberian Railway, is the huge Achinsk Company, recently privatised, which produces alumna, most of which it sends to the Krasnoyarsk Aluminium (KrAZ) Company. It does not make a profit, yet it is the source of massive profits. It pays no taxes to the state. For it does not sell its produce direct to Krasnoyarsk aluminium, but through a series of intermediate companies, owned by the managers of Achinsk Company and KrAZ, all of which make “a killing”, and pay very little tax. Much of this money ultimately finds its way, in dollars, to the Bank of New York. Like Potanin, the owner of the Norilsk Combine, Georgi Lokk, the Chief Executive of the loss-making Achinsk ore combine, is a very rich man; from wealth created by the exploited, poverty-stricken workers of Siberia.

Peter E. Newell

Notes by the Way: You Have Heard This One Before (1948)

The Notes by the Way column from the March 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

You Have Heard This One Before

Mr. Hector McNeil, Minister of State in the Labour Government, spoke at Brussels about the new European grouping:

   “If we are to have a Western Union then this will not only entail immediate sacrifices for both of us but it will also mean important political decisions by both of us.
    “It almost looks as if Europe has taken a new decision.
    “She not only once more maintains that no dictatorship will be accepted but she announces that she is taking immediate steps now to combine to produce the conditions preventing the emergency and the advance of any dictator or any authoritarian system.
  "That is the thought, I believe, behind the Marshall Plan, the Paris Conference, and certainly activating the recent speech by Mr. Bevin.
   “The price in cash, in effort, and in sacrifice of all kinds will be worth while if we are able to ensure that no kind of authoritarian rule will arise in Europe, from whatever quarter it originates.”

(Daily Mail, 6/2/48.)

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The Policy of the “Daily Herald”

In evidence to the Royal Commission on the Press Mr. Francis Williams, former editor of the Daily Herald, disclosed how conflict arose between Odhams and the T.U.C. about policy. The following is from the Times (13/2/48):

   “Minutes of evidence taken on October 15, when Mr. Williams avid Mr. Hannen Swaffer appeared before the commission, were issued yesterday as a White Paper (Cmd. 7318, Stationery Office, Is. 3d.).
  ‘‘Mr. Williams, whose editorship of the Daily Herald lasted from 1936 until just after the beginning of the war, spoke of difficulties which arose in borderline cases, where it was not easy to differentiate between commercial policy (for which Odhams Press, the majority shareholders, were responsible) and the political policy (which was decided by the trade unions, who were minority shareholders). Conflicts occurred, particularly before the war and at its beginning, when the general editorial policy was to emphasize the seriousness of international developments and the dangers in Germany, and to criticise much of the Chamberlain Government’s policy.
  “Often the commercial proprietors felt that such a policy, if vigorously conducted, might drive away some public and advertising support. On a number of occasions leading articles, were, without consultation with the editor, sub-edited by deletion of a fair number of passages by the then chairman of the commercial board of directors. It was the culmination of a clash of that kind which led to his (Mr. Williams’s) resignation.”

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The Russian Concentration Camps

The following arc extracts from a Manchester Guardian leader under the heading “Forced Labour” based on “Forced Labour in Soviet Russia” by David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky (published by Hollis & Carter):

   “The existence of ‘corrective labour camps’ in Russia is, of course, well known and even officially admitted. As long ago as 1931 Molotov told the Sixth Congress of Soviets of ‘these mass projects employing those deprived of liberty.’ A good deal of information about them may still be gleaned from the Soviet Press. But the vast scale of the system, which may ‘employ’ over ten million people, and the terrible conditions in those camps can be judged only from the stories of those men and women who have experienced them . . . All of them, naturally, are 'prejudiced’; some of them are clearly untrustworthy. Yet the total impression is so convincing that an impartial reader is forced to conclude that if only half is true it still remains a damning account of an inhuman system.”
  “The prisoners are paid—but so little that it hardly counts. They are fed—but only enough to keep them working and not always enough for that. If they die, as they do in hundreds and thousands, it is not because the State wishes them to die, but because the conditions in the swamps and forests of Siberia are so fearful that only the strongest can survive.”

(Manchester Guardian, 20/1 /48).

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A Great Game

“Major Frank (Bring ’em back alive) Buckley is what the reference books call 'a football manager out of the top drawer.’ And the Major certainly knows a Soccer player when he sees one. When he puts over a deal it is more reminiscent of Big Business in Lombard Street than the simple relaxation of kicking a piece of leather around.
 “Major Buckley was the manager who sold £100,000 worth of players when he was at Wolverhampton.
  ‘‘Now at Hull he announces that nine young players are for sale on the transfer list.
  “It is a curious sort of auction in humanity, for the football business, which has a turnover of millions, is not noticeably sentimental or generous to the lads who do most of the hard work and provide all the skill.
  “Will these players easily get another job? Are they affected by the Direction of Labour Order? And, if it is policy to train a surplus of players., who looks after the welfare of boys who don’t quite make the grade, or get abruptly put on the transfer list?
  "It’s a great game—while it lasts.”

(Cassandra, Daily Mirror, 2/1/48.)

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The I.L.P.

The I.L.P., which once had over 200 of its members in Parliament as Labour M.P.s, has now faded out as a Parliamentary party. The loss of the deposit by the I.L.P. candidate at Camlachie set the seal on it and one proposal to be considered at the Annual Conference is that the Party give up fighting elections and devote itself to propaganda.

It was reported (Manchester Guardian, 26/1/48) that at the Conference of the Scottish division a proposal was on the agenda to alter the name to “The Socialist Party (with which is incorporated the I.L.P.)”. But it would take more than a change of name to turn the I.L.P. into a Socialist Party.

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Too Many Shoes

“NEW YORK, Saturday. — American manufacturers predict that production will exceed sales of shoes by 40,000,000 pairs in 1948.”

(News Chronicle, 21/12/47).

The truth about Russia (1981)

From the November 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Why don't you go back to Russia?" is the standard comment of the wage slave who stumbles across a socialist propagandist and cannot put up an argument. The fact that most socialists do not come from Russia and have been there does not deter the enthusiastic anti-socialists. But who can blame them? After all, the Communist Party is constantly telling them that Russia is socialist or communist. The Tory party use the myth of "Communist Russia" to discredit the socialist idea. The media will apply the label "Marxist" to any dictator who cares to use it.

Of course, times change and people learn. When in the 1930s the Socialist Party of Great Britain referred to Russia and its satellites as state capitalist dictatorships we were howled down by the Left. Our outdoor meetings were disrupted for saying that the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia was no more socialist than it was during Hitler's Nazi regime. These days our point of view is gaining credibility. The Trotskyists, whose entire case is based upon an acceptance of Lenin's anti-socialist Bolshevism, will reluctantly accept that Russia is not socialist but insist that it was in 1917. Quite how a society transfers from socialism back to capitalism, they have yet to disclose. Other Leftists say that Russia is undergoing a very long transition period from capitalism to socialism (or from socialism to communism as they confusedly put it). In fact, Russia is no more or less in transition to socialism or communism (the terms are synonymous) than any other part of capitalist society. The contradictions of state capitalism are creating within the working class a consciousness which will lead to the abolition of capitalist social relationships; but that will only happen when the workers want and understand socialism and then organised politically for it. When it does happen it will be despite the wishes of the Russian Communist Party — not because of them.

The Russian Communist Party, like its counterparts in Poland, Hungary, China, Albania and the rest of the misnamed socialist countries, is no different in its objective from the Tories in Britain. They stand solely for the interests of rent, interest and profit. They will ban strike, lock up trade unionists and other dissidents, use the police to protect their unearned luxury and set the workers to war in defence of their economic interests. Our political hostility to them is no less than our hostility to Thatcher, Foot or Reagan. As defenders of capitalism they are unworthy of the support of the working class.

As early as 1918 the Socialist Standard was forecasting the state capitalist outcome of the Bolshevik revolution. Being an undemocratic coup d'etat in a backward economy with a non-politically conscious population, mainly consisting of peasants, the only result could be a new ruling class running capitalism in its own interests. Far from being a socialist revolution, 1917 was Russia's 1789. The events of Poland during the summer of 1980 have again vindicated our view. Why were our fellow workers striking in Poland? It was because their enemies are the same as ours: the international capitalist class.

On 16 August 1981 The Observer newspaper (not The Morning Star) published a statement by Mykola Pohyba, a Ukrainian dissident, who was a prisoner in a penal colony in Buchs. The statement was smuggled [out of] Buchs. The statement [is published in] full because of the light it throws on capitalism in Russia.

Steve Coleman   

MYKOLA POHYBA'S STATEMENT

It is no secret that fundamental human rights have been consistently trampled on in the Soviet Union. The flouting and complete disregard of human rights is felt most acutely by workers who are powerless to oppose the political and socio-economic oppression.

My life and my so-called "slanderous activities" may well serve as examples. I am presently serving a second term of imprisonment. In 1975 I was charged under Article 187 and sentenced to three years' imprisonment by the Kiev Oblast Court. In 1979 I was charged under Article 206 and sentenced to five years in prison by the Kiev People's Court.

As a worker relegated to the lowest rung of the Soviet social ladder I personally have experienced economic, socio-political and national oppression. Understandably, I could not help but give thought to and consider the real reasons for this oppression. With time I realised that fellow workers were also victims of exploitation and that this exploitation was greater the lower one found oneself on the social ladder.

I came to the conclusion that ultimately it is the state that is the exploiter, along with the State-party bourgeoisie which is in its service and which is the one wielding the real power in the country. The socialism and internationalism of which one so often speaks in the Soviet Union is nothing more than a smokescreen for a means of production and distribution of material goods which is not in the least socialist.

In short, I have come to the conclusion that our country is actually a State capitalist society with a totalitarian form of government.

In informal conversations with fellow workers I expressed some of my views regarding Soviet reality. I saw nothing wrong in so doing. Specifically, I noted that the real causes of our impoverished condition are to be found not in mistakes committed by the administrative apparatus, but in the very system of production which, in actual fact, is capitalist.

In my conversations, as well as in the leaflets which I wrote and then posted throughout Kiev on bulletin boards, monuments, etc (for having posted my leaflets on a statue of Lenin, I was charged under Article 206 with hooliganism), I showed that the Soviet labour unions (i.e. state-party organisations) neither constitute a separate autonomous organisation nor do they represent the rights and economic interests of the working class.

They are, in fact, an integral part of the Party-State apparatus whose principal aim is to extract the utmost from the worker while keeping the working class in blind obedience, checked and ensured by a system of meting out at first minor and then even greater benefits. The dispensation of benefits depends on factors such as good behaviour success in meeting the designated quotas, and loyalty to the State.

Those workers who express dissatisfaction, be it outrightly, or indirectly, are demoted to the lowest-paying jobs, lose any privileges and are put under the "care" of Soviet penal authorities. All this is done with no objections raised by the labour union.

I believe that I am not alone in my endeavour, that the situation in the Soviet Union is rife for the founding of independent labour unions as opposed to party-state ones), which would prove effective in solving the problems with which the working class is faced. I explained to my fellow workers that we not only had the right to talk of independent labour unions, but the right to organise them.

Throughout the course of my so-called "slanderous" activity, I came to see that similar views are held by many workers who as a rule may be characterised as independent-minded. I became aware that their numbers are growing daily.

And even though the ruling class will go to any length to check independent-minded workers whose protest is born of spontaneity, repressions will no longer be able to suppress that awareness which has been awakened in the consciousness of the people.

The recent events in Poland have shown that the working class is capable of leading the struggle for its rights and freedoms, for a feasible improvement of its well-being. The effectiveness of the struggle waged depends on the degree of solidarity of the working class, on the degree of self-organisation.

This, in short, is the extent of the 'slanderous activity' for which I am being 'rehabilitated' behind barbed wires. I ask that the Ukrainian human rights group make my letter known to the people of the Soviet Union and to world public opinion. But foremostly, to the labour unions throughout the world.  Let them be the ones to determine who the real culprit is and what his true motives are.

Russia explained (1980)

Book Review from the February 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Russian Enigma by Ante Ciliga. Ink Links. £5.95 (paperback).

In 1940 an English translation of a book by a Yugoslav who had spent three years in the early 1930s in a Russian camp for political prisoners was published under the title The Russian Enigma. It has long been known to us as an interesting and useful account of the emergence in Russia in the twenties and thirties of a new privileged and exploiting class, ruling on the basis of state capitalism. Its re-publication, in an expanded form to include parts left out of the 1940 edition, is therefore to be welcomed.

Ciliga was a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party who went to Russia in 1926 and who got himself sentenced to three years in a "political isolator" (1930-33), followed by two years exile in Siberia (1933-35), for having supported the Trotskyist opposition to Stalin. He was eventually allowed to leave Russia at the end of 1935 and so survived to give this account of political and social life in Russia while he was there.

Ciliga entered prison as a Trotskyist but left it convinced that Russia was state capitalist (and not a "proletarian State" as Trotsky said) and that the Bolshevik bureaucracy was well on the way to becoming a new ruling class, exploiting the workers and collective farmers and enjoying definite economic privileges (special housing, shops, restaurants). In the end he also came to see that Lenin as well as Stalin and Trotsky was party responsible for the state capitalism that was evolving Russia. Most of the chapter where he describes his break with Lenin, entitled "Lenin Too", was omitted from the 1940 edition and so appears here in English for the first time. It is good enough to be published as separate pamphlet—as it has been in France.

In the early 1930s political prisoners in Russia still enjoyed a special status and were allowed to discuss politics. Ciliga's account of the discussions that went on in his camp make fascinating reading, as every aspect of "the Russian enigma" seems to have been explored: Was Russia state capitalist or a petty-bourgeois state or a "proletarian state"? Was the bureaucracy a class or a caste? Would it require a revolution to remove them or could this be done by reform?

Particularly interesting is the conversation had with a group of Mensheviks he came across in transit from one camp to another. He went up to them and asked why they wanted to restore capitalism in Russia. He goes on:

They were very much taken aback at first by the way in which I had stated the problem; then one of them answered, "It would be perfectly futile to wish to restore capitalism in Russia, for the good reason that capitalism, though in a modified form, exists there and has never ceased to exist"  . . . We were shown with abundant detail that the present system in Russia had preserved all the essential characteristics of capitalism" commodity production,* wages, exchange markets, money, profits and even partial sharing out of profits among bureaucrats in the form of high salaries, privileges and so on (p. 194).

It would be interesting to know whether such ideas, which are the same as ours on this point, still circulate in Russia. Equally interesting—and equally correct—was the view expressed by a certain V. Smirnov on the Russian revolution:

There has never been a proletarian revolution, nor a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, there has simply been a 'popular revolution' from below and a dictatorship from above. Lenin was never ideologist of the proletariat. From beginning to end he was an ideologist of the intelligentsia 9p. 280).

Ciliga himself did not go this far and continued to regard the Russian revolution as having been in some way "proletarian" even though he had rejected both Trotskyism and Leninism. But his book is still important reading for anyone who wants to understand how State capitalism came to Russia.

Adam Buick

* We have corrected, on the basis of the French version, "production of goods" to "commodity production"—a good example of how the English translation is not always up to standard.

Forced Labour Camps In Russia (1963)

Book Review from the November 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

So there were forced labour camps in Soviet Russia after all. Remember those days during Stalin's reign when this was hotly denied by the servile Communist parties, when even to suggest it was to get yourself called a liar, social fascist, reactionary imperialist, or whatever other term of abuse happened to be fashionable at the time? Well, that's all gone now that Alexander Solzhenitsyn has told his story.

His novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Gollancz, 18s.), describes the appalling conditions in one such camp, where the prisoners were made to toil over twelve hours a day outdoors despite the sub-zero temperatures of the Siberian winter, Their food rations were utterly inadequate, their clothing pitifully thin and ragged. It was indeed an achievement merely to survive from one day to the next.

This was one of many "special" camps, as they were known, set up by Stalin's Security Chief Beria (who was later executed when Khrushchev rose to power). It was organised for those serving from eight to twenty-five years under the notorious Article 58 of the old Criminal Code, but lucky was the man who served only the sentence originally imposed on him. For the authorities had a very convenient habit of adding another term quite arbitrarily, just as soon as the first one has expired. And then perhaps there was exile after that, if he was still alive.

There were many "crimes" for which he could be incarcerated. The hero—not really an inappropriate term—is sent for a ten year stretch on a trumped up charge of spying. Solzhenitsyn himself can speak with some authority here, because he spent eight years in a camp in Kazakhstan. His offence? Making remarks derogatory to Stalin.

This story first appeared in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir (New World) in November last year, and this in itself is significant of a trend in the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin. There has been a tendency to relax the iron fist somewhat, but although thousands of prisoners have been released and allowed to return home, it seems to be the first time that such writing has been allowed to be published. One might almost call it a tacit official admission of the existence of the labour camps.

But more than that, Khrushchev has striven to destroy the image of Stalin for ever, something he had to do if he was to consolidate his own power and gain support for the economic and political changes he knew must come. In the light of this, it was not surprising that Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish his novel, although it was a sensation when it appeared and caused heated discussion and controversy throughout Russia.

Perhaps there will now be other such novels to push the lid a little further off the Soviet cauldron. Who knows, we may even get a glimpse of life in some of the camps which exist now in that unhappy country. Where else, we wonder, would the thousands of youngsters have gone after being torn from their homes and forcibly transported eastwards, following the 1956 Hungarian revolt? The Russian ruling class can be just as ruthless under Khrushchev, when their interests demand.

For the time being though, it is well to read this book and reflect on the horrors which capitalism is capable of inflicting on us. Solzhenitsyn is a promising writer who has a direct and simple, yet telling style, which even in the first few pages gives us a fair picture of the brutality and degradation of camp life. But perhaps the outstanding tragedy is that it has all been perpetrated in the name of Socialism so that, welcome though the truth now is, the job of the real Socialist is just as hard as ever.

E. T. C.