Editorial: Join the protest (2001)

Editorial from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the electoral circus in full swing the parties have been competing with one another in a seemingly endless round of pledges, promises, scare stories and counter claims. And the longer this circus goes on, the less interest most voters show in it. The news media openly spends more time telling us about “the election” itself – its stratagems and ruses – than about the policies on offer from any of the parties. It is hardly surprising given the paucity of the products on show.

The election is carried out as if the two main protagonists are marketing agencies selling two superficially different (but nevertheless fundamentally identical) management teams. The tools of their trade are the typical marketing techniques employed by corporate business everywhere – “spin”, “positioning” in relation to key target sectors, junk mail and cold calling of those in a targeted market niche, all refracted through the magnifying glass of the “focus group”.

Is it any wonder the electorate react with a cold shrug of apathy? The only time the campaign thus far has come to life was when a manager from one of the competing teams hit an egg-wielding farmer’s boy on the campaign trail in North Wales. Nothing of any significance happened and no great issues were debated as a result but it provided a spectacle for a society that thrives on periodic spectacular events to relieve the boredom and passivity.

Who wants to endlessly discuss whether there’s a £20 billion hole in one of the team’s tax and spending plans or whether the other team will abolish the ceiling on the upper rate of National Insurance contributions when we can watch Thumper give the Yokel a left-arm jab on the nightly news? All the arguments are just froth, of course, anyway – how many can (hand on heart) say that they are definitely always better off under one type of management team rather than the other? Very few and they’re usually the ones with money enough not to care too much either way.

For the rest of us – the majority who struggle along from week to week while the people with real money in society get even more money and the politicians play their games to distract our attention from it – it’s one long yawn. A nagging irrelevance that won’t go away. An advertising war in which we are the collateral damage.

But something interesting is happening if you look hard enough. The serfs in this giant political soap suds war are revolting. Fewer than ever wish to take sides between the teams on offer and the near-identical brands they are promoting. In recent elections for the European parliament, local government and parliamentary by-elections increasing numbers of voters are signalling that they’ve had enough. They’re staying at home, sitting on their hands.

This is an encouraging sign, but is one which is of itself a reflection of the passive mentality today’s market-driven consumer society promotes and which the political process encourages. Far better would be a positive refusal to line up behind the teams on offer, a refusal to join in their pointless games. In other words, a protest.

As socialists, we write in this journal as people who wish to help change the world in a positive direction, not get our bums on seats of ministerial cars of play lap-dog to the rich (and getting richer). So in this election we call on the “silent majority”, unhappy – and even disgusted – by the performance of the clowns in this political circus, to protest by spoiling their ballot papers. In so doing they will be taking part in the democratic forum yet at the same time withdrawing their consent from those who would rule over them in the name of wealth for the few and tedium for the rest of us.

Where no candidate standing for the one genuine alternative to the present system – a world socialist society of free access to available wealth – is on offer in this election, socialists and those in general agreement with our cause will be writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across our ballot papers.

So our voice will be heard. We will not allow it to be stifled under a welter of mindless political psychobabble. And the more people who agree with us and do the same, the louder the voice and the more effective the protest against the whole ridiculous charade currently being played out before us in the name of our interests.

Nightmare on Downing Street (2001)

From the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Having no discernible agenda much different from the Tories, Labour are reduced to negative campaigning to try and win their second term. Their latest poster displays the post-modern ironic kitsch typifying their approach to politics: “the Tories present Economic Disaster II” it brays in mock movie-poster fashion, with Michael Portillo as Mr. Boom, and William Hague as Mr. Bust, in a Reservoir Dogs pastiche. Labour, the party that for nearly twenty-odd years was stifled by Tory-inspired memories of the Winter of Discontent, is now more than happy to return the favour upon them, and to strive to become the party of “economic competence”.

Labour has consistently proclaimed economic stability to be the core aim of their economic policy; as the sound-bite has it: “No return to boom and bust”. What this means, in effect, is the end of the expansionary economic policy attempted by previous Labour administrations. Instead of using state power to try to influence basic conditions of the market, such as interest rates, investment levels and currency values, they are now intent upon holding the economic playing field level. The intention behind this ‘stability policy’ is that firms can plan and invest ahead in a stable environment, thus eventually overcoming Britain’s investment gap. To justify their change of direction, they pointed out (in their 1999 budget) that high inflation typically hits the poorest in a way not overcome by rise in incomes or employment rates.

The core of their stability programme was the independence of the Bank of England from day-to-day political control. Without interest rate levels being under direct political control, politicians can act as though the “economic levers” of capitalism are not in their hands, in a true laissez-faire fashion. So if something goes wrong they are not necessarily to blame and can plead that they are powerless to turn the situation around anyway (which is true enough).

Nevertheless, the Bank of England does not in reality have an entirely free hand and many of the parameters within which it operates are set by the government itself . For instance, after its independence was granted the Bank was given strict instructions to implement its monetary policies in such a way as to make a strict target of annual increases in the price level of 2.5 percent achievable.

The reasoning behind having a stable rate of price increases per annum is that it allows investors (and more particularly lenders, who can lose out badly through inflation) to plan their operations and investment strategies with greater certainty; in turn this encourages people from oversees to invest their finance capital in Britain. It also allows for the appearance of market discipline in the economy to the effect that industry cannot rely on government intervention to bale them out of economic problems.

Thatcherite legacy

It is not only this apparent aversion to inflation that Labour has carried over from the Thatcherite Tory policies of the past: attempts to trim the size of the state also feature as a central plank of their policy. To this end the size of the civil service continues to fall – from 431,000 in 1989, to 358,800 staff in 1999 (although some of this reduction has occurred due to civil servants being “hived-off” to Public Finance Initiative (PFI) firms, and thus continuing in place, just not on the government books).

It is noticeable that another continuation of Tory economic management – and thus a break with Labours past – appears to be in the area of state subsidies. According to the Office for National Statistics, subsidies under the Tories, in their final year, amounted to £6,124,000 whereas in the first year of Labour they fell to £4,870,000. By 1999 they only rose £5,758,000. This picture is slightly complicated by Europe, since agriculture will have received subsidies directly from the EU, and Britain received some £434,000,000 in European Social Fund subsidies in 1999 too. Since these funds don’t come directly from the British government they don’t add to the total for state subsidies.

But Labour has still managed to reduce subsidies and has done so in part in the same manner in which it with taxation – by use of ‘Tax Credits’ and alterations to taxation structures to provide incentives or confer advantages. A recent example is the Motorola plant in Scotland which is threatening closure: the government in an attempt to help keep it open has offered to send Treasury officials help it assess its current financial operations so that it can benefit to the fullest possible extent from the existing tax structure. This type of action allows the government to direct funds towards firms it wants to support without breaking European competition/subsidy rules, and without appearing to fund ailing firms from the taxpayers’ purse. Likewise, they also offered Credit Guarantees to Cammell Laird, in an attempt to use state backing to enable private capital to keep the firm afloat.

Instead of intervening in the economy by legal and state powers, Labour has chosen instead to take a “mediating” rôle. Their main action has been to use ‘good offices’ to try and resolve economic problems without direct and overt intervention. Their rôle in the Rover/BMW deal typifies this well. Although they did not offer to use state cash or power, they discussed alternatives with all the parties, and used public statements to pressurise them where necessary. This is why they cried foul when Corus sacked its workforce without talking to the government first. Their aim all along has been to give the appearance of representing the “public interest”, without actually and actively interfering in the operations of the market economy.

Partly, this reflects the central regard they have for the rôle of competition within the economy. This was typified by their passing of the Competition Act, and the renaming of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission as the Competition Commission. The investigation by the Commission into the operations of key supermarket chains is an example of the governments aptitude for using behind the scenes pressure to influence major economic actors.

Their reasoning for encouraging competition is that it increases economic efficiency, and promotes productivity. Instead of macro-economic control of the sort they attempted in the past they have turned instead to supply-side microeconomic measures where the engine for economic action and growth is seen as the individual firm and workplace. Their fervent hope is that through increasing the efficiency of business through competition , market discipline will enable firms to close the productivity gap with such near competitors as France and Germany, making Britain an attractive place for investors and so help further domestic economic expansion. Their policies are thus geared around actively encouraging competition and providing the “right environment” for businesses to grow and provide jobs.

The other main plank of their productivity policy has been education. By improving the skills on offer from workers to the employers they hoped to enable Britain to increase productivity through highly skilled labour. So far this aspect of their policy has been highly compromised by the shortage of teachers especially in key subjects like Maths and the sciences. Teaching numbers have fallen dramatically from 857,000 in 1990 to 730,900 in 2000 which has meant that despite increasing spending on education there have been minimal returns so far. In turn their main response has been to move the academic goalposts and also to try and use bullying tactics to increase the productivity of the existing teaching staff.

Despite some “local difficulties” so far the Labour government has benefited from a relatively buoyant world economy and their economic intervention has been just of a sufficient order for them to be able to claim some sort of rôle in this apparent “success”. As the economic slowdown closes in on them though, their second term is likely to show what they are really made of when it comes to the hard choice of laissez-faire free-market capitalism as opposed to the active state interventionism of their corporatist past.

Whatever the outcome, their current billboard poster of Hague and Portillo is seriously misleading for by labelling the Tories an “Economic Disaster II” waiting to happen, they disguise the fact that there can be only one economic disaster, “Capitalism: the disaster continues”, an epic for which they have been as responsible as anyone else.

Moreover, with turnout at the election expected to be the lowest in modern political history perhaps the working class are now beginning to see what socialists have been claiming over decades: that none of the small-time crooks from either gang vying for a starring rôle in this particular film can make any fundamental difference to the plot.

Pik Smeet

Why you shouldn’t vote state capitalist (2001)

Pamphlet Review from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why You Should Vote Socialist. By Paul Foot, Bookmarks.

Paul Foot is a good journalist, who specialises in exposing capitalism for not living up to its own standards. For this his fellow journalists chose him as “campaigning journalist of the decade”, even though he seems to have got it wrong about Hanratty. But let’s not be too churlish. Despite being a member of the SWP he’s a good writer and the first 50 pages of this 60-page pamphlet are an excellent demonstration of the truth of the old saying “Labour, Tory; Same Old Story” in relation to the Blair government.

Blair and his team have pursued the same policies as the Tory governments of the 80s and early 90s, not just on economic matters, which anyone with a knowledge of how capitalism works could have predicted (as we did, but not Foot – he voted Labour in 1997) but also on civil liberties, where governments have some leeway.

It’s in the last two chapters that Foot goes off the rails. He correctly states:

“Under capitalism, unemployment, inflation, the rise and fall of booms and slumps, are not brought about by governments, but by economic forces beyond government control.”

But also:

“Elected governments of whatever colour cannot and do not determine what happens to the international capitalist economy unless they embark on the most determined and ruthless economic intervention” (emphasis added).

It is just such a policy of state intervention to try to control capitalism that Foot advocates on behalf of the Trotskyist “Socialist” Alliance and the Scottish Sheridan Party (with which the SWP has just merged its Scottish section) who, together, are contesting a third of the seats in the present general election (in most other constituencies Foot says people should still vote Labour!). But, if tried, this would provoke an economic crisis and, if persisted in, would lead to an autarkic state capitalism with shortages and rationing as in Cuba and North Korea.

The alternative to capitalism is not “determined and ruthless” state intervention but socialism, a world-wide society of common ownership, democratic control, and production for use not profit. But Foot doesn’t offer this, not even as a long-term aim. Instead, he accepts a curious definition (by Michael Barratt Brown) of socialism as a society where, among other things, “housing would be available at reasonable rents” and “pensions for the aged and invalid, and payments during sickness and unemployment would be provided on a universal scheme based on contributions related to income”. In other words, the Old Labourite dream of a reformed capitalism. Perhaps Foot never really did vote Labour without illusions.

Adam Buick

Editorial: Apathy rules the waves (2001)

Editorial from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

So the weeks and weeks of posing, posturing and politicking are over. The endless hours of TV reporting and radio coverage and the thousands of miles of newspaper column inches have resulted in just one notable thing: not the return of another Labour government, but the lowest voter turnout since universal suffrage.

What a triumph for the assembled ranks of politicians and pundits! The biggest turn-off in political history and yet no one can say they are truly surprised. After the politicians had spent the previous month stomping up and down the country stirring up apathy wherever they went, the voters turned away in their droves. And then sighed a huge collective yawn as the moment of irrelevance passed.

Out of the barrage of opinion polls to hit the headlines during the election the most interesting was the BBC exit poll conducted on the day itself. Not because of its (fairly accurate) prediction of a Labour landslide, but because it dared to ask a cross-section of non-voters, excluded from the headline figures of voting intent, why they hadn’t bothered. The results were fascinating.

The poll showed that a significant proportion of voters hadn’t bothered to trouble the tellers because they thought the result to be a foregone conclusion. This is obvious enough, as turnout fell most in safe Labour seats and least in Labour-held marginals where there was a real chance of the Tory Party making a gain. Nevertheless, this is enough to account for only a fraction of the mammoth drop in turnout from the fairly dismal 71.4 percent in 1997 down to the record low 59 percent this time around.

The main reason for the drop in turnout is evidenced in the fact that 77 percent of respondents in the BBC survey said that they wouldn’t be voting because they viewed the parties to be essentially “the same”. Allied with this was the supporting view that politicians of all persuasions “couldn’t be trusted”.

Herein lies the reality of the situation, something that socialists have been arguing for many years and which now appears to be the established perspective held by a very sizeable sector of the working class of wage and salary earners. The fact that it appears to be held particularly strongly by former Labour voters too is significant. A 34 percent turnout in a Labour heartland constituency like Liverpool Riverside is evidence enough that Labour can no longer rely on a solid working-class vote, for in areas of previously bedrock support it is viewed as being essentially no different to the Tories.

There are still many who argue that Labour is “the lesser evil” but their numbers are dwindling – literally, in fact, as there were nearly three million fewer Labour voters this time round compared with when Blair first got in. Ten and a half million votes, in fact, would have been a humiliation for Labour years ago – as was the case when Neil Kinnock got just short of this for Labour in the Thatcher landslide of 1987. In 2001 it is enough to be heralded a landslide.

In reality, of course, it was a landslide in name only and Blair knew that only too well. It was etched on his face at his count in Sedgefield as he heard his personal vote drop by several thousand. There is clearly now a large chink in the armour of New Labour and it is only the ineptness of the opposition provided by the other mainstream parties that has stopped Labour from becoming a true laughing stock, most of all among the Party’s most “natural” supporters.

In the months to come we promise that we shall be monitoring the continued progress of New Labour – if progress is the right term – and subjecting them to the closest scrutiny from a socialist perspective. For the Labour Party has tricked and bamboozled the working class for too long. Now that the trick is wearing thin, we will do all we can to expose what Labour is really about and the interests Labour is keen to defend. We do this in the hope that next time the refusal by millions of voters to back the bamboozlers of the working class will turn into something more positive and pro-active than mere abstention.

In the News: No breakthrough for Trotskyism (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

“One of the few exciting stories of this election, largely untold, is the emergence of the Socialist Alliance/Scottish Socialist Party as a credible alternative to Labour,” wrote Mark Steel, expressing the hopes of a section of the London leftwing intelligentsia, in an election day article in the Independent. If he really believed this, when the results came in he must have been as gutted as the Tories.

The SA put up 92 candidates. They got in total around 57,500 votes (i.e. about 625 per candidate). Rather than becoming the fourth party in England, as they intended, they ended up 8th, after the Greens, the UKIP and the BNP. Their only consolation was to have done better than Arthur Scargill’s SLP which put up 114 candidates and only got around 55,000 votes (or about 480 per candidate). It is true that in Scotland the SSP did rather better, with its 72 candidates totalling some 73,000 votes, or 3 percent of the total vote in Scotland.

We are not rejoicing over this failure since we know that it is also a reflection of the popular reception to the word “socialism” which rubs off on us. Of course neither the SA/SSP nor the SLP stood for socialism. Indeed, it was their traditions – respectively, Trotskyism and Stalinism – that have done so much to discredit the idea of socialism by associating it with a state-run economy run by a vanguard party.

The other tradition responsible for discrediting the word “socialism” is Old Labour, but it was precisely as a revival of this that the SA set out to pass itself off as. The SA was an electoral coalition of normally warring (and still mutually suspicious) Trotskyist sects which had come together to create a front organisation which, if it got off the ground, would become a new Labour party which they could then all infiltrate as they did Labour in the good old days. The SA programme was thus consciously constructed to be openly reformist so as to appeal to Old Labourites. In this it succeeded remarkably.

The title of its manifesto People Before Profit encapsulated the reformist illusion perfectly. Just as their other slogan of “Tax the Rich” assumes the continued existence of the rich, so “People before Profit” assumes the continued existence of the profit system but where the government would intervene to try to make it work in the interest of wage and salary workers. As we know from the experience of Labour governments, this can never work.

The profit system can only ever operate in the interest of the class of profit-takers, and any party which takes on the responsibility for managing its political side will inevitably end up doing this on its terms, finding itself obliged by economic circumstances precisely to put profits before people. In the end such a party, far from transforming capitalism into a new society, itself becomes transformed into an ordinary pro-capitalist party. That’s the explanation of the repeated failure of the Labour Party in government and of its eventual transformation into New Labour.

The Trotskyists who drew up the SA’s detailed programme of promised reforms of capitalism showed no imagination. They weren’t even promising anything new, but largely the restoration of reforms that had once existed but had been whittled away by the workings of capitalism since the 1970s. Thus their manifesto of “pledges” (they played the promise game just like any party of conventional politicians) consisted of “say no” to this and “bring back” that. But perhaps, when you’re pretending to be something you’re not, the tendency will always be to overdo it.

There is another possible explanation. That the SA’s reformist programme wasn’t a cynical ploy, but that they genuinely believed in it. In that case they would be genuinely Old Labour reformists. This could be the case but the arguments socialists had with them on the streets and at meetings suggest that they did indeed have a hidden Leninist agenda of violent insurrection led by a vanguard party (but that they couldn’t agree which one of them it should be). So perhaps after all it is reassuring that they did not emerge as a credible, reformist alternative to New Labour.

Adam Buick

In the News: Oldham (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The workers of Oldham were battling in the streets, against each other and against the police, for three days from the 25 to 28 May this year. The poisonous despair, powerless and poverty of the area, caused in large part by the decline of the town’s traditional textile manufacturing industry, lead to workers turning upon one another. Differences in skin colour and culture became the focus for the pent-up energies and frustrations engendered by these social conditions.

The spark was, apparently, the provocative actions of followers of the British National Party and their ilk, who damaged property and harassed and attacked brown skinned workers, seemingly without reprisal from the police or authorities. Their targets eventually responded to the provocation, coming out onto the streets to fight them. As a part of the conflict, the unfortunately named Live and Let Live pub was attacked, and windows in the area were bricked. The police turned out in force, and a series of running battles ensued, leaving some 25 workers (including police officers) injured.

The centre of the trouble was the Glodwick area, with groups of up to 500 workers throwing petrol bombs and firecrackers at the police lines. Over the three nights of clashes a post-office was looted and the offices of the local newspaper became the target for firebomb attacks.

It has been suggested that the trouble was stirred up by the British National Party, as a part of their election campaign in the area. The BNP advocates divisive confusionist policies, based upon the scientifically absurd idea of racial differences. Its leader Nick Griffin, their candidate in Oldham West & Royton, advocates communal separation, along the lines of the so-called “Peace Wall” in Londonderry/Derry. This is supposed to be the only way of ending the allegedly irreconcilable differences between people of different “races”.

Their campaign turned out to be highly successful, with workers continually let down by the promises of reformism and the lack of any prospect for change from any other parties, being attracted to the radical posturings of Griffin’s band of would-be leaders. Their promises, geared toward insularism, putting a mysterious group called “The British” first, by protecting their “homeland” and ending their unemployment by prohibiting “foreign” products, attracted a high number of votes for such a small party. In Oldham West and Royton the BNP recorded 6,552 votes (16.4 percent) and in Oldham East and Saddleworth they scored 5,091 votes (11.21 percent). Each total is almost twice the entire number of anti-capitalists who turned up to the London Mayday event.

Naturally, the left is outraged. One commentator in Socialist Worker expressed shock that police refused to prevent the BNP members canvassing for their candidates, stating it was “perfectly legitimate election activity”. Presumably, the SWP must believe that the state should be allowed to vet and permit candidates’ campaigns.

They and other groups blame the failure of leaders, Socialist Worker observed that Oldham workers couldn’t identify with Many-Homes Meacher (their MP), and no-one in power listens to them but instead neglects them; while Militant noted that “the community leaders should be fired” for being out of touch. The problem, apparently, lies with the leaders and not the social system. Michael Meacher himself blamed William Hague and his “foreign land” speech for stoking up xenophobia.

Of course, the leftists see the fascists as rivals for leadership, and are thus happy to join with liberals in relying on emotive tactics and censorship to impede them. Such tactics back-fired badly at the announcement of the vote, because the local council forbade any candidates from speaking. This allowed the fascists to pose before the television cameras, wearing t-shirts proclaiming “Gagged for telling the truth”, and sporting large and visible gags in their mouths. This played into their victim posture, along with their attempts to claim they were trying to defend “whites from racism”. It also effectively prevented anyone from being able to hear how ridiculous their policies really are.

Liberals and leftists alike will not debate fascists, because they have no real answers to their arguments. They both support nationalism and its logic, albeit qualifiedly. Their differences with the fascists are those of degree not of quality. After all, the SWP has unfurled openly reactionary banners by merging with the Scottish Socialist Party whose slogan is “for a Scottish Socialist Republic”, the capitalist politics of national self-determination. What is the differences between “moderate nationalism” and “moderate racism”? Both are absurd creeds used to mystify and divide the workers.

The SWP calls upon workers to “turn anger on the real enemy”, by which they mean not the capitalist system, but the fascists. It means a futile programme of continually trying to suppress the manifestations of fascism, without destroying its root cause: the fallacy that workers share in some national interest. Without that understanding then the privations of capitalism will always lead to workers misidentifying the cause of their problems as not the capitalist system, but other workers.

Dividing the workers against the fascists will not ultimately bring the resolution of these problems, nor will simply appointing a different set of leaders to save us. Only the clear understanding that workers of all types share a common interest against the capitalist system, and that its replacement with socialism will end the social conditions that breed such violence will be of any use to us. That understanding will only come about through trusting the workers to think for themselves, instead of trying to crush the fascists with state power or street politics.

Pik Smeet

In the News: Nobody cares about you! (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, has anything positive come out of another instalment of British capital’s election farce? Well, 41 percent of those eligible to vote on 7 June turned their backs on it altogether. The representatives of capitalism and the media have done no end of moaning about our “apathy”, but then, of course, they are never going to give workers the credit that we might actually have seen through capitalist political “democracy”. So, maybe we can talk of rejection rather than apathy. But are there any positive challenges or alternatives coming from the working class?

Any readers from the Bristol area will have seen the posters and stickers stating “Nobody Cares” and “Vote Nobody”. Well, on 3 May (the date council elections were originally meant to take place) people in the Easton area of the city did indeed really have the chance to “Vote Nobody”. Thousands of forms were delivered ahead of an “election” held at Easton community centre, where those voting had a choice on the question “who do you want to run Easton?” between Bristol City Council and “Nobody”. 150 local people participated, with the result being Council – 5, “Nobody”– 145. The Nobody campaign then “derecognised” the council and invited people to meet on Thursdays at the community centre, at an assembly where they could discuss local issues. There are now a few “You are now entering free Easton” signs to be seen around the area.

As reported in the Big Issue South West (April 30–May 6 edition): “We’re telling people to ‘Vote Nobody’ for two reasons,” said campaign spokesman ‘Nobby O’body’.

“Firstly, we want to ridicule the idea that democracy is working. Democracy isn’t about ticking a box every four years to choose between a few cloned candidates whose manifestos say almost exactly the same thing. Secondly, on a more serious level, if the council is failing local people, we believe that the community has a right to say that it doesn’t recognise the council’s authority any more”. (The Vote Nobody campaign can be accessed at: http://uk.geocities.com/votenobody)

The “Nobody” team then went on to encourage people pissed off with the political con-game to express themselves by writing “Nobody” across ballot papers in the general election on 7 June. Spoilt ballot papers? Sound familiar?

Yes, in this respect there is more than a little common ground between the Socialist Party and the Nobody team in the elections just gone. We were both saying, if you are opposed to all the political con-merchants and the capitalist interests for which they stand – why vote for any of them? Why not vote for yourself, for a change, rather than just saying “voting changes nothing”? Why not vote “Nobody”? Or, better still, as we support the use of the vote as a potential revolutionary form of political expression, write “world socialism” across your ballot paper?

Both the world socialist campaign and “Nobody” rejected all the parties of capital. And, in the case of the 3 May Easton “referendum”, the Nobody campaign was perhaps tentatively exploring the sort of community/workers’ councils embodying direct working class democracy that would be vital in any future social and political movement for socialism. In our case though we are slightly more specific that this must be accompanied by electoral action to win control of parliament for the revolutionary working class. This in order to neutralise the capitalist state and its forces of repression, express the revolutionary desire of the working class majority and formally dismantle capitalism and its state apparatus. These, of course, are questions and situations for the future. But at least we have seen in Bristol, for any criticisms that could be made, a positive reaction to the evident failure of capitalist politics of all shades to work in the interest of the working class and their communities.

Local Socialist Party comrades delivered our own “anti-capitalist guide to the general election” leaflets to homes in Easton, putting our case for the rejection of capitalism’s election charade and for the rejection of the capitalist system entire – and for self-organisation to build a free society based on the principle of from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. So let’s put self-emancipation and the abolition of capitalism on the agenda. Let’s vote for ourselves for a change, and act for ourselves for a change – turning “apathy” into positive action.

Ben Malcolm

Socialist election result (2001)

Party News from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party contested one seat in the General Election, Jarrow. The result was:

Hepburn (Lab) 22, 777; Selby (LD) 5,182; Wood (Con) 5,056; Badger (UKiP) 716; Le Blond (Ind) 391; Bissett (Soc) 357.

The turnout at 54.6% was 14.2% down on 1997.

So in fact the abstentions — 28,000 — outnumbered the votes of the winning candidate.

The General Election (2001)

Party News from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party will be contesting one seat in the general election, Jarrow, where our candidate will be John Bissett. Unfortunately, because of a recent change in the law making it a condition for a party's name to appear on the ballot paper that it refuse to accept "foreign" donations—which we have refused to accept because, stand ing for world socialism, we reject the concept of a "foreigner" and assert our right to accept financial help from socialists and workers in any part of the world—our name will not be appearing on the ballot paper alongside that of our candidate. Nevertheless, John Bissett will be standing as the official candidate of the Socialist Party and this will be made clear on all the election material we will be producing.

If you want to help out in the election campaign to get the socialist message across, contact North East at: 

Secretary, 10 Scarborough Parade, Hebburn, NE31 2AL.

Phone: (0191) 489 XXXX.

Email: johnbissett@cableinet.co.uk.

Website: www.communities.msn.com/RealWorldSocialismNorthEast

Offers of help from "foreigners" welcome

Why vote for politicians? (2001)

Editorial from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the last election capitalism has to begun to become a dirty word again. All over the world people are protesting against the profit system and the effect it is having on the environment and the poorest parts of the world and on the quality of life generally. There have been anti-capitalist protests in Britain too. Maybe you’ve taken part in them, but what to do in the coming election?

Vote Labour-you must be joking!

Needless to say, Labour wants nothing to do with these protests. They are as committed to the profit system and to serving the interests of Big Business as are the Tories. In fact, at the moment, they have more support in business circles than do the Tories. This is not surprising since Labour has never aimed at anything more than managing the capitalist system-which inevitably means putting profits before people-and business judges that they have done this well enough over the past four years.

So, no self-respecting anti-capitalist can vote Labour.

Vote Green?

The Greens are not anti-capitalist either. Certainly, they criticise Big Business and some of the ways the profit-driven market system works, but from the point of view of small business. For them, Big Business is Bad, Small Business is Beautiful. But a return to smaller businesses is neither desirable nor in fact possible, and it wouldn’t help the environment either. And Green Party Ministers in Germany, France and Italy haven’t made any difference to the way capitalism works.

So, voting Green is out too for the consistent anti-capitalist.

Follow the Leaders?

But what about those calling themselves socialists, such as the Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party, surely they deserve the votes of anti-capitalists, don’t they?

Do they? We think not.

First, there’s the people involved. They’re mainly Trotskyists from the SWP and the Militant Tendency who see the Russian Revolution as a model to follow and who have appointed themselves a “vanguard” to lead “the masses”. The Russian Revolution as a model? No thank you. It only led to state capitalism, and anti-capitalists shouldn’t want to go down that road again, not that many of you do anyway.

Second, look at their programme. It doesn’t even go beyond private capitalism. “Tax the Rich and Make Them Pay” sounds anti-capitalist, and the capitalists certainly wouldn’t like it, but it assumes that the rich continue to exist. It’s the old illusion that you can use taxes and government intervention to make the capitalist system work for everybody’s benefit. You can’t, as has been proved time and again and not just by the failure of Labour governments in this country.

That those behind this alliance of would-be leaders should encourage this illusion is not surprising because, up to now, they’ve always told us to vote Labour. For them, the “Socialist Alliance” is just a tactic to get disillusioned Old Labourites-who still think capitalism can be reformed-to join their ranks.

If we can see through this tactic, then hopefully so can you.

Don’t Vote?

So what’s left? Not vote at all. More and more people are doing this, and it’s not as bad as voting for one or other of the parties that stand for keeping capitalism going. But it’s a bit of a cop-out. The anarchists like it, but they don’t believe in elections and have threatened “direct action” to disrupt this one. We don’t agree. Our ancestors were right to struggle for the vote. The fact that up to now it hasn’t been used properly is no reason for rejecting it as useless.

Write-in vote for Socialism

We suggest something else: a write-in vote for socialism. Real socialism, that is, not the failed state capitalism that collapsed in Russia ten years ago, but a society where there’s common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, where goods and services are produced for use not profit, and where the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” applies.

It is all very well being anti-capitalist but if this is to mean something more than merely protesting against the effects of capitalism, it has got to also mean having an idea of an alternative to capitalism. Ours is a world without frontiers in which the natural and industrial resources of the Earth become the common heritage of all humanity and are used to provide enough for everybody in an ecologically-acceptable way.

Because we think that, in future, the election system could be used in a constructive way we shall be exercising our right to vote. We shall be going to the polling stations and casting a write-in vote by writing “SOCIALISM” or “WORLD SOCIALISM” across the ballot paper.

Beyond Their Empty Promises (2001)

Party News from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is standing one candidate in the general election, in Jarrow. Here is our manifesto

By now, you will have had the chance to hear the various politicians in this General Election put forward their views as to how they intend to make our lives a lot better if we elect them. At every opportunity they will have quoted facts and figures, belittled their opponents and made the usual mundane promises.

Well, we may quote a few facts, but we’ll not attack our opponents or make you rash promises. All we will do is ask you to think, and perhaps encourage you to begin using the most subversive word in the English language-“why?”

This is the first General Election of the 21st century and the first real chance you will get this century to send a local MP to Parliament to fight for issues you think are important. So, is it not worth just pausing to recall the previous century and the empty promises it is littered with.

In spite of continual promises of peace from politicians, the last century witnessed two world wars and over 400 smaller conflicts, resulting in 220 million deaths. Some 30 conflicts still rage.

With great advances in food production in the 20th Century, politicians, in the 1970s, promised a world food summit that global hunger would be eradicated within 10 years. There are now over twice as many chronically malnourished people on the planet—800 million—and the World Health Organisation estimates that more people died of malnutrition between 1999 and 2000 than were killed in the two world wars.

In spite of breakthroughs in medical science and technology, UNICEF can still report that 1000 children die every hour from easily preventable disease.

In truth, we have entered the 21st century taking with us every social problem that plagued us in the previous one, yet still we give our support to a system in which a majority of these social ills are rooted. Crime, unemployment, drugs, war, homelessness, and environmental decay—these are still with us and in many cases accentuated, despite the myriad promises to solve them.

All the politicians will tell you they have the answers. But their answers continually fail to solve the problems society faces. Socialists say that if the politicians’ answers are worthless, perhaps they are answering the wrong questions. Maybe we are asking the wrong questions.

If we ask politicians why there is crime and unemployment, war and strife, homelessness and starvation, pollution and environmental destruction, they’ll prevaricate, change the subject or give an answer a mile off the mark. Very few will locate the problem in a wider social and economic context-in the way our society is organised for production : profit before needs.

But this is what the vast majority of our problems boil down to-the undemocratic control and distribution of the world’s natural and industrial resources and the fact that every aspect of our lives is subordinated to the requirements of profit. The golden maxim of our age is “can’t pay-can’t have". It is the logic that finds hundreds of millions living lives of abject poverty in a world of potential abundance.

In socialist society, the artificial constraints of profit will be removed and the productive processes will be used to their fullest potential and with the aim of satisfying needs first and in an environmentally friendly way.

Socialist society will mean a world without borders or frontiers, states and armies, exploitation and oppression. It will be a world devoid of monetary transactions in which people give of their abilities and take freely according to their needs.

We are not demanding the impossible. Our case is simple: our world would be a much better place to live in if we had a real democratic say in the decisions that effect us and real control over the means and instruments for producing and distributing the things we need to live in comfort.

We are not demanding the impossible. Our case is simple: our world would be a much better place to live in if we had a real democratic say in the decisions that effect us and real control over the means and instruments for producing and distributing the things we need to live in comfort.

John Bissett, Socialist Party candidate for Jarrow

Editorial: The politicians’ festival (2001)

Editorial from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

So a general election has come round again.

In theory, this should be an important event since it is a time when we have a chance to decide who is to control political power: the rich and the super-rich and their political servants or the rest of us who produce all the wealth of society but who are not in charge of things?

In practice, elections have become a Festival of Politicians.

Rival groups of professional politicians spend millions of pounds competing for votes. If only we vote for them—they tell us–they’ll do wonderful things for us. Improve education. End the health care crisis. Solve the transport problem. Stop pollution. Avoid wars. We’ve heard it all before, but nothing much changes. The same old problems continue. The reason they continue is because the capitalist economic system of production for profit, which causes them, continues. As long as this happens it does not matter which party is in office.

The fact is that, at election times, we are not offered a real choice. The candidates all stand for the same thing—keeping the capitalist economic system in being in one form or another. The three main parties only offer themselves as better managers of this system than the others. In Scotland, Wales and Ireland the Nationalist parties there merely propose to change the seat of government, from London to Edinburgh, Cardiff or Dublin, while leaving production for profit intact. As if that would make any difference.

The profit system—which all of them want to keep and try to manage—can never be made to work in the interest of the majority class of us who run production from top to bottom. It can only work as a profit system in the interests of those who live off profits.

If we are going to improve things—and the resources have long existed on a world scale to provide a decent life for all—we are going to have to get rid of the profit system and replace it by a new and different system based on the world’s natural and industrial resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity.

On this basis, production can be carried out, not to make a profit, but to satisfy people’s needs. The ravages of the profit system—the world-wide pollution, the waste of resources on armaments and on buying and selling, the artificial scarcity resulting from only producing to meet paying demand—can be ended and a world of peace and plenty brought into being.

But this is not something we can leave to professional politicians. It is something that we can only do ourselves. That means organising ourselves democratically without leaders and, at a later stage, mandating socialist delegates to stand against the professional politicians. In the meantime (except in the one constituency where there will be a candidate standing for a world of free access, in Jarrow) those of us who want a socialist world can indicate this and our rejection of the profit system and its politicians by writing the words “WORLD SOCIALISM” across our ballot paper.