History and the battle of ideas (1988)

From the September 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

What makes an idea serious or crazy? The "realist" will tell you that the distinction is easy to make Serious ideas are about making reality work. Crazy ideas are incompatible with reality, they are dreams, utopian fantasies, unrealisable ideas.

Few people doubt that ending mass starvation under capitalism is a serious idea. The Right argues that free markets and the elimination of state-dominated economies in the countries where millions are starving would put an end to malnutrition The buying and selling system, left to its own devices, would put food where there are consumers for it. That is the magic of the market, so the economic magicians of the Ministries and universities tell us with faces straight. The Left rejects this method of ending world hunger. The left-wing of capitalism argues that what is needed is more overseas monetary aid from the "rich" nations to the "poor" ones and more state-regulated planning of food production, so that the market is forced to work for the people. Right and left compete openly to prove that they have the most serious idea to end the obscenity of widespread human starvation, with 15 million under the age of five dying yearly for lack of food in a world of plenty.

The socialist argues that both the Right and Left are wrong. Their policies will never succeed. Capitalism cannot meet the needs of those who are hungry but moneyless. The solution is to do away with the profit system which dictates that only those needs which it is profitable to satisfy will be provided for. Do away with money, which stands as a barrier between humankind and the abundant resources of our planet. Take the world, and everything in it, into common possession. This is a revolutionary proposition.

It is also, according to the ideologists of the Left and Right of capitalism, a crazy proposition. It is unrealistic to conceive of a worldwide society where production is solely for need, not profit. To abolish money is a monstrously crazy idea. Free access would never work. Evidence to back these claims is rarely offered. When it is it is usually based on distortion. "Ah, these socialists want to abolish money and replace it with barter." No we do not; we want to abolish money and replace it with free access. "Human nature is such that people could not operate in a society where everything is freely available " Not a scrap of biological evidence is provided to back up this claim that there is something inherent in the human genes which makes us incapable of sharing the world as a united species, each with our different talents and needs. The fact is that when the apologists for capitalism are pushed to deal with the socialist idea, they reject it simply because it is not in line with what exists now. However unworkable their own ideas and policies are, they are defined as "serious" if they fit in with the continuation of capitalism

Getting religion

It was the same in the past. In classical antiquity the ownership of one human being by another was the economic norm. Slave production prevailed. Until the last century in North America slave plantations flourished. The slave who objected to being owned would be labelled “a utopian". Even his or her fellow slaves would find crazy the notion of not being owned by a master or mistress. Under feudalism vast numbers of men were recruited to fight the Crusades against those who rejected the Christian faith. According to this faith still existing in society, but thankfully ignored by most people — all humans are born as sinners and must pray to a Lord in the sky who sent his only son down to earth to be murdered and born again. All very serious. Few people call Archbishop Runcie a crazy man. When Pope Urban II wanted to recruit men to fight and die in these vicious Crusades of mass human slaughter, this is what he said:

The invaders befoul the altars with the filth of their bodies They circumcise Christians and pour the blood of the circumcision upon the altars or into baptismal fonts They stable their horses in these churches, which are now withdrawn from the service of God .Yea, the churches are served, but not by holy men — for the Turks are torturing Christians, binding them, and filling then with arrows, or making them kneel bending their heads, to try if their swordsmen can cut through their necks with a single blow of the naked sword. What shall I say of the ravishing of the women? 

(H Lamb, The Crusades,  Iron Men and Saints, 1931, p 39.)

What are we to think of the ideas presented in Urban II's racist, fantastic, war mongering scare story? Do we accept that it must have been serious because most Europeans at the time believed it? Do we say that it is crazy, even though it reflected the economic needs of the feudal ruling class, who needed to protect the Church’s ownership and control of land and ideology against other rulers with other religious myths to confuse the minds of the oppressed? A few weeks ago the present writer bought a copy of The Watchtower, a magazine sold from door to door by devoted men and women who have ideas to pass on. They are Christians of the Jehovah's Witness sect and. among other things, they believe that the world is soon to end and God will "come down'’ to judge us all. It seems a worthwhile insurance policy to keep a copy of The Watchtower under the bed. Their 15 July issue has a headline JESUS CHRIST GOD. MAN OR MYTH? Had the woman been selling the magazine in the days of feudal totalitarianism, when belief in religious nonsense was compulsory, she would probably have burned at the stake for posing such a blasphemous question. Times change. Inside we are told that in the first century, thousands of people accepted Jesus for what he was the promised Messiah, or Christ, sent to earth to vindicate Jehovah’s sovereignty and to offer his life as a ransom for mankind . . . Today, millions of Christian disciples know that Jesus is no myth. They accept him as the heavenly enthroned King of God's established kingdom, who is now progressively taking control of the earth and its affairs" (p 8). In "the first century" it is not that surprising that human beings, lacking much scientific knowledge of their environment were taken in by the myth of a miracle performing magician descending to earth from heaven. The same belief had been held by countless god-worshippers in countless centuries before the first one AD. Today, we might find it harder to understand how serious people can believe that a messiah, alive only in the "spirit world beyond", can be taking control of the world's affairs. If one went to a psychiatrist with such a story, he would probably diagnose insanity, unless he knew the social conventions which make such faith respectable.

Mental phenomena

Dogmatic faith in ideas of no scientific substance is not confined to orthodox religion. On the Left there has long been a belief among some people that the tyrannical, anti-working class police states of the Russian Empire, China or Albania are socialist societies Although they exhibit all the characteristics of capitalism — wage labour, capital, buying and selling, rich and poor, leaders and oppressed — some workers will not give up the idea that these are examples of socialism in practice. Interestingly, S. M. Lipset has pointed out that

In Holland and Sweden. recent studies show that the Communists are strongest in regions which were once centres of fundamentalist religious revivalism. In Finland, Communism and revivalist Christianity often are strong in the same areas (Political Man, p. 106.)

What seems to have happened in these cases is that workers have given up one set of unscientific, crazy ideas and adopted a new set of pseudo-scientific, equally crazy ideas.

People are not born with ideas. Thinking is a social process. To think we need to think about something, and that something is our environment Our minds, which are not tangible parts of the anatomy but social phenomena, are located in the environment This is why we think most of the time about ideas which relate to our environment. When we are living in cities, surrounded by supermarkets and fast-food joints, we don't think about going out into the jungle and hunting for meat. Hunter gatherers, living in a primitive society, do not think about whether to have pickles on their Big Mac. Primitive hunters did not think about money because they lived in a society where goods were shared by the whole community, without money intervening to restrict the satisfaction of their needs. Big Mac Man thinks a lot about money. He will do more or less anything, including selling himself to a capitalist who will exploit him, in order to get more of it. In many primitive tribes, such as the Panare of South America, it is considered a supreme indignity to work for wages. Who is crazy, the moneyless, sharing primitive, or the highly civilised, highly exploited wage slave? 

In a property-dominated society most of our ideas are property related. The pronouns 'mine", "yours" and "theirs” become very important. People become neurotic about them. The smallest children are taught, "That's not yours. Don't touch Mustn’t touch. Not yours." Grown men and women work forty-hour weeks in factories. When they leave on a Friday they are checked by security guards in uniforms with buttons almost shiny enough to make them cops They are checking that these untrustworthy wage slaves have not stolen a bit of what they produced They produced the goods, the capitalist, who was probably not seen in the factory all week, possesses the wealth. If workers want what they produce they can spend some of their wages buying it. You build mansions but live in a slum.

We are taught to accept that possession is power. The child who says to her mother. “Well, that might not be mine, but I want to use it" will have a problem in understanding the ways of the world. If this carries on she will need to be taken to a child psychologist. In the past she would be belted, probably not quite as humiliating as being sent to the child psychologist. If a socialist factory worker says, "Look, we produce all the wealth and then we're robbed of the fruits of our labour. Why don't we make the means of production — not just this factory, but all of them, and the offices, farms and mines as well — into our common possession!" he will soon be branded a troublemaker. Crazy ideas. If he is lucky he will be derided as a utopian, or he might be blacklisted and persecuted as a Red wrecker.

A culture of deceit

There are some ideas which we arrive at our selves. We do not need to read books to discover that fire burns us or soap tastes horrible. Other ideas we discover by listening to other people. Prolonged exposure of the skin to the sun can damage it; carrots add a bit of flavour to a casserole; if you sleep with a hooker in Bangkok you stand a good chance of catching a dose of something you won't like. These are serious ideas, learned either from direct experience of the environment or from the experiences of those who have no reason to deceive us.

Some people do have an interest in deceiving us. Capitalism is based on a culture of deceit. It pretends that class inequality either does not exist or, if it does, is natural and ineradicable; it pretends that employment is a fair contract rather than a process of legalised robbery; and that profit is the just reward of the hard working entrepreneur, rather than the surplus value obtained by the capitalists, who pay their workers less than the value of what they have produced. Capitalism claims that all workers can become rich if they try hard enough, that hard work will always be rewarded with social success. These are lies. Professional liars — journalists, priests, professors, teachers, politicians are in the business of knocking these false beliefs into the minds of the workers. They are being entrusted with a very responsible job. If they fail, workers might stop accepting the capitalist myths. No wonder the Minister of Education is so eager to ensure that the right lessons are being taught in the curriculum, and Thatcher is so busy trying to censor the BBC. Ideas which we. pick up from the depositories of wisdom which capitalism provides for us are what socialists call Ideology. Or, to put it simply, distorted experience

A few months ago the case of the moving picture became a big news story Thousands of copies of prints had been sold for the £7.50 tastes of proletarian art collectors. Well, they cover the stains on the wallpaper and if you know nothing about painting they look just like the original. One of these paintings depicted a dancing girl, and on walls all over Britain reports came that she was starting to dance. Well, to be honest, what happened first was that one report came in. An old lady in Solihull had spotted this dancing girl on her wall. In stepped that journal of sustained. scientific investigation. The Sun. And would you believe it. within only a few days of reading about the sighting by this Solihull Sun reader, there were girls dancing on the walls of pretty well every city in Britain. They were dancing two to a street in Ireland, where early Catholic indoctrination has made the workers a soft touch for this sort of craziness. (In Ireland the Virgin Mary is known to appear in fields quicker than you can say "Let's build an airport" ) The myth of the dancing girl does nobody much harm. One can imagine the dull and uncreative lives of the poor workers who imagined that they saw their painting dance. Other myths, however. are more harmful. For example, most workers in Britain have never met a Russian. If they did they would probably think he was a German. But most British workers will tell you that "we" (the British) cannot trust the Russians. If necessary, "we" must be prepared to protect ourselves by annihilating several million of them. Indeed, the whole British defence policy supported by Tory. Labour and Liberal alike is based on the assumption that we must maintain a permanent threat to kill millions of Russians if British capitalist interests are endangered. British workers have been given an enemy to fear and, when the time is right, to hate and kill. In Iran and Iraq this creation of artificial human hatred has resulted in hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them only teenagers, marching with enthusiasm to their deaths. Such is the sick nature of capitalist ideology

Socialist ideas

This journal is called the Socialist Standard. You may have bought it for one of many reasons. What Is likely is that before you bought it ideas about what socialism means were fed to you. They were probably not fed by socialists. All kinds of people with a direct interest in discrediting the idea of socialism — from the Sun with its "loony lefties' and the Guardian with its Marxist states", to our class enemies in the pulpits and on party platforms — will have contributed their bit to arouse suspicion about the establishment of a socialist world society. Socialists are willing and able to counter these ideas, preferably face to lace in open debate. In debate the case for socialism is invincible. But more often than not, ideology is perpetrated by means of dishonesty and innuendo, appeals to fear and prejudice rather than self-interest and social awareness Why are socialist ideas attacked? Clearly, it is not because the case for socialism is completely crazy. After all, the capitalists do not invest millions of pounds in opposing the ideas of the Flat Earth Society or the man who advertises regularly in the Guardian to inform us that Jesus Christ is alive and living in Brick Lane, London. Ideas are attacked when they endanger an interest. The Church of England devotes much time and money to discredit crazy religious sects, like the Moonies and Scientologists, who are challenging its monopoly of religious craziness. Why do the Cigarette manufacturers spend money on convincing us that tobacco addiction is not really half as bad for you as these wicked, unscientific anti-smoking activists claim? They do so because in recent years the health dangers of smoking have become more obvious, smoking in public has become stigmatised and some very fat profits indeed are in danger of being lost. Where there is an interest to defend the battle of ideas hots up.

Socialism is the most dangerous idea conceivable for defenders of capitalism. Those who support a system of minority affluence and privilege are not going to sit back complacently while we undermine support for their social order. They will fight with all the lies, distortions, bribes and more sinister weaponry at their command. That is why there is a class war between them and us. It is not a war of bullets and bombs, which capitalists and would be capitalists feel most comfortable with, but a war of ideas. Our objective is to unshackle the minds of our fellow workers: to educate the victims of political confusion.

Socialists are serious about ideas because knowledge is the most potent weapon our class can possess. That is why we are not bothered about whether our ideas are regarded as serious or crazy in some philosophical, academic sense. Socialists could not care less if the pontificating lookers on in the struggle of history deem us to be cranks. It is better to be a class-conscious crank than a serious and respectable accomplice to human oppression. Neither are we bothered about the hangers-on to socialist ideas, often to be found flogging their worn out fallacies in the various sects of left wing capitalism. They have been around a long time, and Engels described them as 

. . . all those who have nothing to look forward to from the official world or have come to the end of their tether with it—opponents of inoculation, supporters of abstemiousness, vegetarians. anti-vivisectionists, nature healers, free-community preachers whose communities have fallen to pieces, authors of new theories on the origin of the universe, unsuccessful or unfortunate inventors, victims of real or imaginary injustice who are termed "good for nothing petty-foggers" by the bureaucracy, honest fools and dishonest swindlers —all throng to the working class parties in all countries (On the History of Early Christianity, in Marx and Engels on Religion, p. 31)

For socialist knowledge to win the day. and capitalism to be destroyed by a well organised working class, two factors are required. The first is a socialist movement which sticks to its principles and never betrays the true interests of the class which is to be emancipated by socialism, Secondly, it is only possible for ideas to change as fast as material conditions themselves change out of the contradictions of everyday life under capitalism arise new ideas. Today some workers might think they are doing well because they own a few shares in British Gas, a few tremors on the Stock Exchange should be sufficient to shatter their illusions. In 1988 you might vote for nuclear bombs in order to keep the peace, it will only take one mushroom cloud to shake that dangerous myth out of your head. As you read this you may be thinking that socialism sounds like a great idea, but you simply haven't the time or energy to do anything about it. Capitalism might create plenty of time for you; it might push you so hard, assault your dignity so much and insult your humanity to the point where you have no alternative but to devote your energy to overthrowing it. As Marx explained:

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come info conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters Then begins an epoch of social revolution

(Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

Steve Coleman

History Through Tinted Spectacles (1952)

From the October 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is evident to anyone who is a student of history, however humble, and who is at the same time interested in trends in modem society, that much effort is being expended in bringing the minds of the public to bear on the so-called glories of the Mediaeval Age.

One can think of a number of reasons for this; first, there is the short-term policy—that of “cashing in" in a box-office sense, on the public’s natural curiosity for things of the past, as is evidenced by the spate of so-called “historical’’ films now being shown throughout the country.

The second and more serious reason for this revival in Mediaevalism and obscurantism is to provide an opiate for a society which is beginning to be restive, and in some cases, resistive to the present conditions of graft and gloom that its “leaders” are continually creating for it. These “leaders” are becoming increasingly aware that society is desperately ill and is heading for another major breakdown. Blame is continually laid at the "other fellow’s” door; it is either the poison of Russian "Communism,” which persists in corrupting the Capitalist Democracies or the poison of Capitalist germ bombs which continue to pour down on the heads of "Communist” countries.

The "free world,” i.e., the countries outside Russian Imperialism but subjected to other brands of the same disorder, are on the one hand building up economic barriers to protect themselves from one another (Britain, Australia, U.S.A. are all devoted to the cause of export whilst frowning on imports), while on the other hand they claim they are forced by the threat of Soviet Imperialism to form military alliances for their mutual protection.

It is plain to see that the world is rapidly dividing into two camps, the one representing the well-known company of actors who have for many years treated the general public with drama after drama—usually tragedy from the audience’s point of view—the other a somewhat newer company, branded as upstarts by the more respected company of stock-brokers, bishops and bankers but nevertheless feared for its lustiness and cleverness born of a study of the weaknesses in the make-up of its adversary. No amount of assurances from either side that both companies can continue to do business without coming to blows should convince us when we realise that it is in the nature of both to expand at the other’s expense. In the meantime the audience is being suitably conditioned by both sides whether it be the hypnotic influence of the Russian political ballet or the sanctified self-righteousness of the Western Capitalist knight errants both striving valiantly in the lists at U.N.O.

Which brings us back to Mediaevalism. It is one of the weapons in the armoury of Capitalist, the idea being to feed the workers on past glories in order to forget present-day problems. It is believed by some that a return to Mediaeval faith and philosophy, to the Mediaeval spirit of adventure and chivalry, will give this wobbling society of ours some "spiritual stability” whatever that may mean.

The lusty infant, Soviet Capitalism, utilises history too. It is more than ever tending to portray Russian history as a means of propaganda to its own and other audiences. It has made its peace with the Church on conditions mutually beneficial to Church and State.

In Britain, where an official State religion helps the Capitalist class in its legislation, abetted by numerous other Christian sects, many faithful Protestants banded in the Protestant League are much perturbed at the swing back to Catholicism on the one hand and to the rash of spiritualist churches on the other. While the latter disease is perhaps the misguided groping of befuddled and dispirited workers for a way out of their daily cares, the former appears to be a deliberate plan to bring the minds of people back to the Mediaeval philosophy of poverty.

The attempt to give the bloody wars in Malaya and Korea a semblance of a new kind of “Knight Errantry” is clearly seen from the public utterances of the leaders of Church and State to whom these wars appear as a holy crusade against “Communist” atheism by the one, as an economic necessity by the other, and as salvation to both from the horrors that may come when the exploited classes of all countries break their fetters.

It is when we really study the Mediaeval scene in its true light that we begin to see how utterly funny the present attempts at re-creation are, funny if they were not so terribly serious, if is time that the exploited masses realised the truth about the so-called glories of the Middle Ages; that it was a time of pestilence, famine and rigid class distinction when no man could get outside the pattern of lighters, prayers and peasants with the latter class supporting the whole Feudal structure on its broad back. The prayers and fighters often allied themselves with one another, as for example during the Fourth Crusade in Palestine. Villehardouin, one of six ambassadors to the Doge of Venice, asked for aid in transporting the Crusaders. He tells of an agreement made in March of the year 1201 —“ Sire, we have come to you on behalf of the noble barons of France who have taken the cross.... they pray for you for God's sake .... to furnish them transports and ships of war." The Doge then tells the ambassadors what aid he is prepared to give and continues, “ . . . and we will do more, we will add fifty galleys for the love of God on condition that of every conquest by sea or land, we shall have one half and you the other ....” While therefore the Venetians were willing to help the Crusade along “for the love of God ” they did not let that great love blind them to a fat share in the booty. The Church was of course extremely interested in the Crusade; the “private" of those days, like some of his counterparts to-day, was only interested in his orders and in the belief that dying in the war for Mother Church was a sure passport to heaven.

So great was the oppression of the serfs by the Chapter of Notre Dame de Paris in the reign of Louis, that Queen Blanche did what many modern philanthropists would do—remonstrated “in all humility" whereto the monks replied that “ they might starve their serfs as they pleased.”

The glorious works of art and architecture, the magnificent cathedrals and palaces, were built not only by the veneration of Christian craftsmen, but out of the sweat of the ignorant and oppressed masses and the blood of the conscript peasant who died fighting holy wars for Christian lords against other Christian lords and even if he did manage to survive the battles alive, lived to supply the wealth with which the members of the late lord's family bribed the Church in order that the period of confinement in purgatory would be lessened.

The progressive thinkers often thought at the peril of their lives if their views were a danger to the existing order. Galileo, who professed the theory of Copernicus that the earth moved round the sun, was forced to recant his scientific belief although earlier, Copernicus had dedicated the same treatise to the Pope. (The Mediaeval Church attracted to herself thinkers and men of learning in order that she might remain the dominating factor, though when she failed at any time she came down with a heavy hand on the blasphemer).

The seamen and explorers of the “Age of Discoveries” were inspired much more by the spur of loot than they were by the spirit of adventure.

It is indeed a fitting comment on the crisis in modern Capitalist society that it must once more revert to a past which it itself burst asunder as being incompatible with the new forms of exploitation and profit-making; that it once again invokes the Medieval spirit on the one hand and piles up super modern weapons on the other.

The writing is on the wall. Capitalism is like the villain in a crime magazine, waiting with bated breath for the stroke of midnight it has nowhere to turn. The world has been grabbed long ago (or almost all of it though various re-distributions go on from time to time, conducted by force or the threat of force as we see in Europe and Asia at the present time). We might remember in this connection the words of Cecil Rhodes, an arch Imperialist to whom the annexation of territories was part of his life blood, “ the world is nearly all parcelled out and what is left of it is bring divided up, conquered and colonised. To think of the stars overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could . . ."

The Christian fighting barons had a faith; the rising Capitalist class had a faith; Cecil Rhodes cleariy had one and we know for a certainty that the Church never lacked a faith. The workers should realise that these faiths, common to them all had to have for practical purposes, a vast army of unthinking automatons to keep them going—first peasants, now wage-workers.

The issue facing the perplexed workers is what to believe in and what to do. They can of course swallow the distortions of the glorious past and live in the Cinema dream world; they can stupify themselves with the various brands of opium turned out by the purveyors of the many religious sects from the State Established to those of humbler but perhaps more exciting causes. They can stop thinking altogether and “concentrate” on placing 14 correct symbols in their proper places on a football coupon, thereby hoping to win a fortune. One thing is plain they cannot go back. They are creatures of the present and must .take the consequences of the present.

Alternatively they can learn to understand Socialism. This will not come as a gift from heaven, neither is it mysteriously inspired nor does it come from “ leaders.” It can only grow from knowledge—a knowledge of the nature of Capitalism and the laws which govern Capitalist society. The only emancipators of the world's toilers will be the toilers themselves. They will then build edifices that will be monuments to those that follow—monuments to men who overcame the last barrier, who understood what freedom meant and having understood, became free.

W.T.B.

Fascism as ideology (2024)

From the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of us, sooner or later, want the chaos, suffering and euphoria of existence to have some meaning. Many find meaning in relationships, family and, if they are very lucky, in their work. Others look to political/religious ideologies for answers. There is no shortage of choice in the modern world. Unlike former generations we are not only conditioned by our local experiences but we can turn to a cornucopia of ideologies courtesy of the media and internet.

It would seem that we have an almost infinite variety to choose from but, as with all forms of consumerism, this can prove to be an illusion. With the decline of religious ideologies in the technologically advanced West we see the dominance of a single political perspective that places all ideologies within a spectrum of left and right forms of capitalism. Because of historical developments we see that bourgeois representative democracies place themselves in the ‘centre’ of this spectrum. They look out upon the spread from this ‘core’ as deviations and the further away from this imagined centre the more the convenient and, in this context, descriptive word of ‘extremist’ is used. Even the Greens and environmentalist groups, after some resistance, have been placed on the left of this spectrum since they have no answers other than the tired impotent call for the reform of capitalism. Only socialists stand outside of this rigid ideologically prescriptive domination and refuse to acknowledge its political relevance.

We won’t go into the historical reasons why this universal ideology of left and right evolved but its continued dominance is plainly due to those who own the means of production, in this context primarily the media, who cannot or will not conceive of an alternative to capitalism; as Marx has said the dominant ideology is always that of the dominant class.

In the last century two ideologies came to dominate the political landscape of Europe – ‘Fascism’ and Soviet-style ‘Communism’. They were both conceived of as alternatives to ‘normal’ or ‘bourgeois’ capitalism. Any meaningful analysis of either of these types of regime reveals that they had a lot more in common with each other and with the conventional capitalism within which they evolved than they would care to admit. Both were militaristic, authoritarian, xenophobic and, most importantly, both condemned the majority to the same meaningless wage slavery and the relentless creation of surplus value to finance the lifestyles of their elites. We have explained the reasons for the failed experiment by the Bolsheviks to turn Marxian analysis into an ideology on these pages many times and it may be appropriate to label their state capitalism, among many other criticisms, as anachronistic – especially in a European context. Can we say the same of fascism?

In some respects, ideologies are impervious to the accusation of being anachronistic; all religions tend to have their roots in the distant past but this does not affect their popularity and cultural durability. We might point optimistically to the demise of religion in the western cultures but millions across the globe still adhere to values and laws prescribed by imaginary deities and their priests. Given the undoubted crimes committed by those calling themselves fascist their ideology has been elevated to the highest ranks of historical infamy. That it is merely a form of capitalism that developed in a specific cultural context does not affect its continual attraction for the dispossessed, fearful, uneducated and those desperate to believe that they and their cultural identity are superior to that of all others. The weak are always tempted to identify with the strong so that their own frailty and fear is diluted.

Is it possible to conceive of the world without the use of an ideological lens? Socialists believe that we can at least negate some of the conditioning that we are all subjected to through a study of history. It would seem that all ideologies are generated by and serve certain groups (classes) and that the actual content of them is of little importance compared with the political control that they enable.

It would be impossible to seriously maintain that the conflicts in England during the revolution of the 1640s had anything remotely to do with the preachings of an obscure rabbi 1600 years earlier in Judea. What promoted Puritanism were the political needs of the rising class of capitalists. This historical ‘class struggle’, so socialists believe, underlies all ideological belief.

We embrace this struggle for what it is and have no interest in lecturing people about the moral strengths and weaknesses of comparing left and right or the possibility of repairing capitalism through the application of one ideology or another. The inhuman outrages committed in the name of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism are the results of ideological detritus used by the oligarchs of Israel and Palestine to justify their greed, fear and hatred. This visceral hatred of the working class for their counterparts in another culture is the lifeblood of ‘fascism’. One of the excuses used for the Russian oligarchs’ invasion of Ukraine was that it was a hotbed of Nazi fascists – forgetting the vicious brand of rabid nationalism in their own homeland.

Fascism and its left-wing counterpart will always find fertile ground to grow within the corrupt and rotting capitalist culture. No amount of wishful thinking that we have ‘moved on’ and that such ideologies are anachronistic will put these genies back in their respective bottles. They cannot be countered by mere moral or rational argument but only by class consciousness that understands their historical origins and the political elites that they served.

There are some who believe that this too constitutes just another ideological perspective but even if this were true then at least it serves the needs of a class composed of the vast majority of the human species. Socialism can never be imposed by any elite and so the resolution of the class struggle can only be achieved through the understanding by the majority of what they have to do to counter the need for ideologies and the political ignorance and historical anachronisms that they all represent.

Wez.

The Workers and Education (1944)

From the September 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many workers read with pleasure the announcement in the daily press of the proposal of the new Education Act to extend their children’s schooling to the age of 15 years, coupled with a vague promise of raising it when possible to the dizzy height of 16 years. Perhaps they took it as an earnest of the post-war reconstruction we hear so much of nowadays, an added inducement to have bigger and better families completely educated by the State.

If proof were needed to show that education is part of the State machinery used by the ruling class to make obedient wage slaves, it was given in the proceedings in the House of Lords on July 11th, 1944. The Daily Telegraph of the following day reports:—

“The Minister of Education is to discuss with his Advisory Council the best course to adopt to see that children are taught the duties of citizenship and to defend their native country.”

In the debate which followed between the noble Lords, the Church gave its blessing to jingoism when the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr. Temple, replied to Lord Mottistone, who stated that it was “the law of the land to defend one’s country,” by saying, “I was fully aware of it and rejoice in the fact.” (Daily Telegraph, July 12th).

Later on in the debate, the following curious statement was made by Viscount Maugham : —

“Historians of France had said that in recent years no body of people in that country were so responsible for the events of 1940 as were the teachers.” (Daily Telegraph, July 12th.)

Blame has been laid at many doors for the fall of France, but Viscount Maugham has at least been original in his particular scapegoat. It is, however, difficult to accept. If he would peruse a little work by Mark Starr, entitled “Lies and Hate in Education,” he might learn a little about history and geography as taught to elementary school children of capitalist countries. A whole chapter is devoted to the French text books. It opens on page 94: “In comparison with the British books, bias and nationalistic hatred are more easily to be seen in their French counterparts.” Many and extensive quotations are given from the French school which illustrate the design to awaken hatred of the Germans and to make children believe that they are their hereditary enemies and the sources of all their troubles. Thus does the ruling clique, as representatives of capital, endeavour to befog the workers, from a tender age onwards, into believing that their enemies are anyone but their masters, and also prepares their minds to accept the vituperative outpourings against a competitive nation, which always accompanies a military attack upon it.

One quotation by Mark Starr shows that the Treaty of Versailles was eulogised by the French history books, whilst the German counterparts gave a totally opposite view. Yet another reads : —

“You will happily put up with the strenuous and noble soldier life if you remember the past—our bombarded towns, our burnt-out villages—if you think of the provinces torn out of France, if you do not forget Alsace-Lorraine.” (Page 97).

From a “Reader for the Young,” the following is given : —

“The poor little boy has two cut hands. It is the Germans who have wounded him thus. They have killed his father, his sister, and his big brother as well. . . . Ah ! wicked Germans, the French children will curse you in their hearts for a long time.” (Page 100.)

A little history about the employment of young children in the French coal mines, such as is given in Zola’s “Germinal,” might have taught the French children to curse a little nearer home, where their own interests might have been affected.

Much, states the chapter on France, is said about German “ferocious beasts” and “brutes drunk with alcohol and blood” (pretty much the same as we read in our daily papers), whilst the Paris Commune of 1871 receives a boycott of silence, except that the Communards are dismissed as dangerous fanatics.

Many workers looking back on their own years at an elementary school will remember a similar attitude to history. Mainly an account of good, bad and indifferent kings, the unsurpassed greed of other nations, treachery among the blacks, yellows and browns, usually rounded off by a Kipling rhapsody on the white Britisher. The general ignorance of, say the Chartist movement is well illustrated by an extract from the chapter devoted to English education in Mark Starr’s book : —

“It is hardly surprising that when British soldiers in Murmansk were appealed to by aeroplane-scattered leaflets to “Remember your Chartist forefathers,” they only replied, “Who the hell are they?”… In treating the earlier Radical and Luddite agitations, the supporters are described as “rioters” and “foolish men.” This is the Fletcher Kipling account of Peterloo : 

"At one riot at Manchester in 1819 the soldiers had to be called in, and several people were shot. Very likely these were only innocent spectators; those who get up riots are usually careful to keep out of the way when their suppression begins. Stiff laws were passed in Parliament to prevent such riotous meetings for the future.’” (Pages 52 and 53.)

All civilised countries have their nationalistic teachings designed to warp the young mind. No wonder Socialist teaching is so often hard going; the workers have so many discoveries to make and so much to unlearn.

The Roman Catholic Church has always appreciated the need to get its adherents very young, and has protested strongly against the Education Act. The Act proposes to give them little financial assistance should they remain as they now are—that is, completely running their own schools and employing only teachers of the faith, and in many schools Monks and Nuns.

Commander Bower, in the House of Commons, among others, put the case for the Roman Catholics : —

“A Roman Catholic therefore must believe all the dogmas of his faith. His faith is a house supported by many pillars and if you knock one down, the whole collapses. . . . From this it follows that our view of education is fundamentally different. So religion must permeate the whole curriculum. All subjects must be taught from the Roman Catholic angle “(our italics). (Hansard, January 20th.)

So there it is, from the cradle to the grave never allow the individual to think for himself in case one pillar might be dislodged. Time, however, is not on their side. Not so very long ago the Roman Catholic Church held undisputed sway in this country. It became inconvenient, however, to the State, which endeavoured to institute a different kind of control on the worker. The manner in which it came about is beyond the scope of this article, but to anyone interested in real history it is most instructive.

It became necessary with the growth of capitalism that operatives of all descriptions must receive some education, but it was not of the variety designed to inculcate ideas of freedom in their minds. Education, nevertheless, is a two-edged sword, wield it never so carefully. Whilst making a useful worker, the development of his mind proceeds apace. Even the doctored history and geography cannot quite bemuse him, and his horizons widen ; often, however, he becomes disillusioned, but many turn this to good advantage, determined to resist and oust the master class. As the capitalist method of production advances, there is an increasing need for advanced education. The machines of the present war, for instance, require extensive knowledge of all branches of mathematics. The tremendous weaving and spinning plants of the cotton districts cannot be managed by a worker like those who ran the domestic industry in times gone by. Whilst many operations are performed by turning a lever, the actual working and construction of the machinery is a highly technical affair.

The longer period of education to be given by our masters, whilst appearing to be in the homes for heroes category, is merely a design for the better filling of our masters’ coffers. In veiled terms, the White Paper on Educational .Reconstruction stated this (page 19) : —

“From the point of view of the country’s manufacturing industry, agriculture and commerce, the training afforded by a system of part-time education in conjunction with employment is long overdue. The initial and natural advantages that gave this country, almost for the asking, its place of pre-eminence in world manufacture and world markets have long been fading. More and more in the future will it be necessary to rely on the capacity, adaptability and the quality of our industrial and commercial personnel. Had fuller attention been given earlier to the all-important question of training of young workers, some of the difficulties experienced by the Services and by industry during the present war would have been markedly less acute.”

Whilst an asset to the master class, therefore, we know the educated worker will be an asset to his own class in its task of educating for Socialism. The ability to propagate knowledge is badly needed. Many people are found to be receptive to our case, once presented, because of their own experience, but Socialist educationalists are needed to reach their brothers in all lands. The deplorable fact that most people believe what they read in their daily newspapers is somewhat mitigated by the fact that they can read; thus our hopes of teaching them with our literature.

To this end we welcome the Education Act, despite its capitalist purpose, for we remember that within the capitalist system are the seeds of its own destruction.

W. P.

Nations and borders (2023)

From the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

So it would appear that the USA and its allies were rather premature in claiming to have won ‘the cold war’. Once again Europe is convulsed in violence as the Russian and American warlords continue their bloody rivalry. This time it is Ukraine that has become their chosen battlefield as one side seeks to defend its global hegemony against the threat from the East. Only the propaganda has changed as the US can no longer pretend that it is the threat to freedom posed by ‘soviet communism’ which is the cause of the conflict. They have reverted to an older and much more corrosive hypocritical form of rhetoric based on the myth of nationhood and ‘sovereign states’. The very chaotic instability of capitalist nation states makes this myth-making vital for the oligarchs of all countries since to protect themselves and their power from any perceived threat they must convince those who will murder and die for their interests that to do so is a noble fight for their own ‘freedom’ from foreign dominance. This is the only reason that the lie of nationhood and the myth of a shared interest of all those within given borders continues to survive in the 21st century. The working class would seem to have learnt few lessons from the dark age of the preceding century as they continue to believe that war can solve their problems. Let us consider the origins of the transformation of community into tribalism and of cultural interaction into racist and xenophobic hatred.

Our species has always been intensely social because for us to survive in nature we had to form communities. As these communities evolved they acquired diverse cultural behaviours and values. When private property first came to acquire significance, the warrior elites who owned the surplus produced by settled agrarian communities were always fearful that another foreign elite might seek to take it from them. They needed an ideology (religion) that contained an inbuilt suspicion of the other cultures that surrounded them. Although such elites were usually well acquainted with these other cultures they needed to fill the void of ignorance shared by their uneducated exploited majority with stories of immorality and cruelty that might one day serve as an excuse to go to war with them. Thus the love of community was subverted into a suspicion of those with other traditions. It wasn’t long before these city states and then principalities adopted a policy of pre-emptive strikes which could, if successful, create an empire. The imposition of one pantheon, one culture and one ruling elite spawned the nightmare of imperialism of which the ‘Pax Romana’ is a prime example. The destruction of cultural diversity was the price for peace. All ruling-class ideology has this element within it from the dominance of Catholicism in the Middle Ages to the promotion of ‘democracy’ (plutocracy) today.

The transformation of hundreds of petty principalities into consolidations of nation states was accomplished through the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire during the reformation followed by capitalism’s destruction of feudalism. As the ‘wars of religion’ and then the Napoleonic wars drew and redrew the map of Europe, borders changed with a rapidity that mixed the diverse cultures profoundly. The age of European imperialism had a similar effect around the world. By the end of the 20th century and its unending conflicts only very few regions of the Earth with a purely indigenous population were left unaffected. It became impossible to define a ‘national character’, which in turn made the need for a creation myth even more acute for ruling classes; hence the endless books on the quest for an English identity etc. As the reality of cultural, ethnic, racial and religious differences retreated before the rise of global capitalism so their myth advanced. To dilute any possibility of international class consciousness the culture of capitalism became increasingly obsessed with national identity. But why is the global working class still so easily fooled by this anachronistic nonsense?

A friend once declared that it would be an advantage if any discussion of history pertaining to current political events should not go back further than 50 years. His reasoning was that we should not be dragged down by the past and its grudges and bitterness because this inevitably inhibits progress. It is true that many seek to endlessly refight the battles of the past but it is equally true that an ignorance of history makes it so much easier to repeat its mistakes. The mass media of any nation have a very selective memory and use history as propaganda which only a deeper understanding of the subject is capable of refuting. Indeed, historical ignorance is the corner stone of all reactionary ideology. In understanding why the majority still identify with their respective nation state we must point to this profound lack of any meaningful historical education. Of course this is only part of the ideology of the parasite class that always seeks to subvert any subject to its own advantage: you are told that your poverty is your own fault, that wars are fought because of evil men, that criminals are born and not made, that greed and violence are the natural human state – all of these lies are dedicated to one end: that capitalism itself can never ever be blamed for anything.

Socialists think the evidence is overwhelming that private property society and its present incarnation (capitalism) is the real cause of wars. Not just in terms of ruling class greed and paranoia but because of the impoverishment of 99 percent of the world’s population who, in the desperation to find a reason for their daily feelings of alienation, meaninglessness, cynicism and political impotence, will grasp at the evilness of a Putin or the invasion of illegal immigrants as an explanation. In the search for secure borders we increase our own insecurity. As we cling to this tiny rock in space there is no room for those who would seek to divide us into tribes of mutual hatred – they do this not because they are evil but because they’re born into an inhuman economic system that demands it of them.

Wez.

National nonsense (2000)

From the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Nationalism is utterly opposed to socialism. Socialists therefore oppose nationalism in all its forms.

It might be supposed that people who profess an interest in the doings of human beings—such as, say, journalists—might well consider a solid and determined strike by nurses over pay to be a worthwhile subject for their notice. This should be especially so when such a strike is going on within but a few hundred miles of their offices, as happened when in October the nurses of Ireland voted by an overwhelming majority (90 percent for) to go on indefinite strike over their shoddy pay. Devoted consumers of the British media, however, would have found nary a whisper on the subject. Clearly, a story of dedicated health care professionals—usually referred to as “angels” by our sharp-eyed reporters—feeling so ill-used and battered by the system that they decided to take action for themselves, is not of interest to human beings on the other side of a small stretch of water. Instead we were treated to facile dissertations upon the constitutional significance of Prince Charles skipping dinner with the Chinese president.

The story is ever the same. Events that occur outside of Britain’s boundaries are of no concern to our intrepid observers of humanity, unless they somehow have a “British interest”. We are not meant to be interested in the affairs of humans generally, but instead to be concerned with “the British” first and foremost. Indeed, when BBC journalist Kate Adie reported on the Dunblane massacre, using exactly the same style and technique as she would have reported a massacre in some far-flung war-torn region, she was execrated for her insensitivity. The deaths of British children are clearly more important than children dead in war.

Tool of rising capitalist class

Historically, nationalism and national feeling have been the tool of the capitalist class for both winning and retaining power. England, for example, can be seen as having developed through the growth of the economic power and influence of London. As London grew, and began to dictate the economic priorities of the surrounding regions, so to it began to need to control them politically, and socially, in order to protect its own interests. Up until the reign of Henry VIII the feudal barons had lived in almost total autonomy, specifically the far-flung magnates like the Percies of Northumbria. Most regions, villages even, maintained a distinctive identity, set of values and traditions. As their influence grew, it became incumbent upon the London capitalists to try and tailor these values and traditions to win over more support for themselves, or at least to ensure an absence of conflict.

In order to achieve this they adapted the traditions they found among the subjected communities, or even made them up when none suitable existed. A classic example was the myth of the Norman Yoke—that Saxon England had been a bastion of Freedom and Democracy, but that William the Conqueror had imported the tyrannical monarchy and feudalism with him. The historical record shows that the Saxons had extensive feudal structures of their own. Of course, that was irrelevant to the myth-makers. They had a tradition to invent, specifically, one which would unite people behind them against their feudal opponents.

The aristocracy itself maintained a preference of looking towards the complex familial power structures across Europe, rather than to a feeling of community with people of their own domain. Title, land and religion were the factors that mattered to them, not nation. They were more concerned with status among their peers. It didn’t matter what language the people who lived on their lands spoke. Further, avowal of the doctrine of the nation was seen as placing an ideological category above the monarch; where before the monarch was the state, now the monarch was to be subordinated to the state.

Making (up) a nation

As the power of the proponents of these ideas grew, so pronouncing an adherence to their ideas became a swift and secure way to win preferment. Hence the power of their ideas grew too, to become the dominant, ruling ideas. There was a further practical impetus for cultural standardisation: the extension of state and bureaucratic power further into life, in order to more efficiently control the economy and delineate property. Coupled with the increased capacity and need for rapid communication, this meant that standardised linguistic practices were needed. Language became a factor in establishing state power, and thus it became a factor in determining a “nation”. It’s no coincidence that the rise of the nation-state coincides with the invention of the dictionary and the encyclopaedia. It’s no coincidence that nationalism is accompanied by a mania for classifying, delineating and defining people into categories. These practical considerations were made explicit by the Polish nationalist Pilsudski, who observed that “It is the state that makes the nation, not the nation the state.”

Nations have taken a great deal of building. There is almost no nation-state that has not had its boundaries drawn in blood, its foundations dug out of human flesh. England was nationalised by Cromwell with the deaths of the Cornish and the Irish. France was nationalised by bloody wars between the monarchy and local lords and interests (not to mention the interminable wars with the Germanic states to set the exact boundary between the two “nations”). America was built on the bodies of the native population. It is a process that continues today in the form nation-building, which has taken in Yugoslavia and Central Africa.

The effort, though, has to be ongoing. States have required the use of an education system, to standardise learning, spread a national history and a sense of shared culture. An example of this can be seen in the Thatcher government’s enforcement of the intellectually bankrupt notion of a Literary Canon in the National Curriculum: a gallery of literary luminaries, led by Shakespeare, that bored, uninterested children are told are great and something for them to be proud of. On the continent, it was the task of “turning peasants into Frenchmen” that the Republic set itself. Nations are made, not born.

In order to enforce the new system of property over the whole range of its influence, the capitalist class needed the state, and its legitimising idea of nationalism and the nation. Culture resides in sets of ideas, values and practises that set out a sense of precedent, self and future possibility. By imposing the idea of the nation upon a culture, complete with its inherent notions of territorial ownership and property, the ruling class impose their notions of property on the very self-image of the people within that culture.

All possibilities and plans are circumscribed by, or at least must be made in relation to, this logic. So long as people think in terms of the “common good” of the “national economy”, in terms of the overall performance of one unit in the world-wide division of peoples, they are, whether consciously or not, serving the interests of the capitalist class. All evaluations, priorities and hierarchies of value within a “national culture” are made from the point of view, from the self-interest, and, indeed, the apprehended self-hood, of the members of the capitalist class. When the economy is “doing well” it is doing so for the capitalists, when the economy is ailing, it is ailing for the capitalists. Their interest and feeling is the condition for action and evaluation of a national culture.

The idea of “the nation”, then, functions as a supreme good, beyond the physical and mechanical functionings of the state, to which any cause may appeal. Thus, both Blair and Hague are claiming that their position on the Euro is the true “patriotic cause”. Put another way, it is a fantasy, a dream, which can be used to cover up for problems and contradictions in the practice of the state’s daily life. Its function is to legitimise both the state and class rule, and sustain a large quantity of support, through workers who identify with the ideals of nationhood and believe themselves to be the same as, and have the same interests as, their masters.

No common interest 

Workers, of course, do not share a common interest with their masters. It does not follow that if the “national wealth” increases, or if trade increases, or even if profit increases, that higher wages will be gained by workers. In fact capitalists can only make a profit by appropriating the wealth produced by the workers to themselves; but in the topsy-turvy world of ideology, it seems that workers will only have good pay and wealth when the capitalists are doing well. So it appears that workers and capitalists share a common interest. In fact, the interest of workers is conditioned by the interest of the capitalist, in exactly the same manner as hostages held by a kidnapper: unless the kidnapper-capitalists’s demands are met, they will not allow the hostage-workers to have what they need to live.

There is a well-documented effect of hostage situations, called “The Stockholm Syndrome” in which hostages under duress began to identify with their kidnappers, and believe in their cause. Nationalism works in much the same way. It is the Stockholm Syndrome on a grand scale. The working class who are dependent (under the current system) on the capitalists, to whom they are bonded by state-boundaries across which they are not permitted to escape, begin to believe that they share an identity with them. Hence the ridiculous comments we’ve all heard from people flipping burgers in McDonalds, insisting blindly that they don’t like socialism because they’re capitalists. Hence further, the ridiculous spectacle of people wittering on about the Union Flag being on British Airways’ planes, as if BA were anything more than a vehicle for enriching share-holders.

Workers have no country

The only way to define such national identity is to define it in terms of what (who) it is not, i.e. negatively. Thus nationalism sets itself as being against other countries, striving to define a uniqueness of national culture so as to once and for all set its country apart from others, to know itself by what is un-like it. At one extreme this can include myths about race and blood, trying to attach the national abstraction to some trait of genetics or similar such nonsense. Since people have a strong desire to retain their own perceived identity, and to have a good opinion of themselves, often the creeds based on such identities function in a highly irrational, and ultimately, defensive way. Thus it is usually a sign of desperation and of an incapacity to formulate a coherent argument when our masters resort to playing the nationalist card.

It is clear, then, that socialists must oppose nationalism in all its forms: not just refusing to espouse their creed, but defying the rituals, the anthem signing, flag saluting and other expressions of craven loyalty to the nation-state, that help enforce the idea of nation in our minds. There is no national interest for workers, and any attempt to reform capitalism must be based on a national interest and thus be opposed to socialism. Self-determination for “nations” just equates with freedom and self-determination for a ruling class. It must be opposed in favour of self determination for people, concretely and actually in their own lives. It must be opposed with socialism.

Pik Smeet

Black-Out (1940)

From the January 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

The harassed householder knows too well the difficulty of obtaining a complete black-out; give it but the least excuse, and light will find a way.

The black-out of all thought not directed to “winning the war,” desired by Blimp & Co., falls, fortunately, far below their ideal, considerably below their expectation probably; it is hopeful that the working class generally has not forgotten 1914-18; the reflected light of those years alone helps to defeat the powers of darkness, squawking their hurdy-gurdy slogan, “God and King.”

It is hopeful that an increasing number of people are seeking a formula to justify sending Freddy Smith to well and truly find the bowels of Fritz Schmidt with the end of a bayonet. Priestly insincerities are availing less and less; the ambiguities and sheer contradictions of the alleged “Gospel of Peace” are becoming increasingly apparent.

Where, then, the “Inward Peace,” so plaintively demanded by a Matthew Arnold, a Peace born of Light and begetting Sweetness, a Peace lapped by the gem-like flame of Understanding —not, like the priest's “ Peace of God,” “passing” it.

Socialism alone has the answer. The Key was finally furnished for use by Marx and Engels. And it requires no learned treatises to master the handling of the Key; in fact, its straightness of outline, its very simplicity of form seems to preclude for many the beauty that should make us desire it.

The Socialist's reply to the decent, but be- muddled, religious C.O., to the sincere, the natively humane advocate of fighting Hitler, is: There can be no peace for you, "inward” or otherwise, while social inequality prevails. The fruit is bitter . . . delve for root; in short, look for causes.

Quinine was a potent foe to the effects of malaria—the dire disease can only be finally eliminated by drying up the homes of the malicious mosquito, which carries its own deadly injection needle; examples could be multiplied a hundred times.

Man is a social animal; individuals react to each other and to society generally on codes of conduct that have been created for them by ages of preceding thought and action. Such thought and action has been conditioned by material circumstances in the long run. “Vice” and ”Virtue” have pertinent content only in relation to a practically stable group; to seek “final sanctions” in some Divine Superman is to invite the worst injuries that witch-doctor, priest (and, finally, “ Leader ”) can inflict.

The leading "virtue” of the Arab was hospitality—the inhospitable desert demanded it. On the other hand, it is significant that “Punic faith” and Dutch “slimness” words of reproach separated by a thousand years and more, had a common explanation in the circumstances attached to two highly commercialised nations.

In the face of history, the chase after “eternal verities” in the field of human behaviour (“ethics") is sheer moonshine. The Egyptian priest blessed the union of royal brother and sister in “holy” matrimony—(Luther condoned a flagrant case of bigamy in his time and day); inquisition into the quite unreproved relations of the Ajaxes and Patrocluses of ancient Greece reveal startlingly divergent angles in “ethics" between the high civilisation of one day and those of another.  In short, history shows “vices” and "virtues” playing a rare old game of handy- dandy. Material circumstances pull the strings.

The greatest pull is exercised by economic conditions. Candid enquiry into the personal outlook of General Lee and Abe Lincoln will reveal in the former a charm that the latter was completely lacking in. Lee sincerely believed that slavery was a God-given institution (he really worshipped in the fane of "King Cotton"); Lincoln (who was prepared to condone slavery if the Union could thereby be preserved) was tied hand and foot by the interests of a highly commercialised North. Both appealed to God. It is interesting to recall that the Baptist North was anti-slavery, the Baptist South pro-slavery.

Let it be clearly stated that human effort (including thought) makes big contribution to material circumstances; only the very stupid or the blindly prejudiced will attribute to Socialist philosophy in this matter the nature of a kind of Economic Predestination.

In all ages there have been fine spirits profoundly disturbed by the evils attendant upon the social structure of their time. Jewish lore is full of noble aspirations. St. Augustine's ”City of God,” More's “Utopia” looked wistfully into a wish-fulfilled future of human happiness.

But it was reserved for capitalism to form the solid ground of harsh fact upon which could be based a scientific analysis of society, fraught with instruction as to future action for the utter and complete reconstruction of human relations which Socialism will entail.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain's warnings have been justified. The “Peace-loving” Russia of Communists and Labourites is now running true to ancient Muscovite tradition. Before this appears in The Socialist Standard, Hitler and Stalin may be definitely joining forces.

The S.P.G.B. respects any community that takes its stand against what it genuinely holds to be an abrogation of such personal liberty as may exist; it has no doubts as to the relative limited democracy of Finland and the ferocious tyranny of Stalin-land, but it keeps clearly in mind the fact that, short of Socialism, wars and rumours of war will persist; as a Party, its "advice” to the non-Socialist worker is that he should seek Socialist knowledge, and speed the day when the economic malarial parasites are dried up at the source.

Augustus Snellgrove

What is Patriotism? (1937)

From the February 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Reprinted from "The Socialist Standard," December 1915)

The answer depends largely upon the point of view. From one standpoint patriotism appears as the actual religion of the modern State. From another it is the decadence and perversion of a noble and deep-rooted impulse of loyalty to the social unit, acquired by mankind during the earliest stages of social life. From yet another viewpoint, that of capitalist interests, patriotism is nothing more or less than a convenient and potent instrument of domination.

Its Origin
The word itself, both etymologically and historically, has its root in paternity. In tribal days the feeling of social solidarity, which has now become debased into patriotism, was completely bound up with the religion of ancestor worship. In tribal religion, as in the tribe itself, all were united by ties of blood. The gods and their rights and ceremonies were exclusive to the tribesmen. All strangers were rigidly debarred from worship. The gods themselves were usually dead warriors. Every war was a holy war. Among the ancient Israelites, for instance, the holy Ark of Jehovah of Hosts accompanied the tribes to battle. It was this abode or movable tomb of the ancestral deity that went with the Jews in their march through the desert, and even to Jericho, playing an important part in the fall of that remarkable city. All the traditions of the Jewish religion, in fact, were identified with great national triumphs.

A Bond of Union
Thus tribal religion was completely interwoven with tribal aspirations and integrity. Tribal “patriotism" and religion were identical. Indeed, without the strongest possible social bond, without a kind of “patriotism" that implied the unhesitating self-sacrifice of the individual for the communal existence, it would have been utterly impossible for tribal man to have won through to civilisation. Natural selection insured that only those social groups which developed this supreme instinct of mutual aid could survive; the rest were crushed out in the struggle for existence. Is it a matter for wonder if it be found that such a magnificent social impulse, so vital to the struggling groups of tribal man, received periodical consecration in the willing human sacrifices so common in primitive religious ceremonial? Bound up with the deliberate manufacture of gods for the protection of the tribe and its works, there is indicated a social recognition of the need for, and value of, the sacrifice of the individual for the common weal.

A Bond of Another Kind
This noble impulse of social solidarity is the common inheritance of all mankind. But being a powerful social force it has lent itself to exploitation. Therefore, with the development of class rule this great impulse is made subordinate to the class interests of the rulers. It becomes debased and perverted to definite anti-social ends. As soon as the people become a slave class “the land of their fathers” is theirs no more. Patriotism to them becomes a fraudulent thing. The “country” is that of their masters alone. Nevertheless, the instinct of loyalty to the community is too deep-seated to be eradicated so easily, and it becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of the rulers against the people themselves.

Patriotism and Religion Part Company
With the decay of society based on kinship, religion changed also, and from being tribal and exclusive it became universal and propagandist. “Patriotism” at the same time began to distinguish itself from religion. The instinctive tribal loyalty became transformed, by the aid of religion and the fiction of kinship, into political loyalty. In a number of instances in political society, as in Tudor England, the struggle for priority between religion and patriotism became so acute as to help in the introduction of a more subservient form of religion. Thus patriotism became emancipated from religion, and the latter became a mere accessory to patriotism as handmaiden of class rule.

Patriotism Always Obliges
Though universal religion did not split up at the same time as the great empire that gave it birth, patriotism did so. The latter has, in fact, always adapted, enlarged, or contracted itself to fit the existing political unit, whether feudal estate, village, township, county, kingdom, republic or empire. No political form has been too absurd for it to fill with its loyalty. No discordance of race, colour or language has been universally effective against it.

What, then, is patriotism in essence to-day? It is usually defined as being devotion to the land of our fathers. But which is the land of our fathers? Our fathers came from many different parts of the world. The political division of the world in which we live is an artificial entity. The land has been wrested from other races. The nation they call “ours” is the result of a conquest over original inhabitants, and over ourselves, by successive ruling classes. Unlike the free tribesmen we are hirelings; we possess no country.

The One Common Bond To-day
Nationality, of which patriotism is the superstition, covers no real entity other than that of a common oppression, a unified government. It does not comprise any unity of race, for in no nation is there one pure race, or anything like it. It does not cover a unity of language, for scarcely a nation exists in which several distinct languages are not indigenous. Nor is it any fixity of territory, for this changes from decade to decade, while the inhabitants of the transferred territory have to transfer their allegiance, their patriotism, to the new nation.

The only universal bond of nationality or patriotism that exists for us to-day is, then, that of subjection to a single government. Patriotism in the worker is pride in the common yoke imposed by a politically unified ruling class. Yet it is this artificial entity that we are called upon to honour before life itself. This badge of political servitude is called an object worthy of supreme sacrifice. The workers are expected to abandon all vital interests and sacrifice all they hold dear for the preservation of an artificial nationality that is little more than a manufactured unit of discord: a mere focus of economic and political strife.

Ignoble Exploitation
Thus one of the noblest fruits of man’s social evolution—the impulse of sacrifice for the social existence—is being prostituted by the capitalist class to maintain a system of exploitation, to obtain a commercial supremacy, and preserve or extend the boundaries of a superfluous political entity. The workers are duped by the ruling class into sacrificing themselves for the preservation of a politico-economic yoke of a particular form and colour. Many so-called Socialists have fallen headlong into this trap.

Had social solidarity developed in equal measure with the broadening of men’s real interests, it would now be universal in character instead of national. The wholesale mixture of races, and the economic interdependence of the whole world, show that nationalism is now a barrier, and patriotism, as we know it, a curse. Only the whole world can now be rightly called the land of our fathers. Only in the service of the people of the whole world, and not against those of any part of it, can the instinct of social service find its highest and complete expression. The great Socialist has pointed the way. He did not call upon the workers of Germany alone to unite. He appealed to the toilers of the whole world to join hands; to a whole world of labour whose only loss could be its parti-coloured chains. And in this alone lies the consummation of that tribal instinct of social solidarity of which patriotism is the perverted descendant.

Capitalism the Barrier
Capitalism, therefore, stands as the barrier the destruction of which will not only set free the productive forces of society for the good of all, but will also liberate human solidarity and brotherhood from the narrow confines of nationality and patriotism. Only victorious labour can make true the simple but pregnant statement: “Mankind are my brethren, the world is my country.” Patriotism and nationalism as we know them will then be remembered only as artificial restrictions of men’s sympathy and mutual help; as obstacles to the expansion of the human mind; as impediments to the needful and helpful development of human unity and co-operation; as bonds that bound men to slavery; as incentives that set brothers at each other's throats.

Despite its shameless perversion by a robber class the great impulse to human solidarity is by no means dead. Economic factors give it an ever firmer basis, and in the Socialist movement it develops apace. Even the hellish system of individualism, with its doctrine of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, has been unable to kill it. And in the great class struggle of the workers against the drones, of the socially useful against the socially pernicious, in this last great struggle for the liberation of humanity from; wage-slavery, the great principle of human solidarity, based upon the necessities of to-day and impelled by the deep-seated instincts of the race, will come to full fruition and win its supreme historical battle.

A Vile Use of a Noble Sentiment
That is our hope and aspiration. For the present, however, we are surrounded by the horrors of war added to the horrors of exploitation, and subjected to the operation of open repression as well as to the arts of hypocrisy and fraud. With the weakening power of religion to keep the workers obedient, the false cult of nationality and patriotism is being exploited to the full. Like religion, patriotism has its vestments, its ceremonies, its sacred emblems, its sacred hymns and inspired music; all of which are called in aid of the class interests of our masters, and utilised desperately to lure millions to the shambles for their benefit. Thus is an heroic and glorious social impulse perverted and debased to the support of a régime of wage-slavery, and to the furtherance of the damnable policy of the slave-holding class: to divide and rule.

F. C. Watts

Nostalgia (2019)

The Wood for the Trees Column from the March 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

As adults almost all of us have memories from our childhood and adolescence that produce intense emotion; for this reason they cannot to be relied upon as representing some kind of accurate chronicle of the actions of the self and others in the past. They are, however, essential for the development of the identity of the individual. It is the synthesis of the emotional development of identity and these memories of the past that produce the bitter-sweet phenomena we call nostalgia. It seems that as we get older this particular emotion becomes ever stronger until, with some, it almost entirely eclipses the ideas and emotions of their contemporary experience. This can be seen as one of the reasons for the political conservatism of the older generation within any population. Memories that have been selected and processed are, of course, safer and far more stable than the continual confusion and challenge that everyday life confronts us with. We find comfort in the illusory feelings of safety and structure that some memories provide; but there are also other memories that can pose a threat to this illusion and for this reason we process them in a very different way – we usually repress them. We tend to choose the memories that sustain the identity we want to believe in rather than those that can reveal another side of our character that we are not so comfortable with. This complex internal struggle is often at the very core of our political beliefs and can be revealed by the nature and type of nostalgia that we embrace.

My father’s nostalgia for the kind of football played in the 1960s that allowed England to win the World Cup was very different from my own – he saw it as a triumph for the old-fashioned authoritarianism of the England manager (Alf Ramsey) and I saw it as an expression of the cultural liberation inherent in the ‘swinging sixties’. The decadence that he perceived (in contrast to his belief in the authoritarianism that, for him, had won the Second World War) was to become my ‘golden age’ of nostalgia. Conversely I also have a nostalgia associated with his work as a union shop steward and his role within the working class community that flourished at that time. It would seem that most cultures, like individuals, have a memory of a ‘golden age’ that generates part of its identity. Of course the cultural and the individual are engaged in a reciprocal relationship which enabled my father to embrace his ‘Englishness’ and me to reject mine. Listening to the music and watching TV shows from that time will always evoke nostalgia in me but I’m very aware of the danger of an uncritical and quasi romantic embrace of what they represent. I love the hope and confidence but dislike the naivety and superficiality.

In retrospect one of the most obvious elements of naivety can be seen in the narratives that many of the films and TV of that time possessed. There always had to be a resolution that punished the wrongdoer and rewarded the ‘good guys’. Undoubtedly this fed into the politics of the time and seemed to render a ‘black and white’ solution to the problems of the age. This moral illusion lies at the heart of a lot of nostalgia – a belief in a simpler time when there was a shared consensus in terms of social values. The moral ‘high ground’ that had justified the militarism used to defeat fascism was now utilised to defend the use of violence against the much more ambivalent ‘enemies’ of the moral morass that was the ‘cold war’. In the 1969 movie The Bridge at Remagen a German officer who is about to be shot as an enemy of the Reich looks up at the sky and seeing aircraft he asks: ‘Ours or theirs?’. The SS attending officer replies, ‘Enemy planes, sir!’ ‘But who is the enemy?’ muses the officer – surely a sentiment born of the many wars of ‘national liberation’ that were raging during the making of the film.

In contemporary TV we see a stranger kind of nostalgia that reaches back even further to the pre-war Edwardian period. In shows like Downton Abbey and Berkeley Square we see an undisguised enthusiasm for portraying the rigid class system of the time when everyone knew their place. The English working class seems to indulge and even delight in the excesses of the aristocracy. There is certainly an element of class envy but it goes much deeper to the very essence of the identity of what it is to be English; the contemporary casual dismissal of the importance of class identity hides a deep obsession with it. The royal family has become the paradigm of celebrity soap operas due to nostalgia and its obsession with class – there still lurks a suspicion that there must be some reason for their ‘entitlement’ other than the accident of birth. Theirs is the most celebrated ‘family tree’ and many who research their own family history secretly nurse a deep longing to find a connection with it.

Undoubtedly there were periods in history that possessed elements superior to our ‘post-modern’ social context but this is not really the origin of the intense emotion we call nostalgia. It is much more akin to religion where what is absent (justice, moral integrity, meaning, structure etc.) are projected into a supernatural realm; nostalgia likewise finds a place for such a longing in a non-existent past.

Wez

Marxism: Inclusive or Reductive? (2016)

From the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Upon reading Karl Marx’s Capital for the first time many are surprised by its inclusive nature. Instead of the anticipated focus on economics the reader finds themselves immersed in philosophy, history and literature together with many other references. This is not only a reflection of the author’s well-known reputation as a polymath but it also reminds us that all disciplines are dependent, to a lesser or greater degree, on each other. But how can we reconcile this with the received notion of Marxism as a reductive political theory; that in the final analysis all social relations are dependent on the mode of production?

This may well be one of the reasons that Karl himself was sure that he was not a Marxist. But if a philosopher or historian was to exhaustively give you an account of a social phenomenon without reference to the relevant contemporary economic structure (as some still attempt to do) many of us would feel it to be incomplete at best and misleading at worst. This is primarily what socialists mean when we say we’re Marxists or that we’re using a Marxist analysis; the attempt to see through prevailing ideology and expose the underlying economic relationships that create such intellectual superstructures. This seemingly reductive technique has alienated many intellectuals who like to defend their own sectarian esoteric disciplines by reference to the intellectual division of labour. They reject any attempt to suggest that the multiplicity of theories and philosophies can have a common origin. So is there a contradiction inherent within Marxism between inclusiveness and reductionism?  

When a Marxist speaks of ideology they mean something much more extensive than merely a set of explicit ideas. We refer to the ‘normalisation’ of political and moral values. For instance most people accept the principal of production for profit as a ‘normal’ relationship between people engaged in industry. Socialists point to the ‘abnormality’ of a relationship based on the exploitation of one human by another. Because it has become an unquestioned relationship most economists fail to see its underlying exploitative nature. Without the benefit of a Marxist perspective they can never fully understand economics. Some propagandists are aware of this and for them the infamous phrase of Dr Goebbels that: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it’ seems as true as it ever was. This is not to say that all studies in economics since Marx have been pointless but they are incomplete without his contributions.

Another feature of the relationship of exploitation within capitalism is called alienation. This occurs because of the lack of control the individual feels during their productive life. The great joy of creative production is replaced by a monotonous set of increasing targets and goals presided over by a ‘boss’ who makes the decisions in the name of profit. The resulting depression and emotional exhaustion will be presented to a doctor who will fail to see or fail to act on the basic underlying inhuman relationships that create such alienation. So again, in the absence of a Marxist analysis psychology and medicine must inevitably fail the individual in terms of their mental and physical health.

We can see that in the absence of a penetrating political analysis both the disciplines of economics and psychology are impotent. We can make a similar case for history, philosophy, sociology etc. (probably all of the ‘humanities’ within which, this author at least, includes the ‘social sciences’). Having made the case that many disciplines are incomplete without the insights available via the Marxist perspective, can we also say that Marxism itself would be weakened without the inclusion of at least some of the discoveries made by these other disciplines?

Could it be that rather than providing alternative explanations for social development they are, in fact, complementary parts of the same whole – at least potentially, once they’re stripped of ideological prejudice. The intellectual division of labour has served to disguise the real focus of study. This division, in its turn, serves the ideological purpose of preventing access to the truth. It is not that Marxism is reductive but that philosophy, economics, psychology, history, anthropology etc. are unaware that their goal is the same as Marxism – the understanding of, and the liberation from, the causes of human suffering. Many of humanity’s intellectual pursuits have this political nature and Marxism represents the first structural understanding of this simple fact. Seen in this light the intellectual sectarianism and inter-discipline competition we perceive today is utterly absurd.

This may seem to most people to be an unduly idealistic view of the motivation for intellectual endeavour but Marxists reject the idea that the belief in human potential is rooted in delusional ideals. We are well aware that many are motivated by greed, status and sometimes by pure curiosity alone but this is rarely the whole story of those who make the significant discoveries. To look at it another way, as said earlier, it is apparent that all disciplines are dependent on each other. How could it be otherwise since global human culture represents an integrated whole? Any attempt to compartmentalise knowledge entirely must inevitably end with error and confusion.

Marx may well have rejected the label ‘Marxism’ for the reasons outlined above. It seemed absurd to him that the interdisciplinary study of human development should be compartmentalised into a sectarian ideology bearing his name. We only use the phrase today to emphasise the contrast it represents to contemporary approaches in the study of politics. It is one of the great ironies of history that through the political ignorance of many of those who have proclaimed his name during moments of political turmoil it has become identified with absolutism and dogmatic reductionism. 

Wez