Opportunity Knocks (1992)

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crowds don't often come much bigger than those they expect to get in St Peters Square in the Vatican but even at that it was an impressively large gathering, a couple of months ago. which witnessed the beatification of Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer. The occasion was not without controversy because de Balaguer was a bit of a fascist in his time, a keen supporter of Franco and not averse to the Nazis either. None of this seemed to affect the Pope, who has the job of announcing these things to the crowd from the balcony. “A joyful celebration”, he called it, “an auspicious occasion”. Meanwhile in the dense, weeping, hysterical crowd others were interpreting the words “joyful" and "auspicious" in their own way; pickpockets trawled through the delirious worshippers, stealing hundreds of wallets and purses.

This was a prime example of how vulnerable people make themselves, while they give their attention to a mythical heaven above, to being robbed on the real material world on Earth. The pickpockets, consciously or not, were working on the assumption that this is a social system in which success goes to those who take their chances—and, until someone else got the beatification treatment, there were unlikely to be many better chances on offer than that.

This has its relevance to John Major—who is not in the same class as a crowd puller as the Pope—and his classless society. It is not entirely clear where Major got his idea from nor what he means, but it is safe to assume that by “classless” he doesn’t actually mean a society without classes but one in which anyone can rise from a lower class to the higher. So "classless society” means that anyone with ability can succeed—they can make a lot of money, live in bigger and bigger houses and travel in bigger and bigger cars and be more and more powerful. Like Robert Maxwell. But of course for anyone to get on in that way they must not only have ability. They must also seize their chances when they see them and be willing to take risks to do so. Like those thieves in St Peters Square.

Romantic delusion
In essential Majors dream society sounds very simple. You work hard and save some money. Then you invest it, starting your own business. Of course there is the problem that you may find your business in competition with some gigantic concern which has the resources to crush you overnight, but with a lot of hard work you can make your business grow. As the profits roll in you begin to expand. Then again and again until you are a multi-millionaire, with the power to crush up-and-coming businesses like yours used to be. You are rich and famous, with a country estate or two, your own private jet and your yacht in the Mediterranean. You are a living example of taking your chance in the classless society.

This romantic delusion seduces millions of people into supporting this supposed society of opportunity where the social and intellectual cream rises to the top—which proves that anyone who does not get to the top must thereby be of inferior quality. However reality is a lot less romantic; there are failures as well as successes, poverty as well as riches, despair as well as fulfillment.

As anyone who reads anything other than the Sun and the Daily Mail will know, we live now in a time of recession. One effect of the recession is to cause a lot of misery to a lot of people whose big mistake was to take what they thought was their big chance when they thought the time was right. In fact it was not a mistake because by capitalism’s standards the chance was there and the time was right. Impressed by the Thatcher government’s assurances that the economy was under tight control and had been steered into perpetual boom by the disdainful brilliance of Nigel Lawson, they committed themselves to a massive debt in order to buy somewhere to live. They were confident that the market would continue to rise so their home would increase in price. They simply couldn't lose, they told each other over their gin and tonics.

We all know what happened next. The economic situation which Lawson claimed to have designed and constructed to work to the eternal benefit of everyone ready to take their chance, and which would last for ever, abruptly changed. Lawson at first called the change a “blip” but blips are momentary diversions; this one went on for years. Interest rates rose to the point at which many mortgage repayments which had once been manageable became cruelly impossible. In many cases things were made worse by redundancies among the mortgagees or their family, whose wages were needed to pay the mortgage. The banks and building societies took action to “repossess” properties which had never been out of their ownership anyway; “repossess" is a polite way of talking about evicting people from homes they had been persuaded to call their own.

Among the evicted John Major’s classless society was celebrated in bitterness. Some dropped the keys of their home through the building society’s letterbox and ran away. One man stripped his home of everything possible—doors, shelves, light fittings, radiators, the bath, sinks—leaving just a shell. Another set fire to the place, killing his baby daughter.

The financial tomorrow
Desperate at this situation is, it is not the whole story for it is not only individual workers, struggling to get themselves somewhere to live, who have seen what looked like a golden opportunity turn to disaster. This recession has reaped a rich harvest of big combines whose collapse has discredited some of capitalism’s current heroes. After the crash of Polly Peck, the fate of Asil Nadir is awaited with interest, in expectation that it holds something extremely unpleasant for him. In Australia Alan Bond is not only bankrupt but with time to reflect on it in his prison cell. Robert Maxwell has been exposed as one of the most unpleasant scoundrels ever to have harried and abused his employees on his way to riches; not content with the legal theft on which capitalism is based he was greedy enough to try the illegal sort as well. The latest in the line of Titanic-like commercial disasters has been Olympia and York, whose Canary Wharf stands as an embarrassing memorial to the anarchy of capitalism.

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

There is now no shortage of experts to tell us what went wrong for the likes of Maxwell and Nadir. They borrowed too much money. They ran their affairs like there was no financial tomorrow. Maxwell borrowed money to expand into American publishing. Nadir to buy up concerns like Del Monte. This presented few problems as long as the boom lasted, as long as sales went up taking profits with them. But when the slump began to bite, the big borrowers had difficulty in just paying the interest on their massive debts. They borrowed to seize what looked like a great opportunity; in the event it turned out to be a trap.

So what of the lenders, the banks who stood for such huge sums at risk? Polly Peck were said to owe something like £1.3 billion; Maxwells empire had debts of over £1.5 billion. With hindsight—and that has recently become one of the well-used phrases in the world of finance—they agree that what they did was unwise, in the sense that it cost them a lot of money when they should have been concerned with making profit. Last February the deputy governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George (how did a man with so demotic a name ever get past the doorman at the Bank, let alone become a governor?) slated the banks about this but in the process he revealed how they had little choice:

  [Borrowers and lenders] now tend to blame the authorities for allowing, or even encouraging, the party to get out of hand—though I seem to remember they rather enjoyed it at the time . . . Had we been more successful in keeping “animal spirits” on a shorter leash at the time, the subsequent damage to bank capital and the subsequent economic and social trauma would, of course, have been less.

Another way of saying that is that when the banks were lending so freely it was boom time; had it continued like that, as it was from 1986 to 1988, there would have been a different story. Pressure of competition pushed the banks into lending; if one backed off there were plenty of others only too willing to exploit what they saw as an unending source of profit.

The banks have now been brought face to face with the realities of capitalism— that it is a system of unpredictable swings, falls and rises, not to be controlled by financial experts or economists or politicians. At times it seems to offer the opportunity to some individuals or some firms to get rich fast. If they missed the opportunity they would not be working the system as they should. With luck it comes out right for them; in other circumstances there is disaster. And none of them, from Robin Leigh-Pemberton to the manager of your local branch shows that they understand how the system works and that it cannot be controlled.

Ivan

Canary Wharf: monument to capitalism’s priorities (1992)

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

It used to be said that at the first sign of trouble or danger, canaries were the first to turn up their toes. The aptly-named Canary Wharf in east London’s docklands is at present proving this old aphorism true. The future of this prestige office development site in the Isle of Dogs is currently in jeopardy. Its owners, the Olympia & York international property company controlled by Canadian brothers Paul and Albert Reichman, are in serious financial difficulties and have called in the receivers. Olympia & York itself owes about £7 billion, with Canary Wharf accounting for about £1.1 billion of this debt. It is extremely doubtful to say the least whether all the planned phases of the project will now be completed.

Work on the Canary Wharf site was started in 1987 and was expected to take up to 10 years to complete. Its centrepiece, the fifty-storey Canary Wharf Tower, has now been finished and is Britain’s tallest building at 800 feet. A monument to free- market capitalism, it was meant to encapsulate the brash enterprise culture of the 1980s. breathing life into a degenerated and depressed area of the capital. Now over half-empty with 500,000 square feet of vacant office space, it has become Britain’s biggest white elephant. Indeed, the Canary Wharf development as a whole has over 2.3 million square feet of vacant office spare out of a total capacity of 4 million.

Though Canary Wharf is the biggest folly of them all, it is far from being the only one. There is currently 40 million square feet of unused office space in London alone, much of it developed by now insolvent companies like Speyhawk which in its last trading year amassed losses of more than £300 million. It has been estimated that 20 percent of London’s office space is now vacant, almost twice as much as in the last major commercial property slump in 1973-4.

The source of this predicament is not hard to find. The Daily Telegraph (16 May) explained Olympia & York's particular problems well enough:

  Canary Wharf was planned in the mid-1980s boom when the Big Bang meant that expanding City firms were competing for the limited space in the Square Mile. Office rents soared and firms were forced to take space outside the City core. By the time Canary Wharf was almost complete sufficient new space had been built in the Square Mile to satisfy demand. The surplus caused rents to collapse.

It has been much the same story for the dozen or so other property companies who have lost out spectacularly in the present slump. A massive extension in the supply of property has not been matched by a commensurate expansion of effective demand for it:

  The prospect of the stock markets Big Bang in 1986 and the booming service economy in the south-east created a feeling that demand for London office space was almost insatiable. Developers went on a building spree the like of which the country has never seen. At the start of the 1980s £1 billion-worth of offices, in todays prices, was built each year. By 1990 that figure has risen to £5.6 billion . . . Entrepreneurial developers did not bother to secure tenants before ploughing hundreds of millions into their schemes. They assumed that in the four years or so it took them to put up a building, the demand would materialize . . . In retrospect. Black Monday, in October 1987, was the first sign that the dream was about to go sour. But the holes in the ground had been dug and there was little alternative but to keep pouring money into them. Only now, when the buildings are being finished, is the full horror of the oversupply becoming apparent. (Sunday Times, 5 April).

Without a doubt, the over-expansion of the commercial property industry has been a key factor in the present slump, with the downturn in its fortunes being transmitted to other sectors of the company.

As companies like Olympia & York and Mountleigh become insolvent there could be even more difficulties ahead. The four major British clearing banks have in excess of £12 billion loaned out to British property companies, with Barclays alone having lent £5.4 billion. With banks often lending up to 70 percent of the development costs of commercial property, once property prices start falling by more than 30 percent the security of the banks starts disappearing. The potential loss to the major UK banks—already having to cut back sharply—could be colossal. Capital values in London have already fallen 40 percent in this slump, without, as yet, having reached the bottom.

All sides will try to minimize their losses, but the real losers probably won't even rate a mention. While millions of square feet of prime office space lies empty and while thousands of building workers are thrown on to the dole because of the slump, thousands of Londoners go homeless with tens of thousands more on ever-expanding council house waiting lists. There is certainly no shortage of demand for accommodation in London—only a shortage of effective demand, that is, demand backed up by ability to pay, the only kind of demand capitalism recognizes. And while the homeless roam the streets the capitalist class build ridiculous monuments to their system in the endless pursuit of the next swift buck. It is enough to remind somebody of an old socialist aphorism—if capitalism is the answer, then it must have been a bloody stupid question.

Dave Perrin

“Uneconomic” hospitals to close (1992)

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Less than a week after winning the general election the new Conservative Secretary of State for Health, Virginia Bottomley, indicated that “uneconomic” National Health Service hospitals will be closed. It is believed that a special commission, under the chairmanship of Sir Bernard Tomlinson, will recommend the closure of one of London's 14 teaching hospitals. Speaking about this possibility Virginia Bottomley stated:

  Hospitals have always closed. At the end of the war there were 300,000 TB beds in this country. Now there are about 300. So there must be change (Independent, 17 April).

This is a blatantly dishonest comparison. TB hospitals have closed because tuberculosis has been practically eradicated due to improved living standards since the end of the Second World War, greater natural resistance to the disease, and immunisation. To close beds because they are expensive to maintain in spite of the need for them is an entirely different proposition.

Bottomley added:

  It is too early to say what the recommendation of Tomlinson will be, but I will not hesitate to take whatever decisions arc necessary to ensure that further generations of Londoners can have the best possible health service.

This example of Orwellian “doublespeak” claims that health care can be improved by reducing its provision. Already the closure of small hospitals, with loss of beds, and the concentration of most of the remainder into large district general hospitals, has led to many people in rural districts living considerable distances from the nearest hospital.

The reduction of hospital beds over the last 25 years led to record waiting lists of over a million people needing treatment by 1991. Political expediency prompted by an impending general election this year has led to patients waiting for treatment for more than two years being attended to. But there have been claims that this attempt to clear the back-log of politically embarrassing long-term problems has sometimes been at the expense of patients with more serious problems of a shorter duration.

Waiting lists
Some health authorities have reduced their waiting lists by the simple expedient of not carrying out certain categories of operations unless the patient opts for private treatment.

The closure of beds in psychiatric hospitals has led to long-term mentally ill people swelling the number of the homeless in Britain's major towns and cities. And Lord Justice Mustill has attacked the lack of provision for mentally ill offenders who move between prison and the community without anyone taking proper responsibility for their care (Guardian, 21 March).

The pressure on hospital beds has led to hospitals having to be “closed" to acute admissions on occasions because there are no beds available. Family doctors and medical staff in casualty departments are obliged to waste valuable time in telephoning other hospitals to find out if there is a vacant bed. This involves considerable delay in getting an ill patient admitted for treatment; can remove patients considerable distances from their families; and taxes the resources of the over-stretched ambulance service because of having to make longer journeys.

The ambulance service is already struggling because of the effects of the government’s economies without these added problems: in Greater Manchester there has been a reduction of 40 posts since August 1991 and further redundancies announced recently (Manchester Evening News, 28 April).

A consequence of the shortage of hospital beds and the need to be seen to be “economic" leads to the premature discharge of patients from hospital to convalescence at home. This has led to higher rates of re-admission in the last few years. But as turnover of patients is seen to be the barometer of efficiency irrespective of whether death or discharge is the reason for leaving hospital, the reduction of hospital beds can only aggravate matters.

There have been attacks on health care provisions in other ways: prescription charges have been increased several times more than the rate of inflation, and the charge for sight-testing have deterred some workers from having their eyesight tested as frequently as they should. Dental charges have increased considerably and in some areas it is difficult to find a dentist prepared to undertake NHS work.

It is expected that most health authorities will become self-governing trusts within the next two years and more family doctors will become budget holders to buy treatment for their patients.

Buying treatment
But an internal market does not provide more money for the NHS; it merely shuffles existing money between hospitals at greatly increased administrative costs. And with doctors being obliged to keep costs down, because of the risk of being labelled "uneconomic”, there is the likelihood that patients will get the cheapest rather than the most appropriate treatment. Because doctors can incur financial penalties for over-prescribing but may use money that they save on treatments to improve their practices some people in high-risk groups (diabetics, the elderly and the long-term mentally ill) have greater difficulty in registering with a doctor.

The debates over the numbers of patients treated and on the waiting list misses the point that poverty is the main cause of ill health. Unskilled workers are four times more likely to die from ulcers than the wealthy and are also more prone to develop heart disease. The Health Education Council’s 1987 report The Health Divide found that there was a difference in life expectancy of more than eight years for men in the most affluent parts of Sheffield compared with the poorest areas.

The large number of patients requiring medical treatment under capitalism (rather than being a matter for congratulation) is an indication of how poor the workers’ health is. Capitalism with its poverty, stress, alienation and pollution is unable to remedy this.

Nevertheless, the NHS, despite its shortcomings, does ameliorate some of the misery of illness caused by capitalism. But because health care “free at the point of use" represents a cost against production it is vulnerable to attack in a recession when there are a larger number of workers than are needed to meet the capitalists' requirements.

But poverty is not an inevitable part of the human condition. A socialist society producing goods for human needs and not for the market; a society of co-operation instead of the competitiveness, hostility and suspiciousness of capitalism could make the high levels of ill health and the long waiting lists for treatment a thing of the past.

Carl Pinel

Letters: Socialists and Majority Action (1992)

Letters to the Editors from the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors.

I read with interest the letter from David Pepper, and your reply, in the May issue. A few questions and comments occurred to me when reading them, so I would like to throw them into the debate if I may.

1. On the question about an attempted reactionary coup, history lends weight to your reply, I think. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936- 1939, many ordinary regular soldiers, and some of their junior officers, chose to defend the elected Republican government, despite the fact that the majority of their most senior commanders were either involved in organizing the coup, or quickly declared for the rebels. And that was despite the lack of a coherent exposition of socialist policies or principles by the motley collection of opportunists who made up the pro-Government coalition—just think what could be achieved with a concerted socialist propaganda effort!

Having said that, the Government was defeated in that conflict. It would be wrong to underestimate the power of the capitalists—they would not need a majority outside of Parliament to create an effective armed force to be used to suppress the socialist movement. Less than 20 percent of the electorate might well suffice.

2. On the subject of the MP/electorate relationship, how would you anticipate making that work? Would you foresee regular constituency conferences, mandating each MP?

3. At present, a party—as we have seen—can form a government which has actually only received a minority of the vote. In that case, the SPGB could quite possibly find itself in the invidious position of holding office having not convinced the majority of the electorate of the need for socialism. Might this not compromise the Party’s efforts to move towards a socialist society, (particularly if the scenario referred to at 1. above arose)? Would the Party use its constitutional powers to alter the electoral system even though that might mean, in the short term, relinquishing office?

4. Equally, under the present system—which the Party would not be in a position to alter until it actually had a majority of MPs in the Commons—each MP is responsible to a constituency. How soon can we say that we could move to a situation where the MP was directed by the members of that constituency rather than by the Party conference, given that many of those electors may not be socialists themselves?

5. Finally, supposing that the SPGB had just won a majority in Parliament (yes, 1 do realize that this is. at present, speculation—verging on fantasy—but I do not think it idle!) and was therefore the only Party capable of forming a government—one particularly knotty problem must be how far can the Party go given that the rest of the world is by no means in the same position? Socialism can only be, as you have rightly said, a worldwide system. I know that you have said before that it is inconceivable that the World Socialist Movement could be so far advanced in one country without some developments having taken place elsewhere. This may be so—but the fact remains that many countries do not currently have a Socialist Party (or indeed any democracy); and even if they did, different electoral practices might well preclude anything like a simultaneous transition. What could the SPGB do in these circumstances?

Paul Burroughs 

Batley, W. Yorks

Reply:

One point must be cleared up right away: we repudiate any idea of a socialist party "holding office" or "forming a government".

The establishment of socialism will not be like a change of government, with the socialist party winning an election, forming a government and using its parliamentary majority to legislate socialism into being.

We do not say to workers "vote for us and we’ll introduce socialism for you". What we say is: "If you want socialism, this is something you will have to do for yourselves; only you can establish socialism, not some party on your behalf".

What we are talking about is not a change of government nor a change to be achieved by a government, but a change in the basis of society—a social revolution, to be carried out by the actions of the immense majority.

Certainly, we advocate that this social revolution should be accomplished by democratic political means; so contesting elections, going into parliaments, etc will be involved, but the mechanics of electoral systems in particular countries are mere technical details. The important element is the socialist consciousness and democratic self-organisation of the working class who, as those excluded from ownership and control of the means of production, are the immense majority.

When the socialist movement has reached the stage your questions presuppose—when it is near to winning control of political power—the socialist political party really will be the majority working class organised politically for socialism. This means that it will be up to the socialist-minded majority itself to decide how to handle the sort of tactical issues you raise as hypothetical problems.

All we can say now is that whatever is decided will be decided democratically, in the light of the fact that socialism cannot be established unless and until a majority want it, and in accordance with the socialist principle that under no circumstances should socialists take on any responsibility for running capitalism.

The change-over to the situation you mention where a person elected for a locality would be the mandated delegate of the people of that locality won’t be able to take place until a classless society has been established. This, along with the procedures and practices it implies—report-back meetings, mandating conferences, referendums, right of recall, rotation of posts, etc— will in fact be the basis of the democratic decision-making structure of the new society.

Editors

Dear Editors,

I once considered joining the SPGB but having read your post “election” coverage I’m very glad I didn’t.

First and most obvious, about 37 percent of the possible electors in Holborn & St Pancras saw fit not to bother to vote. In fact more people didn’t vote than voted for the winner, so your 0.4 percent is reduced to 0.2 percent. Your £500 deposit plus expenses would possibly have been better spent on building “socialism" in those areas where people are so disaffected with the system that they don't bother to vote.

Secondly, I appreciate you will rebuff my first point because you are so totally sold on a “parliamentary road” for socialism. I imagine this is because you take literally what Marx said about capitalism creating the means to its own downfall. You seem to think that parliament was made to do away with capitalism, which would be a laughable slogan if you didn't take it so seriously. If the ruling classes thought that parliament was the means by which their wealth would be confiscated they’d abolish it. They are after all busy reducing the effectiveness of trade unions so workers can’t make “unreasonable” demands on their wealth.

Thirdly, even if it was possible to elect a majority of SPGB MPs into parliament that wouldn’t mean a majority in the country as anybody who knows anything about electoral reform will know. I also find it hard to see the socialist majority telling the MPs “this is what we want” and then the MPs passing some law telling us to do it.

Fourthly, your naivety concerning parliament. If you only got a minority of SPGB MPs I fear it would be nigh on impossible for them not to sell-out. The logic of parliament demands it. No matter how well-meaning they are, they will end up as “good parliamentarians”.

Fifthly, I was somewhat shocked by the apparent tone of your “Socialists and Parliament” letter reply when you talk of “material forces and events”. Do I take it you rub your hands with glee at the prospect of nuclear war or an ecological disaster so you can ride into Parliament on the back of the discontent? Perhaps we shouldn’t be so keen to close nuclear power stations. Imagine the benefits of one blowing up.

The Natural Law Party may appear to be the work of a “crank cult” but the organisation that backs it, the Transcendental Meditation movement, has all the makings of a mind control cult. In fact advertisements for the “teachings” of the cult are banned from many newspapers because of this, doubtless explaining their keenness to expend money on a national election/advertising campaign.

Also, if you so oppose the “nationalism” of Labour’s “the only strings attached to our politics’’ poster, why do you persist in calling yourselves the Socialist Party of Great Britain. To what do you attribute this “greatness”? Even the fascist BNP doesn’t call itself the “Nationalist Party of Great Britain”.

Lastly, in your open letter to the director general of the BBC (they don’t call themselves great either) you say “we leave it to the good sense of the workers whose ancestors fought for the vote . . . ”. Were not those workers listening to the voice of pointless reformism instead of a “socialist" message?

I didn’t join your party. I became an Anarchist.

Tristan Hillman

Huddersfield.

Reply:
There was no need to say you became an anarchist since only an anarchist could dismiss the Chartists’ demand for an extension of the vote to workers as a pointless reform. And hadn't you noticed that we contested the election under the shortened version of our name? Your misconceptions about the Socialist Party riding into power, passing laws telling people what to do, etc are dealt with in our reply to the previous letter.

We don’t want power; we want the majority to take power into their own hands. This in fact is the aim of the socialist revolution: to bring the means of production under the democratic control of all the people. But if this is the case why not organise just to take over the means of production? Why bother to also organise to win control of parliament and the state? This has been the main difference between us and those anarchists (by no means a majority, by a long way) who agree that common ownership can only come about through the majority organising themselves consciously and democratically.

We favour the socialist majority taking electoral action, as well as organising at their places of work, because we see this as the best way for them to ensure that the socialist revolution proceeds as smoothly and peaceably as possible. To try to ignore the state, whose role today is to uphold and protect capitalist property rights, would be a completely irresponsible policy as this would be to increase rather than minimise the risk of violence.

Given the existence of a socialist majority, the sensible way to proceed would be to use the vote to take the control of parliament out of the hands of the supporters of capitalism, so neutralising the state while at the same time giving the socialist revolution an unchallengeable democratic legitimacy.

You say that if the socialist majority sent mandated delegates into parliament these would inevitably sell out. But why? Unless you subscribe to the so-called “iron law of oligarchy" which says that elected representatives will always sell out, you have to explain why the socialist majority would be able to control the delegates it might send to some such extra-parliamentary body as a congress of workplace committees or a conference of neighbourhood councils (or whatever else it is you see as the alternative to parliament) but not those it sent into parliament. We say that, if they can do it in the one case, they can do it in the other too.

Editors

Election Fund (1992)

Party News from the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

As promised, we give below details of the amount finally collected in our election fund and how it was spent.

A total of £4122 was collected. £3600 from the appeal in the Socialist Standard and £522 by the local Camden Branch. Of this £500 was spent on the election deposit, £900 on the hire of election rooms, £768 on the printing of manifestoes, posters and leaflets, £200 on follow-up press advertisements and £335 on incidental expenses (telephone, heating, stationery, etc), making a total of £2703.

This means that £1419 is left in the fund—for the next election campaign, the elections to the European Parliament in June 1994.

Between the Lines: And Now For Our Younger Viewers . . . (1992)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

And Now For Our Younger Viewers . . . 

During the Earth Summit last month it was hard to switch on the telly without encountering some green reformist or another uttering tales of woe about "our" planet. They even gave Jonathan Porritt his own series, modestly titled How To Save The World. Salvation via Porritt’s greenery involves leaving the profit system intact and picking off the scabs which it inevitably breeds. It was salvation for the simple-minded, a sort of secular, modernist Jesus Is Coming message. Switch on BBC's Going Live on a Saturday morning and you will be highly likely to bump into Jason Donovan or Jonathan Porritt; the former can’t sing and the latter can’t offer solutions, only pathetic reforms. The destruction of the environment has assumed the proportions of a children's issue; those talking about it are free to indulge in the sugary platitudes of reformers for whom caring renders unnecessary the requirement for being logical. Saving the rain forests in the late 1990’s is getting to be like collecting pennies to ’save black babies’ which Catholic schools did recently as the 1960’s. One of the most urgent problems of our time, which is the global destruction of the social environment, is reduced to nursery rhyme reasoning and Porritesque posturing.

News Mystification

The ecological crisis is no joke; it could be capitalism's literally most foul attack upon us. but it is reported in terms which mystify rather than illuminate. So, instead of talking about how whole species are being wiped out for the sake of profit, the talk is of "biodiversity". Instead of getting to grips with the industrial poisoning of the atmosphere we are told of "CFC emission levels". In short, the simple and the comprehensible is converted into scientifically grandiose terms to frighten us away from thinking that it is ours to solve. No, such convoluting problems had better be left to statesman and state scientists. Economists have long performed the same task in relation to production, turning starving millions into "the underdeveloped South" and food mountains into "regional agro-over-production". What sounds like an explanation becomes mystification, the result of which is to distance the viewer of TV from a sense of power in questioning or rejecting the self-appointed experts.

The Pushers

First Tuesday (2 June, 10.30pm, ITV) was about drug pushing on a grand scale. These were not gangs making a few million in an illegal market. Here were multi-million dollar companies going into Asian countries and promoting their addiction. In Malaysia packets of of the drug are given free to people in shopping centres. In Taiwan, where it is illegal to advertise drugs, the companies ignore the law by using the drug logo to advertise holidays, even though the companies are not in business to sell holidays. The expansion of this drug pushing into Asia has led to a corresponding increase in fatal diseases there, far outstripping those caused by heroin addiction. A US Congressman from Kentucky, the main state where the drug is grown, defended the pushing campaign into Asia on the grounds that, although it can ruin people's health and will certainly kill many, it is important that Asian consumers have the freedom to choose what they buy. We did not hear the Kentucky Congressman’s views on the right of Kentucky courts to imprison people for choosing to smoke cannabis. Oh, the drug in question was not dope, but tobacco.

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: Human Nature, the Black Market and Socialism (1992)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the war began we were told by those who claimed to know that there would be no “profiteering" in this war. Socialists smiled and were disbelieving, knowing that a system built on a foundation of private ownership and profit-making will go on producing evil results whether in peace or war. We smiled again when the News-Chronicle, nearly two years after the war began, said "the days of the profiteers in clothing and other necessities are numbered" (July 25th, 1941). We were not impressed with the story that the capitalist thistle would suddenly produce a crop of social figs because of the appointment of “34 Board of Trade inspectors" who were going to track down the “profiteers". Nor were we mistaken. (. . .)

But, retorts the reformer, make the penalties more severe, copy Russia and Germany and introduce the death penalty, then it will cease. How little they know of that “human nature” they so often talk about. The history of capitalism has demonstrated beyond refutation that given the opportunity (the ownership of goods for sale and a ready market) and given the motive (big and quick profits) nothing will stop illicit deals in one form or another, from robbery and smuggling to black marketeering, and to the numerous operations that can be conducted just on the borderline of legality.

(From the editorial in the Socialist Standard, July 1942.)

They Said It . . . (1992)

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

• I've never known her pay for anything— Friend of Jimmy Goldsmith’s daughter Isabel.
• A child dies every 2.4 seconds for one simple reason: poverty—Oxfam Appeal.
• What this summit is all about is money— ITN report on the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
• When I first met him, he gave me a big kiss and told me I had a job for life—Ivy Needham, redundant ex-employee of one of Robert Maxwell’s firms, on Maxwell.
• No-one likes seeing details of their private life brought into the open— Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times.

Tolpuddle Martyrs Rally (1992)

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Sunday 19 July thousands of trade unionists will attend the Tolpuddle Martyrs rally. This annual event is held to remember six Dorset farm labourers who in 1834 were sentenced to 7 years transportation to Australia for the crime of attempting to form a trade union.

The early 1830s were years of considerable trade union activity. In 1834 the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union was formed. The aim of this organisation was to coordinate movements for advances in wages and assistance for strikes especially those against a reduction in wages. This same year saw also much unrest amongst agricultural labourers including forms of direct action such as machine-breaking and rick-burning.

As usual the ruling elite acted with naked class interest. Their concern was not with the causes of the unrest but to find and make an example of the main activists in the hope that this would destroy any idea of union organisation amongst farm labourers. Thus six farm labourers from the Dorset village of Tolpuddle were arrested and charged with the administering of unlawful oaths for seditious purposes which was unlawful under an Act of 1797. That this was a false charge and that the real crime they had committed was trying to form a trade union is shown by the fact there there was no evidence that the accused had any seditious intent.

The reaction of trade unionists against the convictions was swift and has lessons for today. A large procession of trade unionists took place in London and a petition was handed to Lord Melbourne at the Home Office. This was followed by more agitation for the sentences to be quashed and in 1836 the Dorset farm labourers were given a free pardon.

Very rarely has the trade union movement been under greater pressure than it is today. The banning of trade union organisation at GCHQ in 1984 and the anti-union legislation of the 1980s and 90s is proof of this. To really pay tribute to the Tolpuddle Martyrs and others like them we need to rediscover the spirit of early trade unionism with the emphasis on self-organisation rather than waiting for leaders to act on our behalf.

Ray Carr

The Socialist Party will have a literature stand at the rally from 10am to 4pm, at Tolpuddle on the A35 between Bere Regis and Dorchester. If you want to help get the socialist message across to trade union activists just turn up.

Smith or Gould—who cares? (1992)

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

No doubt it will be John Smith—the John Major clone—who will emerge this month as the new Leader of the Labour Party. Whether his rival Bryan Gould will get the deputy leadership as a consolation prize is by no means certain, but Gould has at least shown himself capable of discussing political ideas in a way that is rare in the top echelons of the Labour Party these days.

In a book published in 1985 entitled Socialism and Freedom he discussed what would have to be the features of a socialist society. The specific institutions of such a society, he argued, were not ends in themselves; they were means to achieve a situation where every individual human being would have the maximum freedom to shape their life. This, he went on, could only be achieved by spreading decision-making power as widely as possible. The “overriding aim" of socialists, therefore, must be:

to maximise the power (and therefore the freedom) exercised by each and every citizen. This can be done only by diffusing power as widely as possible—in other words, by sharing it equally.

On this definition, a socialist society was a “society in which power is equally shared by all".

At this level of abstraction, we can agree with Gould. We don't want common ownership and democratic control for their own sakes but because we think that these provide the only basis on which all humans can live the best life that is now possible. We can also agree that the way to ensure this is by diffusing decision-making power equally amongst all the members of society. However we wouldn't leave the argument there as Gould does.

This equal decision-making power must apply, in fact must especially apply, to the control and use of the means for providing for the material needs of the members of society. Every member of society must be in a position to have an equal say in deciding how the means of wealth-production—the productive resources, natural and human-made, at the disposal of society—are to be used.

What we are talking about here is a classless society in which the means of production belong to no-one in the sense that there is no group within society that has an exclusive, or even a more than equal, say in the way they are used. This is the same as saying that they belong to everyone—that they are “commonly owned”.

Needless to say, Gould doesn’t go this far. In fact he doesn't regard common ownership in this sense as being a necessary feature of a socialist society. Which must mean either that he is a sloppy thinker or that he doesn’t think that it is possible to diffuse power that widely.

Gould is, however, fully aware that we are living in a society in which decision-making power is far, very far, from being equally distributed. After giving some examples of progress made this century away from inequality (the main one being the achievement of equal voting rights in political matters for all men and women), Gould gives the following accurate picture of the situation today:

   The owners of capital—whether private or public, individual or corporate—still own, control and enjoy the fruits of the wealth-producing process and buy and sell working lives as though they were commodities. Economic power is still concentrated in their hands, with the necessary correlative that it is removed from the hands of the bulk of ordinary people for whom the wage relation bargain remains unequal and demeaning.
    The law still underpins the whole concept of succession and inheritance, so that private property—essentially an artificial, social concept which needs the backing of the law to protect it—can be accumulated to an extent well beyond that needed to satisfy even the most outrageous appetites for personal consumption.
    The welfare state, though valuable and important in itself, remains a palliative for dealing with the casualties of a system which necessarily produces major and self-reinforcing inequalities and injustices. The search for private profit remains the major motivation for economic activity.

Faced with this capitalist reality Gould rejects a policy of “total abolition and replacement" of capitalism in favour of one of “control and reform". This of course is the gradualist and reformist policy that the Labour Party has always pursued. At the turn of the century a genuine argument could go on between what appeared to be two alternative ways to socialism, but the experience of the last 90 or so years has settled the issue. The policy of the “control and reform" of capitalism is not a road to socialism at all. There have been five periods of Labour government, during which Labour was in office for a total of 20 years, yet the situation today is as described by Gould above.

In fact the failure has been even greater as instead of the Labour Party gradually changing capitalism it has been the other way round: capitalism has gradually changed the Labour Party. At one time Labour theoreticians like Gould would have argued that the long-term aim was to actually establish a socialist society in which power, including the power to control the use of the means of production, would be equally shared. Now, however, Gould is reduced to arguing that a socialist society is an impossibility and that the most "socialists" can achieve is some precarious progress towards less inequality:

Socialism is not a destination at which we shall arrive one day. There are no final victories in politics. Socialism is a constant struggle against the forces in society which naturally tend towards the concentration of power.

To a politician whose party has tried and failed to reverse the capitalist tendency towards increasing inequality, it must indeed seem that this tendency is “natural", and given the maintenance of the basis of capitalism—class ownership and production for profit—it does act as if it were a natural law in that there is nothing that can be done to stop it operating.

In using the word "natural" in this context Gould is admitting that all the Labour Party is now trying to do is not to make progress towards a socialist society, however confusingly defined, but merely to slow down and delay capitalism’s tendency to increased inequality. "Socialism" has become not a new form of society but merely the empty dream of a less unequal capitalist society.

But even this watered down version of Labour's original programme is too radical for the likes of Smith for whom a penny on or a penny off the standard rate of income tax is all that politics is about.

Adam Buick

Sting in the Tail: Perks of the Job (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Perks of the Job

Whenever one of Europe’s African colonies achieved independence its new black ruling class quickly adopted the luxurious lifestyle of its white predecessors.

In South Africa the leaders of the African National Congress are introducing themselves to the good things In life. According to The Independent on Sunday (17 May) Nelson Mandela has bought a "spacious new home in gracious Houghton, Johannesburg's answer to Hampstead", for £100,000, but this is probably a hovel compared to ANC chairman Oliver Tambo's £500,000 house in Sandhurst, "the most expensive suburb In the country".

Their good taste also extends to cars: a national executive member "recently remarked that the underground garage at ANC headquarters looked like a Mercedes and BMW showroom".

In one way the ANC leaders are different from those black ruling classes elsewhere in Africa: they aren't waiting until they actually get their hands on political power before they get them on capitalism's little luxuries.

Baying for Blood

Aren't our policemen wonderful? At the annual conference of the Police Federation in Scarborough a call to abandon their policy of restoring hanging was heavily defeated.

Not even the examples of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the numerous other innocent people who would be dead if hanging was still law, made any difference to this bloodthirsty mob.

Pro-hanging delegates raged at liberals, wets, do-gooders, etc., and the conference was urged to "Remember our murdered colleagues" (The Guardian 22 May).

So, in the Federation's eyes killers should hang, but do they think this should apply to policemen who were later found to have had innocent people convicted and hanged on trumped-up murder charges?

Taming the Trots

During the mid 1970s the Socialist Party in Glasgow had competition for a while at its Saturday outdoor meetings from some young Trotskyists of the long-since vanished International Marxist Group.

Their speakers outdid one another In demanding violent insurrection, denouncing the Labour Party and ridiculing electoral activity. One in particular was fond of telling his audience "we don't want your votes, It's your ACTION we want!"

During this year's local elections, there on TV was a Labour Party official condemning the Trotskyists of Scottish Militant and especially Tommy Sheridan. He looked familiar. . . yes, it was that same firebrand from the 1970s!

This poacher-turned-gamekeeper is now one of "the leading lights in the movement to rid the city of Militant" (The Glaswegian 16 May), and his attitude to votes has changed too: he was an unsuccessful Labour candidate at the general election and in the May local elections he lost again to . . .  Tommy Sheridan!

The spectacle of Trotskyist zealots ending up as Labourites is a familiar one, and nobody should bet against the same thing happening, sooner or later, to the current crop in Scottish Militant.

In a Nutshell

The killing and atrocities in what was Yugoslavia are being blamed by the West (the US and Its allies) on Serbia and in particular its leader Slobodan Milosevic.

A letter writer in The Guardian (27 May) pointed out the double standards used by the West in condemning Serbia for the use of force while remaining silent when East Tlmoreans, Thai demonstrators, Latin American peasants and Indians, Palestinian refugees and the victims of Pol Pot are slaughtered.

He added that whatever crimes Milosevic may be guilty of

He has a long way to go before he can be classed with the likes of Pinochet, Duvalier, Suharto, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Samuel Doe and D'Aubuisson, all of who enjoyed the protection of the US while perpetrating unspeakable atrocities.

"Mean Jeane” Kirkpatrick, a prominent member of the Reagan administration, summed up very well the view taken by the US government of the above-mentioned murderers, when she said - "They may be bastards, but they are our bastards."

High Street Massacre

The news that Lloyd's bank has dropped its bid for Midland bank has been welcomed by the banking trade union BIFU.

If the takeover had succeeded then Lloyd's, besides getting rid of a major competitor, would have made huge savings by closing 1,000 High Street branches and cutting 20,000 jobs.

BIFU opposed the proposed takeover and accused Lloyd's of being more interested in bigger profits for its shareholders than it was in worker's jobs!

But this is only normal practice in capitalism. British banks cut 40,000 jobs in 1990-91 with possibly another 30,000 in 1992, and all this without any takeovers.

The fact is that there are too many banks in Britain competing for the available business. To make matters worse the building societies are now providing banking services so the pressure to cut jobs will continue.

BIFU should know that banks, like any other business, exist to make as much profit as possible and not to provide jobs for workers.

Scorpion.

Obituaries: Tommy Jones and Willie Stewart (1992)

Obituaries from the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

From his daughter we have learned of the death of Tommy Jones at the age of 84. He was active in the old Hamilton branch and was its secretary during its ten-year existence.

Tommy had a hard life: he worked down the pit and in foundries for many years and struggled to bring up a large family, but he always did what he could for the party in the Hamilton area.

We also learned at the same time that Willie Stewart, another old Hamilton stalwart, had passed away. Although disabled from an early age Willie never missed an opportunity to forcefully put over the socialist case. He was 86.

Tommy and Willie were lifelong friends as well as comrades and they never wavered in their commitment to the party. We extend our condolences to their families.

Going for gold (1992)

Editorial from the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

It really is four years since the last Olympic Games, and the whole jamboree is ready to roll again, this time in Barcelona. The Earth’s largest gathering of athletes and other sportspeople will assemble there this month and compete for medals and glory. Television and newspapers will keep the world informed of what is happening, compile the medal tables and search out the best news stories. And many people (not just the Barcelona hotel-owners) will be turning a nice profit.

For the Olympics of course are not at bottom about running and jumping and swimming. Like so many other things, Olympic sport has been moulded into a capitalist image, with money and nationalism the motivating factors. The sponsors don’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts, rather they expect good returns for their investment. Every winner wearing the gear of some manufacturer is adding to their coffers, while the greatest prize is that of hosting the Games themselves. The members of the International Olympic Committee are being wined and dined by those hoping to strike it lucky when the site for the 2000 Games is announced.

Besides the money, national pride and reputation are also at stake—as if having the fastest runner somehow proved the worth of a country’s government. But that, alas, is more or less how many workers will see it, that “their” country did well in terms of winning golds and silvers. The countries of Russia’s former East European empire used to be the most desperate for success in these terms, but the shamateurism rife elsewhere was equally hypocritical. Despite the fine-sounding words of the Olympic motto, nobody can pretend that taking part is anywhere near as important as winning.

The financial and nationalist pressures are responsible for the way so many competitors are forced to resort to drugs of one kind or another. The real crime is getting caught, misjudging how long before the contest you can safely stop the drugs you’ve been taking. For a tiny minority, Olympic success does open the door to relative wealth and comfort, but most have only broken dreams to show for their efforts, and often damaged bodies as well. There have been recent claims of athletes being used as guinea-pigs in the testing of unproven drugs, sometimes with appalling consequences.

The Olympics, then, are not about the pursuit of sporting excellence. Despite the dedication and talent of the participants, the name of the game is money and power, in various forms. Just as teaching under capitalism is not designed to educate in a real sense or help people to learn and think, top-level sport is not aimed at finding the best runner or swimmer. The flag-waving and money-grubbing, the deadly rivalry and the underhand tactics all reflect the sick society in which they occur. There is nothing wrong with striving to do your best, whether in sport or any activity. But the Olympics do not exist for this purpose at all—and it’s as well to remember that the next time you flick the TV switch to tune into the latest from Barcelona.

What makes you angry? (1992)

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you irritated? Annoyed? Angry? What causes this? Standing in a ten-year supermarket check-out queue? Your children scattering their toys and clothes all over the house? Gameshows on television? A social system where the many are economically exploited by. and for the benefit of, the few?

Everything’s relative. To be a victim of a capitalist’s pension fraud rates rather higher on the cosmic scale of things to get upset about than does burning the breakfast toast. Whilst the one event is an obvious effect of a social system based upon production for profit where the continuing accumulation of wealth overrides all other human considerations, capitalism can’t be held responsible for burnt toast. Unless it’s a result of having to rush in order to fulfil one’s obligations as a wage slave.

My local newspaper gives front-page prominence to the news that in the town where I live a clothing store run by the WRVS for the distribution of free second-hand clothing to the poor and needy is closing. One volunteer said that she never knew there was so much poverty until she started working for the scheme. Although 10,000 items of clothing had been distributed during the last twelve months, she was distressed that the powers- that-be knew nothing about the needs of people affected by the recession.

Still, it’s all relative. According to the 480-page, 43rd edition of Britain—an Official Handbook published by the governmental Central Office of Information, Britain is a prosperous society enjoying unprecedented wealth (Wolverhampton Express & Star, 9 January). Little mention is made in the handbook of the effects of recession or of rising unemployment. It’s unlikely that those members of the working class queueing up for free hand-me-downs, or buying from charity shops, are among the one in four who now own shares.

A few hundred British Telecom shares doesn’t put you in the capitalist class. Try giving up your paid wage slavery, assuming you have some, and living off the share dividends. You'll quickly discover that you’re still a member of the majority who are forced to sell their labour power in order to survive in a capitalist society. Even if you have “taken advantage” of the many privatisation share offers of recent years, statistics show that most people take a quick profit and run.

Debt

The number of people owning their own homes, says the Handbook, has risen almost four-fold compared to 40 years ago. If you have actually paid off your mortgage you are one of the fortunate minority. Most “home-owners’” houses and flats are still owned by building societies. As more and more families and individuals find themselves unable to maintain their mortgage repayments and have their homes re-possessed, the effects of living in a “private property” society become devastatingly clear.

Still, it’s all relative, isn't it? Compared to conditions in other parts of the worldwide capitalist system life in the geographical economic unit called Great Britain remains reasonably safe and civilised. Or does it? What odds on your being one of those members of the working class who lose their life in one of the 600 work-related fatalities every year? Or being seriously injured in one the 100,000 work- related major accidents every year? Money spent on health and safety in the work-place reduces profits—and profits are more important in a capitalist society than workers’ safety.

If you believe that the odds on your becoming one of the above statistics are too long to worry about, those on your being, or becoming, in serious debt are much shorter:

High interest rates, easy consumer credit and poverty have driven 2.5 million British households into debt. Research published by the independent Policy Studies Institute shows that 12 per cent of British households have problems with debt. The report rejects stereotypical views of people running up huge debts on credit. It concludes that poverty, rather than excessive consumer spending, forces many families into financial difficulties. Mr Berthoud. a senior research fellow at the PSI, said, “We don't find that buying lots of videos. televisions, cars and so on is very strongly implicated in debt; we do find that not having much money to live on, running out of money at the end of each week, what we call hardship, is implicated in debt”. Poorer people are no better off than they were in 1979. (The Independent, 27 February 1992).

It’s all relative. But need it be?

A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut. However high it may shoot up in the course of civilisation, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls. (Wage Labour and Capital. Karl Marx).

Capitalism

The majority working class has no cause to feel satisfied with capitalism. The time has come for the working class to translate its dissatisfaction into positive political action.

“But what", you ask, “of socialism?" It is too facile to sneer at the idea of “civilising” capitalism. What do you imagine the trade unions are about? Or the welfare state? It is a plain fact, which we should all recognise, that there has been no comprehensive programme (Bolshevism apart) (sic) to replace capitalism as the dominant system in this country since the early 1830s when there was massive but brief support for Robert Owen’s niillenarian vision. Two lessons surely stand out from the past 13 brutal years. One is that it is better to have a “civilised” capitalism (sic) than the kind sponsored by Margaret Thatcher or John Major. The second is that, with the internationalisation of capital, there cannot be Keynesianism, let alone socialism, in one country. (Joe England, Tribune, 24 January).

This is the “solution” offered to the working class by all other political parties—reforming capitalism, civilising capitalism. It is not the solution presented to the working class by this particular party, the Socialist Party. All it takes to do away with all the ills of capitalism is a politically aware and motivated working class which wants and understands socialism.

There was a man I used to have business dealings with. I never met him, we used to converse over the telephone a lot. After the company employing him went bust I never heard from him again. I read in the newspaper that he had run a rubber pipe from his car exhaust and gassed himself. The inquest was told that he owed creditors lots of money, and letters from his bank were found beside him. I still feel sick when I think of the unimaginable, the pressures on an individual that forces him into doing that. It’s said that you can be poor and still be happy. The evidence to show that you can only be poor and miserable, or worse, in a capitalist society is all around us. What makes you angry?

Dave Coggan

The Dead Russians Society (1992)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone want to buy a dozen statues of Lenin? The recent recession in the Lenin-statue works is terminal. Now that Sir Nikolai Ceauceascu and his mates have bitten the dust or headed off to their holiday homes in North Korea, only a few fossilised Chinese and Cuban academics are still paid to sing the praises of dead Russians.

In the 1920s Lenin-worship was all the rage. Naive leftists from Tottenham to Turin would dutifully repeat the Bolshevik liturgy to whoever could be persuaded to listen. Russia, it was said, had had the first ever socialist revolution. It was led by Lenin who had translated Marx's theories into practice. If you wanted to see socialism in all its living glory, look no further than the centralised hell-holes of the Kremlin-ruled state dictatorships. That was "the line"". Here was the leading Labour politician, George Lansbury, returning from Moscow as a born-again Bolshevik:

" In my judgement, no set of men and women responsible for a revolution ever made fewer mistakes or carried their revolution through with less interference with the rights of individuals, or with less terrorism and destruction, than the men in control in Russia."(What I Saw In Russia, p. xii, 1920).

Lenin, wrote Lansbury, exhibited "devotion to the cause of humanity" and Trotsky, whom he never even met, was said to be "one of the greatest leaders of men ever." This elevation of demagogic Russian history-makers was one of the most sickening characteristics of the ecstasies with which the deluded praised their gods. Of course, you had to be up with the fashions. One year Trotsky was your main man and Bukharin on historical materialism was second to none; a little later Trotsky was a viper and Stalin repaid Bukharin's servility by liquidating him.

In the 1970s the present writer went to a "Marxist Conterence" where sects prepared to become vanguards while the world outside listened to Gary Glitter and wore flowery ties. It was a day-long event and a conveyor belt of gesticulating gurus were taking turns explaining how the storming of the Winter Palace by the war-weary Russian peasants (known in leftist circles as the brave proletarian masses) could be reproduced in Manchester if only the Trots could fiddle enough votes at the forthcoming regional NALGO conference. One speaker accused another of being a Stalinist. A woman selling papers at the door told a rival paper-seller that he was clearly unfamiliar with Preobrazhensky, at which he retaliated devilishly with the wounding observation that she had clearly more in common with Zinoviev and Kamenev than Lenin. I pointed out that she had a voice not unlike Cilla Black's and was instantly dismissed as a Menshevik stooge. Half a century after the Bolshevik coup and even the vocabularly of abuse was stale Russian.

Sterile dogma
As long as the Leninist Empire remained, the blood-flow into this queer movement of dead-Russian worshippers did not cease. Cheap editions of Lenin’s anti-socialist speeches and writings rolled off Moscow printing presses like Bibles from the Catholic Truth Society. Now that it has become apparent that the victims of state capitalism were the first to want to cast off religious Leninism, only the most entrenched believers can carry on the faith. The present writer paid his annual visit to the Hampstead Morning Star bazaar at the end of last summer. It is always a good place to pick up some cheap editions of long-wanted volumes. But last year, with the Berlin Wall gone, the August coup failed and "Communist" economists busy planning the free market, there was something unusually bizarre about the bazaar.

Old women sitting behind stalls muttered about how Gorbachev would see them through and a man of eighty boasted that he was a hundred years before his time and looked forward to the when starving East Germans would turn to Lenin and repent for their disaffection. An old Stalinist addressed a young Morning Star reader (perhaps the young Morning Star reader) about how he had visited collective farms in Bulgaria and never seen such happiness in his life. Looking around the bazaar, the cemetery of lost dreams, it was easy to see that even ignorance is not always bliss. Their god had died. A bust of Lenin was on sale for fifty pence; I bought it to put next to the burglar alarm and the flick-knife that are being carefully preserved for the Museum of Capitalist Madness that needs to be set up once we have a socialist world.

The bizarre, fetishised attachments of geriatric Bolshevik dogmatists need not detain us. They will die. and with them their illusions. Nobody will be selling Soviet Weekly in the year 2000: in fact, the paper no longer exists and never will again. But what of young Leninists? Why young Leninists? What can it be that makes any one with genuine hatred for capitalism and a desire for social transformation still adhere to these sterile dogmas?

Part of the answer lies in the development of a mythology about the Russian revolution: wishful belief has replaced verifiable history and the end result is a statement like this one, in a leaflet handed out by the International Communist Current: "October was a revolution in the real sense of the term: the overthrow of one class by another". Of which class by which? In the Russia of 1917 the vast majority of the population were illiterate peasants who wanted peace, land and bread. They wanted property society, not socialism. The Bolsheviks pandered to these non-socialist millions, and they won acquiescence from the politically unconscious workers. Especially after the Kornilov coup of August 1917. But when the Constituent Assembly elections came in 1918 a majority of Russian workers and peasants did not vote for the Bolsheviks who, regardless of the majority will, took dictatorial state power.

Undemocratic arrogance
In a remarkably absurd eighty-page article in the SWP's International Socialism (Autumn 1991), John Rees attempts to defend the tactics of the Leninist dictators over the proletariat. Rees and the SWP realise that everything they stand for depends upon the validity of the strategy adopted by the Dead Russians of 1917. Rees, following Lenin, argues that the problem facing the Bolshevik revolution was the failure of the workers in the rest of Europe to follow the Bolshevik lead. This failure is explained thus:

" What was lacking in these revolutionary upheavals was not the objective European-wide crisis. Neither was it the willingness of workers to struggle for power. What was lacking was a leadership of sufficient clarity and an organisation with a core of sufficiently experienced members to successfully lead these movements to power."(p. 9. Our emphasis).

So, all across Europe in 1917 the workers were ready for socialist revolution, but what they needed, says this SWP leader, were a gang of good leaders - like Lenin and Trotsky, like Rees and the SWP. If only they were there at the time. In the course of this defence Rees justifies the Red Terror of the Cheka and the GPU, supports the massacre of the sailors at Kronstadt who wanted an end to Bolshevik totalitarianism within the soviets ("Had the Kronstadters demands for soviets without parties been realised théy would have expressed the ferocious, elemental hostility of the peasants to the Bolsheviks" (p. 63)) and argues the case for the 1921 ban on parties dissenting from the leadership on the grounds that "the Workers Opposition's plans could only have led to a disintegration of the regime" (p. 67). Such explicit support for such disgustingly undemocratic politics should he enough to dismiss the SWP from the minds of anyone whose conception of socialism is not perverted by deeply authoritarian beliefs.

Rees defends most of the Bolshevik actions against the workers (his article is entitled "In Defence of October", after all - even though the revolution was in November), but even he will not openly defend the Bolshevik closure of the Constituent Assembly because they lost the election. Instead, historical myth is invoked and we are told that the Bolsheviks really won the 1918 election, but the results did not reflect this. Other Leninists are rather less coy about the crushing of the elected Assembly by the Bolsheviks: the ICC's World Revolution (November 1991) argues that the soviets, not the Bolsheviks, closed down the Assembly and were right to do so because the parties elected to sit in it would not represent the working class. Apart from the historical fact that the Bolsheviks were the ones who smashed the Assembly by order of their own Central Committee, the ICC must be congratulated for their honesty: if you don’t trust the views of the workers at the ballot box you tell the workers to take a running jump. This is classical Leninist undemocratic arrogance.

What future can there be for this sub-world of 1917-set Russian fantasies?
For how much longer will gurus like Tony Cliff draw in bewildered young workers, attracted to the notion of socialist politics by real experiences under real capitalism, to listen to obsolete orations about the ten days which shook the world and put world socialism back for a century? How much longer can Lenin and Trotsky exercise a sort of mystical influence upon people searching for a way into the creation of a new social system and not a tour of the ruins of failed ideologies?

The most unsuccessful merchant in the modern world must surely be the jerk standing in Red Square selling copies of What Is to Be Done?, the handbook for professional authoritarian revolution-wreckers. The most foolish political thinkers around now must be those who imagine for one moment that they can build a revolution upon the rotting corpses and stale rhetoric of long-dead Russian leaders. The Socialist Party is hostile to all defenders of capitalism, but none more than those who preserve capitalism in the name of fighting for socialism. They are not only crazy, they are dangerous.

Steve Coleman