Voice From The Back: Statistics (2004)

The Voice From The Back Column from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Statistics

From an American learned journal Mental Health Journal of the Berkshires (Spring 2004) comes an interesting review of James Gillespie’s book Preventing Violence (published by Thames and Hudson). Dr Gilligan is a trained psychoanalyst who has worked in the Massachusetts prison mental health system interviewing violent inmates, for 25 years. “Unemployment breeds both poverty and shame . . . and as Gilligan reports, for every one percent increase in unemployment, there is a 6 percent increase in violence. Statistics show the US has the greatest gap between rich and poor of any of the developed countries: the richest 225 families have $1 trillion (that is 1,000 billion dollars!), equal to the total wealth of 47 percent of the world.”

Debtors

“Personal debt is about to break through the £1 trillion ceiling in the UK for the first time, realising the worst fears of consumer bodies. The Bank of England said yesterday that UK mortgage lending increased by a record £9.8bn in April, leading City economists to predict that total outstanding debt would breach the thousand billion pound threshold” Herald (3 June). Behind these cold facts and figures lie the reality of many men and women of the working class living with anxiety and fear. Wasn’t capitalism supposed to lead to happiness and prosperity? So why in such a wonderful world do so many men and women of the working class find themselves in a desperate debt situation?  

 

Students

Capitalism is a very competitive society. It sets capitalist against capitalist, hence war. It sets worker against capitalist, hence strikes and lock-outs. It sets worker against worker, hence nationalism and racialism. There is another aspect of competition that effects young workers. Trying to convince potential employers that they are better material for exploitation than their rivals has led to some workers doping themselves up. “The number of teenagers relying on drugs such as Prozac to see them through GSCEs and A-levels has soared with prescriptions reaching 140,000 in less than a decade . . . The statistics – from the government’s watchdog, the MHRA – also highlight the pressure being put on students by the exam system. They say how that in 1995, 46,000 anti-depressants prescriptions were given to teenagers between 16 and 18 in full-time education. By last year this had risen to 140,000, more than treble the amount” Observer (6 June).

 

Death of a nobody

That capitalism is a cruel and uncaring society was well illustrated by a news item in the Times (11 June) reporting the death of a Japanese worker in his Tokyo flat. ”Only one thing distinguished it from hundreds of other lonely deaths that occur in Japan every year – the dead man’s body was two decades old. The newspaper by his side was dated February 20, 1984. In a busy residential district of the world’s biggest city, he had lain undisturbed and unidentified for 20 years.”

 

Nice for some

“Millionaires around the world saw their ranks swell to 7.7 million last year as economic growth quickened and stock markets recovered. The world’s wealthiest people were worth an estimated £15.8 trillion in 2003, with their riches forecast to grow, according to an investment bank survey known as the World Wealth Report” Herald (16 June)

BNP: product of reformism’s failure (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just what is it about the BNP that the vast majority of British workers find so nauseating?  In the run up to the 2004 local and European elections, all manner of people, organised in their respective groupings, mobilised against them, from the Labour and Conservative Party activists and the myriad left-wing groups, to student bodies, church groups and unions like the CWU who informed members that their “conscience clause” gave postal workers the choice not to deliver BNP material if they found it objectionable. The anti-nazi organisation Searchlight even produced 28 versions of a newspaper targeting the BNP election campaign and distributed 1.5 million of them in areas where the BNP were most active.

Many were clearly panicked at the thought of widespread BNP victories and this afforded the BNP media coverage which was out of all proportion to the size of their organisation. An eve of poll message from Nick Griffin, the party’s fuehrer, on the BNP website of 9 June, stated  that they “were on course for a political earthquake”, that the BNP  would be “breaking through with three or four Euro MPs”.  Yorkshire, the BNP claimed, was to be their “jewel in the crown.”  Two days earlier the same website had this to say: “Today in London a Monk came up to us.  He said he had voted for the Conservatives all his life but this year he was voting for the BNP.  He informed us that most of the Monks in his monastery were also voting BNP.”  One wonders whether the fascists of the BNP had been taking tips in humour from their favourite comedian Bernard Manning.

And so it came to pass that the BNP managed to gain four new councillors in Bradford in four wards. This ‘jewel’ was out of a record 101 candidates they fielded across Yorkshire.

Elsewhere, the BNP made a breakthrough in the south of England, taking three seats in Epping Forest in the local elections. And in Burnley, the BNP gained one seat but managed to lose the other seven in which its candidates were standing. In the North East, where the party stood a full slate of 25 candidates in Sunderland, they failed to make any promised gains.

Leader Nick Griffin, who in April had invited over Le Pen, the Nazi leader of the French National Front,  to plan how they could work as a team (or rather comedy duo) when Griffin became MEP for the north west of England, failed to take the seat he hankered after.  No BNP candidate succeeded in getting elected to the European parliament and in the London mayoral elections the BNP ended up in sixth place and failed to secure the votes required to get representation on the London Assembly.

Regardless of how much these smiley-faced fascists claim to have changed their image, booting out the boneheaded troublemakers of yesteryear, they still represent the politics of hate – and their writings and statements still contradict the respectable shirt-and-tie image they try so hard to project. This was much evident from their election manifestoes, especially that used for their London Assembly campaign and entitled London Needs the BNP.

The manifesto began with a subject the BNP are famous for – the strange obsession with the colour of human skin. It opened: “Within another generation, without political change, London will not even be recognisable as a European city”. Considering the diversity of cultures existing peacefully side by side in most European cities London, in a generation, would very much be like any normal European city. It asserted that the  “remaining British people in London are faced with progressive marginalisation” because there are too many non-whites, neglecting to mention the way capitalism itself marginalises, atomises and alienates not just individuals but entire communities.

There then followed the usual rant against asylum seekers, “both legal and illegal” and Ken Livingstone and the Labour Party were said to be responsible for “this new influx that is about to engulf us.” Here again, no mention of the fact that within the EU alone, the UK was recently ranked 10th in number of asylum applications compared to the country’s population or that the government has recently brought in measures that make it far more difficult for people from a variety of countries to claim asylum in the UK – together with a reduction of appeal rights for a host of countries. Neither does the BNP acknowledge that the Home Office itself has recognised that asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants have made a huge contribution to the economic and cultural life of the UK, bringing with them a wealth of skills and knowledge.

Law and order, another BNP favourite was then tackled. Having informed us that recorded crime has risen by 1000 percent (how they love nice round figures) since the 1950s they go on to cite the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers as claiming that mass immigration had “brought new levels of organised crime, drug dealing, gun crime, prostitution, fraud and kidnapping,” before advocating the reintroduction of the birch and the death penalty and a policy of zero tolerance. Again, no mention that one BNP London Assembly candidate was a reputable soccer thug, that the BNP National Development Officer, Tony Lecomber, has twice been imprisoned or that BNP leader Nick Griffin was given a suspended sentence for incitement to racial hatred. A visit to the Searchlight website will reveal that the BNP has a membership full of unsavoury characters. Moreover, in the year following the first BNP council victory in Milwall in 1993, racial assaults increased by 300 percent. It seems crime will only be tolerated when it is the BNP and their supporters who are carrying it out.

Next was the issue of “security” with the BNP promising to “make London safe from the threat of terrorism”, by deporting “Moslem fundamentalists”. Their TV election broadcast, which was edited, though downloadable later from the BNP website, was similarly Islamophobic, blatantly hinting at a hyped threat of Islamic terrorism. Significantly, the last terrorist bombs to go off in London which killed and injured members of the white working class were set off back in 1999 by one-time BNP activist David Copeland, who, when apprehended , said his aim had been to start a race war which would lead to a BNP government being elected. And the BNP National Organiser has a conviction for setting off a home-made nail bomb and possessing hand-grenades and electronic detonators. Moreover, Griffin’s political mentor is the Italian Nazi terrorist Roberto Fiore; the very same Griffin who once went to Libya to gain support from Colonel Gadaffi  and who was all too ready to share a platform at a Cambridge seminar in July 2002  with Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the despicable Muslim fundamentalist, currently awaiting extradition to the USA for alleged terrorist crimes.

And so the manifesto continues, each statement showing the BNP to be the intolerant, narrow-minded, racist bigots they have always successfully presented themselves as, before closing on a subject covered in the May issue of the Socialist Standard (‘The Beauty Trap’), namely the forthcoming erection of the statue of Alison Lapper: “Just as Ken Livingstone dislikes anything English he equally disapproves of anything British, which is why we are now to have a sad limbless body on the vacant fourth plinth rather than a British statesman or woman. A BNP Mayor would have this dreadful thing removed.”   In this regard the BNP are in keeping with their beliefs on the white master race. Indeed, their National Organiser considers people with learning difficulties to be “sub-human” and those with disabilities to be “genetically inferior”. As true heroes of the white working class they claim to be the BNP have said they will introduce a GM programme to get rid of those they consider “inferior”.

The 800,000 workers who fell for this sort of rubbish across Britain and gave the BNP their votes in the European and Local elections on 10 June are the misinformed products of the demoralising system we know as capitalism, deluded into thinking that one main issue – a total halt on asylum – would suddenly improve their miserable lives. In truth, a shortage of council housing and poorly maintained housing estates, low wages and pittance benefits are no more the fault of asylum seekers than is the hole in the ozone layer. At the end of the day the BNP promised voters little more than extra space at the trough of poverty and tens of thousands wanted it.

Of course, the BNP were fortunate to ride a wave of patriotism—a tool they can use to great effect when it suits—in the run up to the election, with voters going to the polls as the 60th anniversary of D-Day was being commemorated and rammed down our throats every night on TV, and the English football team were gearing up to compete in Euro 2004 and when manufacturers were reporting sales of 4 million St George flags. And neither is their raw brand of nationalism that unique in today’s climate where the UKIP can make huge gains in the European elections on a “say no to Europe” platform, proclaiming the merits of British sovereignty, and where the Labour Party is all to ready to send British troops off to far away lands to protect the interests of Britain’s ruling elite.

Furthermore, we can only wonder at the mainstream parties fears of a surge in support for the BNP. Considering the views of the Labour and Conservative parties on asylum (Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech springs to mind) and the former’s part in upsetting the Islamic world so much recently, their objections to the BNP do seem a  little hypocritical. They may genuinely abhor the racists of the BNP but have been unsuccessful in confronting them where they have made political gains because to do so would mean acknowledging the shortcomings of a system which they champion and which gives rise to the politics of racism.

If anything the BNP are the product of the total failure of all the reformist parties to make capitalism a fit society to live in. And this is not the fault of the mainstream parties, for they are controlled by the system and not vice versa despite their claims and promises. When capitalism fails to deliver, when despondency and shattered hopes arise from the stench of the failed promises and expectations that litter the political landscape, is it any wonder that workers fall for the scapegoating lies of fascists and the quick fix they offer?

John Bissett

Law and Order (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crime is a funny thing.  I don’t mean that it is a laughing matter; on the contrary, it can be very serious, so serious, in fact, that it warrants its own academic body of scientists, known as criminologists, who devote their attention to the study of crime.

Crime, by popular definition, is regarded as doing something ‘bad’. Killing someone is regarded as the crime of murder.  Taking things that belong to someone else without their permission is theft, and, depending on the means employed, may be robbery, burglary, misappropriation, embezzlement, fraud or any of a host of other names legally applied to the act of theft.

As is so often the case with popular ideas, the notion that crime is simply the perpetration of a bad or evil act and should therefore be punished is an oversimplification. Killing, stealing and all the other acts generally perceived as ‘bad’ are not always crimes.  An otherwise quiet man of sober habits who kills another in a sense of outrage or anger at some perceived injustice, will be arrested, charged, and if found guilty of murder, may be sentenced to life imprisonment or even, in some countries, put to death.  If, on the other hand, the same decent man is conscripted into a war by those who rule the country in which he lives, the more of those regarded as ‘the enemy’ he kills, the more he is likely to be regaled as a hero and, certainly, he is not likely to become a case study for criminologists.

Legal arbiters

In fact, crime is quintessentially linked to government. Whether those who gain power in a country are a democratic government – within the restricted meaning of that term in capitalist society – or a violent dictatorship, they become the legal arbiters of what is and what is not a crime.  They are responsible for accepting existing laws and for making new laws and it is the transgression of these laws, not the nature of the deed, which makes a particular act a crime.

As time goes on, new situations require new laws. Some of these are quite sensible, for example the advent of automotive power made it necessary to create many new laws regarding the use and control of vehicles on the roads. On the other hand, legislation concerning other new developments, like broadcasting or the internet, is largely concerned with protecting private interests.  Overwhelmingly the law is concerned with making rules relating to property and the safeguarding of the interests of those who own property.

How often have we heard it said that something is a ‘threat to law and order’?  Politicians, clerics, judges and leader writers are quick to tell us about the danger we face if law and order breaks down and, indeed, there are currently many examples in the world, places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan, that illustrate the frightening absence of  social order.

First title deeds

Laws are simply rules made by an authority with the power to enforce such rules.  In tribal society, before the rise of private property, the compelling force was custom, custom that emerged from experience of what was perceived to be good for the tribe.  

The concept of ownership did not exist; nobody owned, so there could be no means of exchange and no need to establish rules or laws for the conduct of sale and possession.  It is not our purpose here to outline the change in material conditions that motivated the inducement to land ownership but it is obvious that, since land was in common ownership and no accepted means of exchange existed, it came into the possession of individual owners by the use of force, trickery or deceit.

Thus was private property born, its first title deeds probably written by club or spear.  Whatever the means of procurement, with the concept of ownership came the need to establish an accepted endorsement of the rights of ownership.  So there emerged a need for laws, rules that would enshrine the right of the new owners of private property to the legitimate possession of their ill-gotten gains.  

Chattel slaves

Not only was there the need for laws governing possession and conveyance, there was, also, the necessity for an authority to emerge that had the coercive power to make and enforce such laws,  That authority was the precursor of the state as we know it.

While the ownership of land gave an element of security to its owner, it did not relieve him of the need to work that land in the procurement of his means of life.  Whereas, in the period before the advent of private property, prisoners taken in inter-tribal conflict over tribal rights of possession were a liability, now they became another item of useful private property.  They became chattel slaves to work their master’s land and not only increase his productivity but initiate what would become an important element in all future forms of society: the institution of social classes.

It is not hard to see the numerous regulations that became necessary in this first form of slave society.  It became a crime for the slave to refuse the instructions of his master or to escape or attempt to escape from the authority of his master.  The slave was a possession of the slave-owner and it was necessary to have rules to ensure and protect that possession and its conveyance by exchange.

Feudalism

When material developments within the system of chattel slavery made that system socially redundant, a new system of class slavery emerged.  This phase in human development we call feudalism.  The new system that emerged in specific areas throughout medieval Europe was a unifying or bonding process that strengthened the institution of property under the aegis of a single ruler or king.  In England, for example, the king was the nominal owner of all land, which was apportioned out in large estates to vassals, local strong men who had pledged homage to the king.  These vassals, bearing title from the king, in turn apportioned parts of their estates to landless serfs in smallholdings.  The serfs or feudal slaves were permitted a smallholding for the production of food for themselves and their family and for the payment of tax in kind to their feudal overlords.  Additionally, in combination, they worked their master’s land and did military service when their masters were called upon to support the king.

Remains a truism

Just as progressive economic developments made chattel slavery redundant in favour of feudalism so, too, developments within feudalism created political pressures for change.  New productive forces had created an incipient class of rich merchants and manufacturers opposed to the political and economic constraints of feudalism.  These latter were anxious to end ‘the divine right of kings’ and the power of an appointed aristocracy, both of which were decreed by law and held sacred by the canons of the, then, established church.

Feudalism and its plethora of protective laws, both moral and secular, were destroyed to free the serf from feudal slavery and make him a wage slave.  For him there was the pretext of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’; for his new masters, the capitalist class, there was that vital element in the creation of wealth and profit: human labour power.

New godspeak

A new world outlook was required; a revolution that would banish the old ideas sufficiently to facilitate a new social order.  Old crimes were banished, masses of new laws and new crimes were created and the vast religious reformation ushered in by the new forces of property established even a new godspeak in which the condemned usurer of feudalism became the esteemed financier or banker of modern times.

Now capitalist governments are law factories, amending laws and changing laws, abolishing the odd redundant crime and creating hosts of new crimes especially to regulate and protect large capitalists and small investors from the predatory aggression of one another.

If one looks at the hundreds of lower courts, processing on a conveyor belt basis the masses of petty crimes, and throwing the more serious errantry to its upper levels, it is obvious that what is called ‘ordinary crime’ is committed mainly by the working class.  Corporate crime is much more elusive; the squad car is more likely to catch a runaway shoplifter than to detect a respectable swindler engaged in ‘insider’ trading or some other form of stock racketeering.  Some alleged authorities claim that ‘ordinary’ crime, the petty thieving etc which the lower courts deal with, accounts for less than twenty percent of the monetary value of all crime while corporate roguery accounts for the lion’s share.  It is a questionable statistic given the more covert nature and professionalism of the latter.

As for equality before the law, the French writer, Anatole France, showed remarkable insight into crime in capitalist society when he said that the law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, sleep in the parks or to steal bread.

Seeds of disorder

Is there a need for law and order?  Of course it is essential that regulations exist to ensure the maximum degree of safety on public roads; that the surgeon carrying out an operation is suitably qualified; that a person piloting an aircraft is efficient in their duties.  Similarly, there are masses of situations in which human society must find means for its efficient functioning and protection.

What those who shout loudest about law and order seem never to take account of is the fact that the seeds of disorder and the conditions that promote most crime are endemic to capitalism itself.

Capitalism is founded on the appropriation of humanity’s means of life, and functions on the basis of the exploitation of those who create all real wealth.  It is a system that gives rise to ongoing wars and inter-communal violence.  It murders millions of people every year by means of starvation and malnutrition in order to maintain its market priorities.  But these are not crimes; capitalism and its political manipulators do not make laws against the abominable evils of their system.

At another level, the priorities of capitalism cause the alienation that stands as a barrier between human beings and creates the material conditions for those other crimes which gives easy fodder for capitalism’s myopic media to attack. Abolishing crime is another good reason for abolishing capitalism.

Richard Montague

Prehistoric capitalism? (2004)

Book Review from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is the practice of exchange one which occurs in all societies, or is it rather something which emerges in particular historical circumstances? One writer who has recently discussed such questions is Steven Mithen. Mithen has written previously (in The Prehistory of the Mind, 1996) on the genetic development of a brain and mind capable of our modern complex set of activities. His latest book (After The Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5,000BC, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003) deals with the formation of a productive culture within the effectively fixed constraints of our previous biological evolution.

The contents of After the Ice are an excellent, extremely readable account of early human life as reconstructed from known artefacts and other archaeological evidence. One vital component, added as an aid to presentation but essential to a work of this nature, it would seem, is the introduction of an observer, John Lubbock, through whose eyes we explore this prehistoric world. This observer, who bears the same name as an actual 19th century scientist but is not him, combines characteristics of Victorian and modern scientist, and thus when we read what he sees we are alerted to the fact that these are interpretations based on scarce data, and filtered not just through the eye but also the mind of the observer.

This becomes especially important when Mithen comes to discussing prehistoric economics. He takes care to attribute at least the wilder claims to the appropriate sources, these sources being those for whom Lubbock is a warning – those attempting to apply modern economics to scraps of ancient data. For example, we are told that a prehistoric inland tribe buried sea shells with their dead; therefore, given the mind of a modern or Victorian economist, they must have traded food for these shells; the shells must have been a symbol of status and power; and by burying these shells with their dead the high status clans could preserve the link between their ownership of shells and status, wealth and power.

Let us consider instead that ancient humans knew nothing of modern capitalist economics, and that, until we have evidence to the contrary, the human mind does not have a specific module devoted to capitalistic thinking. Instead, we will assume that ideas are the product of development, including ideas about human relationships. We then find that what seems the simplest of ideas, trading shells for an equal value of food, is actually a curious modern concept.

Firstly, the relationship between food and other products must be established: they must be exchanged, and to be valued they must be exchangeable for one product in common, a reproducible product of labour. Historically this is often cattle; for example, our words “fee” and ”pecuniary” are based on words for cattle in the Germanic languages and Latin respectively. Cattle can, however, only be subdivided when they are eaten; therefore in the course of millennia of trading the precious metals come to the fore as products of labour which can easily be used as a means of exchange and a measure of exchange value. Once such a universal representative of value has been developed, and only then, may tokens may be substituted for it, whether paper, copper and nickel, as today, or shells and beads. However, it was only in the 20th century that token money developed to the point of ending the gold standard and allowing the tokens a semblance of freedom in exchange (and only a semblance). How are our primitive forebears meant to have achieved this trick, except in the mind of a 20th century archaeologist with an understanding of such an advanced trading system so ingrained that they see it as natural to humans from the first generation?

Rather than such an understanding being genetically programmed into the hyman mind and brain, it is the product of thousands of years of social evolution, which had not finished even as the first modern archaeologists began to conjure such systems for their ancient forebears.

These criticisms aside – and they are criticisms which we would be forced to level against all academic endeavour which assumes modern conditions to be universal conditions – this is an excellent book which can be recommended to all socialists as an accessible source of information on ancient human societies.

We would, with our different interpretation, however, certainly come to more positive conclusions than Mithen. He writes, “Our politicians might devise both the will and the means to curb pollution, to distribute resources fairly throughout the world, to provide new homes for displaced populations, and to preserve the natural world. They might do all these things. But they probably won’t.” This is consistent with thinking that human social evolution is fundamentally constrained within the inherited mental structure of our organism. Socialists, on the other hand, see people as the product of history, just as earlier we have explained that one part of our lives, exchange between humans, is a product of history rather than a fact of nature to be merely endured. And so we would point to our ability to change, to transcend the limitations of our organism, to manufacture our social conditions rather than to be the product of original conditions; a potential yet to be fully realised, and which will be fully realised by transcending the conditions of our history that have led us so far from the ape to capitalist society. In other words, the answer is not to find solace in our fixed animal behaviours but in our mutability, and our ability to overcome these behaviours and conditions.

SJW

Obituary: Harry Morrison (2004)

Obituary from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our comrades of the World Socialist Party of the US have informed us of the death of comrade Harry Morrison in his 92nd year. Born in 1912, he came to the US from Canada (as an illegal immigrant) in 1937 where he met and joined the Workers Socialist Party (as our US companion party was then called). After moving to Los Angeles for a while, he finally settled in Boston where he earned a living as a salesman.

For many years Harry Morrison was on the editorial committee of the old Western Socialist for which he wrote the editorials and editorial replies to letters as well as numerous articles under the pen-name of “Harmo”. He was also a member of the WSP’s NAC and its secretary, an outdoor speaker – or “soapboxer”, as the Americans call them –  an indoor debater and radio scriptwriter and a broadcaster (the WSP having its own programme on a local Boston station in the 60s and 70s). After health problems caused him to slow down his socialist activity, he wrote some books: one of which, The Socialism of Bernard Shaw, in which of course he showed that G. B. Shaw wasn't a socialist at all, was published in 1989.

Our US comrades have published an appreciation of Harry Morrison's life and socialist activities on their website.

Obituary: Leslie Dale (2004)

Obituary from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Les Dale, our friend and comrade for many years, died on 22nd May in Newport Hospital on the Isle of Wight, aged 84 years.

He and his wife Queenie joined Ealing Branch in 1952. Les accepted our case after discussion with another comrade (the late Jack Law) during their time on the land together as conscientious objectors during the Second World War. Right from the outset, he became active in the work of the branch, soon excelling at the job of literature secretary. What heady days they were, with rapidly increasing sales of the Standard plus much other literature besides. His experience was put to good use when we worked together on the production committee of the Standard in the late 1950s and early 60s.

Les had a very fine knowledge of horticulture and agriculture and was also well versed in medieval history. With his firm grasp of the materialist conception of history he wrote periodically for the Standard and gave lectures on his favoured topics to various Party branches.

Sadly, his wife died of leukaemia at the early age of 48. It was a bitter blow to all who knew her, but Les showed great courage in carrying on despite his grief. Now that he is also gone, we will miss him greatly but will cherish the memory of his erudition and his keen philosophical wit.

A single currency – the magic wand? (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

One basic feature of the present stage of the capitalist system is that it takes desperate measures to confront the problems that it created in the first place. Such measures are mere reforms, which, even if they appear to work, only do so for short periods and in the interests of only a section of the capitalist class. Society therefore has the appearance of moving but in actual fact it at best, stands still and at worst, moves backwards. Following is an example of one such desperate attempt which is currently plaguing European capitalists but which, ironically, is being blindly contemplated by West African leaders.

An impossible task?

When the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was created in 1975, the establishment of a single currency was high on its agenda. However, the implementation of the idea has been dogged by delays and inconsistencies one of which is the absence a second monetary zone. At the December 1999 summit in Lome, Togo the ECOWAS decided that the non-CFA Anglophone countries – Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone – together with Cape Verde and Guinea (Conakry) should come up with a second unitary currency. This second currency (the Eco) was to be launched by 1st January 2003 as a first step towards the creation of the single West African money.

As a fast-track route to the attainment of this second common currency, the West African Monetary Institute (WAMI) was set up in 2001 with headquarters in Ghana. The WAMI put forward certain economic conditions for the five countries (Cape Verde and Liberia not being fully committed to the project) to meet before further action could be taken. These criteria included reducing budget deficit to not more than four per cent by 2002; limiting inflation to five per cent by 2003; keeping central bank financing of budget deficit at under ten percent of the previous year’s revenue; and maintaining foreign reserves equivalent to at least six months’ imports by 2003.

However, and this was not unexpected, in November 2002 at the end of another summit in the Guinean capital, Conakry, the ECOWAS issued a statement postponing the launch of the Eco from 1 January 2003 to 1 July 2005. They had just realised their inability to meet the unrealistic conditions they had set themselves.

False hopes

The founding fathers of the ECOWAS and their current successors saw the need to create a single currency because in their ignorance of the operation of the capitalist system they hoped such a venture would wipe out all the woes of their people. In the words of the current vice president of Ghana, Alhaj Alieu Mahamam, it “will provide the sub-region with the economies of scale to be derived from a bigger market (and it) underpins all our aspirations of unity captured by the slogan ‘a common currency in a common market in a common country’ ”. These proponents of the single monetary zone also think that it will attract foreign direct investment through a stable macro-economic environment and a larger single market; facilitate free movement of goods, services and labour; and lead to reduced transaction costs. These would, in their view, enhance economic growth and eventually reduce poverty. They also believe that a monetary union will naturally foster unity in their balkanised people who now see themselves in the colonialist terms of Anglophones, Francophones and Lusophones.  

     

The snag

This mission of creating a single currency will be hard to accomplish owning to the near-impossibility of the five countries meeting the ambitious conditions necessary for the creation of the second monetary zone. Then there are other more serious hurdles, which may adversely impede the project. Foremost among these is the local capitalists and their, mostly Western, masters who control the various central banks through their control of the various governments. They may see their petty profit interests being threatened by the creation of a single West African central bank. It is arguably not unrelated to this fear that some individuals with vested interests have openly voiced concern over the issue. The chairman of Guardian Express Bank Plc, Moses O. Ihonde, for instance gave a banking conference at Enugu,Nigeria a frightening talk on how banks will have to battle with increased operational costs at the introduction of the proposed West African common currency (West Africa magazine, 11 – 17 November 2002).

The reality   

But even if the West African leaders are able to stem the tide of these and other unforeseen impediments and are able to create this single currency, the problem of poverty, hunger, disunity, illiteracy, disease, etc will still be the lot of the masses. The reason is that the international economic game, in which West Africa is but a mere pawn, does not work in the interests of the masses. The people here are mostly engaged in farming. They produce raw materials – cocoa, coffee, timber, minerals, etc to feed the factories in the West.  Then they buy their food requirements – maize, rice wheat flour, etc from the West. But the system operates such that these West African producers of primary products do not determine the prices of their products just as the prices of what they import are beyond their control. Therefore they sell their exports cheaply and pay through their nose for their imports. But that is the way of capitalism. It ensures that the capitalists take all profits accruing to the economic transactions away from the masses. And that is the cause of the poverty, hunger, disease and all the ills afflicting the masses. This being the case, there is no way that the creation of a single currency can successfully address such problems. This fact can even be gleaned from the situation of the people of the CFA zone that spread over West and Central Africa. Their countries have very little trade links amongst themselves. And in spite of the fact that they use a common currency, the economic situation of the masses is neither better nor worse than their counterparts in the multi-currency non-CFA zone.

Central to the capitalist relations of production is the element of money. Production is organised such that people work to produce goods and services not for the purpose of consumption, but they produce them to sell at a profit. In other words, goods and services are commodities to be sold and bought. But since the means of producing these commodities are owned and controlled by a few individuals, it is they who own the products. They sell them and keep the proceeds. On the other hand, the producers – the working class – who are excluded from the ownership of the means of production are left with little or no money at all to buy what they produce and need! And herein lies the prime source of all the problems of present day society.

The introduction of a common currency will therefore be, to the masses, as irrelevant as was the switch from the British and French money to the present currencies at independence. The fact is that the ordinary person, the working class person will still not have enough of it to buy the necessities of life.

Society can only turn things round when the means of production and distribution of wealth are commonly and democratically owned. When that happens, production of goods and services will be conducted through a harmonious co-operation of all humanity. Under such an arrangement, the products of mankind’s collective effort will be freely accessible to all and thus money, as a medium of exchange in all its forms, will completely disappear.

Suhuyini

Greasy Pole: Tough on Sound Bites, Tough on the Causes of . . . (2004)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Somewhere in the darker recesses of Ten Downing Street, or in a basement at party headquarters, or in a corner of some cramped room in the Houses of Parliament, lengthily educated people are slaving at the construction of sound bites. Sometimes – and such an event is almost as earth-shattering as Archimedes and his bath – they chisel out a phrase so perfectly succinct and attention-demanding that it goes down in the history of oral deceptions. The employer of these ardent people – some high flying politician desperate to catch the public ear if only for brief moment in time – will use the phrase as soon as possible. Especially if there is an appropriate crisis going on (which means most of the time). On the following day it will be thick in the headlines, clogging up the TV news bulletins, in substitute for a proper awareness of what is happening in the world. And then, perhaps, it will be forgotten.

But sometimes sound bites have a nasty habit of biting the tongue that speaks them, of changing from a persuasive slogan to a cringing embarrassment. There was, for example, Harold Macmillan’s boast that during those times the people of Britain had never had it so good. It was not only those who were having it bad – like the two million people who were poor enough to get National Assistance – who disbelieved Macmillan. In fact there was an outraged reaction against him and the man known as Unflappable Mac must have cursed the day he drawled out those scornful, immortal words.

But one who has been among the most persistent and skilled of the purveyors of sound bites is Tony Blair. How many of his most cherished examples of this subtle art must he now bitterly regret? It is certain that among the most embarrassing is his famous assurance that his government would be “…tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. At the time it convinced many people as the perfect solution, covering every concept of crime from those who regard it as trivial responses to a psychologically unsatisfactory infancy to those who slaver that all criminals should be, if not summarily executed, locked up for ever. But like all sound bites, it overlooked the nasty realities of capitalism – in this case the reality that crime is not susceptible to such a simple approach. If we take one of the most commonly used measures of the size of the problem – the numbers of offences notified to the police – the fact is that in 2003 crime remained overall at about the same level as in 2002. Some offences, including burglary and theft from cars, were down by two percent while others, notably violence against the person, were up by 11 percent.

Assessments

To enforce the first part of Blair’s sound bite – the bit about being tough on crime – there have been two Home Secretaries whose punitive passions have made penal reformers wistful for the days when Michael Howard was the Tory Party’s favourite conference performer. Of course the policies followed by Jack Straw and David Blunkett may be not unconnected with their nurturing ambitions to be Prime Minister themselves. Blunkett, recovering from his past as a defiant left winger, is driven on creating more and more legal manacles on our behaviour and on stuffing the prisons with a record number of unwilling residents. This goes down well with the readers of the Sun and the Daily Mail, the appeasement of whose prejudices is a top priority for Blair. Which leaves the second part of the sound bite, about being tough on the causes of crime.

For some time now the Home Office has been labouring with the production of a series of guidelines about the “causes” of crime. This has been as long, onerous task which required scouring through many works of reference for evidence to support the design, and indeed the very existence, of the guidelines. At last the labours bore fruit and there emerged a computer-viable assessment tool which, it was hoped, would be a means of gauging the likelihood of individuals who are before the courts getting into trouble again, or being violent or whatever. As may be imagined, the assessment comes out as a pretty hefty document, running to page after page, all of it backed up with a pretty massive instruction manual. There is no shortage of quoted authority to justify the perceived need for a consistent risk assessment, like: “ . . . Clark et al (1993) summarise the evidence on clinical prediction of risk based on professional judgement . . . Hollin and Palmer (1994) and Gendreau and Coggin (1996) have summarised the research using social dynamic factors to predict re-offending . . . ” In the process of the assessment a variety of characteristics about the offender are contributed in the form of a problem score – the higher the score the greater the risk. The characteristics include offending history, accommodation and employment problems, addiction to drugs or alcohol, education, health… At the end of it all a final score is read off, which gauges whether this person is liable to commit further crimes and how much of a danger they are.

Bad News for Blair

The bad news, for Tony Blair and his admirers reading the Sun and the Daily Mail, is the implicit basis of the assessment, that crime is not a matter of innate wickedness or a wilful resolve to be anti-social but is rooted in a variety if factors all of which are fashioned within society. Not a few people will ask whether we didn’t know that already, without the Home Office wasting all that time and effort. For example a recent report by the housing charity Shelter had something to say about the effect of bad housing on a person’s life chances and behaviour. Over a million children in Britain grow up in housing of such a low standard that it damages their health, education and their general life prospects. Bad housing makes one in twelve children vulnerable to diseases like TB and asthma, it damages their schooling and, in the case of children in emergency housing, makes them twice as likely to be in a hospital Accident and Emergency Department because they have been burned or scalded. If these damaged children, when they grow up, were subjected to that Home Office assessment they would come out with a very high score as likely to be committing crime and possibly dangerous to others.

The Shelter report is the latest in a series of similar investigations which all reached the same conclusion – that for workers it is poverty which conditions their life style, their health and education, their responses to stress, their behaviour and so on. That is the broad general picture; when we look at it in more detail, as in the matter of crime, we can see that poverty is again the determining factor. That is clearly the basis of the Home Office style of criminal assessment. It is also the vital reality which Blair ignored when he was telling us about being tough on the causes of crime. But then he was not concerned with fact but with harvesting votes, which is a very different matter. All that was along time ago and things are going badly for him now. All around him people who once adored him are getting tough on him. Perhaps now they will learn that we must also be tough on the causes of political leaders and what they represent.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Holidays with pay (2004)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is indisputable that, since the war, an increasing number of people have annual holidays, but before we applaud this happy fact, let us examine the reasons. Twenty-five years ago few people enjoyed a regular break from their employment, except, of course, the idleness enforced by unemployment. To-day, however, an annual fortnight’s holiday is an accepted feature of their job. This is mainly due to recognition by the capitalist class that a refreshed working class makes for greater efficiency and higher productivity (e.g., contented cows yield more milk) and also organised working-class activity (i.e., shortage of labour-power giving the workers stronger bargaining powers).

Accompanying the development of capitalism we find machine production ever more complex, a higher division of labour and hence a growth of monotonous repetitive operations. The effect on employees of these factors is boredom, nervous strain and physical disorders, making a break from this drab existence imperative. Having tightened nuts, hammered rivets, checked invoices, and swept floors innumerable times, fifty weeks a year, the remaining two weeks must be spent forgetting nuts, rivets, invoices and floors. The working class, generally speaking, regard a holiday as a period in which to flee from the rut of normal existence. In other words, not to do those things one usually has to do, to do all those things one cannot normally do, and where either of these cannot be carried out, then to do them under more congenial surroundings and conditions.

Therefore, the manner in which various individuals spend their restricted release is determined largely by their particular job of work. Of course, the style of the holiday is conditioned by the financial resources, indeed, whether they have a holiday at all is dependent upon that factor [. . .]

(From front page article by “DE NORM”, Socialist Standard, July 1954)

Letters: What can I do? (2004)

Letters to the Editors from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

What can I do?

Dear Editors 

The April edition of Socialist Standard really spoke to me. It left me feeling poor, paranoid and powerless. Living in a capitalist society is frustrating. I work as an unskilled wage labourer and feel the pressures of job insecurity. This is something I must share with those who sell their labour as a commodity throughout the world. Capitalism will always put profit before people. If I read socialist publications it is with the money I earn from working in a capitalist system. The small commodities that I can afford are to be viewed as luxuries that this society offers to those with disposable incomes, things I could sadly not afford when unemployed. It is disturbing isn’t it, that people descend to shopping arcades whenever they have a moment to spare and money in their pockets? This is a capitalist placebo to prevent people from thinking about things that really matter.

I feel sad to report that I feel Socialist sympathisers are a minority and with the war in Iraq and the War on Terror that intolerance, hate and racism are gathering momentum. I recently encountered an ex-soldier who served in Japan in the close of the Second World War whose experience of atrocities led him to declare that the nation from where the Madrid bombers came from should be “nuked” with the guilty parties extradited there. On another occasion a young man who should be better informed said that “the West should drop the nuclear bomb on the Middle-East”, and also that most people called Patel were terrorists. We live in troubled times but such neo-fascist hysteria is disturbing. Looks can be deceptive.

Peace not violence is the answer and this will best be achieved through Socialism. However I am not a martyr I have to live in this society and try as I might it is frustrating when the daily struggle seems like Orwell’s 1984 or Heller’s Catch 22. I would like to see the Socialist Standard share more instruction on how to practice Socialism today within the sphere of your principles.

Yours for peace and socialism,

Gary Cubbage, 

Bolton

Reply:

It is not possible to “practice Socialism” in the literal sense today since socialism is a system of society which can only replace capitalism as a whole; you can’t have bits of socialism within capitalism. What socialists can do under capitalism, however, is spread socialist ideas – for instance, that those who are forced to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary, whichever country they live in, share a common interest and that nationalism, racism and xenophobia are mistaken attitudes which should be opposed; or that they have no interest in wars that are always fought for capitalist interests, which is why socialists never support them and take what steps they can to avoid being forced to fight in them. As you have discovered, in view of prevailing attitudes, this is often frustrating but, as has been said, if you are socialists this is something you can’t help doing. All the same, it is done more effectively and perhaps less frustratingly if done collectively. Have you thought of joining the Socialist Party rather than battling on as an isolated individual?

Editors.

Rose-tinted view?

Dear Editors

I look forward to reading your magazine every month. I find it informative and entertaining. I’m a bit of a newcomer to politics and am finding that the deeper one digs the trickier the exploration of issues becomes.

One thing has been niggling me for some time is this idea from your ideology that when true socialism emerges in the world then everyone will work and strive for the benefit of each and all. Now from my observation of human behaviour this seems rather a rose-tinted view of the real world. There is no need for me to point out to you the levels of selfish behaviour in the form of greed. crime, war, etc that blights this planet.

In your efforts to counter this charge of gross behaviour you say that this side of human behaviour of humans is conditioned by their environment and not by natural selfishness and aggression (the nature/nurture debate ). What evidence do you have for stating this as a fact? As far as I know this nature-nurture thing has never been resolved satisfactorily.

It seems to me that the success or failure of your new socialist world hinges on this very emotive issue. You are banking on the majority of humans being nice to each other and exhibiting a caring, sharing nature. This is either a very naive or a ‘let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope it all resolves itself’ outlook.

Perhaps you can reassure me that you know what sort of world you are trying to lead us into.

Philip McCormac, 

Burbage, Leics.

Reply:

First, we are not trying to lead anyone anywhere. Socialism can only be established by people who know what they want, not by following leaders and expecting them to deliver it for them. We are not seeking to be leaders, only pioneers pointing the way.

Actually, socialism doesn’t require people to behave all that differently from how most of us do most of the time at the moment, essentially only the accentuation of some of the behaviours we exhibit today (friendliness, helpfulness, cooperation) at the expense of others which capitalism encourages. Capitalism has an all-pervading culture of violence, competitiveness and acquisitiveness, and people are under pressure to adapt their behaviour to this. What will happen in socialism it that this culture will disappear and so people’s behaviour will no longer be shaped by it. We would not have to stop being “selfish” in the sense of giving priority to our own individual welfare; it is just that, in the changed circumstances, this will better be served by cooperating with, not competing against, others.

Aggression is another matter. There is no evidence that this is an in-built, gene-governed part of the biological natures of humans. Humans are of course capable of aggressive behaviour, as we are of a great variety of different behaviours (that being our biological nature), but whether such behaviour is actually engaged in depends on the circumstances. Of course, even in socialism, people will sometimes get frustrated and annoyed and this will occasionally find expression in acts of aggression, but these would be isolated acts of individuals. Social acts of aggression such as war, training for war, terrorism, violent crime, vandalism and the like will have no reason to occur, as the social conditions that generate and sustain them will have disappeared.

You ask for the evidence that aggression is not “natural”. Have you read the book Are We Prisoners of Our Genes? which we have just published? If not, read it (available from us by post for £4.75) and then come back if you want. 

Editors.

Party News (2004)

Party News the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Centenary

Over the weekend of 12/13 June the Socialist Party of Great Britain marked a hundred years of non-stop socialist activity. A highly successful political and social event on the Saturday evening in Regents College in Regents Park, London, was attended by some 140 members and sympathisers. On the Sunday those who had come from outside London for the event visited parts of the City of London and Clerkenwell area associated with the Party (such as the site of the old Printers’ Hall, Bartlett’s Passage, off Fetter Lane, where the founding meeting took place on 12 June 1904, and most of the Party’s head offices, which were situated in this area till we moved to Clapham High Street in 1951) together with other places of historical interest such as Farringdon Hall where the Labour Representation Committee was formed and the house where Keir Hardie lived next door to the one-time head office of his now defunct ILP.

Copies of the special 48-page hundredth anniversary issue of the Socialist Standard are still available (price £2 including postages, or £1 at Branch meetings).

The talks given at Regent’s College are available on CD: for details contact Head Office

Elections

Ten thousand leaflets were distributed in Britain for the June elections to the European Parliament elections, with a lesser number in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and Italy, urging people to consider the case for socialism and, if they agreed with it, to register this by writing “World Socialism” (or “Weltsozialismus” or “Socialisme Mondial” or “Wereldsocialisme” or “Socialismo Mondiale”, as the case may be) across their ballot paper. There was a socialist candidate in the local elections standing in the Monkton Ward of South Tyneside Council. The full result for this was: Lewis (Lab) 984; Kerr (Lab) 960; Sewell (Lab) 929; Slater (LD) 756; Bennett (LD) 666; Coe (LD) 624; Cameron (C) 425; Wagstaff (Ind) 351; Bissett (Soc) 203.

Editorial: Going it alone? (2004)

Editorial from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the results of June’s European elections are anything to go by, more people in Britain like the approach of the “United Kingdom Independence Party” than they do that of the Liberal-Democrats.

UKIP is basically a know-nothing, anti-foreigner party. It is a sad sign of the currently low level of working class political understanding that 16 percent of those who voted in these elections (even if only about 6 percent of the electorate) should have given their votes to such a party, with another 5.7 percent (2 percent of the electorate) going to the even more explicitly anti-foreigner BNP. Not that that means that those who voted for the other parties showed much political intelligence either. No party of capitalism can solve the problems faced by the wage and salary working class and so none of them are worth voting for.

Independence in the sense UKIP means is just not possible within the context of globalized capitalism. Certainly, formal political independence, or sovereignty, is possible, where states have the full power to make decisions without reference to any supra-national rules or decision-making procedures. But there’s a difference between the mere legal power to do something and what can be done in practice. In practice all states, when exercising their sovereign power to make decisions, have to take into account the economic reality that there exists a single world market economy on which they are dependent.

A state can exercise some degree of influence on how the world market operates in relation to it - it erect tariff walls, subsidise exports, devalue its currency - but this depends on its economic clout (such as the productivity and size of its industry and the extent of its internal market). Nearly fifty years ago the leading states of continental Europe calculated that they could better face the world market if they formed a single economic unit. They realised that this meant giving up some of their sovereignty to a supra-national body into whose decisions, however, they would have some input, but anticipated that what they were giving up in terms of national political sovereignty would be more than compensated by the gains brought about by being part of a wider economic unit, exercising collective political sovereignty on trade matters. Thus was born what is now the EU.

Twenty-five years later the dominant section of the British capitalist class made the same calculation as had Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries, and, from 1973, joined the economic union they had formed. The advantages of this, for British capitalism, were access to a wider internal market and a greater, even if shared, economic clout on the world market than they would have had on their own.

UKIP tacitly admits, in the small print, that Britain couldn’t go it alone economically when they argue that, after withdrawal from the EU, Britain should still form part of a free trade area with the rest of Europe. But this is how the EU started, and it still involves a sacrifice of sovereignty in the form of a surrender of the right to erect tariff walls against goods coming from the EU or to subsidise exports to it. And there would still need to be negotiations over the rules, their interpretation and on whether or not they had been infringed, negotiations in which the British capitalist class would be weakened by having to face on its own a bigger unit with a common position.

This of course is where the mainstream parties, which better reflect the current interest of the capitalist class, will be able to fault UKIP if ever things got serious, by arguing that if British capitalism is going to form part of some European economic unit then its interests would be better served by being a full member, with full rights to have a say in determining the unit’s common policies.

But this is to assume that UKIP’s case is a rational one whereas it isn‘t. It is based on xenophobia, with its slogans “No to the EU” and “Keep the Pound for Ever” meaning “No to foreigners” and “Britain über Alles”. It is based on the irrational view that “foreigners” of one sort or another represent a threat to the supposed community with a common interest made up of the “native” population of the UK. But there is no such community, no such common interest. Britain, like every other country in the world, is a class-divided country where the two classes - those who own and class and those who work and produce - have diametrically opposed interests.

The view that all who live in the same country have a common interest against all those who live in other states is part of a political ideology that seeks to mobilise the producing class to line up behind the owning class in its contest with the owning classes of other countries. But the interest of the wage and salary working class in all countries is to reject all nationalism, to reject in fact the very idea of “foreigner”, and to recognise that they have a common interest with people in other countries in the same economic situation of being obliged to sell their mental and physical energies in order to get a living. That interest lies in working together to establish a world-wide society of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit.

Obituary: Bob Miller (2004)

Obituaries from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bob Miller

Bob Miller, who died last month aged 67, first joined the old Merseyside Branch of the Party in 1970 after having been active in the National Secular Society, but left the Party for a time after a branch disagreement. When Merseyside Branch revived in the 1980s, Bob rejoined and was a stalwart at meetings and worked hard selling the Standard, most typically at Williamson Square in Liverpool for many years. At one point BBC local radio used recordings of Bob on his pitch there in one of their programmes analysing the distinctive Liverpool ‘scouse’ accent.

For a short while Bob served on the Party’s Executive Committee and took his duties seriously and with a certain degree of dedication. He remained a staunch socialist until the end, the last 15 years or so of his life blighted by unemployment, this being in no small part related to his activities as a militant trade unionist in Merseyside during the 1970s and early 80s.                                       

DAP

Terrorism and political violence (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has become a commonplace to declare that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ But has violence ever been an effective political tool and, if so, is it still? The American ruling class has declared ‘war on terrorism’ in an attempt to legitimise their own use of political violence around the world. But both the US and their enemies are indulging in an identical activity. The question therefore arises as to whether humankind’s political problems are ever resolved through military conflict.

It is possible to trace the history of warfare back to the origins of private property in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Levant some 5,500 years ago. The initial raising of armies to defend the agricultural surplus from raiding nomads soon became used to attack other city-states. The once elected warlords evolved into permanent kings whose main role became the protection of their class’s power and wealth. The first imperial regimes emerged together with those who struggled against such oppressive empires. Those who opposed any established power regimes have been demonised by their enemies ever since. It is these ‘resistance’ movements who have used political violence (terrorism) in an attempt to destroy and replace existing (usually) imperial regimes. We will not discuss the historical logic of the violence between states but this is where the seeds of internal political conflict are invariably sown. That the subsequent ‘terrorists’ are almost always armed and trained by a state is well documented and  such regimes show staggering hypocrisy by demonising their own students when they turn on their teachers. History has given a very mixed reception (usually dependant on their success) to these heroes or criminals: Spartacists, Thugees, Dog Soldiers, Boxers, Mau-Mau, Assassins – the list is endless. Since violence was used to impose political regimes, many have concluded that it is only through such conflict that they can be destroyed. Before we attempt to analyse whether history backs up this logic let us take a detour to try and understand why our culture is so immersed in the cult of the warrior and the belief that violence can resolve human problems.

Ever since Homer’s tales of the heroic deeds of the Greeks at Troy western culture has been saturated with a military ethos. We cannot imagine Malory, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Fenimore Cooper without Lancelot, Macbeth, Don Quixote or Hawkeye. Such is the central place it occupies in our story-telling that we can hardly conceive of drama itself without a conflict of some kind within the narrative. As we have seen, the very origins of private property produced a warrior elite who subsequently became a ruling aristocracy and it this class who were the patrons of the creators of culture. Given the moral dualism of Christianity it was not difficult for the rulers to characterise their opposing city, or later, nation states as evil. War became described as a struggle between good and evil – the relevant designations were, of course, dependent on which side you were on.  After six millennia of warfare the idea that it still represents a way to resolve problems is still an insidious part of our culture – not because it has proven to be so but because the ruling classes need us to believe in it. As evidence for this, let us consider the outcome of the longest and most bloody conflict of the last century between two of Europe’s ruling classes – Britain and Germany.

It is still a matter of great debate who actually started the war of 1914-18; some say it was provoked by France to recover territory lost during the Franco-Prussian conflict whilst others believe it an inevitable consequence of Germany’s need for an empire. What is not disputable is that the opposing economic interests of the ruling classes concerned were vital in their decision to go to war. They utilised the martial cultural traditions of their nations to convince the populations to slaughter each other. History shows that nothing was resolved by the allied ‘victory’ of 1918 because, as a consequence of the imposed terms of the German surrender, the whole thing erupted again in 1939. Again millions died, but did the fighting end with the defeat of Nazism? The Russian Empire was formed out of the division of Europe after 1945, as was much of the ‘third world’ where they and the U.S. fought out the ‘cold war’. Even today we still endure the consequences of the two world wars where the victors redrew the world map according to their interests – Palestine, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, etc. All we can be say about the direct result of war is that the ruling class of one nation state replaces another. Clearly this is not why those who fought the war did so, thus we can say with some legitimacy that war has not resolved the problems it was (at least in propaganda terms) supposed to. Can we also make this claim for the results of terrorist campaigns?

Many leaders of movements for ‘national liberation’ (terrorists) have subsequently become part of the ruling class they once fought. Israel, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Northern Ireland and many others now enjoy the fruits of their murderous campaigns. But what has become of the promises made during the struggle? Most who killed and were killed did so in the belief that they were creating a better and more just society than the one they lived in. In cases such as Zimbabwe things seem to have become worse in some respects. The exploitation and murderous repression of the Palestinians has plunged Israel into a nightmare of endless violence. The Irish  ruling class seem incapable of resolving their internecine power struggle . So again it would appear that violence has failed to deliver a better life to those who indulged in it and suffered from it. Why? One obvious reason is the inability of humankind to learn from its history. An understanding of history is far and away the most important component of any political consciousness. Before any course of political action is undertaken we must make an effort to understand how the world came to be the way it is. A motorcar cannot be repaired without some knowledge of how it works and no amount of moral outrage and violent action will resolve the problem. War and its bastard progeny we call terrorism, together with the regimes both have brought into the world, are the problem and not the solution.

Socialists have always opposed both violent struggles for ‘national liberation’ and the ‘legitimate’ wars fought between nation states. We see that causing more of it cannot lead to an end to the suffering in the world. War and all organised violence can only be stopped when it is rejected by those who alone must fight it. The ruling class and their media, political ideology, establishment history and all the other paraphernalia of the capitalist propaganda machine can never acknowledge this because to do so would illegitemise the origins of their own power. As to the other myth they peddle concerning mankind’s inherent violence, we can only look within ourselves for the answer. If you sincerely believe in the efficacy of violence to solve your own and the world’s problems then you simply deny the evidence of history.

Andrew Westley

Marxian education in the United States (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

We continue our series on the spread of socialist ideas in other parts of the world.

A “Socialist Party of America” was first formed in 1901 following a split with Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party. It did not have as its objective – its sole objective – the establishment of socialism but instead was basically a left-wing, social democratic, reformist party with, in the early years of the last century, hundreds of thousands of members and supporters. The First World War profoundly shocked the SPA, with at least some of its members questioning its policies, tactics and objectives. In particular, as early as 1915, the SPA, particularly in Michigan – the centre of the American auto industry – came under the influence of anti-war Marxist elements.

In 1915 SPGB member Moses Baritz moved to Detroit where he soon began to hold lectures and meetings in Duffield Hall. Many who attended were members of the Socialist Party of America, while others were members of the Socialist Party of Canada who had settled in Detroit, partly to get jobs in the auto industry, but also to escape any possible army draft back home. A Marxist “Study Circle” was formed.

By 1916, Baritz had moved on, but before he left Adolph Kohn – another member of the SPGB – came to Detroit. Members of the “Study Circle” began to argue that a new, anti-reformist party separate from the SPA should be organised. Others, such as leading left-wing members of the SPA in Detroit like John Keracher and Dennis Batt, were at first sympathetic, but they felt that Marxists should remain in the SPA for the time being, and swing it towards socialism. The formation of a new socialist party was premature, they claimed.

However, at the urging of Adolph Kohn and Wilfred Gribble, a small group decided to organise separately. At a meeting in Detroit on July 7 1916, the Socialist Party of the United States was launched. At the meeting, 19 members of the Detroit local of the SPA resigned from that party. The SPUS was unable to make contact with other like-minded groups elsewhere in America and, at its formation, had only 43 members. Nevertheless, it decided to continue. Lawrence Beardsley wrote its anti-war manifesto, Gribble became the organiser and Bill Davenport was elected general secretary. The Socialist Party of the United States adopted the Object and Declaration of Principles of the SPGB.

At the end of August, the SPUS sent its manifesto to the author, Jack London, and on September 21, just eight weeks before he died, he replied to the party:

“Please read my resignation from the Socialist Party,  and find that I resigned for the same reasons that impel you to form this new party . . . I congratulate you and wish you well on your adventure. I am not bitter. I am only sad that within itself the proletariat seems to perpetuate the seeds of its proletariat.”

Probably the most enthusiastic recruit to the new party was a former member of the Socialist Party of America, Isaac Rabinowich (or Comrade Rab as he was affectionately called), whose mother and father were revolutionary socialists in Russia before he was born in 1893. In 1921, “Rab” moved from Detroit to Boston.

For a while, Marxist and socialist influences were strong in Michigan. The group around John Keracher founded a journal, The Proletarian (later, Proletarian News), in August 1918, which in fact adopted the object and principles of the SPGB. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party of the United States was informed by the SPA that it had copyrighted the name “Socialist Party” and that the SPUS could not use it. The SPUS, therefore, renamed itself the Workers’ Socialist Party of the United States (WSPUS). The Keracher group, which had become pro-Bolshevik, was expelled from the SPA in May, 1919. Together with a number of other former SPA factions, it assisted in forming the Communist Party. But within a year, Keracher’s Michigan group was expelled from the Communist Party charged with “Menshevism”, as they did not believe that a socialist revolution was imminent in the United States. And whilst they continued to support Bolshevism, they also denied that socialism had been established in Russia. Six months later, they formed the Proletarian Party, which did not advocate reforms. John Keracher was the author of a number of easy-to-read basic pamphlets mainly on Marxian economics, but also How the Gods were Made, which has recently been republished by the SPGB. The Proletarian Party finally disappeared in 1971. The Workers’ Socialist Party felt that it was unfortunate that it was not able to save “these otherwise valuable socialists” from their “infatuation” with Bolshevism. Unfortunately, Marxist and socialist influences declined in Michigan after about 1925.

New York had always been a hot-bed of radicalism; and, during the first three decades of the last century, the Socialist Party of America had thousands of supporters in the city. The SPC and the SPGB were also well-known there. Moses Baritz had addressed large crowds on Coney Island. During the First World War, members of both the SPC and the SPGB arrived in New York, and on January 25 1921, they founded the Socialist Educational Society. During the 1920s, their activities resulted in them becoming an increasingly influential local of the Workers’ Socialist Party. They republished the SPGB’s pamphlet, Socialism and Religion and in 1929 the New York local of the WSPUS began to publish the party’s first official journal, The Socialist.

Almost alone, after moving from Detroit to Boston, “Rab” worked tirelessly for socialism in that city. It was not wasted effort. Indeed:

“During the Depression years the membership grew until it became the largest and most active group within the WSP. In fact, outside of the Communist Party, Boston Local of the WSP was without doubt the most active and widely-known organisation professing to Marxism in New England” (W. Jerome, Western Socialist, No. 4, 1966)

During the 1930s, the Boston Local held outdoor and indoor meetings, debates and economics classes six days or evenings a week. The WSP, however, made little headway elsewhere in the United States, although locals were founded in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1947 the Workers’ Socialist Party changed its name to World Socialist Party because it was being confused with the Socialist Workers’ Party, a Trotskyist organisation. The change also emphasised the WSP’s internationalism and world outlook. In 1939 the Western Socialist had been moved from Canada to Boston, and, subtitled “The Journal of Scientific Socialism in the Western Hemisphere”, for the next forty years was the joint publication of the SPC and the WSPUS.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the World Socialist Party of the United States entered a period of decline, partly due to a lengthy post-war period of relative prosperity for the working class in America, and partly due to the “anti-red” hysteria of the Cold War and McCarthyism. Of the situation, Jerome comments:

“Dissenters who voiced social criticism were suspected of indirectly assisting the enemy, that is, they were all but guilty of treason. Threats of social ostracism, loss of jobs and government persecution silenced most critics who had any large audience.”

Internal controversies broke out in the WSP, and a number of members resigned from the party. In 1950 the headquarters was transferred from Boston to Detroit, where it remained for some years before returning to Boston. The World Socialist Party of the United States had a difficult task of attempting to pick up the pieces. Nevertheless, it continued the work of propagating socialism in a hostile environment and, thanks to the coming of the internet, is enjoying something of a revival. Its journal is now called World Socialist Review which can be found, with other material, on its website.

Peter E. Newell