Muslims at War (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The war between the capitalist ruling minorities of Iran and Iraq is now in its fourth year. Both parties are able to buy as much military weaponry as they require — invariably from the same sellers. Neither side is prepared to compromise; both are determined to carry on fighting until the other accepts its terms and conditions of cease fire. The war could continue for years; so far it has cost the lives of more than a million workers -many of them youths — who have no interests at stake whatsoever. Poison gas has been used; civilian targets have been hit by long-range rockets and fighter planes are dropping napalm bombs. The war is now a testing laboratory for new means of destruction.

The origins of this conflict can be traced back to before the First World War, when Britain, France and Russia agreed secretly to divide the Ottoman Empire between themselves so as to expand the market for their commodities into the heart of the Middle East. After World War One Iraq became a part of the British overseas colonies. Then, in accordance with the principle of Divide and Rule, the whole political map of the Middle East was redrawn, with Iraq showing a majority of people of the Shiite faith. Shiite is an Islamic sect and the official religion of the Iranian ruling minority. Geographically, northern Iraq included a part of Kurdistan, as does Iran. The rich lands along the eastern side of Shatt Al-Arab fell within southern Iraq, but the Iranian ruling class objected to this and attempted to occupy all of the eastern side of the waterway. Iraqi territory was then under British protection, so the Iranian ruling class was impeded in its efforts.

When the map was redrawn Iraqi government fell into the hands of Arabs whose faith was, and still is, Sunni — another Islamic sect. Shiism and Sunnism are conflicting Arab faiths; only a minority of Iraqis are Sunnis. Iraq has never enjoyed political stability because it has constantly suffered from the territorial ambitions of the Iranian ruling class, who lost no opportunities to attack their Iraqi counterparts. Since the 1930s there have been groups existing within the mountains of Kurdistan in Iraq who have rejected the authority of the Iraqi government. As well as the Kurds, the Shiite majority in Iraq has resented Sunni government, feeling that they have been humiliated and discriminated against by the Iraqi ruling minority. In fact these divisions are rooted in economic and political interests and only take the form of religious conflicts. The Iraqi ruling minority was selected at the outset by the British government and have been used as a fist of iron to rule on behalf of capital, including the substantial overseas investments in Iraq. The Iraqi government has machine gunned demonstrators on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi towns. They sent the RAF on bombing raids against the villages of Kurdistan and Arab tribes saw no reason to give up their ways of living and submit to the central authority of Iraq.

As a result of the widespread unpopularity of the government Iraq became a paradise for political opportunists, whose policy was to establish a new government claiming to represent all Iraqi people (not just the Sunnis) and claiming to be committed to individual freedom. In reality, extreme nationalism was the common characteristic of all of them and in the long-term they helped to make the situation-in Iraq even worse. At the head of each of the opportunist parties was an individual or elite drawing support mainly on the basis of tribal loyalty or by bribery and pressure. Each party aimed to capture political power, often using unscrupulous and undemocratic methods such as the infiltration of the Iraqi army. As a result of these tactics, one military coup followed another; the one which brought the present Iraqi ruling elite, the Socialist Arab Baath party, occurred in 1963. Within twenty four hours of the Baath coup the new rulers eliminated their opportunist rivals, so establishing a dictatorship.

The Socialist Arab Baath Party took power with a policy of rigid nationalism and Arabism. They tolerated no opposition, although Baathist ideology was out of touch with the mainstream of Iraqi society. Firstly, more than one quarter of Iraqis are not Arabs and therefore opposed Baathist Arabism. Secondly, most Iraqi Arabs opposed Baathist ideology and openly opposed it as an alien idea. The Baathists responded in extreme terms: they started deporting people of Iranian origin to Iran; they attempted to "Arabise” Kurdish villages and towns; they organised an aggressive military campaign against anti-government forces. The Baathist policy gave the Iranian ruling class a chance to revive their old territorial claims east of Shatt AI-Arab, using the political situation in Iraq as a pre- text. The Baathists refused the Iranian demands, claiming that it was an insult to the Arab nation. Iran used military force to take over eastern Shatt AI-Arab and sent military supplies to anti-government forces in Kurdistan. The Iraqi government in- creased its pressure on the anti-government Iraqi Kurds and, after a hard military campaign, it seemed that the Iraqi government were losing. As a result, Saddam Hussain, the Iraqi dictator, went to Algeria in 1975 to meet the Shah of Iran in order to persuade the latter to stop supplying anti-government forces with military aid. In return the Shah, and the class which he represented, was officially granted eastern Shatt AI-Arab. After this the anti-government forces in Iraqi Kurdistan ceased to exist, but it was a deep humiliation for the Baathists. Another Iranian score needs to be mentioned at this point: in the 1960s the Iranian ruling class gained control of three small islands in the Arabian Gulf which had previously belonged to Britain. The Baathists were resentful about this, believing that these three islands should belong to “the Arab nation”.

The acceptance of Iran’s territorial claims left deep scars on the Iraqi Baathist regime, but they were saved by the fact that hard currency started to rain on them as a result of massively increased Iraqi oil revenue in the mid-1970s, caused by the increased demand by the world’s industrial capitalists. The Baathists devoted a substantial portion of this revenue to buying arms, which were only too readily supplied by the capitalist superpowers. Meanwhile, in Iran the old regime of the Shah collapsed as a result of popular discontent and was replaced by a dictatorship consisting of the followers of Ayatollah Khomeni. The new regime demoralised the Iranian army by executing its officers and dismantling many of its units in an attempt to prevent a counter revolution. This gave the Baathists the opportunity they had been waiting for to take military action against Iran and win back what they had lost. The Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980, was started by the Baathists in the belief that it would be won within a few months. It is a continuation of an old struggle over control of territory and natural resources.

The war in Iran and Iraq is not in the interest of the working class, who are slaughtering each other so that their rulers can expand their spheres of ownership and control. Very few members of the Iranian or Iraqi ruling classes have been killed in the war over the past four years. It is workers — over half a million (more than Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki added together) — who have had to do the dying.

Rahman A. Ahmad

Against the odds? (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism production is carried on for profit but governments nevertheless have a certain leeway to choose, for political or strategic reasons, to subsidise industries that would otherwise go to the wall. The coal industry in Britain is a case in point. But money diverted to subsidising unprofitable industries is money that could otherwise have been used to invest in modernising profitable industries to enable them to compete better on the world market. Thus the logic of capitalism decrees that subsidies should be kept to a minimum.

The present Conservative government, under pressure like governments everywhere from competitive conditions on the world market, has decided to prune subsidies to industry. And they have imported an American businessman, Ian MacGregor, to help them do this. After having wielded his axe in the steel industry more or less successfully, he has now been given the task of doing a similar hatchet job on the coal industry.

It was inevitable that the NUM. under its present leadership, should have responded to this challenge. Its President, Arthur Scargill, has never disguised the fact that he has always wanted a strike both on the wages and on the pit closures issues. But the NUM Rulebook only authorises strikes under two circumstances: a national strike after a ballot in which 55 per cent of those taking part vote for strike action, and an area strike on a simple authorisation from the National Executive Committee. The NEC’s recommendation to strike having been turned down on two occasions since Scargill's election to the presidency in 1982 (without doubt because most members felt that, with 3 million unemployed, the moment wasn’t propitious), the only alternative for the NUM leadership was to authorise area strikes as they did at the March NEC meeting.

In doing so they took the risk of splitting the union since the NUM is still to a large extent what it was officially called until 1945: “The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain"; in other words, it is a federation of area unions (which are registered trade unions in their own right) enjoying a certain amount of autonomy. This led to some Areas (Yorkshire, Scotland, Durham) deciding to strike while others (Nottingham. Midlands, Lancashire) decided not to. When miners from striking areas decided to picket pits in non-striking areas the scene was set for the clashes between miner and miner — and the intervention of the State — which the capitalist media have been gleefully chronicling.

We have always held that the details of how a particular struggle against a capitalist (or state capitalist) employer should be waged must be decided by the group of workers immediately involved. Beyond that all we have offered is general advice based on past experience of the class struggle: any strike action should be decided and organised democratically; the chances of winning should be carefully weighed up; is the employer deliberately provoking a strike for his own ends; don’t trust leaders; don’t let politicians and political groups interfere; recognise that a strike is not a simple disagreement between “social partners’’ but an aspect of a conflict between two classes with antagonistic and irreconcilable interests.

What then can be said of the chances of the present miners’ strike succeeding? The first point to notice is that, in calling for unprofitable pits to be kept open, the NUM leaders are in effect calling on the government to make a political decision to continue to subsidise the coal industry to the same extent as before. We can understand why miners would want to make such a demand but are not sure that it is a legitimate trade union demand. Experience has shown that, in such circumstances, the best that can be obtained is better redundancy terms (higher lump sums, bigger and longer weekly payments, and so on). We would have thought, therefore, that a more intelligent approach would have been to raise this demand, being prepared of course to strike to back it up if necessary.

But, as the NUM leadership has decided to fight on the issue of maintaining the government's subsidy to the coal industry, we are bound to say that victory on this issue seems much less likely, not to say highly improbable (look at what happened to the steelworkers when they went on strike against MacGregor). A long strike can work, as the previous relatively successful miners’ strikes in 1972 and 1974 showed, but this requires favourable circumstances such as the full backing of the men and women involved and the sympathy of the general public. But the full backing of the miners is precisely what is lacking in this particular case. Miners have voted twice since 1982 against national strike action, and. though their opinion might have shifted since, this is by no means certain and it obviously hasn't in Nottingham and the Midlands. So to have launched into a strike, with a dubious objective and a divided membership, would seem to have been rather imprudent.

The capitalist press have of course concentrated on vilifying Arthur Scargill but he undoubtedly does have the support of a majority of miners in his home area of Yorkshire and in a number of other areas too. He is clearly more acceptable, from a trade union point of view, than his predecessor Joe (now, naturally. Lord) Gormley, who wheeled and dealed with the Coal Board, the Labour Party and the government behind the miners’ backs in the posh restaurants of London. Even so, Scargill is open to criticism from a trade union point of view, first and foremost because like a number of others who want to lead the working class he is not and never has been a democrat.

Though no longer a card-carrying member of the so-called Communist Party, he is still a staunch supporter of Russian state capitalism (to the extent of opposing the emergence of free trade unionism in Poland). As an unrepentant Leninist he believes that he has a right to go against the wishes of a majority of his members, to “give them a lead" as he would put it; set them in motion, people like him think, and by the dynamic of the situation they'll follow. Undoubtedly the traditional solidarity of miners once on strike, even of those opposed to strike action, has played a part in this strike, but Scargill and other we-know-better-than-the-mass-of-the-workers militants are playing with fire here. If he doesn’t want to go down in trade union histroy as the man that split the miners' union he's sooner or later going to have to take into account the fact that perhaps a majority of his members didn't want to strike.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: Local Councils versus Central government (1984)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

This paragraph raises the issue of the more “generous and sympathetic" attitude of the Labour Party councillors as contrasted with that of Liberal or Tory councillors. It is almost entirely irrelevant. Labour councillors on the LCC or other similar body are not there to exercise their generosity or sympathy but to carry out capitalist laws under the strict control of the central Government and its officials. What, therefore, happens is not that the workers feel grateful for the sympathy and generosity of the Labour Party councillors, but that they blame the latter for the callousness of the laws and regulations they arc carrying out. If a Labour Council kicks over the traces it is sharply called to order by the central Government. if need be by the threat or reality of imprisonment as happened in Poplar a few years ago to Mr. George Lansbury and others.

Furthermore, the claim that the Labour councillors have a monopoly of knowledge of poverty or the desire to be sympathetic is absurd. Liberals and Tories have just as much right to claim to share in these cheap and useless virtues, and no matter who are the individuals who wish to be sympathetic and generous in spending local government funds, their wish invariably wilts at the prospect of being imprisoned or surcharged for doing so in defiance of the law.

(From our reply to a correspondent, “Should socialists support the Labour Party?”, Socialist Standard, May 1934.)

Not in front of the workers (1984)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism can never be an open society. Trade rivalries, international competition and battling class interests necessitate secrecy on the part of those who hold power. There is not a single government in the world which does not keep secrets from those it claims to represent. Even the most liberal of so-called constitutional democracies have elaborate mechanisms of secrecy and deception. The minority class which monopolises the means of wealth production and distribution also dominates the means of information. Class-controlled channels of information transform knowledge about society, full and free access to which is vital to democracy, into propaganda which gives a false sense of what is going on around them to those being "informed”.

According to the liberal illusion, which is much cherished by Western political commentators, there exists a fundamental division between totalitarian and "free” states. Under totalitarian governments, it is argued, the state is virtually free from accountability to the working class and the ruling class run the country as they please. "Free states”, on the other hand, are supposed to have rulers who are accountable to “the people". In fact, the supposed division is far less clear. Even the most ruthless dictatorship does not survive long if it fails to spend huge fortunes indoctrinating workers and responding (through violent repression or reform) to workers’ discontent. The “free state” is also a constitutional hallucination: the defence of class privilege and the existence of real democratic freedom are incompatible and, however sincerely governments may adhere to liberal ideology, the state is always a weapon of class rule. Indeed, the very existence of the state which is ultimately the executive committee of the ruling class precludes the possibility of real freedom. This is not to deny that significant differences exist between the position of workers in different parts of capitalism: there are degrees of democracy and we would be foolish not to concede that workers in Britain enjoy more than those in Poland — that a Dutch worker who can join a trade union and vote in an election is in a more politically advantageous position than their counterpart in Chile or China or Turkey. The point is not that workers have no power whatsoever but that as long as the state exists, whatever its form, effective political power, including the right to use violent force, belongs to the capitalist minority in whose interests the state functions.

Consider the activities of the state in Britain in 1984. A “democratic state”, we are told. Police erect road-blocks at county boundaries to stop workers moving from one part of the country to another in order to engage in industrial action. Mine workers are stopped by police and asked how they voted in the last election and how they propose to vote in the next one. The Home Secretary refuses to answer questions in parliament about how many telephones are being tapped. Thousands of workers’ names are filed on police computers. An organisation called The Economic League compiles blacklists of trade union activists which are passed on to employers. The government bans trade unions at its spy centre, telling workers that they must accept a bribe of £1,000 or get out. The next election for the Greater London Council is abolished and unelected councillors are to be appointed to sit on the GLC. A worker in the civil service is sentenced to six months in prison for telling the press about the date of the arrival of weapons which we are told are being installed to defend, among other things, the freedom of the press. A "democratic state”?

The state has always kept secrets from the workers. This is particularly so in relation to its military activities, in which workers are permitted the liberty to slaughter and be slaughtered, but not the right to know what the bosses are negotiating and why. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943 Winston Churchill (addressing his comment to his war-time ally, Stalin) summed up the capitalist attitude to freedom of information when he remarked that “In wartime truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies". Stalin seems to have learnt the lesson, and it does not seem to have been lost on Michael Heseltine and his fellow residents at the Ministry of Truth.

The Official Secrets Act was passed in 1889, largely as a result of the activities of a Foreign Office employee called Charles Marvin who leaked information to the press about the secret negotiations which had surrounded the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. Lord Halsbury, who moved it, stated:

  The Bill provides for the punishment of those persons who either give information to the enemies of the country, or who act as spies, or make or communicate plans or sketches of fortresses and like places, or disclose official secrets.

So if, when you are next on a fortnight’s package tour to sunny Bulgaria and the bouncer in the disco asks you casual questions about where your missile bases are or how many scientists are employed by the British government on developing germ warfare, beware. As a worker, however, you need have no fear, because you are likely to be just as excluded from knowledge about “our” secrets as workers in other countries are left ignorant of "theirs”. National secrets are secrets from the majority of people who live within the nation: the state has an interest in keeping secrets from both the national enemy and the class enemy. That is why the arrival of American nuclear missiles at Greenham Common was supposed to be kept secret from the British workers whose “democratic way of life” the Cruise weapons are alleged to be defending. It is because she tried to tell other people about a matter which she thought concerned us that Sarah Tisdall is now sitting in a “democratic" prison cell. Under capitalism it is often a crime to tell the truth.

In Nazi Germany reports of the atrocities being committed inside the concentration camps were illegal. It is against the law for South African police to speak to the press about the mysterious deaths of political prisoners. The greater the ugliness of the state’s actions in defence of class privilege, the greater is the secrecy surrounding such activities and the more severe is the penalty to be paid by those who commit the crime of telling forbidden tales.

What about the incarceration of Sarah Tisdall? Unlike certain deluded liberals, we do not throw up our hands in horror that so vicious a sentence has been handed out in so democratic a country as Britain. What’s new about British capitalism turning democratic behaviour into a crime? The British ruling class is the oldest in the world and, in its time, has committed some of the dirtiest tricks and enacted some of the most repressive measures. The modern state has tended to maintain a liberal facade, but those of us who know what the state exists for can hardly be shocked when it comes out into the open and exhibits the power of undemocratic oppression. Unlike reformists, socialists will not be pleading with the government to do the decent thing and let the poor girl free. When the prison gates are opened it will not be as a result of the oppressors bowing to the moral pleas of the oppressed. but will be a consequence of the class which is robbed and deceived (all quite legally, of course) realising that the real robbers and frauds are not the inhabitants of the prison cells. Workers have nothing to gain by holding processions to place pressure on the exploiting class to behave with goodwill. Our task is to rip off their democratic masks and to expose the disgusting fraudulence which enables power to belong to a minority in the name of democracy. Socialists could not but admire the courage of Ms Tisdall and those like her, throughout the world, who have defied the assertion that telling the truth is an act of criminality. We may sympathise, but that will not change society — indeed, it will not in itself make any difference if there were a thousand or ten thousand workers with access to secret information who were willing to reveal it unless the working class start to make real use of the knowledge which is available.

Will there be secrets in a socialist society? Without doubt socialism, because of its feature of democratic control, will allow no possibility for secret information to exist in relation to matters of collective social significance. Whatever information society has will be available to everyone, without any administrators or bureaucrats being allowed to keep certain knowledge for their own privileged use. On the assumption that knowledge is power, socialism will not allow social groups to exist whose access to information is greater than that available to all other members of society. Modern communication technology, which is currently used for the perverse purpose of storing secrets, can be used in socialism to make realistic the democratic aim of having the widest dissemination of information which is technologically feasible. Free access to information, which can only happen when there is free access to all goods and services. is a far more realisable and democratic change than the modest demand for limited access to state information which is advocated by the reformist proponents of a Freedom of Information Act.

One of the greatest examples of capitalist hypocrisy is its claim that capitalism provides freedom for the individual, whereas social equality would eradicate such liberty. Those who now dwell in prison cells because they took the pretence of capitalist liberty at its face value would not agree. Those who claim that socialism, with its feature of social equality, will destroy liberty, would do well to read what Marx had to say on the matter:

  We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic work-house. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced . . . that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership. (Marx, Communist Journal, September 1847)

For a society without secrets, states, elites and prisoners of truth, workers must unite consciously, democratically and without compromise.

Steve Coleman

Letter: Bevan and the Bomb (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In the November issue (of the Socialist Standard) I discovered a comment uncharacteristically shallow and pithy. The aforementioned comment was superimposed on a picture of Labour's new leader Neil Kinnock. I quote:

  Now how did Nye ditch the nut-cutlet brigade? Oh yes. “We cannot send a British foreign secretary- naked into the conference chamber . . ."

No one can deny that Bevan actually uttered those words but if you are to condemn him, you must first understand his reasoning. I hope the quotation below from a letter he sent to a close friend after the Brighton speech enlightens you:
  . . . I am afraid that my Brighton speech has been misunderstood but I suppose I must accept most of the responsibility.

   I do not regard the possession of the hydrogen bomb by Great Britain as making the slightest contribution to peace or to our security, so the argument is not for, or against, Britain possessing the hydrogen bomb. My case is a little different. It rests upon the argument that if we unilaterally reject the bomb, then we are at the same time rejecting all the alliances and obligations in which this country has become involved, either rightly or wrongly. We could not keep an alliance with countries possessing the bomb and yet repudiate it ourselves. When I spoke of Britain going naked into the conference chamber, I was not thinking of the bomb at all. I had in mind the fact that without substituting anything for them in the meantime we should have made a shambles of all our treaties, commitments, obligations and rejected our friends, and this without consulting them. . .

He later goes on to say:

  I am convinced that we must so conduct our affairs as to bring about the abolition, not only of the British bomb, but the American and the Russian as well. . .

Clearly Bevan's opinion is a reasoned analysis not simply an attempt to "ditch the nut-cutlet brigade".
Interestingly in your picture Kinnock was holding a copy of In Place of Fear, which is a book which clearly expresses Bevan's socialism—a socialism of Marxist and Syndicalist origins. As a socialist I hope Mr Kinnock remains a Bevanite for if he does there is hope for all socialists in Britain. Perhaps it would be wiser if the SPGB was not so far removed from the organised labour movement, and was to recognise the common interests that it has with that movement? To claim to represent the working class and to then reject organised labour is untenable.

A. J. Walker 

Warwick University 

Coventry

Reply:
Aneurin Bevan was probably the subject of more myths than most politicians in recent times. One of these concerned his attitude to nuclear weapons and he himself exploded the myth in his speech at the 1957 Labour Party conference in Brighton, when he opposed a resolution calling on the party to renounce the testing or manufacture of nuclear weapons in any form whatsoever. This shocked some of his supporters (the "nut-cutlet brigade”), because they saw it as a great betrayal. In fact it was nothing of the kind.

At the time Bevan, with his history of "left- wing" dissent, was linked with the growing alarm at the results of nuclear tests and at the prospects of a nuclear war:

  More and more it did appear—due chiefly no doubt to the Christmas Island explosions earlier in the year—that the strange numbness which seemed to afflict the national consciousness on the subject was being removed, and Bevan himself had played a principal part in the achievement (Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot, p.566).

It is true that some of Bevan's actions and speeches could have been interpreted in that way; they certainly had an appeal to the disarmers’ lobby. In March 1955 he had demanded of Attlee that the British forces would not be the first to drop an H-bomb (Hugh Gaitskell, Philip Williams, p.494). During the 1955 election he had declared himself “profoundly opposed" to the bomb's manufacture (The British General Election 1955, D.E. Butler). In April 1957 he still pursued the same line: “I can see no good purpose at all in Britain also arming herself with that useless weapon” (Foot, op. cit. p.552). At the miners' gala in Cardiff in June 1957 he urged that street demonstrations might be necessary if the government failed to act. Inevitably, in that year before the formation of CND, there developed an assumption in some circles that Bevan would be in the leadership of any movement aimed at the abolition of nuclear weapons.

But anyone who thought like that was overlooking some other, very important, facts in Bevan's record. To begin with, he was in the Labour Cabinet which had given the go-ahead for the manufacture of a British atomic bomb and he gave the project his active support (Williams. op. cit. p.454). According to the inveterate disarmer, Peggy Duff (Left, Left, Left, p.70) a few days before his demand to Attlee about first use of the H-bomb he had actually encouraged Richard Crossman to support the making of the bomb. Crossman agrees with this interpretation. recording that for Bevan ". . . not the H-bomb, but our strategy and foreign policy were the real issues ... I was extremely impressed by his argument that public opinion was not ripe for (opposition to manufacture of the bomb)" (Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, 4 March 1955).

The best that could be said for Bevan's record on nuclear weapons, then, was that it was inconsistent and opportunistic. When it came to his speech at Brighton, he was in the position of a future Labour Foreign Secretary (with high hopes of soon becoming the real thing, for the Conservatives were still in disarray after Suez and before Macmillan's careful reconstruction of their electoral support). Bevan’s inconsistency, in a more critical gathering, might have been embarrassing for him. He dealt with the problem by arguing the case he had put to Crossman—and to many others for some time— that nuclear weapons were inseparable from capitalism at large with its world-wide conflicts and its diplomacy. To abolish British weapons, immediately and unilaterally, was not reconcilable with the role of the British ruling class in those conflicts. Disarmament, although desirable. would therefore have to be postponed—which was. of course, the sort of argument any Conservative would have accepted.

At the pre-conference Labour Party NEC on 30 September 1957 Bevan attacked the unilateralists' resolution:

  . . . the full implication of accepting this resolution would mean the dismantling of international alliances and commitments, dismaying the Commonwealth and reducing Britain to complete negation in the councils of the world (Foot. op. cit. p.570).

It would, he said, be a mistake “. . .to take all the cards out of the hand of Labour's next Foreign Secretary" (Williams, op. cit. p.456), a metaphor which was transformed, a few days later into the plea not to send him:

. . . naked into the conference chamber. Able to preach sermons, of course; he could make good sermons. But action of that sort is not necessarily the way in which you take the menace of this bomb from the world (Conference Report, p. 181).

So it is clear that the argument quoted by Mr. Walker represents Bevan’s attitude at the time of that conference. One effect of it. of course, was to publicly cement the alliance between Bevan and Gaitskell. his sworn enemy of recent times; it also assured him his place as the next Labour Foreign Secretary and even, had he lived, perhaps Prime Minister. It was the unilateralists, angry and bewildered, who had got it wrong; they had fallen for the myth and ignored the reality. Peggy Duff (p.71) saw it more clearly: ". . . he was not reneging on the left. He merely stayed where he was, and maintained what had always been his position". A couple of years before, Crossman also had got it right: ". . . he had no moral scruples about the H- bomb . . .” (Diaries, 7 March 1955).

That leaves us with the more important question: does it matter? The Bevan myth is that he was a special, unusual sort of politician, a man of principle who could have made our lives immeasurably better. The reality, as his record on nuclear weapons shows, is that there was nothing exceptional about him as a political leader, trying to run British capitalism in the interests of the ruling class and at the same time keeping his support among the working class. Of course this caused Bevan, with his background as an impoverished miner and his following of starry-eyed labour fanatics, a few problems, which he could usually obscure by application of his agile brain and swift tongue. So he made countless fluent speeches to persuade workers that it is possible to run capitalism without its essential problems like poverty and class conflict, war and weapons of war. In this he was no more consistent (or honest?) than the rest.

These characteristics are also evident in Bevan’s book In Place of Fear, where he describes his ideas on "socialism” in typical confusion and irrelevance:

  The philosophy of democratic Socialism is essentially cool in temper . . . Because it knows that all political action must be a choice between a number of possible alternatives it eschews all absolute prescriptions and final, decisions . . . It struggles against the evils that flow from private property, yet realises that all forms of private property are not necessarily evil (p.169).

For Bevan. the way to "socialism" was through pettyfogging reforms and readjustments in taxes and wages policy. He favoured the "mixed economy" — some concerns being owned by the state and others remaining in private hands (Foot. op. cit. p.37l), so even his support for the capitalist reform of nationalisation was not consistent. What he did not stand for was the socialist, Marxist, alternative to capitalism — a democratic revolution in which the world’s workers will overthrow the capitalist system, dispossess the minority owning class and transform the basis of society from private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution to communal ownership.

Socialism will be a classless, moneyless society and to that Bevan was opposed. He was no more than a typical politician, seeking power from non-socialists on a programme of reforms, then trying to wriggle out of the backtracking and intellectual confusion which this inevitably causes. He wriggled, with a combination of an overbearing personality and telling oratory, rather more effectively than most, which does a lot to explain the myths that still surround him and which entrance Mr. Walker for one.

When Bevan died capitalism was as strife-torn and insecure as ever; two years after his death we were almost plunged into a nuclear war by the Cuban missile crisis. There was no more to hope for in that particular Welsh wizard than in any other political trickster.

Finally: the Socialist Party of Great Britain does not claim to "represent" the working class, who at present overwhelmingly support capitalism. We stand for working class interests — the establishment of socialism — which is a very different matter. As the socialist movement grows so it will come to represent the working class. Mr. Walker does not say what he means by “organised labour" but if the term means the Labour Party and, where they are in combination with the Labour party, the trade union movement, then socialists are opposed to them. Their policies and actions are opposed to working class interests and are aimed at the maintenance of capitalism. Socialists — and indeed anyone who is concerned for workers’ interests — must be hostile to them.

Editors

Stable story (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we all know (or should know by now) there are certain things which are good for us, like Clean Living and Saying Our Prayers and Looking Up To The Royal Family. Another one is Stable Government, which is supposed to ensure all sorts of benefits which we would miss under unstable government.

In England, where there is usually Stable Government, we are encouraged to regard with pity anyone who has to live under an unstable government, as happens in Central and South America and parts of Africa. Unstable government is clearly a nasty foreign habit, to be avoided in any sane country with ambitions to being great.

So what about one of the most stable governments in the world? How do the people there get on? Over the past 60-odd years, since the revolution in 1917, there have been only six leaders in charge in Russia (five if we do not count Georgi Malenkov, who lasted only one week in March 1953, following the death of Stalin, before he lost out to Nikita Kruschcv) starting with Lenin and ending with Andropov.

The most durable of these leaders was of course Josef Stalin, who ruled for 29 years and who asserted his stability — and protected it — with ruthless purges of any opposition. Under his iron grip millions of Russians were murdered and when his cynical carve up of Eastern Europe with Nazi Germany fell apart he led the country into a war which was won at a staggering cost to the Russian people.

Stalin's term of power was marked by its brutal dictatorship and by the extremes of privation suffered by the Russian people, while the ruling class there lived privileged lives. While the ordinary people of Russia suffered and died, they provided the human foundation on which Stalin could rest the stability of his power. He was that thing beloved of the apologists of capitalism — a strong leader — and the people under him suffered for it.

Workers’ interests do not lie in stable government, or indeed in a weak version of it. Any self-deception on this score obscures the fact that no style of government has anything of benefit to offer the workers; they must struggle for a new society in which government will give way to the management of things.

Why Contest Elections? (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In the February 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard you devote much attention to the socialist ideas of William Morris and comment on them as being very advanced considering the state of socialist thinking in the early 1880s. I found the articles most informative and in particular his rejection of the "parliamentary socialists" outlined in “the policy of abstentions", with which I am compelled to agree.

This brings me to your election fund. You state that you support parliamentary action without reform and to this end the fund will be used. I do not believe that we have a large enough body of socialist opinion uniformly spread throughout the country to put a socialist in the house of commons under the present electoral system.

Thus would not the “making of socialists" by increasing socialist propaganda be a better use of all election funds?

Vijay Kumar

Imperial College

London SW7

REPLY

The SPGB is a political party; we aim at the capture of political power through the democratic, conscious action of the world working class for the replacement of capitalism by socialism. We argue that this must be through parliament so that socialists must contest elections national and local. This asserts our nature as a political party as providing a valuable method of propaganda for the socialist case. We are well aware of the depressing fact that the level of socialist consciousness, throughout the world let alone in this country, is at present too low to elect socialist delegates to parliament. (This is of course due to the level of consciousness and not to the electoral system.) In our propaganda we constantly point out the fundamental difference between a socialist party and those parties which seek to get power on a programme of reforming capitalism. Such parties are the prisoners of the reform-minded non-socialists who elect them and can therefore do nothing to introduce socialism.

Our funds are used for our propaganda in all its forms. There is of course debate about the most effective way of using them but contesting elections is not only effective; it is essential to us as a socialist party.

Editors

Nationalisation changes nothing (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of writing, after months of an overtime ban designed to force the Coal Board to increase their offer of a 5.2 per cent increase of pay, most areas of the industry are on strike against pit closures, with the NUM President and Executive trying by mass picketing to force the areas which voted against the strike to join in. If the members of unions are to maintain democratic control of their own affairs in their own hands, it is essential that there should be a ballot before a strike begins and a ballot on acceptance or rejection of the terms negotiated by their leaders for calling off the strike. In the present dispute the NUM President and Executive have consistently refused to take a national ballot, one of the results of which has been conflict between miners wanting to continue working and miners trying to prevent them.

At the same time the courts became involved. Under the law as amended by the Thatcher government it is illegal for pickets to operate elsewhere than at their own place of work. The National Coal Board were awarded a court injunction forbidding the Yorkshire Miners Association to send pickets to other areas but delayed taking the further step of going to the court with a request that the Yorkshire Association be fined for its continued breach of the injunction. The NUM obtained promises of support from unions in road and rail transport and in steel, designed to prevent the movement of coal or its import but unions in the electricity power industry refused to help and gave instructions to their members to cross picket lines and continue working.

The background of the dispute is a complex one. It involves great changes in the techniques of coal cutting; the price at which the NCB can market its coal in competition both with imported coal and with the cost of power generated by oil and gas and atomic energy; and what will be the future demand for coal if North Sea Oil goes into decline. While modernised pits can produce at highly competitive prices and make a profit, there are others which make huge losses. In the former the miners can look to continued employment but in the latter the prospect is that the jobs will disappear as the NCB closes them down. In localities where the Coal Board is the chief or even the only big employer this spells disaster for the whole population.

The government’s attitude is that the NCB as a whole shall pay its way and cease to be dependent on subsidies, thus increasing the pressure to close down the loss-making pits. The Coal Board holds record stocks of coal it cannot sell. The NUM’s aim is that no pit shall be closed, however big its losses, until all the coal has been extracted. Also that there shall be no reduction in the total manpower employed, that no coal should be imported and that government policy shall encourage the use of coal against other sources of energy. They take the long-term view that there will come a time when coal production will have to be expanded again to meet demand.

The media have for the most part been hostile to the NUM's claims and actions, seizing on the refusal to take a national ballot as evidence that most miners are against the strike. This, they say, is undemocratic, but more of them insist that the NUM, also in the interest of democracy, should not settle the strike until after the workers have, by ballot, agreed.

The effect of the new techniques of mining on the industry and the NUM can be seen in the recently opened Selby coalfield. When it reaches full production in four years time it is expected to produce ten million tons a year, a twelfth of the Coal Board’s present total output, with just 4,000 men (Financial Times, 26 October 1983). But before Selby produced a single ton of coal over £1,000 million had been spent developing the mine and installing the costly equipment. What it means in economic terms is that more and more of the labour required to produce coal is that of workers not employed in the pits.

The mineworkers have been hit by the ceaseless change and development of industry under capitalism. In their search for profit, companies and nationalised industries take up inventions which promise cheaper production and increase profits, no matter what effect it has on the livelihood of the workers whose jobs disappear. Even if they get other work the change makes their old skills useless. In the past it was the handloom weavers driven into starvation by the application of steam power to new weaving machines; the coach drivers and farm horsemen whose jobs were destroyed by the railways and motor vehicles; the railway men in turn hit by motor transport and air transport; the morse telegraphist hit by machines and the development of telephones; and now the numerous office jobs that are becoming obsolete. Trade unions always do what they can to prevent or at least to delay the change but in the long run it is a losing battle. At present there are something under 200,000 miners, threatened by the loss of 20,000 jobs if loss-making pit closures planned for this year take place. At the beginning of this century they numbered over a million, reduced to 736,000 by the time the mines were nationalised in 1947 and to 490,000 in 1964. The NUM cannot put the clock back.

One of the tragedies of the NUM, as of other unions, is their long-held belief that nationalisation would solve their problems. The TUC began its claim for nationalisation of the mines before 1900 and the Labour Party adopted it soon afterwards. In 1919 the Miners Federation of Great Britain (as the NUM was then named) conducted a big campaign for nationalisation, got it approved by a ballot of its members and gave evidence to the Coal Commission set up to study the problems of the industry. The claim for nationalisation was combined with a claim for a 30 per cent increase of pay and a reduction of hours from 8 to 6 a day. The MFGB also argued that these claims could be met and still the price of coal could be reduced. They forgot all about capitalism. Within a couple of years selling prices for coal had fallen drastically, bankrupt companies were closing pits, and the union had to face demands for lower pay and longer hours, culminating in the General Strike of 1926 and the miners being forced back to work after a five months strike.

In the present dispute Arthur Scargill made a speech calling on the miners to unite against “the enemy, the Coal Board”. What is this Coal Board? It is the board of directors of the nationalised industry. It was set up under the Labour Government’s Nationalisation Act of 1947. The Miners Union had got what they had been campaigning for. Their MPs in the House of Commons voted for it, including its requirement that the industry should pay its way. There was nothing in the Act about maintaining the number of miners at 736,000. The Attlee Labour Government would not have dreamed of including such an impossible condition. What then did coal nationalisation bring for the miners? It was described by an earlier NUM Secretary Will Paynter in his book British Trade Unions and the Problem of Change:

  I remember the morning of January 1st, 1947—the first day of operations with nationalised mines — standing on the top of a tram of coal at one of the collieries I served as a Union Agent, making an enthusiastic speech about “the dawn of a new era", of the significance of the day being one where the "workers were moving forward to the control of their own destinies" and that we were at the beginning of the process where capitalism would be replaced by Socialism. This was obviously a naive and immature judgement of the change taking place, as we soon realised from experience. The relationship between management and workers remained the same; the union still had to fight hard to get improvements in wages and conditions and little in the daily lives of the men reflected the change that had taken place.

Paynter went on however, to say that there had been some improvements. Discussion between the management and the unions "became less acrimonious”, and it now became possible, as it had not been before nationalisation “for workmen to influence management policy”. In the present scene he would have to abandon that also. The miners have yet to learn that nationalisation is state capitalism and alters nothing in the class relationships of capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

What we say (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human beings have very complicated systems of communication; a facility for spoken and written language. What is language? One helpful analysis describes it as a code that we develop to organise, interpret and communicate our experiences to each other. Human languages have developed historically in a way which is related to what we have experienced. Although languages, including people's native language, are taught formally in schools, we always learn the first and most important aspects of our language by listening and experiential learning. Babies are generally not taught the basics of language with a grammar book.

Because language is rooted in experience, it usually makes little sense to describe particular accents or dialects as superior or inferior. They are simply different. We are traditionally taught that a particular variety of the English language is superior to all other varieties. The grammar must be the sort which is described as Standard English and the pronunciation should conform to a style known as Received Pronunciation. This is the sort of English used by newscasters. The reason this brand of English became elevated to the status it now occupies are historical and geographical, not linguistic. London became a key location because of the suitability of its ports for commercial and military purposes in relation to Western Europe. With the growing strategic importance of London from about the fifteenth century, various governmental, military, commercial and financial institutions settled in that city. These were the factors which endorsed the type of language which was used by the Establishment, although at that time a very different sort of language was used including a form of court French. If Liverpool or Newcastle-upon-Tyne had been a more advantageous base for the ruling class, then Standard English would have evolved in a different fashion.

Although we are taught otherwise, it is pointless to judge the inherent qualities of one grammar, accent or vocabulary. There are many examples in English which illustrate this point. The regional accents in English which stress the letter “r” when it comes after a vowel are by formal standards looked on as rural and inferior, for instance the way a person from the West country might pronounce the word “cart”. The same stressed “r”, however, in some North American dialects is regarded as refined. Linguistically, Standard English is no better or worse than Cockney or Geordie, no more so than French is better or worse than Italian. All languages and dialects are complicated, rule-governed systems whose rules are known to and used by their speakers.

The fact that languages arise from experience is significant. Many contemporary aboriginal communities live on the basis of sharing the work they need to do and then sharing the product of their work according to need. They have a word to express the idea of all that they have, common property (naolimba) but no vocabulary for “tax- man”, “UB40” or “neutron bomb”. Similarly with another contemporary group, the Panare Indians. The lifestyle of this group in Venezuela is characterised by the principle of cooperation and sharing. Apart from the enjoyment they find in their work they thrive on a great variety of songs, dances, drinks and festivals. They completely reject the principles of the commercial system and are free from all of the neuroses it produces in the people who suffer such a society. An American evangelical organisation, the New Tribes Mission, which recently attempted to convert the Panare and to make them become meek, fearful and obedient wage-slaves, met with some difficulty. There is no vocabulary in Panare to describe “guilt”, “sin”, “punishment" or “redemption". Nor, because these ideas are outside their social experience, was there any adequate way of paraphrasing these notions. Tragically, some of the Panare have been converted through some peculiar guile from the missionaries. The fables in the Bible were rewritten in Panare casting the ancestors of the Panare as the killers of Christ. The missionaries then said that unless the Panare were obedient to their every instruction they would be burnt alive in hell forever.

Today the social experience of most people takes place in capitalism—the social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods and services are in the hands of a minority. In capitalism goods are produced as commodities. Things are produced primarily to be sold on the market. In this system the abilities of the majority of people are commodities (or prospective commodities) because they are bought and sold on the jobs market. It follows that capitalism is a global system existing in state capitalist areas like the Russian Empire as much as in avowedly commercial places like the United States of America. Because capitalism puts the need for profits before human needs the system is constantly creating social problems. The lives of most of us are made unnecessarily miserable and difficult because of the social system which we live under.

Language is directly related to ideas and ideas to language. From the time when we are very young and begin to receive and develop ideas about the world in which we live, we are fed with words and ideas in a way which generally encourages us to make serious misjudgements about society. Two of these misjudgements, if we do not correct them, create a distorted view of society. The first is that we are encouraged not to see the organisation of society as a system. The state of society we are born into is just “the way things are". The fact that humankind has developed through a series of different social systems, like slave society and feudalism, is presented in such a way as to make it seem that our development has now stopped and that the basic principles of the profit system are correct forever. According to this fallacy it becomes acceptable to question the desirability of various aspects of capitalism but not to question the necessity of capitalism itself.

The other perversion we are encouraged to accept is dependence on leaders and employers and politicians to run society in a way that will be best for the majority. All the useful work in society—the design. manufacture, servicing and distribution of goods and services and all of the supplementary work needed to run society — is daily carried out by men and women who are not investors, financiers, politicians or economic experts. The process by which we are indoctrinated to lack confidence is a subtle one. The picture of the world we form from the words directed at us by parents, comics, schools, colleges, churches and the communications media all contribute to this process.

In his novel Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell described the Newspeak principle of “doublethink” as

the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them . . . The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

In criticising some of the emergent contradictions Orwell saw in 1948 he chose to have the three Party slogans plastered everywhere in his 1984 society as:

WAR IS PEACE 

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

We notice the type of contradictory thought signified by these slogans around us today. "Join the Peace Movement” the banner headline proclaims from a newspaper advertisement. The small print beneath the headline informs us that the Peace Movement referred to is. in fact, the Army (The Guardian, 25 November 1983).

What of Freedom?
We are all linked by a common belief in freedom and in Britain's greatness. (The Conservative Manifesto 1983)
We urge the British people to reject the Tory drift to catastrophe and to support our alternative strategy for peace, jobs and freedom (Labour’s Call to the People, NEC. 1980)

In these contexts the idea of freedom is bound up with wage-slavery. The freedom to be given employment and to be used to make a profit for a minority. It means freedom in a society of governments and armies and prisons and police forces. The idea of nationalism and of making sacrifices for “Britain" is first installed by the acceptance of a set of false assumptions about property. The vocabulary of possession is instrumental in the inculcation of this myth. We are bombarded with talk about "Our country . . . our need to stimulate trade ... our investment overseas ...” For most people this "our” business is quite inappropriate. It should be "their”. In Britain, according to the Inland Revenue Statistics, the top 2 per cent of the population own 64 per cent of all the land and the top 13 per cent of the population own 91 per cent of all housing.

The idea that ignorance is strength is again one which is repeatedly pul to us in the form of exhortations to trust leaders and politicians and bosses. The notion is that by harnessing your mind to that of a leader you will divest yourself of great responsibilities and, with many people transferring their power to the same leaders, those leaders will become very powerful and the better placed to run society efficiently. Minority power exists by consent because power is always, if only potentially, with the majority. We have only to get up off our knees.

Although language and ideas can influence the majority to be acquiescent in capitalism and to regard change as undesirable or impossible, the dynamic, changing nature of society can never be arrested by language. Socialism will entail a society without nations, armies, the rivalry which causes war, employment, money and all of the paraphernalia needed to support the profit system. The idea of socialism is thus born out of capitalism. When people’s experiences clash with the prejudices they have acquired, they can either reinterpret their experiences to conform with their prejudices or allow their experiences to refute their prejudices. Human history, including the development of the sciences, of technology and of language is evidence that experience is mightier than myth.

Gary Jay

Running Commentary: Strike Lessons (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strike lessons

In the tactics they have followed in the clashes with the flying pickets, the police have shown a willingness and an ability to learn from experience. Can this also be said for the miners? There are in fact some very important things which have been overlooked by the men speeding from one coalfield to another.

The first is that the police will not unfailingly do their best to ensure that everyone who wants to work will be free to do so. They are fighting the pickets for reasons other than to protect a “right to work". Redundant workers who don’t want to be sacked will not find any sympathetic boys in blue to case their way through the entrance of their old workplace.

The second is that a police force cannot by nature be a tolerant or credulous organisation. Policemen have the function of being suspicious — they often get commended for it — and they must cast a wide net in their suspicions. So if they suspect a car load of men looking like anything but bank clerks or insurance salesmen of being flying pickets they are bound to harass them with impertinent questions about their political opinions and private lives. It may not be quite the Dixon of Dock Green image but in real life it is all part of a day’s unpleasant work for them.

The third is that the police concept of public order, which they apply to the pickets, is not invariable in its principles. Some types of public disorder are permissible and get their protection — for example the parading of cruise missiles along country lanes.

The link between all these points, the matter which is overlooked by the people who fall foul of the police, is the fact that the police have a role in capitalist society. They are in being to protect an order and to assert a law which is based on the rights of private property. That means the police protect the privilege of a tiny minority of social parasites against the interests of the majority who are useful, productive people like miners. To put it another way. the police are part of a coercive state force which props up the dominance of the capitalist class and so helps to ensure the exploitation of the workers.

And workers, of course, is what the flying pickets are. So what do they do about this coercive, privilege-protecting machinery when they have the chance? What happens in the coalfields of Britain, when the miners can choose between coercion and freedom? At every election they vote for one or other of the parties of capitalism — Labour. Tory, Alliance, Communist . . . They spurn the case for a different society of common ownership and freedom preferring, on the most specious of arguments, to fasten the chains about themselves anew.

If the pickets are angry and bewildered by the police tactics, they should remember that the remedy to it is in their own hands — and the failure to apply it rests on their own heads.

Panic in the streets

Florid, well-fed Roy Jenkins had made a name for himself as a liberal before he became Wilson’s Home Secretary. This meant that he was associated with a few minor reforms which went well with the clink of sherry glasses in Hampstead but which, compared to the real problems of capitalism and the vast burden of human suffering which the system inflicts, are of absolutely no consequence.

But even at that there were plenty of flaws in that urbane image. This reforming, liberal Home Secretary was responsible for rushing through parliament the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which gave the police some disturbingly wide powers of arrest, detention and questioning. Labour MPs who indignantly demand that the Act not be renewed always seem to forget that the odious thing originated under their own party.

It was in Jenkins’ time too that the Special Patrol Group was formed. The stormtrooping tactics of the SPG were so successful and spectacular that the force was imitated in many other areas. Police operations are especially suited to the technique of ruthless and decisive intervention; only those on the receiving end — as was Blair Peach — are expected to have any serious doubts on the score.

Now we have learned that, in another triumph of liberal reformism, it was Jenkins who authorised the equipment of the Metropolitan Police with sub-machine guns. He did this in response to the London sieges at the Spaghetti House and Balcombe Street, although in each case these incidents were brought to a casualty-free end through tactics the very opposite of spraying the streets with machine-gun bill lets. Perhaps, behind that comfortable exterior, Jenkins was really a panicky liberal?

He would not be the only politician to have his pretensions reduced to scale by the exigencies of office. The Labour Party has always campaigned for power over capitalism to run the system in the only way possible in the interests of the owning capitalist class. This means taking action which is all too clearly against the interests of the people who elected them. A truly reforming Home Secretary might consider abolishing the police, or at least reducing their status to that of lollipop ladies, rather than widening their powers and arming them more ferociously.

But that of course would be nonsense. Capitalism needs its coercive forces to guard the position of the ruling class and to assert its property-protecting law and order. Whatever his reputation — and whatever his reality — Jenkins went along with that requirement. Experience of him emphasises the fact that workers who put their trust in leaders to improve things for them had better think again — before another liberal in Whitehall decides that the police could coerce us more effectively with tanks, artillery, nuclear weapons . . .

Tackling apartheid

An English Rugby Union team will after all be playing in South Africa this summer — always supposing that, after their disjointed and lack-lustre performance in this season’s internationals, anyone will still want to go to watch them play.

The announcement was greeted with predictable outrage by anti-apartheid campaigners, who have long argued that severing sporting links with South Africa would be an effective way of persuading them to drop their racist policies. In fact the campaigners have a point, for sport is popular enough in South Africa to make a loss of contact at the highest level of competition a powerful pressure for reform.

The South African government claim to have responded to the boycott which has so far operated in games like cricket and to have made formal gestures towards integration. These are obviously more cosmetic than basic; some rugby players who have toured South Africa, in the belief that they were "bridge building", have been sickened by the discrimination which they saw still to operate there.

By a remarkable, if typical, twist of logic the supporters of the tour have criticised its opponents for the deadly sin of “bringing politics into sport". The argument, once stated by the execrable Denis Thatcher at a rugby referees’ dinner, is that sportspeople should be free to play whoever they want, without interference. Thatcher, and those who agree with him, conveniently overlook the fact that it is the South African government, by forcing apartheid onto sportspeople, who breach their sacred principle and it is the protesters who campaign for the freedom to play against or with anyone.

Whatever pleasure and well-being may be derived from sport (which is in any case not free of the demands and the distortions of capitalism — it will be very different when we have a socialist society) they should not be inflated into an obsession. Compared to this society’s mountain of repression, suffering and fear, the matter of which side wins a game of football or cricket is of no account.

There are larger, more enduring issues at stake. One thing the demonstrators might ponder is that sport is about the only boycott which is being clamped onto South Africa. Trade, travel, military support, diplomacy — the very stuff of capitalist existence — merrily continue regardless of apartheid. And that is what the protesters are up against. Racism is illogical, unscientific and divisive of the world working class. But there is a remedy for it which is fundamental and permanent, in contrast to the ephemera of an integrated sporting tour.

Common Market: A Bore or an Opportunity? (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the Common Market seems such a bore to so many people that's because, quite simply, it really is. As its name suggests, it is about tariffs, quotas, customs duties and other such matters of vital interest to capitalist firms but of no importance whatsoever to the great majority of us who have to work for a wage or a salary for a living. It's a businessmen's club whose main concern is buying and selling. All the same, if we want to understand why our capitalist rulers and their political servants are getting agitated over this matter we are forced to consider the world of free trade areas, customs unions and other trading arrangements.

Not even a Common Market

The Treaty of Rome, which set up the Common Market, was signed in 1957 by six European states (France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries) with the aim of creating a single vast market in Europe for industrial goods and agricultural products to be called, pompously, the "European Economic Community" (EEC). In 1973 the Six were joined, after protracted negotiations, by Britain, Ireland and Denmark and in 1981 by Greece. Spain and Portugal are waiting on the doorstep with 1 January 1986 provisionally fixed as the date for their entry.

The establishment of a European "common market" is an ambitious project in that it involves creating the same sort of trading conditions throughout Europe as now exist singly in each of the member states. In other words, not simply the abolition of customs duties but the establishment of uniform tax and monetary conditions too. Ultimately it implies, if not a single European state, at least a single European currency and a single European economic policy.

As anyone crossing a European frontier knows, this is far from being the case at the moment. VAT rates, not to mention other taxes, differ from country to country. The rates of exchange of European currencies fluctuate and have to be periodically adjusted. Europe is far from being a genuine common market, as Geoffrey Howe complained (on behalf of the "business community" who alone are really concerned) at a meeting of the Common Market Council of Ministers last September:

“The principle of the free circulation of goods and people and the free offer of services within the European Community is one of the foundation stones of the Treaty of Rome. Twenty-five years after signature however, it is still not a reality. The Community has got little further than the abolition of tariffs. This falls well short of our business community's expectations. What they experience day by day is a range of non tariff barriers and administrative measures which impede a true common market for both goods and services, which seriously add to the cost of trading across frontiers, and which indeed are in danger of growing, despite recent efforts to make progress in this area” (paper presented to Special EEC Council of Ministers meeting, 20/21 September 1983).

At the moment the Common Market is essentially only a customs or tariff union.

An EEC document explains:

“In international law, a customs union consists of an economic area comprising members who undertake contractually: (i) to refrain from applying to one another any customs duties, charges having equivalent effect, or quantitative restrictions; (ii) to apply a common external customs tariff to countries not within the union. ("The Customs Union", European Documentation, No 6/1983.)

So, in the EEC, there are no customs duties on trade between its member states while goods entering into the area are subject to a uniform tariff no matter which country imports them. This latter means that the EEC enters the world market as a single trading bloc; the biggest in the world in fact.

“The Community's common external tariff means that it is seen as a single trading partner by other world trading powers. By volume of trade, it is well ahead of its partners. Averaging imports and exports, the Community has 19% of world trade, compared to 14% for the United States and 8% for Japan” ("The External Trade of the European Community", European File, December 1983).

As a matter of fact, the main economic conflict in the world today is not, as might be imagined from listening to Reagan, between America and Russia but between America, Japan and the EEC as these three trading groups jostle each other for markets, investment outlets and sources of raw materials. Even some of the political and military conflicts are not what they seem. For instance, the conflict in Central America is not so much between America and Russia as between America and the EEC, with America trying to prevent the EEC countries from entering its traditional hunting-ground.

The British ruling class made the choice to join the European trading bloc in the late 1960s. It wasn't a unanimous decision since it meant sacrificing the commercial interests of certain sections of the capitalist class: those who imported from outside Europe, especially the Commonwealth, and who would now face tariff barriers where none existed before.

The Labour Party made itself completely ridiculous over the Common Market, supporting it when in office and opposing it when out of office, but opposing it on the most inward-looking, nationalist grounds. Since the Labour Party accepts

capitalism, to make its opposition to the Common Market seem less ridiculous, it had to come up with suggested alternative markets for Britain's capitalists; these ranged from Britain's internal market protected by tariffs to the underdeveloped countries and the state capitalist bloc. Needless to say, the capitalist class wasn't convinced and even began to write off the Labour Party as the alternative government of capitalism to the Tories that it has traditionally been, creating and grooming the SDP to take over this role.

In opposing the Common Market the Labour Party in effect chose to identify itself with the interests of the more backward-looking sections of the capitalist class rather than with those which stood to benefit from the creation of a vast customs-free trade area in Western Europe.

The agricultural anomaly

Since the aim of the Common Market is essentially to create the conditions for freer trade and since trade in Europe is mainly trade in industrial goods, why has the Common Market adopted a "Common Agricultural Policy"? Or rather, why did it adopt one so early in its evolution (since the long-term aim of a true common market would indeed have to involve agricultural products too)?

The Common Market could have chosen to allow its member states to pursue their own agricultural policies, subsidising and protecting their farmers in the ways their national governments thought fit, while pressing ahead with progress towards complete free trade in industrial goods. This was the option taken by the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), set up as a sort of rival to the Common Market around Britain in 1959 and which still survives but is now dominated by Sweden and Switzerland (in fact free trade in industrial goods exists between EFTA and the Common Market so the whole of Western Europe is already a vast industrial free trade area). There is free trade among the EFTA countries in industrial goods but each country is left to pursue its own agricultural policy. Thus, although farmers in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria and Portugal are subsidised like farmers in the rest of Europe, this is done by the national governments concerned, not by an inter-governmental organisation.

The answer to "the Common Market having an agricultural policy lies in the conditions under which the Treaty of Rome was signed:

“It is important to appreciate that the Rome Treaty was a delicate balance of the national interests of the contracting parties. Let us consider West Germany and France in terms of trade outlets. In the case of West Germany the prospect of free trade in industrial goods, and free access to the French market in particular, was extremely inviting. In the case of France the relative efficiency of her agriculture (particularly her grain producers) as compared with West Germany held out the prospect that in a free Community agricultural market she would make substantial inroads into the West German market. This was obviously likely to result if the common price level of grain, for example, was set well below the West German level but at or above the French level. Agriculture had therefore to be included (D. Swann, The Economics of the Common Market, 1970, p.78).

Or, as a more recent Common Market propaganda document puts it, "Community countries most dependent on agriculture inevitably made free trade in farm produce a fundamental condition of their willingness to open their markets to the industrial goods of their neighbours" (European File, March 1984, p.12). In other words, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was the price industrial Germany had to pay to have a European-wide market for its industrial goods. De Gaulle kept the British capitalist class waiting on the doorstep until it too agreed to pay this price.

What the adoption of the CAP meant was that farm prices and farm subsidies are fixed annually by Common Market Agriculture Ministers meeting in Brussels. In view of the large number of lobbies and vested interests involved it is not surprising that these sessions have often lasted all night before coming up with a compromise agreement. So, with the CAP, European farmers are subsidised, feather-bedded as the Americans say, from European funds rather than directly from national funds. Up to 70 per cent in fact of the Common Market's total budget is devoted to agriculture. Since it is the industrial countries, Germany and Britain, which contribute proportionately more to the Common Market budget, they are at the same time paying proportionately more towards subsidising European farmers. This is what the famous "budget issue" is all about, with Britain complaining loudly and Germany more discreetly.

The fact that agricultural policy is decided at European level has meant that decisions to stockpile or destroy agricultural so-called "surpluses" (butter mountains, wine lakes, bulldozing of tomatoes, pouring diesel oil on peaches) are made in Brussels, not in the national capitals. This has given rise to the illusion that it is the Common Market that is responsible for these actions, thus allowing anti-Marketeers to turn people's legitimate indignation at this destruction of food and productive capacity against the Common Market. But this is to mistake the real cause. It is capitalism, not the Common Market, that is responsible. Milk, for instance, was being poured down disused mineshafts before Britain joined the Common Market and this would happen again from time to time even if Britain withdrew. All the Common Market has done in this respect is to centralise the process by which these decisions are made, but it is the logic of capitalism that imposes such decisions whether they are made at European or national level.

The British capitalist class's campaign against its "unfair" contribution to the Common Market budget has involved trying to drum up mass support through such exhibitions of mindless nationalism as the Sun's anti-French campaigns. But this issue does not concern wage and salary earners. It is not "our money" that is going to subsidise French, or for that matter British, farmers. The only money that is ours is what we are paid as wages and salaries plus any state hand-outs to which we may be entitled. What we produce over and above this belongs to the capitalists to use as they think fit. We have no control over what they do with the wealth they take from us and certainly no interest in taking sides when they fall out over how to use it.

If Heath and his Tory government negotiated a bad deal for the British capitalist class in 1972 (as it now seems) that's too bad for them, but we have no interest in allowing ourselves to be stirred up by them as a means of trying to renegotiate a better deal today.

A single crumb

Since the Common Market represents to a certain extent a normal stage of development of capitalism ― towards bigger trading units and bigger markets ― it would be surprising if it didn't bring a few marginal improvements for workers. We've scraped the bottom of the barrel and have only been able to come up with one relatively insignificant change which could be seen as an improvement compared with what happened before; namely, the free movement of labour. But we hasten to add, this change does not warrant abandoning a position of complete indifference to the Common Market. We merely note it as a consequence of an inevitable trend under capitalism to break down national frontiers and national differences.

We appreciate too that the free movement of labour is only a corollary of free trade in other commodities since what we are talking about here is free trade throughout the Common Market in the commodity labour-power. All the same, this has meant that workers have been able to travel freely over a larger area than previously (even if this is only a return to a situation which existed in Europe before 1914) and this is a real, if marginal, improvement.

The first thing to notice about the European Parliament is that it is not really a Parliament. Real decision-making power in the Common Market lies with the Council of Ministers from the various member states who come to decisions on the basis of proposals from the European Commission in Brussels. The so-called Parliament is merely a sort of advisory committee that is consulted in the course of this decision-making process.

When elections to the European Parliament take place workers in countries with a total population of 270 million (320 million if and when Spain and Portugal join) are being given the opportunity to express their views at the same time. At the moment they misuse this opportunity by confining their support for capitalism but, when the socialist movement has reached a more developed stage this will provide an occasion for socialists to demonstrate their strength across frontiers, to turn these at the moment meaningless elections into a Europe-wide referendum on the issue of "socialism or capitalism"?

Elections to the European Parliament are taking place next month, on 14 June. Socialists will be able to express their support for world socialism by writing "WORLD SOCIALISM" "SOCIALISME MONDIALE", "WELTSOZIALISMUS", "SOCIALISMO MONDIALO" across their ballot paper.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain will not now be contesting the forthcoming European Election in Central London. We will, however, be mounting an intensive propaganda campaign, during which your help will still be needed. Please contact the Parliamentary Committee at Head Office for details.