Unite for Socialism (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has only one purpose, that is to establish a Socialist system of society. We define this as “a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community”.

The system of society now in existence throughout the world is capitalism. The productive resources, land, machinery, materials and so on are owned and controlled by a minority of the population. The overwhelming majority of people are propertyless and can only get access to the necessities of life by working for the minority as wage and salaried employees. This is the latest and by far the most efficient form of the master and slave relationship. Workers fending for themselves on wages and free to roam the earth in search of employment are far more productive than their predecesors were as serfs or chattel slaves. Capitalism is run from top to bottom by the hired labour of the working class. It is a society torn by antagonism, the most important being that of the class struggle between capitalist and worker.

The capitalist class continue to dominate society by having control of political power and so having at their disposal the power of the armed forces, police, judiciary and so on. Political parties are at present returned to power by a majority of the electorate to run capitalism. This is what parties such as Conservative, Labour, Liberal and Communist stand for. So that Capitalism with its rich and poor, production for sale and profit, its strife and warfare keeps going because the majority of people who are exploited by it accept it as being the best of all possible worlds. Socialism, where production will be solely for use, where strife arising from a multitude of social divisions will have given way to peace based on social unity; can only be established once a majority understand it and are organised politically to get it.

The War in Vietnam (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

American troops are not in Vietnam to defend Peace, Democracy, Liberty or any other high-sounding ideal. They are there for the same reason they are in Korea, Okinawa, Formosa, the Philippines, Laos and Thailand : to defend American domination of the Pacific Ocean. This was why America fought the second world war, but no sooner had one rival, Japan, been beaten than another, China, arose. The Vietnam War, like the Korean War, is just an aspect of the conflict between American imperialism and Chinese imperialism for control of the Eastern Pacific. Not an issue in which Socialists take sides.

Nor do Socialists support the many demonstrations that are said to be “against the Vietnam War”. The organisers of most of them do not try to disguise the fact that they are for a continuation of the war until the so-called National Liberation Front, the side they support, has won. In other words, these are pro-war, not peace demonstrations.

In any event, given the balance of power in South East Asia, “peace” would only be an armed truce which would give both sides the chance to start fighting somewhere else, in Laos or Thailand perhaps Whichever side wins the poor people of Vietnam will lose as the war is basically over who is going to govern and exploit them.

Too much of a good thing (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The current problems in the apple market are highlighted in this report from The Guardian (25 September):

  Fruit growers throughout Southern England are dumping thousands of tons of apples or leaving them to rot on the trees because of a disastrous slump in prices.
  Piles of rotting apples can be seen from Worcestershire and Cambridgeshire to Kent.
  The slump began when Australian and New Zealand apples, held up by the dock strike, came on the market much later than usual, just as the English season began, said Mr. Robert Miller, chairman of the National Farmers’ Union fruit committee.
  “For some reason the market has just not picked up since. We have had a big crop of fruit of excellent quality, but we can’t sell it.”
  “Every English apple and pear sold at the moment is being sold at a loss.” 

Perhaps few people are going to be disturbed by the thought of dumped apples. But the same thing happens to other food, more essential to human health, and to other forms of wealth, if the market is in the same depressed condition. This is capitalism at work — the market is an essential part of it, but it is something capitalism cannot control.

The common ownership of the means of production (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The source of all wealth is the application of human labour power to materials found in nature. As William Petty put it, Labour is the father and Nature the mother of wealth.

There was a time when the workman owned the simple tools with which he worked. He was, in fact, a working-owner. But in time, with the development of expensive and complicated machinery, the worker became separated from the instruments of his labour. The ownership of these instruments became concentrated in the hands of a few. The worker, now virtually without property, had to sell his working ability to those who owned the instruments of labour. This is the situation today. Production is a vast co-operative effort, involving the world-wide division of labour. Production is carried out by process workers, managers, technicians, clerks and cleaners — all of whom are equally necessary to production. Yet despite this co-operative effort, the products belong to a section only of society.

Profit is the monetary expression of that part of the wealth which those who monopolise the means and instruments of labour have after paying out wages and the cost of buying raw materials, etc. Its source is the unpaid labour of those who work.

The change Socialists advocate is this: The means and instruments of labour should cease to be the monopoly of a few and should become the property of the whole community. The community, organised on a democratic basis, could then use them as it thought fit to meet the needs of its members, individually and collectively.

In such a society buying and selling, prices and money would be superfluous. These are features only of a private property society in which wealth is individually or sectionally owned. In a socialist society the wealth, produced by social labour, will belong to society as soon as it is produced. After setting aside wealth to renew and build up the instruments of production, the rest can enter directly into the consumption-fund of society. The problem of distribution will be the technical one of how to move the wealth to where it is needed.

Putting a price on items of wealth and issuing people with round metallic objects and pieces of coloured paper will not arise. Nor will there be any other kind of rationing since Socialism will be a society of abundance. The productive resources of the world, with the most modern productive techniques, are quite capable of providing enough for all. Society can go over to free distribution just as soon as there is production for use on the basis of the common ownership of the means and instruments of wealth-production. With free distribution people will want more, and certainly better goods. But, once the barrier of profit has been removed, these demands can be met.

What exists in the world today has nothing in common with such a system. Everywhere, a privileged few enjoy the best of everything while the consumption of the majority is restricted within the confines of their wage or salary.

Adam Buick

Putting on the style (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fashion, in its very nature, must constantly be changing. At times, praise be to Georgie Best and Jean Shrimpton, it changes more violently. There is more to it than whim or the inspired flash of a struggling courturier. The gaudy boutiques may try to hide a fact so sordid and worldly but there is much money to be made in “fashion” and changes can bring such rich dividends that change can be represented as a virtue in itself.

Naturally, politicians have seen the possibilities in this. Not that Wilson or Heath has yet come out in flared trousers and a tie-dyed shirt. But they seem to agree that style is important and changes of style vital.

That was why at the last election Heath promised us a new style of government. The details of this were suitably cloudy but we were given to understand that it was all something to do with taxes and integrity and giving business men more say in the running of British capitalism from Whitehall and getting rid of the Wilson gimmicks which have been such an entertainment over the past six years.

This was all very well — many people were fed up with Wilson and he had lost his glamour for the voters — but it took no account of the fact that Labour had themselves come to power on the same sort of promise. It is almost like a history lesson, now, to look back on those days when Wilson, as soon as he had taken over the Labour leadership, launched out on his promises of a new style of government.

Then we were told that we needed to throw out the men who held their power as the result of friendly deals over a glass of old port or during a day out on the grouse moors and replace them with thrusting, ambitious technologists. We needed a plan — in fact a National Plan, no less — which would take care of absolutely everything. And of course we were going to get a new method of collecting taxes, because every political party should make some sort of gesture to the frustrations of the workers who sigh each week when they check the deductions on their pay slip.

This Labour propaganda is now so stale and discredited that it seems incredible that it was ever tried and even more that it came off. And now the Tories are trying the same trick although their new style seems to be that, while Wilson started off with a bang, threatening to devour us all in the white heat of his energy. Heath has projected an image of self-effacement and inactivity.

As the day-by-day problems and crises of capitalism blow up, the government seem determined to give the impression that they are allowing the ship to drift before every wind and current. They have been in no hurry to get out one of those emergency budgets with the object of telling the working class that they have been living too high and must reduce their standards. Problems like Ulster remain sore and festering; a crisis like the skyjackings, which was a great chance for Heath to emerge as a strong man who could be relied on to teach the lesser breeds where they stood, was let pass. The Heath government seems to be sunk in lethargy.

Perhaps this will turn out a successful (in the sense of a vote-winning) style of government. But the people who vote for capitalism usually do so within the assumptions which are necessary to the system and one of these is the assumption that leadership is indispensable. There are few experiences more threatening to the supporter of capitalism than the feeling that his leader, voted into power with such high hopes and confidence, is impotent. Nothing is more comforting than the feeling that the leader is strong, capable, honest . . .

Whatever the mass of the voters are thinking about Heath's image of inactivity, we can expect the Conservative Party to become restive, perhaps even rebellious, under such stress. There was a similar situation soon after Eden took over as Premier, when the frustrations of the Tories eventually spilled over in the famous “smack of firm government'’ article in the Daily Telegraph. Eden, it was said, was quite unhinged by this attack (he was never famous for his patience and in any case at that time was a very sick man) and conducted much of his subsequent policy in that same angry, impulsive mood.

Perhaps Heath would not lose his composure under such an attack; we do not yet know whether he has the nerve needed by a Prime Minister. Previous Tory Premiers who have affected an air of indolence were figures of comfort to the working class, who showed their gratitude by voting them into power again and again. There was Baldwin, who sucked his pipe and gazed at his pigs and who came over as the humane father figure who would keep us all safe from harm. There was Macmillan, who would not (at least for a long time) allow himself to be flapped and who seemed to have persuaded millions of workers, with their council schooling and in their council houses, that they were as prosperous as he with his Eton background and his sumptuous home in Sussex.

Beneath the lazy, courteous exteriors of these men there was a ruthless, calculating concern to win and keep power. They were both very clever at this; perhaps too clever, because their exposure was quick and cruel and those who had found them once such assuring father figures turned on them with the wrath of betrayed sons. (There is a theme here for a Freudian essay — the Oedipai factor in politics). Baldwin in the end wondered why they hated him so; Macmillan confessed tremblingly to being out of step with the times.

No Labour government has ever felt able to present the same relaxed image as a Baldwin or a Macmillan. Like the car hire firm they have always been Number Two and so have had to try harder. Labour governments have been periods of intense gloom and apparently endless crisis with Labour leaders working hard to cripple the working class with an outsize guilt complex over their alleged indolence and extravagant living.

Our first experience of this was in the MacDonald governments, who added to the gloom a fair measure of buffoonery and panic. It was never possible to think of those governments as being in touch with events and when they finally went down in confusion they left the Labour Party — what was left of it — with a reputation for irresponsible stupidity when all they deserved was an exposure for promising to do the impossible and for prostituting the name of Socialism.

The post war Labour governments were not thought of as buffoons, whatever sport the Tories made of bread rationing and snoek. But they too were a doleful bunch; Stafford Cripps with his vegetarian’s face and his hair-shirt speeches; Wilson grumbling about the longer skirts; Shawcross going for strikers. And over them all Attlee, like an austere head master wielding the cane over us for not learning our lessons and for smoking behind the gym.

The style of a government is in many ways its surface appearance — what the public, the voter, sees. Whatever differences in style there may be between one government and another, they are all determined by a basic similarity. Government exists to organise the affairs of capitalism and to make its own capitalist class as secure and prosperous as can be. But capitalists cannot be run on the basis of free hand outs to the working class; for example, industry cannot compete profitably without some check on wages. The property basis of capitalism must be preserved and protected; workers who are propertyless must be persuaded that they can get the goods they need only by the legal method of paying for them. The international trading and investments of a capitalist class must be protected and fostered. All of this, and more, is the concern of a government, whatever its party label and whatever its pretensions.

It is an uncomfortable fact, for politicians, that none of this can be made attractive to the subject class in capitalism. The working class dream of a society free of the restrictions and poverty of capitalism but the feeblest memory should have no difficulty in recalling that working class problems persist in spite of all the pledges to get rid of them. Every government says that it can do something about poverty, every one promises to clear up the housing mess, every one has a policy for ending the threat of war. Yet nothing effective and permanent is ever done about these things. The simple fact is that governments can’t do anything about them.

At the same time the politicians are caught in their own trap; they can’t admit to their impotence, they can’t tell the workers not to vote for them and to start thinking about a fundamental change in society. So they are driven to make false promises; they write a selective history, and. simply, tell them lies. They put on the style, they change the style.

When Heath, then, says that the Tories will brings us a new style of government what he is really saying is that they will try to tell us some new lies. These may be different from the lies which Wilson told us but the effect will be the same, the promises equally empty, the future equally grim.

If there is impatience with Heath it would be better directed at the social system which needs leaders and which lives on lies. Capitalism has had its day and it is time for the fashion to change to give us a new society and a new style of living.

Ivan

Capitalism in Poland (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are about 500 zloty millionaires amongst Poland’s big market gardeners, according to the Financial Times (3 October). As a zloty is only worth a few pence the wealth of a Polish millionaire is "only" £17.000. but their existence shows that there still exists a privileged class in Poland. Says the Financial Times:

  Wealth here shows itself in tight bundles of 500 zloty notes, town houses, seaside villas, expensive Western cars, lavish parties, and other more blatant manifestations which from time to time draw bursts of criticism from the official Press. Friends of Pani Barbara estimate that she spends more in one month on massage and beauty treatment than a computer programmer earns in the same period.

It would be a mistake to think that Poland's wealthy individuals are all private-enterprise market gardeners. Others will have amassed personal wealth out of the bloated salaries they are paid while occupying the top posts in the government, army or industry.

Nor is the existence of millionaires in an allegedly socialist country new. During the last war supporters of Russia were shocked to learn that some people were contributing millions of roubles to Stalin’s war loan. In Britain the Russia Today Society had to rush out a special pamphlet, Soviet Millionaires by Reg Bishop, to try to explain this away. Apparently the first Russian millionaire, Berdyebekov, was. like Mrs. Barbara in Poland today, a farmer.

Bishop never did succeed in explaining what wealthy individuals were doing under "socialism”, but that was because he avoided the obvious answer: there are capitalists in Poland and Russia because these have never ceased to be capitalist countries.

A Study in Hypocrisy (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Don't mix politics and sport", say the supporters of the cricket tour. "It was the South African government that first brought politics into cricket”, reply the tour’s opponents.

Certainly, sport ought to be played for fun and, certainly, the South African government applied their racist policy to cricket when they barred D'Oliveira. But we must say that this discussion has revealed great hypocrisy on both sides.

Take those who say you should not mix politics and sport. Where have they been living all these years? They cannot really think that international, competitive sport is played for fun. Quite apart from the fact that profession football clubs are commercial institutions employing wage workers to provide entertainment for sale, they must have noticed that every time England plays some “foreign” team is the occasion for patriotic outbursts in the sports pages and on the sports programmes.

The sports pages are perhaps the most dangerously political part of a newspaper. They churn out the crudest patriotic nonsense helping to sustain the illusion that Britain is a community all of whose members share a common interest. In identifying ourselves with “our” national team we are supposed to forget that we live in a class divided society. Oh yes, national sports teams have long had a very important political role to play. It is sports-page patriotism that paves the way for politicians to dupe us into fighting wars or accepting wage restraint in the bogus “national interest” (in reality the interests of our ruling class).

Those who want to stop the cricket tour because they, quite rightly, object to apartheid are no less hypocritical. The Right Reverend David Sheppard, former Test cricketer and the current Bishop of Woolwich, writing in The Times on 25 April on “The Cricket Tour and Christian Conscience” tried to explain why “the churches should speak out against a South African team, but not, for example, against the visit of a Russian football team”.

South Africa, he said, was specially relevant to Christians as apartheid was said to be “a defence of western Christian civilization”. This may explain why he would not demonstrate against a Russian football team but not why he would not protest at the visit of a Portuguese or Spanish or Greek team, all of whose governments justify their dictatorial rule as Christian (we are not inclined to quarrel with them on this in view of Christianity’s record).

The Bishop also argued:

There would only be a parallel if, say, Jews were rigorously excluded from selection for the Russian football team.

Now, as everyone knows, modern Russia like its Tsarist predecessor is the prison house of nationalities. If it is national oppression that the protestors are worried about they should be demanding that no Russian sportsman gets anywhere near Britain.

Luckily America does not play much cricket or football because its imperialist policies should make its sporting teams obvious targets for protest. Come to think of it, in view of Britain’s immigration colour bar our protestors ought to be ashamed that British teams go to India and the West Indies. They should be demanding that they stay at home.

Enough of this trivial nonsense. We have better things to do than get involved in arguments about whether the cricket tour should go ahead or not. We have enough to do working for the establishment of a frontierless world community which would liberate all mankind.

The Celtic myth (1970)

Book Reviews from the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Celtic Nationalism’, by Owen Dudley Edwards, Gwynfor Evans and Ioan Rhys, Hugh MacDiarmid. (Routledge and Kegan Paul. 45s.)

‘Scottish Nationalism’, by H. J. Hanham. (Faber and Faber)

‘Wales: A Nation Again!’ by P. Berresford Ellis. (Tandem Books. 5s.)

The nationalist argument, as propounded by Plaid Cymru in Wales and the SNP in Scotland, is quite simple ― and wrong. The people of Wales and Scotland, they say, suffer because they are misgoverned from England; what they need is an independent State of their own so that they could begin to solve their problems. In fact the problems faced by wage and salary workers in Wales and Scotland are basically the same as those in Britain or Ireland on any other country; they are caused by international capitalism and can only be cured by world Socialism. The setting up of “more frontiers in the world”, as the former Welsh nationalist MP Gwynfor Evans so frankly puts his aim, would be irrelevant and a waste of time.

Socialists reject allegiance to any State and regard themselves as citizens of the world. We accept the boundaries between States as they are (and as they may change) and work within them to win control of each State with a view to abolishing them all. Our aim is the establishment of a democratic world community without frontiers based on the common ownership of the world’s resources.

“Celtic nationalism” is a misleading phrase as the word Celtic, like Aryan, has no real meaning outside linguistics where six languages (Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Breton and the extinct Manx and Cornish) form a distinct group labelled “Celtic”. What Ireland, Scotland and Wales share is that they are areas where now only a minority of the people speak a Celtic language. This, however, does not justify calling them “Celtic countries” or creating a mythology about “the Celtic nations” or, worse, about “the Celtic races” (a phrase which repeatedly occurs in Ellis’ book).

Of course people should be free to speak the language of their choice and, if they occupy a distinct area, to have social affairs discussed and administered in that language. The language question, however, is distinct from the so-called national question. Welsh-speakers have had a real grievance against the English-speaking administration; this to a certain extent and thanks to their protests has now been resolved and certainly would be in a Socialist world. These grievances have been misdirected by the partisans of a separate State in Wales in accordance with the old nationalist slogan “no language, no nation”. This is nonsense. Those who speak Welsh are just Welsh-speaking human beings, not members of some imaginary Welsh nation. Welsh-speaking Socialists have long recognised that they are Welsh-speaking world citizens.

Of these books, Ellis’ is a readable journalistic account from a nationalist viewpoint of Welsh nationalism; Hanham’s is a more scholarly history of Scottish nationalism; the three essays on nationalism in Ireland, Wales and Scotland are a deadly bore. MacDiarmid, the eccentric writer who stood as a Communist against Sir Alec Douglas Home in 1964, has filled his essay with large chunks from the Communist Party’s programme and makes the absurd suggestion that “the Labour Party’s betrayal of the Scottish cause is on the point of being effectively contested by the development under Communist leadership of a Scottish National Liberation Movement”. He should stick to poetry.

Home Rule as distinct from independence, i.e. a separate parliament subordinate to Westminster, was for a number of years the policy of the Scottish TUC and, in view of the current moves of the Communist-led Scottish Area of the NUM to revive this, it is interesting to note some of the views Hanham records as being expressed at the STUC in 1921 :

  “It was disgraceful they should be wasting time over a question like Home Rule. It was of no consequence to the working class”. 

  “While capitalism continued the workers would not be any better off even when Home Rule was in operation”.

Let us hope someone can be found to say the same at the next STUC conference.

Hanham unwittingly confirms the correctness of this view when he concludes by saying that the nearest parallel to an independent Scotland as envisaged by the SNP

  “is to be found in the old Colonial empire, where dominion status or independence simply meant a transfer of power to a new group of politicians, while the structure of state and society was but little changed.”

                                                                                                                              Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: Class struggle industrial and political (1970)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The labour-power commodity is like all other commodities in that it is bought and sold upon the market, its value being determined by the cost of production, around which the higgling of the market allows its price to fluctuate.

It is unlike all other commodities in that it is the commodity of a subject class sold to a dominant class, and further in that the standard of living, an historical element, enters into the question of its cost of production.

It is these two fundamental distinctions that make the matter a class conflict as apart from the ordinary matter of the competitive buying and selling of commodities.

The modern class struggle presents two aspects. On the one side the struggle to sell labour-power under the best conditions — the industrial struggle for wages and hours of labour; on the other side the struggle for the overthrow of the wages system — the political struggle for Socialism. The un-class conscious worker takes part in the former, but only the class conscious takes part in the latter.

The class struggle is. therefore, both industrial and political — the latter being its ultimate, its revolutionary form.

[From an article “Commodity Struggle or Class Struggle" by G. McClatchie, Socialist Standard November 1920].

From Marx to Milton Friedman (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the six years of the 1964-70 Labour government, two developments were going on in the field of economic theory; on the one side confidence in a government’s ability to “manage the economy” was being undermined by the series of crises and the rise of prices and unemployment; on the other a big offensive was being mounted by monetary economists against the Keynesian ideas on which the Labour government’s policies were based. The two trends came together in the declaration made on 19 May 1969 by Roy Jenkins, Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, that his priority was not expansion of production and employment, as his supporters would have wished, but dealing with the problem of “too much money” in the economy.

Prominent among the monetary school is Professor Milton Friedman of Chicago University, whose lecture, “The Counter-Revolution of Monetary Theory”, was reproduced in the Financial Times  (7 September). It should be noted that Friedman said he was attacking Keynes’ followers not Keynes himself. Indeed he claimed that Keynes, if still alive, would, in present circumstances, be in the forefront of the counter-revolution.

Among the many aspects dealt with by Friedman the two most interesting were his treatment of inflation and his own idea of how a government should try to manage capitalism.

On the first he declared:

  “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon – in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

At first glance it may seem that Friedman was merely restating the view held in the past by economists as diverse in their approach as Marx, Cannan and Keynes, that if an inconvertible currency (such as exists now) is issued in excessive amounts this causes a proportionate rise in the general price level. There is however a variation of terms that should be noted. These three economists were talking specifically of currency (notes and coin) while Friedman was talking of currency plus bank deposits. (Current use of the term “money”is so variously defined that the government central statistical office now has three different calculations of the money supply).

In practice no doubt the Friedman “money” view of inflation comes back roughly to the currency view because any policy of controlling “money supply” would in the last resort entail also control of the currency issue. Most economists follow Friedman in including some or all of bank deposits in their conception but among those who after the war continued to deal with inflation specifically in terms of currency was Sir Arnold Plant, Professor of Commerce in the University of London. He declared that “all our troubles arising from the present inflationary position would cease as soon as a British government decided to accept the full responsibility of their position as the sole controller of currency issues”. He wanted an absolute ceiling to be placed on the total currency issue (The Times, 1 June 1956).

In order to understand the attitudes of Friedman and Keynes (and Marx) it is essential to separate the question of inflation (currency depreciation) from the question of the possibility of managing capitalism. Keynes was not an advocate of currency depreciation for its own sake, though he did rely, as a method of handling certain situations, on his belief that workers who would strike against a reduction of money wages could be induced to accept a fall of real wages through a rise of prices (The General Theory, p.9).

Keynes’proposition was that no control of the currency issue was necessary because if the monetary authorities looked after bank lending (“the creation of credit”) the creation of currency could be left to follow suit (Tract on Monetary Reform, p.184).

When Keynes declared his belief that formal control of the currency issue was unnecessary Professor Cannan immediately raised the alarm. He said that experience showed that unless there was some form of control governments would always succumb to the temptation to depreciate the currency, with its consequent rise of prices. In fact currency in the hands of the public has increased from £449m in June 1938 to £3,107m in June 1970. Such a rate of increase was never intended or anticipated by Keynes. Friedman is now saying that some control is necessary. He wants the increase to be limited to a steady 4 or 5 per cent a year.

   “A steady rate of monetary growth at a moderate level can provide a framework under which you can have little inflation and much growth. It will not produce heaven on earth. It will make an important contribution to a stable economic society.”

If Friedman’s lecture is compared with the 1944 White Paper Employment Policy, which was the agreed three-party statement on how Keynesian doctrines were to be applied after the war, it will be seen that Friedman’s other main criticism was of the belief that interest rates could be kept down by government policy and that this could be an effective instrument for controlling economic affairs. Bank rate under the Wilson government rose to the highest level for a century and Friedman argues that the excessive rate of growth of the money supply is a contributory factor in high interest rates.

That 1944 statement showed how the government would iron out the ups and downs of overexpansion and depression by varying interest rates, by alternately increasing and decreasing government and private capital investment and by increasing and decreasing the market for consumer goods, and at the same time aim at “work for all“, stable prices and continual expansion of production and a rising standard of living. It has failed in most of its objectives.

What are the prospects that Friedman will do any better? He is of course more moderate in his claims. He appears to think that under his proposal British experience will come more into line with American. It would seem that he is not expecting much; indeed it may well be he expects the already rising unemployment in Britain to reach the higher level that has prevailed in America in recent years.

There is no reason at all to suppose that his moderate and controlled inflation will get rid of the cycle of expansions, crises and recessions than did the more rapid inflation of post-war Britain, or the long period without inflation in the 19th century.

Marx never supposed that capitalism could be made to work smoothly and neither Keynes nor Friedman has shown how capitalism can do without unemployment to provide an industrial reserve army and keep wages down to a level profitable to the capitalist. It is true that post-war governments thought they had found a substitute in the form of an incomes policy and wage restraint but it came up against working class resistance they never expected.

Incidentally in all the plausible plans of the 1944 statement there was not a word about having to include such a policy.

Edgar Hardcastle

Russia and Marxian Economics (1970)

Pamphlet Review from the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Marxism and Market Socialism’. Irish Communist Organisation pamphlet. 5s.

“Market Socialism” is of course a contradiction in terms since the establishment of the common ownership and democratic social control of the means of production necessarily involves the abolition of the market. It is used here by a group of Maoists (they say that soon after the death of Stalin in 1953 the Russian government began a policy of “restoring capitalism” in Russia) in their criticism of the current economic doctrines of the Russian ruling class. They too see this term as contradictory but from a different angle since they accept Lenin’s false distinction between “socialism” and “communism”. Nevertheless this is an interesting pamphlet which makes some pertinent points.

“Marxist-Leninist literature”, a Russian economist Lev Leontyev has written, “has proved as entirely groundless the idea that Marx and Engels, and Lenin, pictured socialism as a natural economy without commodity-money relations”. To see why this is a distortion of Marxism we must know something of what Marx said.

Marx set out to examine how capitalism worked. Capitalism, he showed, was the most developed form of commodity production, a commodity being an article of wealth produced by separate, competing enterprises for sale on the market. The existence of commodity-production implies the existence also of private property, of private owners of commodities who buy and sell them. What prevents a complete breakdown of this unorganised system of production is the fact that commodities exchange in definite proportions depending on their value (or the amount of socially necessary labour used in producing them). It is through the impersonal workings of the market, called by Marx “the law of value”, that production is regulated under capitalism.

Socialism, by establishing the common ownership of all the means of production, brings commodity-production to an end. No longer is wealth produced by numerous separate enterprises all competing to sell their goods on the market. The law of value ceases to operate. Instead there is the planned production of useful things under the democratic control of society. This was the view of Marx and Engels and is the view of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. It was inherited also by the Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia in 1917. They proclaimed their ultimate aim as the abolition of the market and money and explained the persistence of commodity production after 1917 as a survival of capitalism which would gradually be eliminated. This is what the classic Bolshevik textbook of 1919 The ABC of Communism argues; it is also what the Irish Communist Organisation describe as “orthodox Marxism”.

In 1936 Stalin declared that Socialism had been established in Russia, despite the continued existence of commodity-production. This glaring contradiction was not resolved until 1943 when an article on “Teaching Economics in the Soviet Union” appeared in a leading Russian journal. This simply denied that Socialism involved the abolition of commodity-production and said that the law of value continued to operate under Socialism though, instead of acting blindly as under capitalism, it was consciously applied by the State. This line of thought has led today to Russian economists (just like their colleagues in the West) defending the market, and even rent, interest and profit as useful economic weapons. All this is traced and discussed in detail in this pamphlet.

In wishing to absolve Stalin from any blame for this distortion, the ICO is in a curious position. They say that the 1943 article “clearly represents revisionism at a high level of development and in an influential position in the CPSU” and imply that Stalin would not have endorsed it. This is most unlikely. So important an article could not have been written without Stalin’s knowledge or approval. Indeed it probably arose from the meeting Stalin had with leading Russian economists in 1941 which is mentioned in passing by one of the Russians quoted in this pamphlet. All the ICO have to go on to argue that Stalin held a view similar to the early Bolsheviks is some remarks in his Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, written in 1952.

It is odd that this pamphlet should be chosen as an example of the orthodox Marxist view. For it contains a very significant distortion of Marx’s view ― it argues that there will be “objective economic laws” under Socialism. An objective law is one that operates independently of the will of man. Natural laws are thus objective and so is the way capitalism works or what Marx called its laws of motion. A moment’s thought will show that there can be no such economic laws in a socialist society. For Socialism establishes full social control over the use of society’s productive resources. The production and distribution of wealth becomes purely a technical and administrative matter carried out in accordance with plans worked out and consciously implemented by human beings. Under these circumstances to talk of “objective economic laws” is nonsense. But Stalin was insistent on this point. “The laws of motion of the political economy of Socialism” he wrote, “are a reflection in the minds of men of objective laws existing outside of us”. But men could, he went on, discover what these laws were and “utilise them in the interests of society”.

In proclaiming that objective economic laws existed which could be controlled by the State in the interests of society, Stalin was paving the way for the current Russian argument that there is nothing as such wrong with commodity-production or money or the market or profits as long as they are properly controlled and not allowed to work blindly. This of course is the old impossible dream of capitalism planned to work for the good of all.

In a sense Stalin was right. The Russian economy has always been subject to economic forces that operate independently of men’s will. But that was because it is not, and never has been, socialist but a form of state capitalism.

Adam Buick

Marxism and Russia (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The outcome of the Russian Revolution —the evolution of state capitalism in Russia— was a confirmation of Marxism. For Marxism holds that Socialism is only possible at a certain level of social, economic and political development: when the productive system can provide plenty for all, and when the working class, being the main class in society, understands that their problems can be solved only through political action to make the means of production the property of the whole community. In 1917, could the Russian productive forces provide plenty? Was the working class the main class there? Were they Socialists? The answer to all three questions must be “no”. Given this the failure of the Bolshevik attempt to impose “Socialism” by dictatorship was inevitable. Marx was right. It is not possible to skip stages by bold leaps or legal enactments.

Cathy — no home to go to (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cathy — shall we ever forget — was the fair, slim, lovely young girl whose family and life were wrecked simply because they could not find a home. They went from one hopeless situation to another, from verminous slum to wet tent to reception centre. She was parted from her husband and then from the last of her children. In the end she stood by the roadside with the passing lamps of the lorries playing across her face. She was going home, back the way she had come.

The play was an instant success, owing nothing to the fact that it was the work of an ex-Etonian. There were one or two rather half-hearted attempts to debunk it but the author had got in first; all the incidents in the play, it was announced at the beginning, had happened, in London, during the previous year. This was reality. Shocked, everyone agreed; something must be done about the homeless.

That was several years ago. Since then, there have been countless promises and schemes to deal with the problem. Statistics have been computed, weighted, published. Speeches galore have been made and applauded. And last month the latest figures came out. in the annual report of the grandly titled Department of Health and Social Security.

That name in itself sounds enough to assure us all that health and security arc in good hands, that there is actually a department full of civil servants with higher civil servants at the head and a Minister of the Crown over them all to make sure that we are all healthy and secure. Surely, with such an army of talent and diligence to serve us, a little matter like the homeless would simply wither away?

As a matter of fact, this latest report includes a special write-up on the homeless, commissioned by Richard Crossman when he was at the head of the Department and before the electorate decided that they were so dissatisfied with the way the Labour government were dealing with these matters of health, security and so on that they would try the Tories again. And this write-up indicates that the late government have been less than successful in this field, where they made so much political capital while the Tories were last in power.

The report said that in 1969 20,820 people lived in emergency accommodation. In 1967 the figure was 16,176. which means that during the past two years the numbers of homeless people have risen by one third. Even a government like Wilson's, which was constantly nagging about increasing production, must feel proud at such a steep rise in that particular field of production, even if it is the production of misery.

It is bad enough to contemplate the rise in the homeless. What is worse is to do so against the background of the political manipulation which goes on, the pledges which are given and the idea which all the capitalist parties put about, that the problem can be cleared up simply by carrying out one or two policies which are to be found in their programmes. On housing, there seems no end to the politicians’ cynicism.

In the 1966 election, the Labour Party programme said that their first priority was houses. Note that: their first priority. They intended to achieve a target of 500,000 houses a year by 1969/ 70, and then to go on to higher levels still. Three months later, in June 1966, the Ministry of Housing were admitting that the present target of 400,000 a year could not be met and by the end of the year there had been what the Daily Telegraph called a “drastic” fall in house building. (At the same time, despite all those homeless, the builders were complaining about a fall-off in demand).

The same month these figures were announced, saw the launch of Shelter, heralded with a procession of grim statistics: three million families in Britain in slums, near slums or in grossly overcrowded conditions; in Glasgow 100,000 unfit houses, in Liverpool 73,733; a waiting list in London of 150,000 families, in Birmingham 38,000. This, apparently, was a fall-off in demand.

Nevertheless, the Labour government bounced back. The very next month blunt Bob Mellish, who won a reputation for straight speaking because he was MP for a dockers’ constituency and who was at that time Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing, lashed out with his own figures. He claimed a big advance in tackling the housing problem and audaciously predicted that London’s slums would be eradicated by 1972. Of course, at that time the Labour Party were rather worried about their chances in the elections to the GLC which were looming over an unpromising horizon but bluff Bob was too honest to be diverted by such considerations, wasn’t he?

About fourteen months later, in May 1968, Mellish’s Minister, Anthony Greenwood, enlarged on his claim. Perhaps, since Greenwood was a higher Minister than Mellish he thought it only right that he should be rather more ambitious. At any rate, he was not content to think just of London’s housing; he talked about ending the entire housing shortage “in about five years’ time”. He even went as far as to mention a surplus of housing, although he also said that nobody could forecast what the demand (that word again) would be in the 1970’s.

This startlingly confident approach was obviously considered a winner by the Labour government who, following Wilson’s dictum that in politics a week is a long time, must have thrilled to think how much longer is five years. In February 1969 Kenneth Robinson, who held the grand title of Minister of Planning and Land, coolly repeated the Greenwood line in the Commons:

By 1973 we should have a margin of about one million more houses than households. That should be just about enough nationally to give us the 5 per cent we want for mobility of labour and orderly working of the housing market. The national housing shortage should then be over . . .

One wonders what those builders, preoccupied with their visions of falling demand, thought about all this cheery talk of a surplus. Perhaps, keeping their heads like solid business men, they knew that it was all politicians’ blather. When the figures for 1969 housing came out. in January of this year, they showed a slump in the construction of new homes to 366,793 — the lowest total since the bad Tory days of 1963. Somehow, Greenwood could not bring himself once again to talk about ending the shortage; he fell back on the old Labour sport of Tory-bashing. “In the last five years,” he said, “there have been five houses built for every four built in the last five years of the previous government.” Which was not, probably, a remark which helped Labour win the last election.

And that brings us to the last batch of manifestoes, and the promises in them, again, to end the housing shortage. Labour’s are for the moment irrelevant; the Tories said that they will

. . . house the homeless . . . concentrate on slum clearance and . . . provide better housing for those many families living without modern amenities.

Good enough to warrant a standing ovation at a Tory conference, but in reality worth no more than all the other, similar pledges made before. (The Tory programme also said that the problem of the homeless “. . . is concealed by unrealistic official statistics. We will lay down a more sensible definition . . " That must have got past the censor.)

And that brings us to the present, and to the latest figures of homeless. One criticism which was made of Cathy Come Home was that Cathy and her husband were such nice, good-looking, intelligent people that they did not represent a homeless family, who are usually of the more inadequate, lower paid variety of worker. There may be some point in this, but if there is it only highlights the fact that housing difficulties are part of a poverty problem and that the deeper the poverty the worse the housing situation.

Poverty is ineradicable under capitalism but the system’s leaders can never admit their impotence to deal with it. They must go on. with their promises and their assertions and their programmes. Meanwhile, the harsh reality remains. This is what Enoch Powell, who sometimes comes uncomfortably near the truth for the peace of mind of his fellow-misleaders, once said about it all:

For fifty years we — my brother politicians — have practised in regard to housing the oldest and cruellest of all the deceptions which politicians practise on their victims — to persuade them that we will make a thing cheap and plentiful for them by holding down the price of it by force. (The Guardian, 29 November 1968)

“Cruel . . . deception . . . victims . . .” What words to use, about the work of what is supposed to be an honourable profession. But what other words can be used, about the people who are prepared to lie and cheat to gain some advantage for their particular method of running capitalism, and when they coldly do so knowing that they are playing with the health and the happiness of human beings?

Capitalism has no home for Cathy, only endless misery and despair, with lives broken and all in the name of privilege. We are right to be angry but at the same time we must remember that there is work to be done, to set up the new society of abundance and hope.

Ivan.

A Question of Incentives (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are often told that a society operating on the socialist principle of — from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs — must fail. All the incentives that bring out the best in mankind are missing. Something called a reward in the form of cash payment is needed to overcome a natural reluctance to get down to a bit of hard work. The argument goes on that this is especially so where unpleasant working conditions are involved. How could large cities get people to man the essential services without monetary reward? So unpleasant are tasks such as sewage disposal, rubbish collecting and pest control we are told, that only the fear of losing their affluence keeps people at those jobs. Under Socialism, without wages to keep us working, we would laze our time away and end up engulfed by our own dirt. Let us see what this argument in defence of capitalism is worth.

How well does the “pot of gold" technique cope with routine tasks of keeping such vital services going? At the time of writing the people doing these jobs are exerting themselves to get more of that ‘reward’. Are they doing it by working harder? Not likely, experience has taught them that less work helps them in this respect. The strike and go-slow by virtue of the inconvenience they cause employers are weapons in the workers’ quest for more wages and better working conditions. It must be noted that employers can and do use the no-work technique to bring pressure to bear on their employees; that is the lock-out. The society of wage labour and capital is one of conflict and antagonism. On the one hand the workers must if they are to defend their interests act anti-socially. On the other, employers must resist and be no less anti-social. As in most strikes dire warnings are issued. This time they are not about “the nation’s trade" but about the danger to “public health" due to pollution from untreated sewage getting into rivers and a plague of rats thriving on uncollected garbage.

The Daily Telegraph (8 October) quotes Conservative Minister Peter Walker speaking on the environment at his party's conference.

  Referring to the strike of local government employees, he said no responsible authority could go beyond the offer the men had rejected. As a result of the men’s action rivers had been polluted and in some cases, if the pollution continued it might take years to put right.

Here the threat of pollution is being used as a weapon in the struggle. What an equation, the workers demand 55s a week pay- rise; the employers (responsible authority) offers 36s a week and over the difference of a miserly 19s, years of river pollution could result. As Walker well knows pollution is rapidly becoming a major problem for capitalism. Not because of strikes but due to the need to keep costs down; industrial and domestic waste including sewage is dumped as cheaply as possible and pollution follows. The quarrel over pay claims is bound up with this cheese-paring procedure. Far from being well paid it is recognised that these jobs are amongst the poorest. So much for rewards..

When it comes to taking adequate precautions to safeguard the public wellbeing in other ways we find that capitalism is just as niggardly. When dustmen strike we are warned of plagues of rats. In spite of the warning, those who pay the wages don’t seem to be in much hurry to settle the dispute. However it was admitted in a recent survey in the Evening Standard (8 October) that other factors are involved. One is demolition work. Another is economy measures. The G.L.C. borough of Islington has seven council rodent operatives whereas there had previously been twelve for the same area. The Evening Standard comments “no wonder they can’t cope. (Last year the seven operatives made 3.500 visits in the borough)”.

If capitalism runs its services for preventing disease on a shoe string, how does it do when curing the same? The same London evening paper ran a story that started:

  A casualty patient can wait up to three hours to see a doctor in most inner London hospitals. The cause : A severe shortage of doctors and nurses.

Need we go on? If there is one thing about capitalism it is that it provides plenty of evidence to expose the fallacious arguments about incentives and efficiency. The new government have sworn that things won’t change. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer put it:

   Employers both in the public and the private sectors must be prepared to resist unreasonable claims even if it means standing up to strikes. (Evening News, 9 October)

We wonder what he made of the report in the Times (9 Sept.) of a survey of directors’ salaries that showed “an increase of 91 per cent between 1968 and 1969 in the remuneration of part-time chairmen”.

What is the answer then? This strike has shown the potential. A call was made for volunteers to keep the sewage works going. Not with the lure of financial gain but on the basis of helping out in an emergency. That many people offered their help no doubt strengthened the employers' bargaining position. This is typical of capitalism that it perverts people's finer feelings, in this case by having them as potential strike breakers. At present the working class accept capitalism and are easily divided against their fellow workers. Once they understand their class position and how they are exploited through the wages system. they will unite for the political task of establishing Socialism. Socialism must operate on a basis of voluntary co-operation. Once the question of cash payment no longer intervenes, that of removing drudgery from work must dominate. It will only be in a free society where production is solely for use that human welfare will come first.

Joe Carter

A visit to eastern Europe (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

When socialists visit so-called socialist countries it can be a particularly nauseating experience, because socialists proceed with their eyes open and with a background of understanding. What they sec is a variety of capitalism, which more correctly might be designated as fascism. One should not forget that the Nazis called themselves socialists (National Socialist German Workers Party) The label on the bottle does not always denote the medicine inside.

I have several times been to the so-called “Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia”, but have never seen anything remotely resembling socialism there.

The workers of Yugoslavia arc paid wages, and there is at present much unemployment— just as in other capitalist countries. Money is used as a means of exchange because there is buying and selling — a fundamental of capitalism. This may be new to non-socialists, but indicates to us the true nature of the economy.

Outside the trade union hall in Belgrade, I watched hundreds of workers trying to get into the hall to see an important chess match. At that moment, an enormous car came along — a veritable palace on wheels, and a sort of combination of a Rolls-Royce and a Cadillac. One should appreciate that the average car in Yugoslavia is well below the standard here. I concluded that this car must be that of President Tito. When it pulled up I noticed the Soviet flag flying on the bonnet, and out stepped the Russian chess team, immaculately clad just like film stars. The Yugoslavs beamed at them as if they were from Mars.

When the chess tournament started there was the usual speeches from the platform by the local mayor and other dignitaries, who proudly welcomed the Russians (and others) to the “Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia”, and one speech after the other kept referring to the “Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia”.

I once asked a railway official (who was both interpreter and guide) where 1 could see any signs of socialism in Yugoslavia. “Yes”, he said, as if pleased with my simple question. “Just come with me”. He took me to the square outside the station which was decorated with Russian and Yugoslav flags, following some agreement between those countries at that time. “There”, he said proudly, “that’s positive signs of socialism”. When I told him that flag waving (as socialists saw it) was a sign of jingoism or patriotism, he failed to appreciate my standpoint.

The German Democratic Republic

The crossing of the East German territory when travelling to Berlin by plane presents no difficulties, for one flies straight in. But when going by train, one has to traverse the Eastern zone, known by the false name of “German Democratic Republic”, for no democracy exists there.

In 1946 when the G.D.R. was formed, the Communist Party received only 20 per cent of the vote which gave them power; and in 1953 Russian tanks faced and butchered a mass of hostile workers during an uprising. There can scarcely be anything democratic after that affair.

When the train stops at the West German frontier, the passport authorities quickly walked through the corridors, and their work was finished in a few minutes. Then the train goes on through two or three miles of no-man’s land to the Eastern frontier. The passport inspection is quite another thing here. 1 counted no less than twenty-four officials who swarmed into the train or played a part in the inspection. Two soldiers with rifles were standing at each end of the train, and I noticed a policeman with a large Alsatian dog standing on the line near the end of the train. Then he let the dog off the lease, and the dog went under the train from end to end, for obvious reasons.

Four other officials climbed on top of the train and opened the vents and covers where the water for the toilets is taken in, walking the whole length of the train to perform this task.

The delay caused by this thorough search took up about an hour, and the train was nearly empty. Reports have it that three or four hours delay are not unusual.

From West Berlin foreigners (but not West Berliners) can visit East Berlin by special coach. Passport details, and the amount of money one has, are all checked and entered on a large form which has to be signed before one is allowed to board the coach.

“Check Point Charlie” is a special entry point on the Berlin wall. The wall itself is about ten feet high, with concrete blocks and barbed wire to decorate it realistically. There are notices of mines, and soldiers arc patrolling it on the Eastern side; while on the Western side is an electrified wire fence in case one has managed to beat the other obstacles. The atmosphere of the concentration camp dominates everything ; and I began to wonder, as a socialist, what 1 had let myself in for.

At “Check Point Charlie” everybody had to descend from the coach and line up with “permit disc” bearing a letter and number (and in numerical order — like in army or prison), while the East German guards checked every detail of passports, visas, and the form which had been signed in the Western zone. This took about an hour, and frequently visitors are sent back because their passports are not in order for the East section. When one has scaled all these hurdles, you re-board the coach and are permitted to go through from “Capitalist Berlin to Socialist Berlin”.

East Berlin, which remained far behind West in re-building, has now surged forwards and there is a mass of buildings completed, and many still being built. The Russians pillaged all they could lay their hands upon, and Fast Germany suffered as a result. While the West was receiving Marshall Aid, East Berlin was being ransacked and made to pay for the war. No wonder the East Germans wanted to escape to the West.

The coach stopped only once during its three hours in East Berlin, and that was in the middle of a park where there was no possibility of contacting anybody. The real purpose of this stop was for toilet requirements, although the official guide made it appear that the purpose was to visit an enormous war memorial, guarded by Russian soldiers. The Russians evidently knew that if they did not guard their monuments in Hast Berlin, the workers would soon demolish them.

We were several times warned that cameras and newspapers must not be taken into East Berlin — so democratic is their regime.

With all the propaganda and security of this police state, there was absolutely nothing remotely resembling socialism— only a nauseating hypocrisy.

Horace Jarvis

The Bourgeois role of Bolshevism (1970)

Book Review from the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Insurrectionists, by W. J. Fishman. Methuen. 55s.

The theme of this book is one we ourselves have often advanced: that, as we put it in the April Socialist Standard, Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party can be traced back through Russian revolutionaries like Ogarev and Tkachev to French revolutionaries like Babeuf and Buonarroti.

Fishman writes as an obvious opponent of what he thinks is Socialism and so does not really know what Marxism is all about. Nevertheless he does describe well enough the evolution of insurrectionist ideas as they spread from 18th century France to 20th century Russia and he does make some useful points.

The original Jacobins under Robespierre ruled France for a brief period in 1793-4. Though not against private property, they were on the side of the poor against the rich and believed in the ruthless use of violence to crush any opposition to Equality, one of the supposed aims of the French Revolution.

The first to combine the idea of an armed uprising and then a temporary exercise of armed power with that of communism was Babeuf (1760-1797), who was executed for his part in an abortive such coup in 1796. One of his collaborators was Buonarroti, whose account of the uprising under the revealing title of Conspiration pour L'Égalité served as a handbook for the following generation of would-be insurrectionists. Buonarroti, who lived on as an active conspirator till his death in 1837. argued that, since the old order so degraded the masses that they were unable either to see where their interests lay or to act for themselves, it was only an active, conscious minority that could overthrow the old order. This minority should be organised as a secret society with the aim of seizing power in an insurrection.

Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). who spent most of his life in prison, was the man who more than any other personified this kind of insurrectionism. He, too, stood for a vague communist society and again argued that the masses were so ignorant as a result of the old order that its overthrow would have to be the work of a minority. Marx had a great respect for Blanqui as a man of action, but their ideas of the social revolution was quite different. For Marx it was not a question of a minority insurrection followed by a minority rule leading to communism, but rather a question of a majority capture of power (perhaps by peaceful means) followed by democratic majority rule leading to communism (or Socialism—he gave the two words the same meaning). The emancipation of the working class, proclaimed Marx in a famous slogan, was the task of the working class itself. Although Fishman quotes Engels’ well-known repudiation of minority insurrection in 1895, he does not bring out the important difference between the theories of Marx and those of previous communist revolutionaries like Babeuf, Buonarroti and Blanqui. He stood for majority revolution; they stood for minority insurrection. What he learned from them was the need to win and use political power ("dictatorship" as it was then called) to carry through the social revolution.

French revolutionary ideas spread all over Europe, including Tsarist Russia where an attempted coup was made as early as 1825. Here the secret society was the only possible form of revolutionary organisation and it was strongly advocated by Ogarev (1814-1877), a collaborator of Alexander Herzen. Ogarev was well acquainted with Buonarroti’s book and it was through him that French ideas on how to organise an insurrection — including the secret “vanguard” party — were transmitted to the Russian opponents of Tsarism.

The view that because of their oppression the masses were so ignorant that a minority organised as a secret society would have to act for them was held by many well-known Russian revolutionaries, including Nechaev (1847-1882) (the man who made a fool of Bakunin) and Tkachev (1844-1886) and even by Bakunin himself.

Tkachev, who associated with the Blanquists while in exile, is particularly important in that he anticipated some of Lenin's views on how to overthrow the Tsar. He realised that by themselves the revolutionaries could not overthrow the Tsarist bureaucracy; they needed a mass basis. He suggested the peasants as the weapon the revolutionary leaders should wield. He even realised the possibilities of using the then developing urban working class as the main element in the mass struggle. In the insurrection, said Tkachev, the Tsarist bureaucratic State should be completely smashed but the victorious leaders should set up another State in its place — an idea Lenin later tried to foist on Marx with regard to the modern bourgeois State.

By Lenin's time the use which a revolutionary minority might be able to make of the urban working class was even more obvious. Lenin, sticking to the by now well-established Russian revolutionary idea of a vanguard party and the ignorance of the masses, suggested a new tactic: the anti-Tsarist revolutionaries should concentrate on using the working class as their main weapon.

It is here that Fishman’s lack of understanding of Marxism leads him astray. He thinks that Lenin advocated this tactic as a means of establishing Socialism in Russia (in fact he mistakenly thinks there is now Socialism there, but that’s another matter). But until 1917 Lenin’s aim was the traditional one of the Russian revolutionaries: the establishment of a democratic republic. From his study of Marxism, he knew that this was the task of the bourgeoisie and one they had carried out in some West European countries. Lenin saw that in Russia the bourgeoisie was too weak to do this and applied Marx’s analysis of the period of Jacobin rule in France to the Russia of his day. By their drastic actions against the old feudal order. Marx pointed out, the Jacobins though not themselves of the bourgeoisie had furthered the bourgeois revolution by taking measures the bourgeoisie was afraid to take itself, Lenin’s suggestion was that this was more or less what would have to happen in Russia: Russia’s bourgeois revolution (the establishment of a democratic republic) would have to be accomplished without the bourgeoisie by the vanguard party leading the workers and peasants.

Trotsky argued that if the working class were to gain power in the course of Russia's bourgeois revolution they would, and should, go on to take "socialist” measures. Fishman does not seem to realise that Lenin did not come round to this view till 1917, nor that Trotsky did not accept the vanguard party idea till 1917 either. He has them as collaborators from 1902 on, an elementary mistake.

Lenin’s switch in 1917 from aiming at a democratic republic to a "socialist” one took him even further away from Marxism, but it did not invalidate his previous analysis of how Russia’s bourgeois revolution would come. The role of the Bolsheviks in Russia’s bourgeois revolution did indeed turn out to be the same as that of the Jacobins in France’s, that is, to carry through measures against the old order the bourgeoisie themselves were incapable of. The great difference was that while the Jacobins' rule did not last, the Bolsheviks’ rule did and the Bolshevik rulers gradually evolved into a new bourgeoisie (or capitalist class) themselves. Lenin and Trotsky confirmed their own earlier prognosis: their seizure of power in 1917 and subsequent short rule paved the way for the further development of capitalism in Russia.

Adam Buick