The "Irish Press" and the "Socialist Standard" (1963)

Party News from the October 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently the Executive Committee of the World Socialist Party of Ireland decided to launch an advertising campaign on behalf of the Socialist Standard. As we are restricted by finances, we decided to use small advertisements on a wide scale rather than larger advertisements in a few newspapers. In keeping with this decision the General Secretary of the Party sent a small advertisement (offering free specimen copies of the Standard) to the Irish Press, Ltd., for publication in their morning daily.

A short time later a letter was received from the advertising manager of the Irish Press stating that before publication of the advertisement they would need to peruse a copy of the Socialist Standard as well as being advised about its distributive outlets in the Republic of Ireland.

The request was unusual in our experience and the tone of the letter indicated that the senders, were in something of a dilemma. Viciously opposed to advertising anything that might pierce the fog of ignorance spread by the Press in the Republic, they were by virtue of their attacks on the Unionist Press in the North, like occupants of a glass house, unwilling to become involved in throwing stones. Obviously they hoped to avoid the need for an outright refusal on a “technical” issue.

But it was not to be. Our General Secretary sent them a copy of the Housing issue of the Socialist Standard, as well as the additional information requested. Doubtless the news-chiefs of the Press, who feed a steady diet of political rubbish to the Irish working class, went painstakingly through the columns of the Standard. No pornography, no four-letter words, were found; no cosy excuse for denying the W.S.P.I. the same right to advertise as is extended to the other political organisations in Ireland.

But the slum property of Irish landlords was falling in on its hapless inhabitants causing death and destruction. The Press, along with the other newspapers, carried the stories of tragedy; the Socialist Standard revealed the brutal hand of capitalism in the misery of slumdom. The Press, as pious upholders of Irish capitalism, could not afford to advertise an indictment of the system from which it draws its revenue.

Accordingly, some fourteen days later, our General Secretary received an almost-pleading letter in which the advertising manager of the Press said: “. . . we would ask you to excuse us from publishing your advertisement just at the moment”.

It seemed almost sadistic to prolong the embarrassment of the newspaper set up by De Valera and his cohorts in 1926 to “promote the ideals of freedom”. However, our General Secretary tried again; he requested publication of an advertisement merely stating the fact of our political existence and the address of our Head Office, but this again was refused—with the hypocritical assurance that the publishers of the Press had nothing against our organisation!

All this from the paper that prattles about freedom and denounces the Unionist Press in N. Ireland for discriminating against the nationalist minority. There is nothing to commend the editorial policies of the Unionist newspapers; we would be less than honest however, if we failed to admit that usually we are given fair representation in their columns, and we have never had an advertisement questioned or refused by the most rabid of the Unionist papers. This in an area represented by Irish Press Newspapers as an armed concentration camp where minorities are ruthlessly silenced.

The Socialist Standard will be pleased to publish any statement by the Irish Press setting out the reasons for refusing to accept our advertising. Surely the “great men in the struggle for freedom” who grace its columns and its Board of Directors have sufficient courage to come into the open and defend the attitudes of their paper. Or has absolute power corrupted absolutely?

Richard Montague

The Socialist attitude to the Kibbutznik (1963)

From the October 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

First, we had better define our terms. Most of our readers will probably know what a Socialist is. But if, for example, you think he is a follower of say, Harold Wilson or Nikita Kruschev, you would be sadly mistaken. Socialists are people who want political power for one purpose only, to revolutionise the world we live in, and change it from a Capitalist system to a Socialist one, where the means of life are owned by society as a whole. Which of course rules out the Kruschevs and the Wilsons. They want power sure enough. But whatever labourites and communists have used power for, they have never used it for making the means of life into the common property of all the people. No sensible person even expects them to.

What are kibbutznik? They are Israelis who live in various kinds of communal settlement (the kibbutz). It is the purpose of this article to tell something about this interesting experiment, to show what the kibbutznik aim at, what they achieve, and to see what lessons they provide for those interested in Socialism.

The general background of the kibbutz movement is that among the many Jews who became Zionists (people who believed that the remedy for anti-semitism and persecution from which Jews have suffered for centuries was to form a Jewish State in Palestine) were some who felt that the economic basis of their life should be communal. These people were dissatisfied not only with anti-semitism but also with capitalism and considered themselves to be Socialists. They therefore formed themselves into groups, varying in size from a few dozen to a few hundred, for the purpose of organising their lives on farm settlements in what was formerly Palestine and is now Israel.

Most members of these groups were young Jews from Eastern Europe. They had to be young because the conditions were arduous, the land often barren and malarial, and the surrounding Arab population hostile and dangerous. And it is no coincidence that the bulk of these pioneers came from countries like Poland and Tsarist Russia, because there antisemitism was rife and so-called Socialist movements were thick on the ground. There were a number of different “movements " among the settlers roughly corresponding to the kind of left-wing movements they were used to in Europe—Labour (Mapai). left-wing and somewhat fellow-travelling labour (Hashomer Hatsair) and various orthodox religious groups.

One thing they had in common was that they were all idealists who wanted to show that there was another kind of life (and another kind of Jew) than the one of sweating in tailoring factories or furniture works or, for the go-getters and the successful minority, the chance of becoming rich exploiters themselves. They wanted to show the world that people can live in a spirit of one-for-all and all-for-one. They obtained land mainly with funds raised from the charity of Jews rich and poor who stayed in the countries of the west, and from the same source they also obtained the capital to buy materials for building their living quarters and farm buildings. The land was usually cheap because in many cases it was desert and swamp and the main asset of the group was the enthusiasm, the sweat and tears (often also the blood) of the kibbutzniks themselves.

Many readers will have already detected a similarity between this sort of movement and others which have been tried in various countries of Europe and. particularly, of America. The one important difference appears to be that, after a history of up to about 50 years, with new settlements being formed even now, the kibbutz movement can make a reasonable claim to have stood the test of time — some time at least. Any visitor to Israel can see for himself that the kibbutz are viable institutions; they work. And by and large, the majority of the people are reasonably satisfied with their daily lives.

Now perhaps we can take a look at the way a typical kibbutz is run and in so doing we may be able to see how their ideas compare with those of Socialists. We will find that the kibbutzniks are not Socialists. The fact that they call themselves Socialists proves nothing. After all. so does Kruschev, so does Wilson. But we may find some features of kibbutz life which we are happy to salute as demonstrating the truth of some of the things we Socialists claim.

“From each according to his ability." That, the first half of the Socialist's golden rule for the kind of society he wants to create, is by and large a principle which works in practice in the settlements. The problem of the scrounger, the lazy man who will let his fellows do the work, is one that is always thrust at Socialist propagandists; it is not a problem that causes much loss of sleep in the kibbutz. The average settler does his best for the settlement because he knows that it belongs to him as much as to anyone. He knows he is working for his own wife and children as well as others. And he knows that the work is necessary for the settlement to survive; and acting on this knowledge, he behaves not like a rat in a capitalist rat race but like a human being.

The problem of “ who will do the dirty work " is also one that does not loom large. There is a lot of dirty work on a communal farm. It gets done because it has to be done. Those who are used to looking down on the dustman forget that this is only the case because he is regarded as an also-ran who has failed in the rat-race towards so-called better (and of generally better-paid) jobs. The kibbutznik who cleans the cowshed does so because it needs cleaning. He is doing a job for the good of all. And because of this he is looked up to and not down upon by his fellows. Surprisingly enough, this makes the cow-dung less smelly. Some people like doing the job and have only pity for the white-collared clerk in a London bank who adds up his incessant rows of figures of other people's money. Of course, they are sensible enough to rotate jobs as much as possible, when elections take place for administrative committees to run the affairs of the community, the cowman’s vote is equal to the secretary’s. He is in fact just as likely to be elected himself, and in such a process, the principle of leadership tends to get lost. Which is the best thing that can happen to it.

“To each according to his need." It is in this second half of our dictum that the kibbutz shows its essential failing. Socialism encourages a world which is built upon the enormous powers of production which capitalist society has engendered. A world where goods are so plentiful that we can all have free access to them in the way that we have virtually free access to water now. The kibbutz, far from utilising the enormous powers created by international capitalism, is by very definition a small-scale isolated enterprise. As such it cannot produce goods in teeming abundance so that all can help themselves freely. On the contrary, kibbulzniks can only have a limited ration of limited supplies. It is only their idealism that enables the settlers to run with reasonable smoothness a society where everyone must be spartan enough to take only an equal share of the modest amount available. And partly for this reason, most of the workers of Israel prefer to work for private capitalists. But think how life could be if only we all had a chance to share, not in parsimony, but in abundance.

The kibbutz is an attempt to make little islands in the worldwide ocean of capitalism. It cannot be self-sufficient (not even a giant country like Russia or the US. could be that) so it must produce its goods—normally farm produce—for sale on the capitalist market. In return it buys the things it cannot produce—clothes, bricks, glass, tractors, radios and the countless other essentials. It is therefore at the mercy of the market like all capitalist enterprises and the demand for (and the price of) its products shows the usual anarchic fluctuations of glut and shortage that the capitalist world knows so well. Socialism means, among other things, production not for sale on a market but directly for the use of human beings. No kibbutznik, be he never so convinced that he is a living exponent of Socialism, can claim that his movement has anything like this basic feature of Socialism: most of them, in fact, will hardly be aware that Socialism poses this as a basic fundamental. The kibbutz is as far from this as is every other section of our capitalist world.

The kibbutz movement has to struggle with the fact that many of its younger members become dissatisfied with their small island and are lured to the big world where there are so many of the things that large scale production offers—not to speak of theatres and pavement cafes and sea-beaches. But it has an advantage over most such experiments in that the Israeli government finds the settlements and their idealistic (and often chauvinistic) members to be valuable adjuncts of their military forces. If and when their use in this respect is less important, the kibbutz will find that the government's benevolence and support, which have been so valuable to their survival, will tend to disappear. Such are the facts of life in a capitalist world.

In a word then—the kibbutznik is not a Socialist But he is a human being who is demonstrating in practice what we Socialists have always maintained—that people can behave like human beings. And if they can do this under their own difficult restricted circumstances, how much better and easier could it all be in a society of world-wide abundance. For that is what Socialism will be.

L. E. Weidberg

Demonstration in Washington (1963)

From the October 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The demonstration by two hundred thousand people in Washington recently to protest at discrimination against the American Negro was an example of self-disciplined protest —restrained, yet massively determined. August 28th marked the flaring of accumulated frustrations that had smouldered for over two centuries. From this time forward the character of the Negroes' struggle is altered, they have a national organisation and specifically formulated demands that they can pursue in the spotlight of world-wide publicity.

‘Nobody knows the trouble I seen’ is a familiar lament of a Negro blues song. It expresses the special misery of 19 million people who have inherited a legacy of hatred and violent suffering. Although it is possible to recognise it as a fact, nobody who has not experienced it can feel on his shoulders the harrowing burden of American Negro history. And even now, for the Negro, life offers unstinted humiliation, for added to his exploitation as a wage worker, in every corner of American social life he faces the pointed finger that accuses him of racial inferiority. 

In public transport, he is still to a large extent accommodated on sufferance, unseen at the rear of the bus, or on segregated trains he is refused the privilege of using the dining car. Of perhaps more importance, he is denied any equal access to education. In the area of employment, he is the last hired and the first fired, which in an economy that for years has supported millions of unemployed, involves the Negro in semi-permanent economic depression. In housing and other social amenities the Negro gets the worst of everything. In respect of freedom of speech and the franchise he is prevented by brutal intimidation, more particularly in the southern states, from exercising his ostensible right to vote. Here again, his right to assemble is jeopardised and made physically dangerous by the police. In some localities, the Negroes' struggle is reduced to one about basic democratic rights, which for many decades white workers have been able to take for granted. In these areas, the political climate for the Negro is no different than in the police state.

Again the repressive atmosphere in which the Negro still has to live, there exist counter tendencies. On the one hand there are social pressures acting against the exercise of colour discrimination. Without doubt there is an hardcore of prejudice built into attitudes of older generations, younger generations will be more susceptible to attacks on this issue through the media of radio, television, cinema and the press. There are dozens of books and pamphlets now available on archeology, biology and all departments of the social sciences that refute, and reveal the intellectual shallowness of, bigoted views on race. Against this phalanx of argument, documented with detailed evidence, the enunciation of prejudice remains the preserve of those whose thought processes are captivated by blind irrationality.

On the face of it, there would seem to be a good deal of affinity between the aspirations of Negroes in America and the economic and social reforms that the Kennedy administration seeks to bring into effect. But in truth, the American Government is moved by political and economic compulsions that take into account the interests of Negroes in only an incidental way. It was the Eisenhower Administration that saw the uneducated, under privileged Negro represented the greatest single aspect of manpower wastage in the United States.

To an economy dedicated to a doctrine of steady expansion, the unfitness of the quality of Negro labour power is an enormously inhibiting factor. This applies especially in the southern states, where  since the end of the second world war, there has been a rapid development and intense concentration of secondary industry, a phase in the history of the total economy which amounts to a second age of expansion. Indeed, the financial cost of local prejudice to the American capitalist class runs high. Enormous amounts of money are invested in the institutions and general facilities for education. This represents an investment in the quality of tomorrow's available exploitable labour power. That a large section of the working class should remain more or less unaffected by this preparation process is a costly economic absurdity.

The unfitness of the Negro for exploitation in a community geared to production of an increasingly complex technical nature is of critical relevance to the future of the American state, both economically and militarily. Reformist politicians who exercise power in the administration of capitalism are not men of principle but are flexible "realists," who react promptly to the needs of the moment. And though they may describe their ends and their motives in terms of glowingly humane moral appeals which are often hard to resist, ultimately their eye is on the fast buck and the military strength of the power they represent.

The question that Negroes must ask themselves is whether capitalism can accommodate all their needs and aspirations towards material security, the freedom and opportunity to develop their individuality and the realisation of harmonious integration with the rest of humanity.

Capitalism cannot give the working class of any colour material security. Its entire method of producing and distributing wealth is based on a system of sale for profit and there can be no security in a distribution system that overrides human needs in favour of the vagaries of market demands. A system that always includes the risk of creating unemployment and so shutting off the provision of material necessities. Even the earning of a regular wage is not enough to provide these necessities for individual needs from birth until death.

The part of this Negro protest demanding scope for the development of individuality cannot be realised within capitalism, the very basis of which is the exploitation of man by man. The contribution of the individual to society through his work is made under capitalism the very means by which he is being brought under economic subjection. Under the duress of his poverty, the worker is forced to sell his physical energies to an employer for wages. The very essence of his individual existence, his power to labour socially, is brought under the control of another, his employer, in exchange for wages. How then can any wage worker of any colour, who donates his whole life in the employ of other men, who works most waking hours of most of his working life at the direction of other men, possibly develop individuality?

Again, capitalism can never provide the Negro with his dream of true social integration. Because capitalism is based on the ethic of material interest at the expense of other men, it inevitably must remain a divided society. There can be no social integration for any man whatever his colour where there is no genuine world wide community of interests and where almost every aspect of social life is in vicious competition, individual against individual, group against group, nation against nation.

It is vital that sooner or later Negroes should transcend any strong identification they have with what they may regard as an exclusively "Negro" interest. At the moment, at least in America, this is made extremely difficult for them. In a hundred and one ways, American life drives the Negro into insularity and narrow fugitive attitudes, and to some extent, especially where democratic rights are concerned, their views can be understood.

At the same time, it must be remembered that there are no solutions to the problems of this world that hold out hope to any particular section of men without holding out hope at the same time to all men. Individuals have had the courage and the generosity to rise above the embittering agony of their recent history. James Baldwin writes ‘I am not a nigger—I am a man.’ We equally wish to simplify things and join in the refutation of ‘ Niggers,’ ‘ Yids,’ ‘ Wogs,’ ‘ Proddydogs,’ ‘Jocks’ and ‘White Trash’. We too want to celebrate —Man.

Pieter Lawrence