Japan: the courage of a few (1983)

Book Review from the November 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan by John Crump (Croom Helm, 1983)

Yesterday the Japanese were the "Japs", sub-human orientals who specialised in war atrocities. Today they are a congenitally hard-working race who produce quality goods cheaply and efficiently. Which image is the true one? Doubtless neither, for popular images are rarely based on truth or direct experience. Although the Japanese people, as peoples everywhere in the world, have changed and developed by interaction with their environment and the circumstances of history, they have always been seen by outsiders through the distorting lens of the interests and propaganda of those with control over the means of information. The truth is something we have to find out for ourselves. And to help us find out the truth about Japan we now have an excellent new tool. John Crump's new book (1) looks at Japanese development between 1868 and 1918 but also sheds considerable light on the shaping of Japan and its people since then.

Even in terms of the period explicitly covered, the book's title understates its scope. For apart from describing vividly and authoritatively the events and personalities of the epoch and giving a coherent account of ideas about socialism which were then in circulation, it also paints a broad sweeping picture of the whole make up of Japanese society when different social and political forces at work after the Meiji restoration started the process of capitalist development.

Japan has had to telescope its industrialisation into a far shorter period than older established capitalist countries like Britain. Most of it has taken place in the last 30-40 years. But the foundation was laid in the slow accumulating of capital which began in the mid-nineteenth century. And slow it was, for in 1902 little over 1 per cent of Japan's 46m population were industrial workers and in 1918 the figure was still only 2.6 per cent in a population of 54.7m. The slowness of the process, however, did not stop it being extremely painful for those caught up in it. More painful in fact than it had been for workers in nineteenth century Europe. Crump quotes eye-witness accounts of children of six upwards working eight hours a day for the equivalent of a few pence and cites the admission of the then President of the Industrial Bank of Japan that "the condition of labourers is to be pitied by an impartial observer". Workplace conditions were hellish for both men and women. The women, many of them girls barely in their teens, constituted more than 50 per cent of the workforce. They could be paid less for their work than men. They would labour up to 18 hours a day in the mills, drenched in sweat, in temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. They suffered illness and premature death on a large scale. Such conditions led, as they have everywhere in developing capitalism, to protests which took the form of collective action by workers to try to force better pay and working conditions from their employers - nascent trade unionism. Official trade unionism remained illegal in Japan throughout this period, so workers had no choice but to take illegal action. When they did, they were sometimes successful in their demands, but more often were driven back to work by the forces of a state incomparably more repressive than any in nineteenth century Western Europe. The violent clashes that took place between protesting workers and the police and army occasionally resulted in widespread damage to property and heavy casualties on both sides, as for example in the copper miners' action of 1906-7 and the rice riots of 1918. Many of the copper workers had been soldiers in the mass slaughter of the 1905-6 Russo-Japanese war and, although now demobilised, used their training for violence to unbargained for effect against the forces of state repression.

When disturbances like these took place, many radical minds in Japan mistakenly thought that the workers' revolution had come. They failed to see that these were little more than expressions of despair devoid of ideological content. The radicals were rarely industrial workers themselves and shut their  eyes to the most important factor of all -  that the Japanese working class was still tiny in comparison to the overwhelmingly peasant-based population. For this reason the mass consciousness needed for a workers' socialist revolution was impossible in Japan at the time.

Any changes which promised to better workers' conditions, however, tended to be referred to as "socialist'. And indeed few of the early Japanese "socialists" saw socialism as anything more than trying to make the existing system more humane through social reforms or, at most, nationalising industry under centralised state control, as was to happen later in Russia and other countries. Their notion of socialism was based on the European conception coming mainly from the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), seen as a "powerful older brother". The small groups of Japanese "socialists" that grew up even imitated the SPD in its rifts and controversies over reform or revolution - over whether to concentrate on getting into capitalist parliaments and implementing reforms or whether to go for an immediate and potentially violent revolution aimed at getting rid of parliament and private ownership of capital and establishing state control over the economy. Both these policies were, as in Europe, referred to as "socialism", whereas they were just different recipes for running capitalism. As the author of this book states: "Capital no more ceases to be an anarchic force outside of people's rational control on being collectivised than the state ceases to be an organ of repression on being given a socialist label".

The operating space allowed to these groups by the Japanese authorities was extremely limited and the state had frequent brutal recourse to the infamous "Public Peace Police Law". For the courageous few who dared to speak out, losing their jobs and social ostracism were the least penalties. For many it meant exile, imprisonment or even death. After a small street demonstration in june 1908, a number of the demonstrators were arrested. Among those taken to the police station, Crump says, "Arahata Kanson and Osugi Sakae were ruthlessly beaten up. Stripped naked, both men were dragged by their feet along the corridors, were kicked, beaten and stamped on, the police only ultimately relenting when Arahata had been beaten into unconsciousness . . . For the heinous crime of demonstrating with red flags, nine socialists received prison sentences of up to 2½ years." Particularly poignant is the case of Kotoku Shusui, one of the foremost activists and radical thinkers of the time, who died on the gallows in 1910 along with 10 other comrades for allegedly plotting to assassinate the emperor.

Kotoku was one of the few who came near to getting away from the SPD reformist-state control conception of socialism and to understanding the idea of socialism as conscious revolution to abolish the wages system by a class conscious majority of workers. But frustration led him, as it led other brave men and women, to contemplate terrorism as a means of revolution. As even the most law-abiding attempts to spread new ideas were met with rising terror by the state, so those who opposed the state became increasingly violent and anarchical in what they advocated. "The means whereby the revolution can be funded is the bomb. The means to destroy the bourgeois class is the bomb", said the journal Kakumei in 1906, and, addressing the Japanese capitalist class, it went on: "There may come a day very soon in which there will be built a large mountain of your bloody bodies". Their terrorism, it is true, was more in words than in actions, but it did not prevent the state from using its own institutionalised apparatus of terror to try to silence them. As Crump does not fail to point out, violent direct action was futile, not only in terms of its prospects of success, but also for the way it went against the fundamental idea of the need for mass public consciousness before socialist revolution could be on the agenda. So when, after the executions of 1910, Arahata Kanson, who had earlier called for the abolition of the wages system, conceived a plan for assassinating the Prime Minister and declared that "the overthrowing of the tyrants who set themselves up against civilisation and humanity is not a utopian illusion", he was succumbing to despair and forgetting that, in Crump's words, "terrorism by its very nature imposes a military disciple on those who resort to it, in place of the self-liberating and creative activity which socialism requires". Hopelessness had also made him forget that socialism could not come from "a conspiratorial minority acting in isolation from the workers whose interests they claimed to have at heart".

Crump, who is a lecturer in Japanese and whose knowledge of the language has enabled him to use original sources, has written a book which is refreshingly readable and contains none of the complicated specialist jargon often found in the work of academics. He acknowledges his debts too. In his introduction he says he "gained a great deal" from the men and women who have worked in the Socialist Party of Great Britain. "Political differences", he says, now separate him from us. Yet there is nothing in this book to indicate those differences. Crump's stated views in capitalism (2), state capitalism (3) and socialism (4) as well as his sound materialist account of the origins of radical thought in Japan all constitute a convincing advocacy of the position of the Socialist Party and its insistence on the urgent practical need for worldwide socialism. The book's dedication uncompromisingly proclaims that need: "This study is dedicated to the working class in Japan, in the hope that a day will come when (along with the workers throughout the rest of the world) they will decide to get up off their knees".

Howard Moss

References

1 The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan, Croom Helm, 1983.

2 "By capitalism I mean a system of society where production is carried on for the purpose of sale on the market, where the majority of people  . . . are . . . forced to sell their ability to work for wages or salaries in order to survive, and where there are social classes, the state and money." (Introduction, p. 2.)

3 "Now, it is the fact that we do live in an age which has seen a succession of capitalist revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere which explains why socialism should have come to be widely thought of as a policy of rapid capital accumulation carried out under the supervision of a strong, centralised state . . . What was more natural than that, in a world which has seen the drift towards state capitalism on all sides, socialism should have become a convenient ideological device for masking the ugliness of what has in reality been taking place?" (Introduction, p. 4.)

4 "Socialism is given the meaning of a society where production is for the direct satisfaction of human needs without the mediation of a process of buying and selling or exchange, where the means of production are commonly owned and democratically controlled, where there are neither social classes, the state, nor money." (Introduction, p. 3.)

Pathfinders: 'Smart' is the New Black (2013)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Put the word ‘smart’ in front of just about anything these days and you are describing the techno-savvy reality of the 20-teenies. We have, or will soon have, smart cars, smart traffic lights, smart houses and smart cities like Songdo, or maybe even the Venus Project (see ‘Tomorrow’s Cities’ ). Now schoolkids can dictate essay questions into Google on their smart phones (unless they’ve got strong regional accents which the speech algorithms can’t cope with). Pretty soon they’ll be dictating into their smart watches instead, and not long after that, via their smart Google Glass lenses. It surely won’t be long before the next horizon technology, wetware, creates reliable bio-interfaces to allow subcutaneous and perhaps even cranial smart implants, and who wouldn’t want the knowledge and communication power of biblical gods? The 20th century pioneered cyberspace, but the 21st century will pioneer cybernetics. Better, faster, smarter, cheaper, Human version 2.0, or rather Worker version 2.0 is set to superheat capitalist technological development, each individual cocooned inside an artificially-tailored personal reality, and each a uniform functioning component of the global hive.

Well, that’s one possible view of the near future. The technology news right now is breathless with excitement about smart watches, but Google Glass is just round the corner and third-party developers are secretly beavering away right now to come up with ‘killer apps’ which are supposedly going to persuade today’s young generation of early adopters to start wearing spectacles even though they have perfect vision. No more embarrassing encounters with people whose names you can’t remember – just silently run a facial recognition app while you’re standing there chatting. Can’t find that obscure little café? Pull up an on-lens GPS streetmap. Unimpressed with the forlorn pile of old stones in a famous historical site? Get an artist’s reconstruction superimposed over the real thing. Want to leave a message for your friends that that obscure little café was overpriced? Dictate a piece of rude graffiti and leave it on the front door of the café, invisible to anyone but your friends, similarly glassed-up.

Socialists and other people who are accustomed to reading beneath the hype will of course ask the obvious question: does all this smart stuff make us any cleverer? The answer is equally obvious:  no. The difference between smart and clever is the difference between technology and science. Smart is having good tools. Clever is knowing how to use them. Smart will win a war, but clever knows how to avoid the war.

There is no question that capitalism is smart, far smarter than any type of society that’s gone before. Classical antiquity was a time of remarkable sophistication in many ways, but it was rigidly obtuse in its slave-based economies and as a consequence never able to see the point of science or technology. But that doesn’t mean modern society is especially committed to science or that modern populations understand much about it or its methods. But they can appreciate the labour-saving devices and the toys. Where old societies were swamped in myth and the supernatural, we are swamped in gadgets and technobabble. We congratulate ourselves that we invented reason, and yet we’re probably no better at logical thinking than a Cro-Magnon cave painter, and probably significantly less artistically talented. But hell, we have smarts, so it doesn’t matter.

Smart is also an acronym, used a lot in businesses as a shorthand mnemonic for evaluating steps in a project. The letters are usually made to represent the following: S – Specific; M – Measurable; A – Achievable; R – Realistic; T – Time-delimited. If a step or course of action does not satisfy all these conditions, for example if it is too vague, or over-optimistic, or there is no failure condition or there’s no deadline, it is not ‘smart’ and therefore it is not worth doing (you could reverse the acronym and use ‘Trams’ instead, to stop your project going off the rails).

Capitalism is ‘smart’ in this sense as well. It doesn’t do things that don’t seem achievable within a short time period. It doesn’t do things that are not measurable with ‘hard outcomes’, which generally translates as money profit. It’s always specific in its boardrooms and vague in its parliaments. It’s realistic in its assessment of where the next profit is coming from. And its bottom line is always a deadline, the month-end, the quarterly profit statement, the annual report.

There is something fundamentally wrong with ‘smart’ targets. You can be perfectly smart and still do the stupid thing. Capitalism ‘smartly’ ignores the long term problems of climate change, resource-waste, war, global hunger and deprivation. Things that aren’t specific or measurable, like quality of life, fulfilment, self-realisation, democratic freedoms, simply don’t count. Pollution is not a measurable cost to anyone specifically, and there is no deadline to stop causing the damage.

Maybe this is why a lot of workers, forced to put up with managers at work wittering constantly about ‘smart’ targets, have learned to hate the very mention of the word. Not only are these smart targets invariably designed simply to extract more and more work out of the hard-pressed minions, suffering like crushed olives getting their third pressing, there is a strong sense that there is an overall dimension missing from the concept. If they were truly smart, these targets would make the workers happy too. And so with capitalism. If it’s so smart, why is everyone so miserable in it?

What the world needs is more swots.  SWOT is another of those acronyms, only it doesn’t evaluate a step, it sizes up an overall situation, assessing the pros and cons of a big picture. It stands for S – Strengths; W – Weaknesses; O – Opportunities; T – Threats. Before you get smart, you should be a swot. Socialists aren’t always smart, worse luck, but they are good at being swots. We recognise, sometimes better than capitalism’s own defenders, what its strengths are and have been, a global smart machine that has brought us almost to the point of expansion into space. We recognise its weaknesses better too, because we don’t dismiss them immediately as unavoidable. We see the enormous opportunity of a globally-connected, smart and (yes) clever working class to drive society forwards beyond class division, and we understand better than most what will happen to the world if we don’t. That’s why we would say, if you want to get smart, swot up on socialism.

Paddy Shannon

Back to the Future for Working Conditions (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conditions for workers today in Britain are moving back towards those in Victorian Britain. The struggles of the working class in Britain in the nineteenth century to ensure better working conditions and humane working hours are documented by Marx in Chapter ten The Working Day in Capital Volume 1. With zero hours contracts we have gone 'back to the future'.

The capitalist class in the UK have about 1 million workers on zero-hours contracts. These contracts mean there is no guarantee of work and pay each week, no holiday or sick pay. The balance of power favours the employer and makes it hard for workers to complain. Workers are often only told how many hours they will work when weekly or monthly rotas are worked out, but are expected to be on call for extra work at short notice, like the day before. If you don't comply you don’t get any work. Cinema chain Cineworld, Buckingham Palace's 350 summer workers, retailer Sports Direct (20,000 of its 23,000 staff), Pub group JD Wetherspoon (24,000 of its staff  - 80 percent of its workforce), 1/3 of the voluntary sector, 1/4 of the public sector , McDonalds, Boots, Amazon, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Tate Galleries all use workers on zero hours contracts.

There are now fees for lodging claims at industrial tribunals. A worker has to pay a fee when a claim is lodged at the tribunal and another one at the hearing. Level 1 claims include those for unpaid wages, payment in lieu of notice and redundancy payments which cost £160 and a hearing fee of £230. Level 2 claims include unfair dismissal, discrimination, equal pay and whistle blowing which cost £250 and a hearing fee of £950. There will be higher fees for those cases where there are multiple claimants.

Currently an employer could discuss offers of settlement with a worker to terminate his or her employment on a 'without prejudice' basis, which means they could not be divulged in future tribunal proceedings as evidence against that employer. There would need to be a prior 'dispute' for an employer to take advantage of this protection. Under new rules, employers will now be able to engage in pre-termination negotiations/ early exit discussions with a worker even where no formal dispute has yet arisen. The new law allows employers a free reign at any time to enter termination discussions with their staff without fear of it being used against them.

The maximum compensation that could be awarded for routine unfair dismissal claims at an employment tribunal was £74,200. Now it will be the equivalent of 52 weeks' pay or £74,200, whichever is the lower. Average salary today is £26,500 for full time workers.

These changes prompted Elizabeth George, a barrister in the employment team at law firm Leigh Day to say:

'This sends a very dangerous message to employers who will be less inclined to abide by their legal obligations as the risk of being challenged will be much reduced, these fees will disproportionately hit those suffering discrimination because of their age, race, disability and gender, the disproportionate fees will mean many people having to put up with discrimination and unable to challenge unfair dismissals, however badly they had been treated. We have already seen guidance from lawyers advising employers to wait to fire people as it will be cheaper and the chances of being taken to tribunal will be less following the introduction of fees. Instead of standing up for people suffering unlawful discrimination in the workplace, the government is doing the exact opposite'. (Guardian, 29 July)

Online retailer Amazon opened a huge processing centre in Rugeley, Staffordshire in 2011. Arthur Valdez, vice-president operations Amazon said at the time: 'We look forward to assembling a team of talented people who will play their part in ensuring that customers receive the millions of items that will be ordered' (Daily Telegraph, 10 July 2011). Mike Dell, president of the Black Country Chamber of Commerce concurred: 'It's excellent news. It brings jobs to an area that desperately needs it'. Aidan Burley, local Tory MP put his tuppence in: 'It's absolutely fantastic news for Rugeley. People are crying out to get back into work'. (BBC News Stoke and Staffordshire online, 10  July 2011)

A recent Channel 4 investigation discovered at the Amazon factory in Rugeley timed toilet breaks, workers' movements were monitored by GPS trackers, workers given 30 minutes for lunch in a ten-hour shift, 20 minutes of which were spent walking to and from the canteen, workers were issued penalty points for talking to colleagues, taking sick leave, or even spending too long in the bathroom. This all on a 'three strikes and you're out' basis. Workers were searched for stolen goods at airport-style security checkpoints before going into the canteen, and temporary staff laid off to avoid giving them the same benefits and rights as permanent workers. Zero hours contracts were used extensively which meant those staff having no job security and were forced to make themselves available for work with no guarantee they will be offered a shift on a particular day. Also Amazon tried to avoid paying out hundreds of pounds in accrued holiday pay to agency staff by instructing agency representatives not to inform employees that it was owed to them.

We should always remember that the capitalist class demand the free exploitation of working class labour-power. Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and Marx's Capital came out in 1867. There are differences between life today and life then but fundamentally there is no change as the capitalist mode of production grinds relentlessly on, a person has to 'sell their labour or starve'. Capitalism can never operate in the interests of the working class.

Steve Clayton

Waging the Class Struggle (1968)

From the June 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thousands of workers know from personal experience that members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain are involved in supporting and encouraging industrial organisation and action to improve wages and working conditions. Socialists are active at all levels of the trade union movement - branch officers, shop stewards, works convenors, organisers, committee men, conference delegates, regular branch attenders - and in many unions and industries. Socialists are active unionists because they are class conscious workers; they know that there is an irreconcilable conflict of interest between workers and capitalists and  that all governments have to act as agents of the capitalists.

Briefly, the policy Socialists advocate is democratic action to improve or maintain wages and working conditions and they emphasise that this policy should be pursued whatever party forms the government. We do not soft-peddle the class struggle because there is a Labour government or because capitalism has started a war. Socialists are opposed to unions being linked to the Labour Party and refuse to pay the political levy. Beyond this, we say it is up to the workers involved to work out the details of their demands and how to get them. As it is the workers in an industry or factory or office who have to take part in the struggle, and suffer the consequences of any defeat, it is clear that they alone should decide what to do and how to do it. We do not tell workers what to do, except of course for general advice on the importance of democracy and the class struggle. We do not fancy ourselves as leaders.

The Socialist Party, as a party, does not intervene in the affairs of trade unions. It is merely that we, as class conscious workers share a broad conception of what sound industrial action is. As far as details are concerned we can, and do, find ourselves reaching different conclusions; some favour the closed shop, others say it's undemocratic. We have members in rival unions. Some support ginger groups; some have joined breakaway unions while others have stayed in, and so on.

Socialist Party members have always been active unionists. In the early days many were members of craft unions, particularly in the building industry. One of these was perhaps our most "illustrious" ex-member George Hicks, CBE, one-time TUC President, Labour MP and Junior Minister who died in 1954. One member who knew him says:

George Hicks, after leaving the SPGB became an official of a building workers union and was President of the TUC in 1927. He also joined the Labour Party and remained in it for the rest of his life. In spite of this he continued to take an interest in the SPGB and on occasions declared that he still agreed with the SPGB case. Early in the 1920's he debated with Palme Dutt and not only put the SPGB case against the Communist Party but frankly stated that it was the SPGB case he was putting.

Today the composition is rather different though. M. Harrison in his Trade Unions and the Labour Party since 1945 remarks that in the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers  several branches "are influenced by minority Socialist groups like the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Party of Great Britain". Not that the ILP is socialist, mind you, or that we are out to influence the ASW. It is true, however, that there are socialists active in this union. Between the wars, with the bulk of the members in London, socialists were active in unions like the Union of Postal Workers and the busmen's section of the TGWU. During the war members formed branches of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. At first this might seem odd but the explanation lies in the fact that many Socialists were working on the land after refusing to do military service. There are Socialists active in the printing unions, in the seamen's union, AEU and ETU, and in white collar unions covering civil servants, teachers and technical workers. As Socialists are recruited from all sections of the working class, so there are Socialists active throughout the trade union movement.

To illustrate how Socialist Party members are active in trade unions it will be useful to take the cases of two who have been particularly so - one in the TGWU and the other in DATA.

The TGWU, with over a million members, is the largest genuine trade union in the world. Perhaps this is its drawback as it seems to make for bureaucratic rule. And the TGWU must hold the record for giving birth to breakaway unions. Socialists, as we said, were active on the buses just before and during the last war. The busmen, then, were a highly regarded section of the working class. It was a secure job that carried with it some prestige and this encouraged militancy. The union was at that time dominated by Ernest Bevin with Arthur Deakin as his deputy. After the failure of the negotiations for a shorter working day for London busmen an official strike began on May Day 1937. The Central Bus Committee was given full powers to conduct the strike. This six-man committee included one Socialist and four members of the so-called Communist Party. The CP also ran the London Busmen's Rank and File Movement. Although the TGWU executive had given the busmen full powers to conduct the strike, on 28 May Bevin issued over the radio an order to return to work. To preserve their industrial strength the busmen returned to work in an orderly fashion. The executive, however, then moved against the militants. As one of our members involved described it:

The Union instituted an enquiry into the strike. The Central Bus Committeemen and many local branch members were summoned to Transport House to answer for their actions. I was included. Despite my protest and the production of my SPGB membership card and badge, I was accused of being a Communist by Arthur Deakin who acted as a prosecutor. 

As a result of the inquiry all but one of the Central Bus Committee, together with a few others, were dismissed from union office. In 1938 some busmen, including a few Socialists, set up the National Passenger Workers' Union as a rival to the TGWU. Other Socialists, and this well shows how we can come to different conclusions on trade union tactics, opposed this move "on the ground that a new union could do no more than the existing one till members were class conscious and that the effect would be to divide the busmen and thus weaken them". The NPWU did not really stand a chance. It did carry on till after the war when the TGWU, by signing a closed shop agreement with London Transport, was able to squeeze it out. In 1943 the CP declared that as the NPWU was "a hotbed of every kind of anti-working class politics - SPGB members, ILPers and Trotskyists" no member of it could join the CP. The Socialist Standard of 1943 commented: 

With the issues involved in the dispute between the rival unions we need not here concern ourselves except to say that members of the SPGB are to be found in both unions.

The union's national organiser was in fact a Socialist. The same man was later to national organiser of another breakaway from the TGWU, this time in the docks, the National Union of Port Workers. The Socialist Standard had to make the same point again in October 1946 when a pro-Labour paper tried to discredit a strike in which this Socialist was active on the grounds that he was an opponent of the Labour government.

After the war the TGWU brought in a rule that barred members of Fascist and Communist parties from holding office (this rule still applies, but may be relaxed soon for the Communists). All candidates for union office had to sign a document saying that they were not members of these parties. Socialist in the union were quite opposed to this because they

objected to political discrimination in a trade union, claiming that members had the right to nominate any other member they wished irrespective of politics, race, religion, etc.

When later one Socialist did sign the document "the better to fight against political discrimination and other objectionable union policies", he found himself with the unwelcome support of the Communists (our members in the ETU have experienced the same thing since that union too barred Communists from holding office). Our member, who had been elected to committees at all levels of the union, was very active in the 1958 London bus strike. Socialists contributed regularly to The Platform, the unofficial busmen's journal, which ceased publication in 1967 after some seventeen years on the retirement of its editor (a sympathiser of the Socialist Party). "When Frank Cousins came on the scene", one says, "the CP heralded him as a Trade Union Messiah and carefully abstained from saying a word against him". Other socialists have had similar experience of CP tactics in other unions. At present the CP are trying to channel industrial discontent behind men like Cousins and Scanlon and the leftwing of the anti-working class Labour Party.

The first white collar strike in Bristol Siddeley Engines factory took place in February 1961. It was staged by sixty members of the Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen (now DATA) in support of their "collecting member" (or shop steward) who was the only one in the office not to get a pay rise. The one week strike became official and was successful. The victimised man, a member of the Socialist Party, got his rise. A couple of years later this Socialist was elected chairman of the local DATA branch and as such played an important organising role in a strike over pay that began in the same factory in June 1963. The Bristol Evening Post described our member as "leader of the 1,000 Bristol Siddeley workers who are on strike". This of course was not so as Socialists are opposed to all leadership, on the industrial as well as on the political front. Our member's protest was published in the paper on 16 July:

May I, as chairman of Bristol No. 2 branch of DATA, thank you for the way in which you have to date, covered our dispute with BSE Ltd. But as an individual member I wish to deny that in any way am I the Leader of the 1,000 members who are now on strike. I am their elected Representative and as such, with the rest of the annually elected branch, try to carry out, to the best of one's ability, their wishes which are decided in a democratic way, either by secret ballot, or by show of hands at a general meeting. I regard this as a very important distinction.

The same member (who as branch chairman again had an important role to play in 1965 in the struggle against redundancy following the cancellation of the TSR 2,) described the six week's strike, which was controlled by the strikers and successful, as "the best organised and successful ever. It was a show down between DATA and the employers nationally and cost DATA £180,000. The members levied themselves towards local costs and paid 5% of their salaries back to DATA". DATA in fact is one of the most successful unions in Britain, consistently pursuing an aggressive wages policy.

These, then, are two examples of how Socialists are involved, in a democratic way, in waging the class struggle  on the industrial front. We could have quoted more examples but we think these suffice to nail the lie spread by those would-be leaders, the CP and the trotskyists that the Socialist Party is anti-union.

Adam Buick

Diminishing our view of the world (1995)

Theatre Review from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beautiful Thing by Jonathan Harvey 

Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing is a success. Starting life at the Bush Theatre it has subsequently played in Leeds (at the West Yorkshire playhouse), and in London (at the Donmar Warehouse), before finally making it into the West End.

Critics have been enthusiastic, using words like "honest" and "vivid" to describe plot and dialogue. When I attended recently an uncharacteristically young (for the West End) audience showed similar enthusiasm and delight. Yet as laughter rumbled round the elegant theatre I felt initial surprise, then disappointment and, finally, anger.

Beautiful Thing is packed with characters straight out of Eastenders. The action may take place in a scruffy block of high-rise flats in south London, but those familiar with the antics of the residents of Albert Square will quickly be reminded of the ugliness, the meanness of character and aspiration, the sordid pointlessness of it all. "This is how life is", the author seems to be saying; "this is what life must be like", he seems to be suggesting by implication. If people are selfish and unknowing, out of touch both with themselves and the larger world of which they are a part, this is to be expected; it is "natural". The possibility that people might have learned to be selfish, acquisitive and repressed -  that they might even have learnt how to remain ignorant - is not considered.

True, in the maelstrom of indifference, stupidity and no little malevolence which Harvey describes, there grows a loving relationship between two young men - presumably the Beautiful Thing referred to in the title. But this is no metaphor pointing to the possibility of larger transformations. The world continues as before: the other characters make no significant discoveries; and even for the loving couple the rest of life remains insufferably the same.

Although the play is described as a modern fairy story Harvey sells us short. The little love affair he describes could have offered a pointer to the redemption and liberation of others; of changes and transformations at many levels. By eschewing such possibilities the play, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces the perception that such things are impossible. Our vision of the world is thus diminished rather than expanded, and we are imprisoned rather than set free. Not so much a fairy story as a nightmare.

Michael Gill

Pies in the sky (1986)

Book Review from the March 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marie Louise Berneri, Journey through Utopia (Freedom Press)

Journey through Utopia is Marie Louise Berneri's classic study of the most important utopian writings from Plato to Huxley. The book was first published in 1950, a year after the author's untimely death at the age of thirty-one, and recently re-issued. It is a scholarly work (Berneri used her fluent knowledge of four languages to make her own translations in the absence of English versions) but the author's journalistic experience ensures that the text remains very readable.

An examination of the utopias of antiquity shows Aristophanes satirical utopias to be more pleasant than Plutarch's "most perfect example of a totalitarian state" or the slavery, despotism and elitism in Plato's Republic. As Berneri points out: "It is rather puzzling that Plato's Republic should have aroused such admiration and, paradoxically, it has been chiefly admired by men whose principles were completely opposed to those of Plato".

The chapter dealing with the utopias of the Renaissance is the most interesting. Sir Thomas More's Utopia calls for the abolition of the death penalty for theft, and puts forward one of the earliest arguments for free access to wealth, pointing out that it is economic insecurity which makes people greedy. However, far from being a perfect society, crimes and adultery are punished by slavery and imperialist wars are waged against weaker states. Berneri points out: "In a society which admits of slavery even the 'free citizen' is not free; his chain is no longer than that of the slave".

Campanella's City of the Sun is the first utopia to abolish slavery: property is abolished for the whole community and a leading role is given to natural sciences. Campanella was tortured and imprisoned by the Inquisition and because of the risk of confiscation, several versions of his works exist. Torture and prisons are banned from Campanella's utopia - probably influenced by his own ordeal - but there is little individual freedom: women can be condemned to death for using make-up or wearing high heels.

Francis Bacon anticipated modern trends by placing faith in technological changes, departing from the idealistic utopias of his predecessors, while Andreae, although deploring the death penalty and the "wickedness of men who punish rather than reform", displays the intolerance of the religious reformer. By contrast, Rabelais did not propose a remedy for the evils of the time. His utopia is more of an individual rebellion with only one rule: "Do What Thou Wilt", and probably all the more readable because of it.

The first utopian to believe that society could only be changed by the people as a whole was Winstanley, who wrote The Law of Freedom in 1652. However, paradoxically, slavery is the punishment for lesser crimes while for more serious ones Winstanley's ideas are barbaric: "He who strikes his neighbour shall be struck himself by the executioner blow for blow, and shall lose eye for eye, tooth for tooth, limb for limb, life for life".

The nineteenth century utopias are considered boring, reflecting the conceit of the authors. A notable exception to the authoritarian, centralised control of Cabet or Bellamy and the curious attempt by Lord Lytton to reconcile certain socialist ideas with laissez-faire capitalism is News from Nowhere by William Morris, which appeared in serial form in Commonweal in 1890. Morris "realised that the manner of life of a community cannot be artificially arranged in the mind of an individual, but must be spontaneously created by all the members of the community". Berneri praises this charming vision of an ideal society and it is one of the few utopias with which socialists could sympathise.

The final chapter deals with modern utopias. Bureaucracy, coercion and moral compulsions are used by H. G. Wells in A Modern Utopia in 1905, although he altered his views in Men Like Gods in 1923. Berneri considers Wells to be the last utopian writer in the classical tradition; modern writers such as Zamyatin and Huxley have written dystopias in which the central characters rebel against the authoritarianism, regimentation and enforced happiness of their societies.

Journey through Utopia is a comprehensive guide to the utopias of the past and a warning of the dangers of permitting others, however well intentioned, to plan our future for us. The emancipation of the working class must be carried out by the workers themselves.

Carl Pinel

Letter From Europe: Bordiga and the Idea of Socialism (1982)

Amadeo Bordiga

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the socialist form production remains social and thus there is no ownership by anyone of the instruments of production, including the land and fixed installations. In this society there will be no individual appropriation even for consumption; distribution will be social and for social purposes. Social consumption differs from individual consumption in that the physical attribution of consumer goods does not take place by means of commodity purchase and with a currency. When society satisfies all the needs of its members which don't conflict with the best interests of its development independently of the greater or lesser contribution they have made to social labour, all personal property ceases and with it its measure, i.e., value and its symbol money (translated from Bordiga et la passion du communisme pp.79-80).

So stated Amadeo Bordiga in a lecture given in Italy in 1958, thus showing that the original idea of socialism as a moneyless, wageless society which we and our companion parties have kept alive in Britain and the English-speaking world has also survived on the Continent.

The rest of Bordiga's views however are quite unacceptable. After playing a prominent part before the First World War in the youth section of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and in the campaign (together with, of all people, Mussolini, then also a member of the PSI!) against the openly reformist elements in that party, he opposed the war, and Italy's entry into it, as an imperialist slaughter in which no working-class interests were at stake. He later emerged as the leader of the pro-Bolshevik elements within the PSI. By 1919 he had come round to a position which was to bring him into conflict with Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders: his experience of the failure of the PSI to control its MPs had made him an "abstentionist", or opponent of contesting elections and participating in parliament. Neverthless, he still became the leader of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) when it was founded at Leghorn in January 1921 as a breakaway from the PSI.

His "abstentionism" was in fact an attempt to resolve the problem of reform and revolution which those in the pre-war Social Democratic parties of Europe who genuinely wanted socialism had had to face. Bordiga believed that, because of their corruption and oppression by capitalism, a majority of workers could never come to want and understand socialism while capitalism lasted  (in this of course he agreed with Lenin). This led him to conclude that a policy of trying to obtain mass electoral support for socialism was not only pointless but dangerous in that it would lead a socialist party into reformism by lowering itself to the non-socialist consciousness of the mass of the workers.

He favoured instead an elite socialisy party, composed exclusively of those who understood socialism, whose policy should be not to advocate reforms or seek mass electoral support but to use working-class discontent to seize power and establish its dictatorship. On this point, Bordiga was quite open and frank: he advocated a dictatorship by the Party. He was in fact virtually a classical Blanquist. For Blanqui too, following in the tradition of Babeuf and Buonarotti, had held that the workers were too corrupted by capitalist rule to be able to liberate themselves and so would have to be liberated by the action of a determined minority seizing power, establishing a dictatorship and then educating the people in socialist ideas. Marx, although sympathising with Blanqui as a man of action, of course rejected such views, countering them with the declaration that the emancipation of the working class could only be the work of the working class itself.

As a solution to the problem of reform and revolution Bordiga's view was quite inadequate though he was correct to see the danger, indeed the inevitably, of a descent into reformism if a socialist party sought electoral support on a programme of reforms. The founders of the Socialist Party of Great Britain also saw this danger but, because they did not accept that the working class was incapable of coming to want and understand socialism under capitalism, this led them to a different conclusion. The "education" of the working class to want socialism (the result of their own experiences and reflections as well as of the propaganda activities of a socialist party, thus "education" in the broadest sense) had to take place before capitalism could be abolished and indeed was a precondition for this. The danger of reformism could be avoided, not by renouncing the attempt to win an electoral majority, but by renouncing trying to win this on a programme of reforms. A socialist party, they said, should campaign among the working class only for socialism. This has remained our policy to this day and, as the solution to the problem of reform and revolution, represents our specific contribution to socialist theory.

Despite being a throwback to the 19th century, Bordiga's views were supported by a majority of the members of the PCI during the first two or three years of its existence. This inevitably brought Bordiga into conflict with the Bolshevik leaders, particularly Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, and Lenin himself who devoted an appendix to his pamphlet Leftwing Comminsm, An Infantile Disorder to attacking Bordiga's abstentionism.

In 1921 the Comintern decided on one of its many changes of tactic, this time to adopt the so-called "united front" which involved the new Communist Parties co-operating with the Social Democrats and even forming "Workers Governments" in coalition with them. This new line was  not popular with the non-Russian CPs since they were now being asked to co-operate with the very people they had just broken away from and in many cases had opposed as reformists since even before the war. This was the case of Bordiga himself and he went to Moscow to oppose the new line, though he left accepting out of a sense of discipline the majority decision. The PCI, even under Bordiga's leadership, thus did participate in elections even though he personally was opposed to this.

The Bolshevik leaders soon decided that Bordiga was quite unsuitable to be leader of one of their parties and attempted to remove him; but they had to proceed carefully in view of his reputation and support in the Italian party. He was eventually removed and replaced by Gramsci (now the rage in leftwing circles despite the fact that he was little more than a Stalinist hack) in 1924. From then on Bordiga was on the way out as Stalin's orders to suppress all opposition in the non-Russian parties were implemented. Bordiga, who was then in a fascist prison, was expelled in 1930, officially for having sided with Trotsky.

Bordiga, however, was no Trotskyist. He eventually came round to the view that Russia was state capitalist, or rather that the state capitalism under the control of the "proletarian state" which he held had existed under Lenin had given way, with the dictatorship of Stalin, to a simple state capitalism. Bordigist groups, with one of which he himself was associated from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1970, have existed in Italy, France and Belgium as rivals to the Trotskyists, propagating Bordiga's Blanquist idea of the incapacity of the workers to become socialists under capitalism and of the need for them to be liberated by the dictatorship of a vanguard party.

Although Bordiga knew what socialism was (in the sense of using the word only in the way we do) he did not stand for the immediate establishment of socialism. This followed from his basic position that the workers were incapable of coming to want to socialism after capitalism and would have to be educated to it after capitalist rule had been overthrown. Thus he had to posit a transitional period between the overthrow of capitalist rule and the final establishment of socialism, during which tis process of education would go on. When this had been completed then socialism, a moneyless, wageless, Stateless society, could be established. It was because he believed that this was what Lenin had been trying to do that he had supported the Bolshevik regime even though he was well aware that Bolshevik Russia wasn't socialist.

Not only did Bordiga insist that socialism would be a society without money, wages or the state but he also emphasised that it was the common ownership of the means of production by society as a whole and was a vigorous critic of syndicalists and others (like Gramsci, for instance, at one period) who advanced slogans like "the factories to the workers" and "the land to the peasants". He correctly pointed out that, if these slogans were implemented, the result would not be socialism since they envisaged the continuation of private (non-social) property in the form of the ownership of the various means of production by sections only of society (those working in a particular factory, mine or farm). A point we have often made ourselves.

Bordiga and the Bordigist movement have influenced people and given rise to splits which have retained his correct description of socialism while abandoning some of his other views. The so-called "International Communist Current", for instance, through its parent group in France revolution internationale has a Bordigist ancestry. Jean Barrot, author of a number of books including Le mouvement communiste, reviewed in the Socialist Standard in October 1973 and which contains a correct definition of socialism, has also been influenced by Bordiga. And in France a whole series of Marx's writings on subjects like trade unions, Malthus, education and utopianism has been collected together and introduced by a more or less orthodox Bordigist, Roger Dangeville who (while often distorting Marx's views on other subjects such as violence and democracy) correctly points out that Marx's conception of socialism involved the disappearance of money and wages.

Others have advanced further, coming to criticise the labour-time voucher system and to favour free access, as in the publication La Guerre Sociale. This group distributes the pamphlet entitled Le communisme: Un monde sans argent (Communism: A World without Money), extracts of which were published in the July Socialist Standard and which gives a description of future society which is identical to ours.

All these groups and individuals, however, are still mistaken on how to get socialism either because they still accept the idea of a vanguard party (the orthodox Bordigists of "Programme Communiste", Roger Dangeville, the ICC) or because they deny that the establishment of socialism is a question of majority consciousness (Barrot, "La Guerre Sociale"). All of them favour violent insurrection rather than democratic political action (elections and Parliament) to try to establish socialism.

Adam Buick

Further Reading:

Bordigism by Adam Buick

Spare us the confusion (1996)

Book Review from the March 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels by Albert Meltzer (AK Press 1996)

This is a confusing book full of confusing and ill-conceived statements. Ostensibly the autobiography of one of Britain's most well-known anarchists, its anecdotal nature overrides any pretensions to serious political thought. Lip-service is paid to the goal of a classless, stateless society very occasionally but it is no more than just that.

Meltzer is a self-styled 'man of action' of the anarchist movement whose protege, Stuart Christie, was famously convicted of terrorist offences; in this book action for its own sake is lauded to the skies, without apparent consideration of its effectiveness in achieving Meltzer's ultimate goal. In truth though, Meltzer has always been horribly confused on the issue of how to bring about a classless society - despite his many other undoubted qualities - so this is unsurprising enough.

His political confusion can be illustrated by his description of the old Independent Labour Party as an organisation with a "revolutionary socialist programme far beyond the grasp of most of its membership". Quite what he can have had in mind in writing this is difficult to say as anyone with any revolutionary and anti-statist credentials whatsoever during the ILP's hey-day must have realised that it was a reformist organisation through and through.

Meltzer also writes of the Russian dictatorship that "What reigned in Russia was not capitalism nor communism but the state in control of everything. Some dissident Communists introduced as an alibi a fiction that State Capitalism existed in Russia but all that oppresses is not capitalism". It is not indeed, but where class division, commodity production, wage labour and capital accumulation out of surplus value exist, then it's a pretty safe bet by anyone's book. And, of course, the theory of state capitalism was not introduced as an "alibi" by dissident communists, but as an original analysis based on the facts by the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

For some peculiar reason, when Meltzer talks about the Socialist Party on a couple of occasions, it is in the past tense and he writes that we were "a small sect of dogmatic socialists" founded "around 1910". For this he can get no other than nought out of ten for both originality and research, though ten out of ten for cheek, as Meltzer has spent all his political life in British anarchist groups like Black Flag and the Direct Action Movement which have made the SPGB look like a veritable mass party.

Frankly, when Meltzer writes of his admiration for Socialist Party orator Tony Turner when stopping to listen to him speak in Hyde Park at the outbreak of the Second World War one is left wishing that he had stayed a little longer and listened more intently, if only to spare us some of the confusion now.

DAP

• Meltzer's autobiography can be read online at the following link.
• There is an audio recording of a 1987 debate between Albert Meltzer - representing Black Flag - and Richard Donnelly of the SPGB at the following link.

Editorial: Class struggle - back on the agenda (1996)

Editorial from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over recent years commentators, left and right, have argued that the phenomenon of "class struggle" has become an anachronism - something that died with the bad old days of the 70s. Those on the right have actively supported the subsequent attacks on the working class (mass unemployment, poorer conditions at work, etc.) as being a price worth paying for the "national interest". Those apologists for capitalism the left have floundered around condemning the "evils of Thatcherism", forgetting previous experiences of Labour governments and losing in the battle of ideas to the "realists" on the right.

Real socialists have remained resolute in our analysis of society. Capitalism is based upon the class antagonism between Capital and Labour. Although class struggle has operated at a relatively low level for so long, we have always maintained that this central feature of capitalist society will not go away while capitalism remains.

The explosion of popular unrest in France is testimony to this. As the economic crisis in capitalism forces France to cut its social spending - exacerbated by its move towards a single currency. The commentators who have previously written off "class struggle" have been forced to sit up and take note.

Workers everywhere can take heart from these developments. The working class in France has demonstrated not only working people acting as a class - but the power that class has in society.

This doesn't mean that socialism is around the corner or indeed that this is even the beginning of the end of capitalism.

This struggle is dominated by defensive reformist ideas and defensive institutions such as the trade unions. The positive point is that within such an atmosphere the potential for revolutionary ideas to spread is increased. This will mean workers breaking with reformist ideology (as indeed some have shown) and realising the only alternative is the political solution of world socialism.

There is no shortcut to this goal. It can only occur when the majority of the working class organise for it and achieve political power democratically.

Without this, struggles like the one in France will just become dates in the turbulent history of capitalism.

Cooking the Books: The Death of the Middle Class (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article in the Daily Mail (23 August) lamenting ‘the death of the middle classes’ Dominic Sandbrook wrote:

‘One day, predicted Karl Marx, ‘the lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants’, would begin to sink down the social ladder, crushed by the cruel economic logic of modern life. Society, he thought, would inexorably be divided into haves and have-nots, and tension would turn inevitably to violent revolution. Marx gloried in his own prediction. As the founding father of Communism, he looked forward to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, when the middle classes would be extinguished and capitalism would be torn down.’

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels did write something like this, but not exactly. Discussing the origin of the ‘proletariat’, or working class, defined by Engels in a footnote to the English edition of 1888 as ‘the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live’, Marx and Engels wrote:

‘The lower strata of the middle class the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.’

Earlier in the Manifesto Marx and Engels had pointed out:

‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.’

Which has gone on ever since, despite the rise of the so-called ‘new middle class’ of salaried employees; these have not even been ‘reduced’ to ‘selling their labour power in order to live’ as they never were independent owners of their own business.

Sandbrook in fact takes it for granted that his ‘middle classes’ have to work for an employer when he writes ‘middle-class men and women once expected to have a job for life.’

Society is already divided into two classes: those who, not owning means of production, are forced to sell their labour power, whether for a wage or a salary, to live and those Engels in his footnote called ‘the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of production and employers of wage labour.’

It is true that the ‘tension’ between the two classes did not turn into ‘violent revolution’ as Marx and Engels had expected in 1848. Later they envisaged the possible conversion of universal suffrage into ‘an agent of emancipation’, not that this has happened either.

It is true, too, that Marx occasionally used the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but what he meant was the exercise of political power by the majority class of wage and salary workers, which he considered should be done democratically.

To tear capitalism down? Yes, by converting the means of production from the property of a tiny minority into the common ownership of the whole of society, so allowing production to be geared to meeting people’s needs instead of for sale on a market with a view to profit.

To extinguish the middle class? Yes, in fact of all classes. Together with the rest of the wider working class, today’s so-called middle class will commit suicide by abolishing itself.

Material World: Who Are ‘The Poor’? (2013)

The Material World column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists are reluctant to talk about ‘the poor’ as a distinct social group. In a certain real sense, all of those excluded from ownership and control of the means of life – the large majority who make up the working class – are poor.

All the same, there are degrees of poverty. Being homeless or trapped in a rat-infested tenement is very different from living in a comfortable house (however heavily mortgaged) in a clean suburb. The focus here is on the people conventionally regarded as poor in the United States. Socialists might prefer to call them ‘the extremely poor’.

The US government defines a ‘federal poverty line’ (FPL) – currently an annual income of $19,530 for a family of three or $23,550 for a family of four – and equates being poor with falling below this line. By this definition, 16.3 percent of Americans (up from 12 percent in 1975) are poor, although for children the figure rises to 22 percent.

Poor = black? Wrong!

In the US ‘the poor’ tend to be identified with black people and especially with residents of the city ghettoes, who occasionally draw attention to their grievances by rioting. It is true that the poverty rate is higher for blacks than for whites, but in absolute terms poor whites – sometimes called ‘the invisible poor’ – are far more numerous than poor blacks.

Millions of poor people live in small towns and rural areas. In large parts of the South the majority of them are black, but in some other depressed areas, such as the Appalachian Mountains in the East, they are mostly white.

Poor = unemployed? Wrong again!

There is also a tendency to identify ‘the poor’ with welfare recipients and the unemployed. In recent years, however, there has been growing recognition of the ‘working poor’ – the quarter of the American workforce whose pay is so low that despite long hours of hard work their income still falls below the poverty line.

According to a 2011 study by the Congressional Budget Office, 10 percent of US wage earners are paid under $8.90 per hour. This is also the current median wage of workers in fast food outlets. The federal minimum wage is $7.25, which if a bill now before Congress is passed will rise to $10.10 by 2015. But many workers – especially but not only illegal immigrants – get less than the minimum wage. The workers at a carwash near our home receive only $5.75.

How can people possibly survive on such low wages? They work long hours or even in many cases two jobs. They also draw government benefits and get help from charity (so-called ‘income supports’). One increasingly important income support is the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as ‘food stamps’. The number of participants in SNAP has risen steadily from 17 million in 2000 to about 47 million at present. In fact, government and charities subsidize the employers of low-paid labour, who in the absence of such programs would have to pay higher wages to enable their workers to survive. 

The near poor

The Federal Poverty Line is an unsatisfactory yardstick in several ways. It ignores taxes and ‘income supports’, it allows only for bare subsistence, and it takes no account of the huge regional variations in the cost of living.

Some researchers have tried to compensate for these defects by adding a category they call ‘the near poor’ – people with incomes from 100 up to 150 percent of the FPL. When this category is included, the poverty rate doubles to about a third of the population. A clear majority of children (57 percent) are ‘poor or near poor’.

These must still be underestimates because a family needs an income of anywhere from 150 up to 300 percent of the FPL – depending on the cost of living in the area where they live – just to cover ‘basic expenses’ (National Center for Children in Poverty, nccp.org). 

Lifespan poverty experience

While those who are ‘poor’ at a particular moment may be only a minority, though a very substantial one, studies of ‘lifespan poverty experience’ show that a majority of Americans have the experience of being ‘poor’ at some time in their lives. Thus, a study published in 2001 found that 51 percent of 75-year-olds had passed at least one year in ‘poverty’ since the age of 25 (‘Signs of Declining Economic Security’, 28 July 2013, bigstory.ap.org). 

It is this continuous large-scale movement of workers into and out of ‘poverty’ that gives the lie to the conventional idea of ‘the poor’ as a separate social group or even as a sort of special ‘underclass’. A large majority of Americans are always at significant risk of falling into ‘poverty’; the fear of ‘poverty’ occupies a crucial place in their psyche.

The typical suburbanite can become destitute and homeless very easily. All it takes is a single ‘negative life event’ such as the loss of a well-paying job, a serious illness or accident, imprisonment or divorce. Especially during a slump, masses of ‘middle class’ workers are rudely awakened from the ‘American dream’ to find themselves stranded among ‘the poor’.

‘Poverty’ and relative prosperity are alternate phases in the life of a single social class, the working class – a life marked by abject insecurity and dependence. Most members of the working class are not ‘poor’ most of the time, but it is ‘the poor’ who most starkly embody the essence of working class status.

Stefan

Editorial: What About Nuclear Weapons? (2013)

Editorial from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

When someone enlists in a military or paramilitary organisation they swear or affirm their willingness to obey all orders issued to them by their superior officers. In turn, such officers, in ascending order, are subject to the orders and instructions of their superiors who, ultimately, must respond to a national executive of politicians or an individual with executive power.

Effectively, then, this means that armed forces throughout the world are composed of people who have abnegated their sense of right and wrong when such a sense is in conflict with the orders they are given.

Like so many things in capitalism, it sounds absurd – and very frightening – but, in a world where there is at least one war going on every single day, it is consistent with the lunatic logic that underpins a wasteful and outmoded system of social organisation.

At the moment the problem preoccupying the most powerful nations of the world and their politicians is the conflicting politico-economic interests confronting the Syrian dictator and General Secretary of the Ba’ath Party, Bashar al’Assad, who took over power from his deceased father in 2000.

Like Saddam Hussein, his predecessor and holy war suppressant in Iraq, Assad’s power lay in his ability to suppress the toxic feuding and internecine killing that reside in the different strains of Islamism – just as they do in Christianity. It is possible that the present Syrian conflict may be the prelude to a more diverse sectarian conflict in which the US, Russia, Britain et al, will have more direct sponsorship as the awful potential of Cold War politics returns.

In the old cowboy films the Sheriff could deal with impending strife by collecting the gun belts and guns of the gunmen. In capitalism this would not be possible nor would the capitalists and their political agencies desire it. The arms trade, bordering on some two trillion dollars per annum, is a major source of profit - and, of course, employment - for the major nations of world capitalism. But weaponry, necessarily visible weaponry, is essential in dictating the terms of the system’s uneasy ‘peace’ agreements. Capitalism’s temporary periods of peace, like its industrialised phases of killing, requires a heavy investment in armaments.

The Syrian crisis has again brought the shadow of the Cold War with the same players who terrorised the world for decades following the Second World War. Then – in what was openly referred to as ‘a balance of terror’ - they threatened the planet with nuclear destruction. The US, Russia, China, France and Britain produce  the bulk of the world’s armaments; all have stockpiles of nuclear weapons and, if they were not all-powerful and beyond the control of the United Nations Organisation, it is likely that all five would be adjudged ‘war criminals’.

Obama and Putin lecturing the world about ‘morality’ and civilised human standards from behind their massive stores of the most awesome weapons demonstrates the veniality of what they defend as democracy. Yet in all the scores of interviews we see on our TV screens never is the issue of their nuclear weapons raised. Unquestioned virtue would appear to be the reward for power.

Alternative History (2013)

Book Review from the September 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Human Front, by Ken Macleod. PM Press, 2013.

Alternative history is a strange genre. Its central premise, that small changes in history can lead to radically different worlds is somewhat tenuous: Hitler dying as a small child is unlikely to have prevented a Second World War (merely changing the cast and their precise lines, instead). It is, though, fiction, and it provides a useful means of exploring ‘what ifs’, where the route to the alternative history is usually just an excuse to look at a world that might have been or is simply just different from our own. Being able to imagine different societies is a useful skill, in and of itself.

A few are wish fulfilments, and there’s a few too many ‘If the South won the Civil War’ or ‘If the Germans won the Second World War’ and even ‘If the British Empire never fell’. And of course, the less said about Zeppelins, the better.

Ken Macleod’s work has featured in our review columns before, often for their interesting examination of the ideas and cultures of the revolutionary left, as well as for his commitment to libertarian (proper sense) causes. The Human Front was his first published novella, and it has recently been reissued, along with an essay and an interview that further flesh out some of its themes.

It begins with the news that the Communist partisan Joseph Stalin has been killed in early 1963. The Soviet Union had fallen in 1949, under assault from Allied super hi-tech secret weapons. As Macleod explains in the essay, this dramatically changes the shape of the post-war world, leading to the unrestrained use of military superiority to maintain the colonial powers’ positions. The absence of the Soviet Union and the ongoing Chinese revolution means Maoism rather than Trotskyism comes to predominate on the British left. This leads to several scenes of ‘People’s War’ in the Scottish Highlands, with all the horror and brutality that entails.

Originally published in 2001, the image of a fugitive Stalin gunned down escaping is now resonant with the fates of Hussein and Bin Laden, and indeed, of our present unipolar world with the unrestrained use of drone strikes. Tens of years on, it seems more like prescience than alternative history. Although the novella soars off into high science fiction for its end twist, its grounding in the Scotland and the Lewis of Macleod’s childhood gives it a sense of solidity, grounding it in real history and left wing arguments remembered.

This reissue is an opportunity to not only consider the themes of the original story, but also alternative history itself and the way in which we shape our pasts to try and make our own future.

Pik Smeet

Cooking the Books: An Easy Match for Mammon (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 25 July the Archbishop of Canterbury, who fancies himself as a bit of a financial expert, said that it was his Church’s intention to drive the payday loan company Wonga out of business. He revealed that he had told Wonga’s boss that ‘we’re not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence, we’re trying to compete you out of existence’ (London Times, 26 July).  The next day he was left red-faced when it came out that his Church had money invested in a venture capitalist, Accel Partners, that was one of Wonga’s financial backers.

His plan is to encourage credit unions by offering them premises in churches and expert advice from Christian businessmen. But the idea that credit unions could out-compete capitalist money-lending enterprises like Wonga is pure fantasy.

A credit union is basically a savings and loan club. People pay in small amounts of money (on which they receive some interest) which gives them the right to borrow small sums of money (on which they pay interest) when they need it. To remain viable by covering its administrative costs, the union has to charge a higher rate of interest to borrowers than it pays to savers. Basically, they are a form of bank, mainly for poor people. Ideally, they are run democratically by their members.

A payday loan company, on the other hand, is a profit-seeking capitalist enterprise specialising in short term (from payday to payday) loans at a very high rate of interest. They don’t particularly target poor people, but rather anyone in short-term financial difficulty. In fact they prefer people who have another payday coming. The money they lend is theirs (or put up by backers such as Accel Partners) – and they have to have it in the first place.

It’s all about money and getting an income from lending it, but the Archbishop didn’t offer to put up any of his Church’s money, merely to let the credit unions use his churches as their offices. Even if he had, it is unlikely that the Church Commissioners, who manage the Church’s millions, would have approved as the rate of return, though eminently ‘ethical’, would have been too low. They have to choose investments with a higher rate of return to generate the income to pay the salaries and pensions of the clergy and for the maintenance of the bishop’s palaces. They are forced to behave capitalistically too.

If the Archbishop really thinks that local credit unions, operating from churches, can out-compete capitalist enterprises like Wonga (who have the resources to advertise every day on TV) by stealing their customers, he can’t be the financial expert he thinks he is. But at least he doesn’t think banks can create money out of nothing which if true (but it isn’t) would surely solve the problem. A Church bank creating money out of nothing would easily out-compete a payday loan company which has to already have the money to lend.

The only way the Church would have a chance of driving payday loan companies out of business would be to set up its own payday loan company, charging ‘ethical’ rates of usury and sending polite, ‘ethical’ solicitor’s letters to defaulters.

You can’t stand a chance of beating capitalist businesses unless you join them but there’s no guarantee that if you do join them you will beat them, as the ‘ethical’ Cooperative Bank has found to its cost.