The Idealists! (1925)

From the November 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

All that is vile in politics is well represented in the Labour Party. The grasping after fat jobs; the petty bickering over positions of influence; and the changing of ideas and programmes to suit the political weather.

Those who in opposition foam and froth over disarmament, when in office pushed forward a programme of Naval and Air Force development. Those who proclaim the rights of small nationalities, when they had their chance to fulfil their promises met the claims of Indians, Egyptians and others with threats of force and cargoes of bombs.

Based mainly upon the single idea of personal advancement, what else can be expected of these "Leaders of Labour"?

Ramsay MacDonald, J. R. Clynes, J. H. Thomas, vie with one another at pleasant social functions as to which can talk in the most honied tone calculated not to disturb the wealthy host who provide the tempting repasts.

They preach little homilies to the workers on the merit of working hard for the employers and giving them a square deal; they boost Wembley and parade their sound adherence to all the capitalist doctrines of Empire, they ape the manners and conceits of the ruling class, who in private laugh at them for their folly.

Dinners and social functions take up a great part of the time and energy of the more prominent Labour members.

Mouthers of windy and empty phrases; accomplished diners-out; settlers of strikes—with honours to the employers; trimmers of sails to suit political winds—for the securing of pelf and place; such are the crew the votes of the working class and the permission of the employers have placed at the political helm.

And yet, what self-sacrifice on the part of the rank and file has taken place to push these self-seekers into affluence! What a desire for improvement has backed these efforts whose fruition is barrenness!

The workers allow high wages (or salaries!) to be paid to these industrial and political bigwigs and thus make the jobs attractive and an inducement to the unprincipled adventurers. Those who are on the look-out for a career in which they can climb see such a career in these movements; and a career, moreover, that is easier than in ordinary business—brass, wind, and unscrupulousness being the main qualifications required. The "intellectuals" find an easy opening and crawl in and up.

The history of the "labour" movement the world over is to a great extent the history of sacrifice by the workers and betrayal by the "intellectuals."

Finally, is it necessary to attend gorgeous functions and to be tricked out in knee breeches in order to help on the emancipation of the working class?

GILMAC.

First Steps In Socialism: Who Are the Working Class? (1913)

From the April 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who are the working class? Many members of the working class, who dress after the fashion of their masters, and ape their manners, would repel with lively indignation and scorn, the suggestion that they belong to "the backbone of the country," the working class. They think that between these "hewers of wood and drawers of water" and the "upper ten" there exists a class whose fortunes and interest are with neither.

The idea is falacious. Manners may make the man, or nine tailors, working in harmony and with might and main, may accomplish the same feat, but neither manners nor the tailors give a man his class status. Nor can the nature of the person's daily occupation draw the line of class distinction, though the fact of any occupation at all being followed goes far in the direction of placing the subject in the ranks of the despised and rejected.

Many imagine that the working class are those who perform what they are pleased to refer to as manual labour, as distinct from those they are even more pleased to call mental workers. But if this is so, where is the line to be drawn?

Who, think you, has to exercise the greater mental activity—the booking clerk serving out tickets or the signalman passing the passenger safely on to his destination?—the office dignitary who works out the amount of the joiner's wages or the joiner involved in the intricacies of staircasing and hand-railing?

As a matter of fact a little consideration will show us that it is impossible to draw the line anywhere, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a distinction between manual labour and mental. The brain is the centre of all activities. Every muscle in the body, therefore, derives its power of movement from the brain. It follows, then, that every muscular activity must be mental as well.

On the other hand, there is no possible means at present known by which any mental activity can find outlet to the world save through the exercise of manual or muscular effort in some form or other. A thought cannot be written without the muscular effort of wielding the pen, cannot even be spoken without the muscular exertion of moving the lips. So all mental labour that does not perish fruitless in the head wherein it is generated, must be manual as well as mental.

What is it, then, that divides the community into classes? What is that there is common between all those who constitute each class, yet is not common to the different classes? The answer to this last question, when we find it, may throw some light on the first.

If we take a survey of those about us, our fellow members of society, we find them a motley crew. Some are old, some are young; some fair to view, some we shouldn't care to be mistaken for; some are big and strong, some small and weak; some are good like ourselves, some are awful perishers. But none of these things can form the basis of a class division.

Shall we say that all the strong, or the good, form a class by themselves? Then class cannot go by families. There can be no working-class families, or other-class families. For there are long and short, strong and weak, plain and comely, in every family; and though, of course, all crime is with the working class, not all the working class are criminals.

In the same way occupation does not supply the test, for the same families frequently supply the workers for both the office, the workshop, and the factory; the salaried black-coat and the waged cloth cap.

What, then, can it be, that divides and unites the people into classes?

There are two things and two things only we can discover that remain fairly constant in certain circles, seldom dividing individual families, though separating families into two great groups and keeping them apart. These are, the possession or non possession of wealth, and the necessity or otherwise of working for money or selling one's energy.

A moment's thought will reveal the fact that three things are intimately connected. People possessing considerable wealth are not compelled to sell their strength and energy in order to live, while those who do not share in the ownership of wealth have no means of living except by means of the sale of their labour-power.

So there we have it. The working class are the propertyless, those, with their dependants, who must sell the the strength of their mind and body for sustenance. What matter whether it is expended in mine or office? What matter whether it is paid for with salary or wages? All these trivialities vanish in the essentials that it provides. The propertyless have to work, to obey, to suffer unemployment, insecurity, and poverty. The propertied live idle and luxurious lives—and dominate.

The working class, then, are all those who have to sell their energy to live.

A. E. Jacomb

From Our Branches. (1906)

Party News from the March 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

Watford.

Dead? Not much. Not by a jugful. Just busy, that's all. Too busy to report, even at times. But alive! O! very much alive. Ask our local Labour-misleading friends the enemy. They may conceivably wish we were dead. It isn't their fault we are not. But we won't die, ingrates that we are. So they try the game of ignoring us. It's a goose game. And their elaborately simulated indifference is worth coming a long way to see. As a sample this: - Before the election the local S.D.F. and I.L.P. who jointly make up a third body—the Labour Church—issued a manifesto. (Incidentally and in justice to the author it should be stated that a considerable portion of the manifesto was lifted without acknowledgment from a pamphlet by C.A. Glyde.) This document urged the workers to abstain from voting. Whereupon the chairman of the I.L.P. Branch (also member of the L.C.) promptly appeared upon the Liberal candidate's platform, moving resolutions of support—an example immediately followed by another of the L.C. As a result the Branch published a repudiation of their chairman's action in publicly supporting the Liberal and called upon him to resign his chairmanship. Of course we could do no less than point out in the press that the action of the Watford I.L.P. was out of harmony with the I.L.P. action all over the country, citing the case of the neighbouring Harrow Branch, which had supported the Liberal candidate, and emphasising the inevitable confusion in the working-class mind such muddled tactics must engender. Also we a asked a few questions! Thus. If the matter was of the importance to warrant public repudiation, would not the only logical and sufficient action of the I.L.P. had been the expulsion of the member? If it had been a private member instead of a chairman would he have been called upon to resign membership? If so why not the chairman? If not what is the value of the Branch action? And would it have been all right if the support of the member had been given the member privately, seeing that it was his public action that impelled the Branch to move? Again would the I.L.P. refuse future support to the second individual mentioned who, as a member of the Labour Church and Trades Council was supported in his candidature for public office by the I.L.P. and S.D.F? And would the LC and S.D.F. publicly repudiate his action in supporting the Liberal. The reply from all these bodies has been a very loud and very interesting silence—the sort of answer we are very familiar with here because the only answer that may safely be vouchsafed. However, the local council elections are at hand, when they will probably hear from us again.

One other matter only may be squeezed into our present note. The Party membership is aware that the police have taken action to prevent our meetings in the Market Square. The Salvation Army, however, are not interfered with. After which exhibition of even-handed justice it will be no matter for surprise that the chief constable's name is Daniel! We have had an interesting correspondence with this worthy which may see the light of publicity in the future. The police fiat came to us at the end of last year's open-air season, so that there has been no particular need for hurried action. But as it seems inevitable that our meetings in the coming summer will be interfered with, we hope the Organisation will take the question into early consideration. Members prepared to accept the hospitality of His Brittanic Majesty's lock-up are urged to communicate with the E.C., to whom the matter has been referred, at once.

The Branch.

Peckham.

At the end of last year this branch vacated its old premises, for the sole reason that they were more expensive than useful. This trifling circumstance has been has been commented on by a member of one of the several utopian reform associations of this district as an indication of our decline. On the contrary we have much reason to be gratified with an all-round improvement—increased attendance at branch meetings, an enthusiastic desire to make our influence felt when opportunities offer, and a healthy condition of the funds. This, by way of warning to those who await our funeral not to be over-sanguine (and kindly note that in The Socialist Party we do not "tell lies in the interests of the organisation." The performance of the fatuous pseudo- Socialists are always interesting, if not instructive. On Feb. 7, Mr. John Clark, M.A., S.D.F., was permitted to lecture at the Peckham Liberal Club on the "Points on which Socialists and Liberals can agree." Needless to add, the usual stale list of impossibilist radical reforms were advocated with the usual sentimental fervour.

During the election contest in the neighbouring constituency of Deptford, a local official of the S.D.F. displayed the "vote for Bowerman" placard, notwithstanding the gentleman's plain declaration to his fellow trade unionists that "He had always been a Liberal, and would probably remain one." Therefore, one is not surprised to read in the official journal of the London Society of Compositors that Mr. Bowerman "has been welcomed by the majority of Liberals in the district, many of whom worked strenuously to secure the return of the Labour Candidate." Incidents like the foregoing constantly recurring show the necessity for a genuine revolutionary Socialist Party apart from those whose political tactics are marked by confusion, pusillanimity and compromise.

W. K.

Fulham.

Although this branch has only been fairly active during the winter, the literature sales have been well kept up. We held a splendid "No vote" meeting on Saturday, Jan. 13th. Plenty of questions and opposition were the order of the day.

One sequel to this meeting was a lengthy discussion in a local paper, in which our position was upheld against the Liberals, who talked about political suicide, disenfranchisement, etc. Several young fellows are studying Socialist literature in order to properly grasp our position before joining the party. All things considered, all is well.

E.J.B.Allen 

Tooting.

We have held some encouraging meetings at Streatham Drinking Fountain, where we have found a favourable spot for open-air work. Comrade Moore has debated with a local Progressive whom he had no difficulty in disposing of.

Standards and Manifestos have sold well, and the special Party Election Manifesto was got into circulation so effectively that we have been credited by the local Liberals with losing them the seat. We have opened premises at 29. The Parade, Upper Tooting Road, where any evening after 8 we shall be glad to welcome any who desire closer acquaintance with the Party Principles.

A. Barker

Fighting Human Nature (2014)

From the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Critics sometimes say that socialist society will not work, on the grounds that people are by nature greedy or selfish or lazy or whatever. Here we examine one writer’s arguments to the effect that people are naturally aggressive.

In his book On Human Nature, the sociobiologist Edward Wilson asks, ‘Are human beings innately aggressive?’ His answer is Yes, and here is part of his reasoning:

‘Throughout history, warfare, representing only the most organized technique of aggression, has been endemic to every form of society, from hunter-gatherer bands to industrial states. During the past three centuries a majority of the countries of Europe have been engaged in war during approximately half of all the years; few have ever seen a century of continuous peace.’

Let’s look at Wilson’s arguments, and consider some facts about human behaviour. Before going any further we should look at his definition of aggression: ‘Any physical act or threat of action by one individual that reduces the freedom or genetic fitness of another’. This is odd in that it implies that only individuals, not governments, armies or companies, can commit aggression.

With regard to those who blame aggression on environmental rather than genetic factors, he writes:

‘They forget that innateness refers to the measurable probability that a trait will develop in a specified set of environments, not to the certainty that the trait will develop in all environments. By this criterion human beings have a marked hereditary predisposition to aggressive behaviour.’

So in certain circumstances humans may behave aggressively. The extent of this probability is said to be measurable, presumably by such methods as counting the number of murders and other violent acts per head of the population.

It is important to appreciate that Wilson is not arguing that aggression is an inevitable part of human behaviour, since he accepts that it will not emerge always and everywhere (and that women as a group are less aggressive than men). He is well aware that it can vary greatly over time even within a single society: he cites, for instance, the Semai of Malaya, who were entirely peaceful until recruited by the British colonial authorities in the 1950s to fight against guerrillas. They then became extremely bloodthirsty. And there have been recent claims that the extent of violent crime in England and Wales has fallen, with only about one half of the number of violent incidents that there were in 2002. No doubt the details of the statistics are questionable, as is the claim that a rise in the price of alcohol is in large part responsible. But similar trends have been reported in other countries too, so it is likely that there is a real change here. This just emphasises the point that aggressive behaviour is influenced by other aspects of society.

Notice, moreover, that one can turn Wilson’s argument round and claim that humans are innately peaceable, by restating his claims as follows:

‘Peace has been endemic in every form of human society. There have been plenty of years when European countries have been at peace rather than fighting.’

This argument for innate peaceableness is entirely parallel to that for innate aggression, and at least as convincing.

Consider, too, your own behaviour. Some people have a shorter fuse than others, and we all get angry from time to time, but how often do you react to perceived mistreatment with physical aggression or even the threat of such action? Human society would surely be impossible, or at best very unpleasant, if people really used physical force even a large part of the time. That simply is not how people behave.

Wilson also argues:

‘Most significantly of all, the human forms of aggressive behavior are species-specific: although basically primate in form, they contain features that distinguish them from aggression in all other species.’

There is no general aggressive instinct applying to all animals, and humans are far less aggressive and violent than hyenas or lions, for instance. Wilson seems to be claiming that humans show only some of the possible aggressive responses found in the animal kingdom, hence there is something specifically human about people's aggressive behaviour, therefore it must be genetically inherited. But what is supposed to follow from this?

In fact he sees human aggression as ‘a structured, predictable pattern of interaction between genes and environment’. He does not appear to believe that anyone can predict whether individuals or groups will behave aggressively in any particular situation, so all that is left is the claim that genes and environment interact to affect how we behave. Which is neither surprising nor worrying.

Wilson examines some hunter-gatherer societies, and then summarises his position:

‘Human beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats and to escalate their hostility sufficiently to overwhelm the source of the threat by a respectably wide margin of safety.’

The question of how violent hunter-gatherer and other tribal societies really are remains controversial (see Edward Helmore in the Observer, 3 February 2013) but his examples show no more than that people sometimes act aggressively and that various cultural and environmental factors determine whether they in fact do so (such as the reliability of food supplies).

In addition, we should examine to what extent Wilson’s claims discredit the idea of socialism. If people really were ‘predisposed’ to react violently to each other, especially to strangers, then he might have a case against an egalitarian stateless society. But in socialism there will be no ‘external threats’ of the kind he envisages, so nothing follows about the impossibility of such a way of organising society.

Nothing Wilson says argues against the following claim:

‘it is part of human nature to be able to become aggressive and to wage war. But how and when we become aggressive is controlled by our cultures rather than by our genes.’ (Marvin Harris: Cannibals and Kings)

The Socialist Party’s pamphlet Are We Prisoners of Our Genes? discusses a number of other arguments about the way human behaviour is supposedly controlled by our genetic inheritance.

Paul Bennett

Proper Gander: Porn and Real Life (2014)

The Proper Gander Column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

For some reason, porn films don’t tend to get reviewed or discussed on the telly very often. This gap in the market was recently filled by The Golden Rules of Porn (More 4), a pornucopia of x-rated movies. In this show, Grace Dent and some talking head porn stars, comedians and viewers, give a knowing, tongue in cheek guide to pornos from the last forty years. The clips sourced from VHS tapes are so grainy that the editors at More 4 hardly needed to fuzz the genitalia out.

100 seminal porn films were surveyed, from Flesh Gordon to I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight. Not-so vital statistics were gleaned from the films’ 573 sex scenes, including how many featured steamy shower scenarios (5 percent), whips (8 percent) and men with moustaches (more than half). 42.23 percent of chat-up lines involved puns and innuendos, although in real life an opening gambit based on fixing plumbing isn’t likely to have the same outcome as in a skin flick. And few people meet and ‘get it on’ as quickly as the 72 seconds of the average porno pair-up.

The programme highlights the gulf between porn and reality, but there’s also a gulf between how the programme describes porn and porn in real life. Porn is presented as something kitsch, made by enthusiastically happy stars whose sexploits have afforded them luxury pads with their own swimming pools. The other side of porn – how it exploits and cheapens those pushed into it – isn’t mentioned. Some statistics not cited by the show are that 37 percent of women in porn films were child victims of forced sex, 33 percent met the criteria for depression, 50 percent had lived in poverty within the last year (California Women’s Health Survey) and 88 percent of porn films feature physical aggression (US Department of Justice report, 2004). The long-term impact of pornography on its consumers was also ignored by the programme. The average age at which Americans first watch hardcore porn is 11 (internetsafety101.org), and this can lead to distorted views on self-esteem and relationships. The role which pornography has in society should be discussed more often, but not as trashy clip shows like The Golden Rules of Porn.

Mike Foster

The Socialist Party and the Scottish Referendum (2014)

From the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of us don’t own a single square inch of Scotland. It doesn’t belong to us: we just live here and work for the people who do own it. In or out of the Union, that won’t change.

In Scotland, society is run in the interests of those who own the wealth. They argue among each other over billions of barrels of oil, GDP rates, profits and exports, because where the borders lie matters to them. Every border is an opportunity to wring cash out of other property owners.

Scotland will remain dependent upon their whims and interests whatever the outcome of the referendum. 

They’ll try to sway us one way or another with crumbs (or the promises of crumbs) but we’ll only get what they feel they can spare to protect their privilege and wealth. We will remain dependent upon their investments, making a profit for them before we can get our needs and interests met.

The only way to stop this dependency would be for us to take ownership and control of the wealth of the world into our own hands. We could, together, use the wealth of the world to meet our mutual needs and gain the true independence of being able to control our work and our lives in a free and voluntary association of equals.

Though the outcome of this referendum is irrelevant, it is an opportunity for us to tell our fellow workers that this is what we want. We don’t have to suffer in silence, we can go to the polling stations and put ‘NEITHER YES NOR NO BUT WORLD SOCIALISM’ on the ballot paper. Then join The Socialist Party to fight for an independent world.

Greasy Pole: Dobson Drops Out? (2014)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine you have to allow extra time for your morning dash to the newsagent because of the people who want to shake your hand and engage you in gossip. Imagine you once saw yourself as the ideal choice for the most prestigious and demanding job in the capital except that nobody of any influence agreed with you. Imagine you held a series of ministerial jobs but were demoted and retired to the back benches to attract attention by your beard and heavy-handed jokes. Imagine you are Frank Dobson, who recently announced that after 35 years he will not stand again to be the MP for Holborn and St. Pancras – which stimulated the appetites of some powerful and hungry hopefuls to succeed him.

Bruiser

Appropriately for someone born in York, Dobson came from what is often called up there a railway family. He then switched to the more fertile environs of the capital. Along the way, in 1971 he was elected as a councillor for the London Borough of Camden with its reputation as a hotbed of the wildest leftwing delusions, asserted by their flying the Red Flag above the Town Hall. Dobson's experience as a councillor locally made him the obvious choice as the parliamentary Labour candidate for Holborn and St. Pancras, where he won in the 1979 general election and which he has held since. His reputation as a bit of a bruiser – and perhaps also for re-circulating 'dirty' jokes along with the equally unremarkable clean ones – marked him down as promotion material for a future Blair government. In this he was helped when in 1994 he led the Labour Party response to the infamous 'homes for votes' policy of Westminster Council, driven by the Tesco heiress Lady Shirley Porter who evaded an Order from the Law Lords to repay ￡27 million of the ill-gotten gains by staying for a while in Israel (eventually coughing up ￡12 million).

NHS

As a rapturous Tony Blair swirled through Number Ten, his first job was to organise a team of ministers who could deal with the changes imposed by the previous Tory government. In this the NHS was a priority so that his appointment of Dobson as the minister responsible was particularly significant. But he was not completely satisfied with his choice: 'At the helm of the NHS, I had put Frank Dobson. This, in itself, indicates how little I understood when first in office... He was one of many who considered New Labour a clever wheeze to win'. Yet there was evidence that Dobson's problems were deeper seated. In the 1981 election of Labour party officers he voted for Tony Benn until the pressures of reality disillusioned him so that he said he preferred 'sane left' leaders; examples were Neil Kinnock, Ed Miliband and Blair himself ('who else was there?' Dobson helplessly asked).

London Mayor

Late in 1999 Dobson was lined up to be wangled out of the Commons and was internally selected by Labour to stand as their candidate in the inaugural election for Mayor of London (a choice which stank, according to then MP Chris Mullin). A small problem for him was that in the election itself he would be up against the seasoned, subtle Ken Livingstone standing as an independent (which was a breach of his solemn assurance that he would not be a candidate, but never mind – we are talking politics here). Blair assessed Dobson's chances 'about as much as ... Steptoe and Son's horse had of winning the Grand National'. Livingstone beat Dobson humiliatingly into third place, which left him bitterly to reflect on the fact that his successor in charge of the nation's health was Alan Milburn, once a left-wing bibliophile who ran the 'Days Of Hope' radical bookshop but then built himself into a millionaire consultant for massive private companies such as Lloyds Pharmacy and Pepsi; apart from those he set up his own very lucrative media company.

Bribery

In the general election of 2001 Dobson was re-elected and quickly confronted with the realities of matching what he might have called his conscience with what the Whips would have been aware of as his ambitions. In 2003 there were some votes in the Commons on the issue of the war in Iraq. The Attorney General Goldsmith had done the work needed to enable Blair to claim that an invasion of that country would be legal. As if that would have made any real difference. Dobson was treated as a possible rebel in the intended Commons debates and he was offered the job of High Commissioner to the Republic of South Africa as a bribe for supporting the government. But that was not effective enough to deter him. The war went ahead and we are now reminded, day after day, of the merciless futility of it all, in the fighting and the desperate plight of the people there.

Starmer

In June 2011 Dobson was the focus of media attention because he was a tenant in a flat owned by Camden Council; he said he did not know how much rent he paid, which triggered some lurid speculation (one guess was £160 a week when other flats in the same luxurious building went for ￡1000). This, with the fact that he and his wife have a comfortable joint income and own a large property in Yorkshire, did not help him keep his image of a lovable eccentric. Tessa Jowell, who was one of his junior ministers, recalls him padding about the ministry office without his shoes on, at times with a bare toe peeping through a hole in his sock: 'We all absolutely adored him. I love him – he's a person of incredible generosity and loyalty'.

Among Dobson's other fans, one of the more likely successors for Holborn and St. Pancras, is Sir Keir Starmer who as a KCB and a QC and ex-Director of the Crown Prosecution Service is unlikely to unbalance his staff by showing them his bare toes. Unless he were to have the same effect by his view of the political situation: 'It would be an honour for anyone to succeed Frank Dobson . . . Our constituency needs an MP who will be able to influence a future Labour government’ – something which the tempestuous, unachieving life and times of Frank Dobson exposed as impossible.

Ivan

1945 Revisited (1997)

A Theatre Review from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tom and Clem by Stephen Churchett. Aldwych Theatre.

Days after the confirmation of Tony Blair (anag: Tory in Lab) as Prime Minister, it was interesting to see a play about events in 1945, immediately after the Labour Party's landslide victory in the first post-war general election. Tom and Clem, a play by Stephen Churchett, is centred on a series  of imaginary conversations between Tom Driberg, journalist and darling of the Left, ex-Communist Party member and recently elected Labour MP for Maldon in Essex, and Clement Attlee, the first Prime Minister to lead a majority Labour government.

On 17 July 1945, the so-called "Big Three"—Churchill (British Prime Minister), Truman (President of the United States) and Stalin (Russian Generalissimo) began a meeting in Potsdam, outside Berlin. Meanwhile in Britain a general election had been held on 5 July, but the result was delayed to allow the inclusion of the votes of the million or so members of the British armed forces who were scattered around the globe. In Potsdam proceedings were adjourned to allow Churchill to journey to Britain for the result. He never returned. The Labour Party had won a famous victory (sic), and it was Attlee who was soon to be photographed with Truman and Stalin.

But it is not the world of macro-politics which forms the substance of this play. We never see Truman, Stalin and their acolytes, although we do hear their motor-cavalcades arriving. Rather Churchett has written a chamber play for four characters: Driberg and Attlee, and two members of the conference team of army officers — Kitty, an unshockable, "seen it all before", Briton, and Alexie, a romantic young man who is her Russian equivalent.

For the most part I enjoyed the evening. The author gives us four credible, well-rounded, warts-and-all characters, who are played quite splendidly, and dialogue which is revealing and instructive. And the play is unexpected and refreshingly funny. There are some wonderful one-liners ("So you're an agnostic then?" "I'm not sure. I haven't made up my mind yet."), and some hilarious exchanges prompted by Alexie's attempt to understand idiomatic English.

Michael Foot argues in a postscript to Driberg's posthumously published autobiography, Ruling Passions,  that Driberg's "homosexuality truly was his ruling passion", and Stephen Churchett clearly shares this opinion. Driberg emerges as a practised seducer, who makes a play for Alexie with potentially tragic consequences: a man driven by his erotic appetites and love of the English language; a humanist who is still emotionally shell-shocked following a visit to a concentration camp. In contrast Attlee is a controlled, pipe-smoking pragmatist, whose passions are not so much sensitised by his intellect as anaesthetised by it. Michael Gambon and Alec McCowen play Driberg and Attlee with such finesse and conviction as almost to make you believe that they miraculously become these two long-dead politicians. They are simply magnificent. To watch them at work is a privileged delight.

But finally Churchett cheats. We know, with the benefit of hindsight, just what Attlee's government did and, more importantly, did not achieve. And we know the effect of Driberg's romantic passions because of their unfortunate, if unintended, consequences for Alexie. And, yes, many of Driberg's beliefs were inconsistent, and foolish. Nationalisation has nothing to do with socialism, and capitalism cannot be changed so that it operates in the interest of the whole of society. But in the key last act exchange Driberg capitulates in the face of Attlee's passionless Sunday School rendition of "England arise, the long, long night is over . . . " Why? Not only does Churchett set up a false antithesis between Attlee's cold pragmatism and Driberg's supposed socialist position, he then rigs the result by gagging one of the combatants. It makes for unconvincing drama, and a disreputable attack on socialists and socialism. In fact socialists made mincemeat of Attlee's position, as readers of this journal in the 1940s know well. Attlee's successor, Tory, sorry, Tony Blair, will fare no better.

Michael Gill

Madness (1997)

A Short Story from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

I recently made an appointment to see my doctor. He sat at his desk and I sat on a chair to the side of him. He had my records in front of him with one eye on me and another on them.

He asked "now tell me what can I do for you?"

I told him "I think I'm going mad."

He turned a page of my notes to see, I think whether there was any record of my ever having gone mad before. "So," he said, sitting back in his seat and clasping his hands together. "What on earth makes you think that?" I told him that everything on earth made me think that. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Can you be a little more specific?"

"Yes," I said, "people are killing one another, if not in one way then in some other way, pollution, malnutrition . . . "

He frowned at me. "You can't do anything about that, it is the way of the world. That is how the world has always been."

" . . . Exploitation," I went on, "the stockpiling of more and yet more weapons of torture and destruction . . . and  . . . " My doctor shook his head.

"But this is nothing for you to get depressed about surely."

"And this lottery, millions are given away to one person and yet in this city, as in others, people are begging on the streets and . . . "

He picked up his pen and wrote something down.

"And there are rich people with several homes and other who have no homes and no paid work . . . "

He looked at me sternly over the tops of his spectacles. It is a waste of time to concern yourself with these matters and what is more it is detrimental to your health. You really must not upset yourself about things you cannot change."

"But they could be changed —if goods were produced for use instead of for profit and more profit."

My doctor gave me a long, hard stare. "There are fine minds out there whose job it is to make sure these things are taken care of. You must realise that there are people who cannot fit into society who prefer to  . . . "

I finished it for him. "Who prefer to remain on the streets, cold, depressed and hungry. Do you believe they prefer that?"

A look of irritation flitted across his face. "I did not say that they 'preferred' it but if there is no work they can do . . . " He looked at his watch. "Now I do have other patients to see so I will tell you what I am going to do. I am going to prescribe some tablets, and they should help you to stop worrying about these things. If we all of us dwelt in such matters then would we all end up?"

I suggested perhaps with a more just society. But ignoring this he wrote out a prescription. "I want you to take two of these three times a day with water. I should warn you that there could be side-effects; you could suffer from a blurring of vision, some auditory impairment and possible some sensations of numbness and loss of feeling. But I think if you take them regularly you may find that poverty, starvation, injustice, pollution and war no longer worry you quite so much." Then, cheerfully, "We'll soon get you back to sanity

"Thank you doctor," I said, "but I would far rather be mad."

Heather Ball

News on Sunday (1987)

From the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The News on Sunday was hyped as "the paper that bites back", "the paper that has got balls but no tits", and "the paper that gives you the naked truth not naked women". It is financed by trade unions and left wing local authorities. It has an Editorial Charter which espouses a series of "ideologically sound' causes: it is anti-sexist, anti-racist, in favour of a united Ireland, concerned about the environment, the poor, the Third World, it will support workers taking industrial action, and so on. It has an impressive list of journalists, mostly collected from other left wing magazines and "radical" publications. But even before the first issue was printed it had lost a few including John Pilger. The News on Sunday has a recruitment policy that aims at achieving a target of 52 per cent women and 10 per cent blacks and is castigating itself for not yet having achieved this target.

It also had an initial target circulation of around 800,000 and its failure to achieve that target led to some rather more serious soul-searching —like whether the paper can afford to continue. Because although the paper might have the right "leftist" credentials and an "ideologically correct" editorial policy, this does not alter the fact that the paper itself has so far been profoundly disappointing. The newspaper that promised us the "naked truth" in fact contains very little in the way of news. Their advertising hype had suggested that we might expect "in-depth" investigation of issues that concern ordinary people without the right-wing or conservative filter that operates on most newspapers. Instead, issues like the Third World, ecology, health and welfare are used as convenient pegs on which to hang romanticised guff about "heroic struggles" of working people. The causes that produce the heroes may be different from the other tabloids — Nicaraguan peasants, not the Falkland Islanders — but the journalistic style and sentiments are similar. Short sentences. Tear-jerking emotional stories. Little analysis. Over-simplistic assertions.

The News on Sunday is explicitly aimed at manual workers, blacks and women and is courting the readership of the Sunday Mirror — supporters of the Labour Party, trade unionists — workers who, it is argued, want more than tits and bums and naughty vicars from their Sunday newspaper. However, the News on Sunday quite clearly also thinks that anyone who fits into this marketing category is unable to cope with news presented straight, without appeals to emotion or ideological rectitude — a truly alternative newspaper.

The new information technology which made the News on Sunday possible is not being used to produce a new radical, alternative newspaper. Even if that promise had been fulfilled there would still have been enormous problems. Newspapers, unless there is someone willing to subsidise them, must run at a profit. Most newspapers rely heavily on advertising revenue to make money and advertisers are in a strong position to influence the editorial stance taken. But the News on Sunday is unlikely to lose advertising of its "left-wing" stance. It will lose advertising because its circulation is too low to make it worthwhile for companies to advertise in it. The only people that the News on Sunday is likely to upset are the people who spent 35p on it thinking they would get a different kind of newspaper only to find that it was a paper without news but with a lot of patronising moralism instead.

Janie Percy-Smith

Fizzling out (1979)

Book Review from the April 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Slow Burning Fuse by John Quail. Paladin, £1.95

Quail's aim to present "the lost history of the British anarchists" between 1880 and 1930. His account is primarily a narrative one, with little emphasis on theoretical matters — which is just as well, since the theoretical discussions are the weakest part of the book. Quail's researches have led him to uncover a number of near-forgotten incidents and personalities, some of which are recounted interestingly here. Particularly noteworthy is the tale of the Walsall Anarchists arrested in 1892 and sentenced to terms of imprisonment (ten years in three cases) for a bomb-making conspiracy that was largely the inspiration of a police agent provocateur.

Most of the book is devoted to events and groups around such journals as Freedom and Commonweal, and to anarchist influence on organisations such as the Socialist League and the Social Democratic Federation. It is in the context of the latter that a passing reference is made to the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. Quite apart from Quail's jibe that we "never escaped from the status of completely uninfluential sect", his account is inaccurate in implying that the founders of the SPGB were motivated merely by dissatisfaction with the group round H. M. Hyndman that ran the SDF. In fact two matters of principle were at stake: that a socialist organisation be thoroughly democratic and have no leaders and that a revolutionary party should not advocate reforms. If Quail had mentioned the SPGB's anti-reformism, allied with our insistence on gaining control of the machinery of government through the ballot box, we might have been spared his simplistic equation of reformism with electoral activity and revolution with anti-parliamentarism.

A little clarity on this score would have improved what is in any case the interesting part of the book, the account of earlier events in the SDF and the Socialist League. The League was founded early in 1885 by a number of people (including William Morris, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling) who had shortly before left the SDF. This revolt was largely a matter of personal opposition to Hyndman, and the new organisation was by no means agreed on political strategy. The Avelings drafted a constitution committing the League to electoral activity, and this was adopted by the Council but then rejected by the League's first annual conference in July 1885. Unlike the SDF, though, the League was genuinely opposed to reformism. Its circular To Socialists stated:

We believe to hold out as baits hopes of the amelioration of the condition of the workers, to be wrung out of the necessities of the rival factions of our privileged rulers, is delusive and mischievous.

Dissension between pro- and anti-parliamentarists plagued the League, but by 1888 it was completely committed to an anti-parliamentary policy. William Morris left in 1890, signalling his opposition to both reformism and violent revolt, and with his departure the League ceased to exist as a national body. Morris, with his emphasis on education and "making socialists", held views far removed from those of the direct-actionist members of the League. It took the latter "impossibilist" revolt to establish an organisation uncompromisingly opposed to the policy of seeking reforms and committed to making socialists as the condition for the establishment of socialism.

One of the reasons for dissatisfaction with the SDF was that the party's journal Justice was owned by a private group over which the members had no control. It is interesting to see from Quail's account that anarchist practice led to exactly the same situation with regard to Freedom. This journal was founded in 1886 by the Freedom Group, which had strictly "limited and confidential" membership. By 1897, when it was the only anarchist journal still being published, anarchists in the wider movement suggested that it become more popular in character. But the Freedom Group would not respond to such criticisms; according to one critic of Freedom:

It was edited and managed by an inaccessible group of arrogant persons worse than the Pope and his seventy cardinals and written by fossilised old quilldrivers.

In spite of a number of shortcomings, the book is informative and well worth reading. 

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Tomorrow’s People (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

To those unfortunate enough to be waiting for exam results, their whole future turning on a single envelope, this summer’s heat-wave can’t have brought much pleasure. In the event, A level grades were slightly down on previous years as the government has striven to make exams harder (to combat the so-called Flynn effect of rising grades with no accompanying rising ability), but university admissions have gone up, as governments have continued to push more students into higher education despite the crucifying burden of costs now expected to be borne by those same students.

Those still at school can hardly fail to be aware of ongoing changes to education policy with the introduction of holiday fines for parents taking ‘French leave’ from term-time attendance. And there has been ominous talk of extending the school day until, horrors, 6pm.

So for anyone reading this who finds themselves wondering why the government just can’t seem to leave education policy the f*** alone, and why they keep interfering with child and parental rights in such a petty, condescending and high-handed manner, we present the business guide to the capitalist school.

It all starts with evolution. There’s not much doubt that genes play a part in innate ability or ‘predispositions’, but nobody knows which and by how much genes are involved, say, in making someone good at maths or music. No single gene ever does one single thing, but performs multiple operations which themselves have cascading effects on other genes, in a process known as pleiotropy. Lucky for us it’s so complicated, in a way. If science were ever able to untangle the byzantine complexity of gene expression it would certainly lead to a Brave New World, akin to genetic feudalism, where you were feted to be a space scientist or fated to be a street cleaner and there wouldn’t be a damned thing you could do about it.

In the absence of this marvellous state of affairs, the captains of industry who are interested in mining future generations of talent have a bit of a problem. Capitalist cultural institutions are organised hierarchically, with rich kids getting into all the best schools and universities, their lives set fair for comfort and privilege, while poor kids are  generally directed towards the Gates of the McJob Underworld with the words ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ over the portal.

The problem for the captains is that evolution doesn’t follow social hierarchies, and ‘good genes’ tend to be distributed randomly, and horizontally, through the population. Nobody knows where they are or what they look like, and only careful development and processing will bring them to the fore. In consigning poor kids to poor education, capitalist social hierarchies are effectively throwing away more than half the potential talent. Any mining company knows that you don’t make money by chucking most of your gold on the slag pile.

But there’s another problem, which is that old workers are refusing to die off in the obliging manner they used to, and the costs of keeping these generally unexploitable people alive are spiralling, costs which are ultimately borne by the same captains of industry who are trying to reduce wastage. Future generations of workers are going to have to work harder, faster, smarter and longer to make up for these increasing costs, as well as pay back their student loans. After six years of recession, with no guarantee of a decent job, the educational incentives are shrinking. Among those with student loans (ie students without rich parents) the current loan write-off estimate stands at 45 percent, barely above the state’s break-even level (Guardian, 21 March). The kids are not alright, and the captains are not happy about it either.

The captains’ union – the Confederation of British Industry – regularly updates the government (it doesn’t matter which one) with their requirements. Tomorrow’s worker is expected to have a skill set that would have looked like science fiction a generation ago. But above all, the state must do something about wastage. Hence all the tinkering, for example the following:

Poor kids tend to leave school earlier in order to bring money into deprived households, and they have lately been doing so in increasing numbers. Now the law has changed so that they will have to remain in education until 18. They’ll probably end up working nights, the poor sods.

Everybody knows about the law of supply and demand. Holiday companies tend to make a loss in the off-peak season and recoup their losses in high season, tripling or quadrupling prices. Naturally this doesn’t affect rich kids, but poor families, if they want any kind of decent quality of life including an annual holiday, have been in the habit of playing truant from school to get the low-season prices. A day here or there may not matter too much, but across a generation of kids the weeks and months add up. Poor kids miss school more than rich ones. More disadvantage, more wastage.

In secondary schools, kids get around 2 hours of homework per night. This is not a problem for rich kids, who have supportive and motivated parents to help. But poor kids frequently have home environments which are not conducive to homework, and the social attitudes of poor families are often hostile to academic achievement (after all, what did school ever do for them?). So rich kids do their homework and poor kids don’t. But if the 2 hours homework was done in school time instead, the advantage enjoyed by rich kids would in theory evaporate. Hence the desperate talk of extending the school day, in the teeth of union opposition (‘Michael Gove’s plans for longer school day dealt 'huge blow’, Telegraph, 13 February).

The capitalist school system is essentially an extractive and refinery business, confronted in the world market by brutal competition on all sides. The traditional institutions of class privilege in individual countries tend to blunt their competitive edge, which is why capitalism, from the individual standpoint of a poor worker, can sometimes look progressive and even egalitarian. Money talks, not birth or background. Capitalism wants to plunder the workforce for everything it’s got, and it expects tomorrow’s people to be the smartest that have ever lived.

If you don’t like the idea of being mined and extracted, processed, refined, developed, graded and squeezed dry your entire life, join the club. And there is a club. You should join the people who want to abolish the commodity system. To get off the conveyor belt, you have to help shut down the conveyor belt.

Socialist education won’t be like this, because socialist society won’t be an endless competitive war of all against all, but a supportive and human-centred environment where a child’s development could proceed naturally, at its own pace and in the direction of the child’s own inclinations. Children learn best what they want to learn most, and socialism is defined by the philosophy that individuals blossom when able to determine their own needs, and shrivel when they are not. The people of tomorrow’s socialism won’t be commodities to be bought and sold, used and discarded, like so much pig iron and slag. They will be people whose desires, motivations, hopes and genetic predispositions are allowed to shape an individual path towards fulfilment and self-realisation, producing a flowering of art and science we can only guess at. These people, not their enslaved forebears, will be the smartest who ever lived, and quite probably the happiest.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: Not Something to Get Used to (2014)

The Cooking the Books Column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

When at the end of July the official figures for the UK Gross Domestic Product in the second quarter of 2014 were announced - an increase of 0.8 percent, which brought GDP back to the level it had been before the slump started in 2008 –the politicians and media who support the government were jubilant. The crisis is over, they proclaimed. Others were more circumspect about what this meant or, rather, did not mean. Anthony Hilton, Economics Editor of the London Evening Standard, even wrote that ‘the next set of output figures should top pre-recession levels –but it is good news only for a privileged few’ as ‘we now live in an economy where the rewards from growth or globalisation go to an ever narrower elite’ (24 July).

The figures certainly meant that production had reached its pre-slump level but this did not mean that the crisis was over for most people in the sense that their standard of living was back to what it was in 2008. GDP had reached its pre-slump level but GDP per person had not. This was because the population has also increased since 2008. GDP per person is not expected to reach its pre-slump level for another three years.

GDP per person is not really a measure of standard of living as it says nothing about how what has been produced is distributed. The figure would be the same whether everybody was getting an equal share or whether a few were getting a very large share with the rest below the average. Or anything in between. As Hilton pointed out:

‘Total output matters but what matters more in terms of individual wellbeing is how the output is spread around. It does not matter how big the cake has grown if you only qualify for a small slice –or possibly something even smaller –than you did a few years ago. Sadly, an ever smaller slice is the reality for most people these days.’

This was confirmed by an article in the Times (16 July) by Ed Conway, Sky News Economics Editor, headed ‘Feeling worse off is the new reality and workers should get used to it’ which started:

‘Were you in any doubt about the scale of the depression Britain is now emerging from, consider the following: real wages, adjusted for inflation, have fallen more in the past five years than in any comparable period in a century and a half. Not since 1864, when vaguely reliable data began, have our living standards been squeezed so much … [N]ever before has there been a five-year period with as sustained, significant and sizeable fall in family earnings as the one now coming to an end. Between 2009 and 2013 real wages dropped by 8 per cent.’

Real wages (what take-home pay will buy) is a better measure of individuals’ standard of living than GDP per person. If the slump in production is over, as it appears to be, real wages will begin to rise again but, according to Conway, at a much slower rate than before. He suggested about 1 percent a year. In that case it could take another seven or eight years for people’s standard of living to reach its pre-slump level. Meanwhile the rich get even richer.

Armed and Dangerous (2014)

From the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 14 July jets led by Air Marshal Thierry Caspar-Fille-Lambie flew over the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Paris, to commemorate the storming of the Bastille 225 years ago that triggered the advance of French capitalism. Soldiers led by Brigadier Henry Bazin, closely followed by motorised troops led by General Marcel Druart paraded past the President of the French Republic. This celebration of the bourgeois revolution tellingly illustrates the enduring bond, and historical significance, between the capitalist class and militarism. The theme for 2014 was of course: ‘The Centenary of the First World War’. Ten million dead. The President remarked ahead of the parade, ‘we owe them gratitude.’

Meanwhile, 200 miles away a tiny gathering of protesters took place outside the Science Museum in West London. Inside, in the museum’s Making of the Modern World Gallery, arms dealers from around the world congregated for what the organisers described as the ‘most important event during Farnborough week offering an unparalleled opportunity for industry networking’. Farnborough, for the public, is renowned for its Airshow, but behind the glitz and red, white and blue jet trails lies a marketplace where the world’s weapons salesmen court military delegations. The consequent marriages invariably end in multiple deaths.

The Museum’s director responded to a petition by over 2,000 signees, who view the Museum as supporting the arms trade, by stating: ‘The revenue generated by bookings such as this plays an important role in the funding mix that enables us to remain free to millions of visitors.’ Yes, of course. It’s all about money. Museums need cash, as does science, as do scientists, who can’t dine on principle pie. A large proportion of science’s funding comes from the military. It’s a symbiotic relationship under capitalism. The arms trade is as elemental to capitalism as are banks and insurers. States need weapons to defend profits, gain access to new markets, and to acquire raw materials. Typically as the big stick wielded for show, or simply as a veiled threat in negotiations with competitors. And when all else fails they need weapons—to wage war.

The killing business

War is a fundamental consequence of capitalism; since 1900 there have been 247 conflicts with over 77 million fatalities (www.war-memorial.net). Yes, the killing business is always brisk. Since the First World War the character of conflicts has altered. Around 50 percent of those killed in wars in the first half of the last century were civilians. Towards the end it had risen to 90 percent. Vast profits for the manufacturers accrued from these deaths. A handful of capitalists have filled their boots, whilst the workers in the industry received a wage packet. Amongst these were capitalism’s scientists.

Radar, space exploration and communications satellites, nuclear technology, microchips, digital photography, the internet and GPS all have their origins in the killing business. Much earlier mathematics had a role to play in the development of the siege catapult. Even Galileo touted the telescope as a military aid in an effort to gain funds from the Medici court in Florence. In general, though, inventors and craftsmen worked independently from the military developing weapons and then sought their patronage once the product was ready to market. Research and development directed by the military was minimal until the dawn of a new war at the turn of the 20th century.

As much as the civilian population was recruited for the First World War so too was science. Trench warfare, with its use of strongly fortified positions, supported by heavy artillery and machine guns, caused millions of deaths but little strategic advantage. The military minds and their political masters sought new killing technologies and scientists and engineers were employed to deliver them. Tanks and aeroplanes roamed the battlefield but with limited effect. Poison gas however did have an impact—a terrifying psychological one.

Capitalism’s ideologies that had successfully mobilised millions of ordinary civilians and turned them into front line killers also worked on scientists. Why shouldn’t it? Thus scientists like Fritz Haber, described as the ‘father of chemical warfare’ and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918, developed and organised the use of chlorine and other toxic gases employed extensively throughout the First World War. His adversary was the French Nobel laureate chemist Victor Grignard. Haber considered himself a patriot. Decorated and given the rank of captain by the Kaiser even though he was too old to enlist, Haber exposed the poison of nationalism when he penned his rationale: ‘During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country’( Science: A Many-Splendored Thing, 2011).

The 20th century saw the development of new weapons. Thousands of scientists have, and still are, recruited and involved in programmes that have only one end product—killing en masse. In 1939, Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, argued his way up and down Whitehall for the research, development and use of biological weapons. Banting was an advocate for total war as was Winston Churchill. Thus his plans found willing listeners leading to work beginning on an anthrax bomb at Porton Down under the guidance of microbiologist Paul Fildes. Banting justified total war, in his writings: ‘eight to ten people working at home are now required to keep one man in the fighting line. . . so, it is just as effective to kill or disable ten unarmed workers at home as to put a soldier out of action, and if this can be done with less risk, then it would be advantageous to employ any mode of warfare to accomplish this’ (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

Manhattan project

The discovery, in Germany, of nuclear fission in 1939 was the precursor of the Manhattan project which began in 1942. By 1944 the Project employed around 129,000 waged workers, 84,500 of whom worked in construction, 40,500 were plant operators and 1,800 were military personnel. Scientists were at the apex of this workforce. The Manhattan Project culminated in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. About 70,000 to 80,000 people, 30 percent of the population, were killed immediately, and another 70,000 injured. The legacy of this project is what we now live under—a nuclear stockpile estimated at 20,000 warheads.

Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity shaped the theoretical foundations for Hiroshima’s bomb. Is he to blame for all of the deaths? Or are, perhaps, the 84,500 construction workers? Are Habing and Banter to blame? Or the noxious ideologies that motivated them that creates human beings who are willing to murder other human beings simply because they salute a different coloured rag? Have the protestors at the Science Museum who caused the ‘Bahraini military delegation and a number of arms dealers to be turned away’ considered that the weapons peddlers and the military delegations are just a symptom of a corrosive disease? If one arms dealer is turned away ten others will fill the void. For every tyrant deposed five are evolving. It’s not the weapons, their peddlers, or the buyers that are the problem—it’s the system that spawns them. That system is capitalism. And all industries are governed by its priorities.

The killing business needs customers and capitalism’s impetus towards war always provides them: ‘Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he will reduce the country’s ‘useless’ science programs to finance the production of drones and precision weapons. ‘There will be no more spending of billions of people’s money, taxpayers’ money on useless research programs, which were used as a tool for theft’, said a statement published on the president’s website early on Wednesday. ‘Today, Ukrainian production will be busy making precision weapons systems, Ukrainian drones, everything the Ukrainian army needs, starting with bullet proof vests and ending with thermographic cameras,’ he said’ (rt.com).

A clock is ticking. A scientist who understood how capitalism works and what it is capable of left this timely reminder for all of us: ‘I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones’ -- Albert Einstein

Andy Matthews

The working class is us (1978)

From the January 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the middle nineteen-fifties academics and littérateurs invented the old-time working class. Before that, books about the life of the poor had always been more or less documentary, describing the miseries of unemployment and slum conditions. The new picture presented via "kitchen-sink" drama, novels like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and "deeper" works such as The Uses of Literacy was of a materialistic, hearty, boozy industrial proletariat with a core of sensitivity which made uprisings possible.

This emerged in the 'fifties as a subsidiary of the myth of "the affluent society".  After ten years of post-1945 full employment, plus the wartime period, it was felt that the bad old days had gone for ever. Working people owned cars and television sets, the Welfare State was in full swing, and forests of council flats were springing up in former slum areas. At the same time, there was a great deal of talk about "the quality of life". People said they were unhappy in better living conditions as compared with the communalty of the slums, and the young were dissatisfied by their own lack of dissatisfaction; the memorable line in the play Look Back in Anger was "There aren't any good, brave causes any more".

As a result, the working-class living standards of the past were looked at (by those who had not experienced them) through rose-tinted spectacles. The current vogue for "labour history", information and reminiscences about working-class life and struggles, continues this tendency as far as the 20th century is concerned. Labour history is useful, but the grafting-on of present-day motives does a disservice to labour itself. A writer on working-class life has described to the present writer how radical academics encourage him, but also pressed him to lay on thick what they wanted to see: plenty of swear-words and accounts of rough behaviour.

All this thoroughly anti-working-class, from two points of view. First, it is contemptuous, it reiterates the traditional upper-class attitude that the workers are indeed the lower orders. Second, it assumes that "working class" means only those in manual jobs. The writers, and the people presumed to read their books and articles, are in "professions" or non-productive occupations and are therefore held to be "middle-class". This is a familiar idea, but repetition does not make it any less mistaken or change the way it divides the working class.

Who are the workers? People who go to work, of course: those who have no alternative and must work in order to live. The necessity is created by the constitution of capitalist society. There is an owning class, to whom all the means of producing and distributing wealth belong. This fundamental fact of ownership establishes the pattern of life for the remaining nine-tenths of the population. They have to sell their labour-power for wages, on an exploitative basis: to produce surplus-value—rent, interest and profit—for the owners. Outside the ten per cent. who live by ownership, we are all in the working class, and consequently in the struggle against the capitalist class.

The belief that a lot of workers are not in it because they belong to a "middle" class is a very useful one to capitalism because it is divisive. It was institutionalized in an Act of Parliament in 1864 which commanded the running of workmen's trains. These continued until the second world war. They were early-morning trains whose passengers paid approximately one-third of the normal day fare. The purpose was to hold down wages in industry and the distributive trades, and there was a long list of unskilled and semi-skilled occupations eligible for workmen's tickets. Clerical workers were excluded, and the tickets were not issued from stations farther out on the lines. Thus, clerks were separated from from "workers" and could go to work later. They could also look down on them because workmen's trains were slow, crowded and dirty; and could live in outer suburban districts while the labouring sections were held in the inner cities.

Nevertheless, clerks and the "professions" are all in the working class. They are as insecure and as vulnerable to the problems imposed by capitalism as all the others in the non-owning nine-tenths; very often, their respectability is a nastier kind of poverty. To realize the solution to these problems, their first and greatest breakthrough must be to the fact of their class position. We live in a world of Them and Us, but it is necessary to identify Us.

Consciousness

Does this mean that the labouring poor have got to embrace workers who think they are middle-class as their brothers? The unskilled and semi-skilled in general know they are working-class, because they are continually told so; what they need to learn is some implications of it. Principally, it is for the "superior" workers to face up to and act upon. They must grasp that they are not superior, that the middle class is a myth, that all those who work for wages or salaries are in the same boat. When they understand this, they can stop insulting other members of their class — in particular, by romanticizing versions of working-class life which are disguised imputations of inferiority.

The left is guilty on this count. Most of those who pronounce the word "worker" with veneration don't think they themselves as workers; they are the educated vanguard who choose to get among the workers. If that conception were true, a person would be much more among workers in a football crowd than in a left-wing gathering. But whose doctrine is this? It reasserts the divide-and-rule outlook and the contemptuous stance of capitalism. The capitalist class says the workers are stupid and vicious. He wants this repeated by one section of workers against another; his position depends on it. The reply of class-conscious workers is that they are educated in a sense he never can be, and that their—our—capability will get rid of the wealth-based arrogance of his kind.

Class awareness is the all-important condition for bringing a new world into being. It arises from existence under capitalism; workers become all the time more responsive to their environment, the framework of which is the wages system. The task of socialists is to give precision to those responses. We judge all claimants to working-class support by their attitude to class. Whoever conceals it or distorts its meaning is acting contrary to the interests of the workers. The apparent divisions between social and occupational groups are shadows cast by the real and irreconcilable division between capitalists and all workers. Class rule can and shall be ended, through the understanding of what class is.

Robert Barltrop