Same Old Shaw (1943)

From the May 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Daily Herald for March 10, Mr. George Bernard Shaw presented a lengthy article on the subject of Marx, entitled, "What would Marx say about Beveridge?"

His answer to his own question (for what it is worth) is that "if he were alive now he would probably denounce Sir William Beveridge as a rascally appeaser, trying to ransom capitalism for another spell by his Report" — and though that is precisely what Sir William is doing, Sir William is not a rascal.

We are not bothered by literary speculations as to what Marx would have done, or said. The only reason Mr. Bernard Shaw writes such things is because it helps to perpetuate the myth that he is the bold, daring, revolutionary thinker who has "applied" Marx to British conditions. In this article, as in the "biography" by Mr. Hesketh Pearson ("Bernard Shaw," Collins, 1942) this legend is again dished up.

Marx "made another man of me"; "Marx's torpedo hit it [the 19th century] between wind and water and blew the golden lid of hell"; BUT—Marx's "dialectic of historical materialism belongs to the days when Tyndall startled the word by declaring that he saw in matter the promise and potency of all forms of life," (Shaw's metaphysics belong to the days of Methuselah, as we shall see), and "now we know that Marx's attempts to measure value by abstract labour-power, when he should have measured it by abstract desirability and his treatment of both as mathematical constants, instead of as variables, can only lead to nonsense and bankruptcy."

It's quite simple, Marx's own teachings—Historical materialism, the Labour Theory of Value and the Class Struggle are bankrupt  nonsense—but Marx himself was the greatest figure of the 19th century, because he made a new man of Mr. George Bernard Shaw. The "Fabian Essays," which Shaw edited, had nothing whatever to do with Socialism (Marxism). They were pure and simple Social Reform, which G.B.S. in the same article declares the capitalists turned (when published in his programme, "A Plan of Campaign for Labour") to their own account, thus producing the new form of capitalism called Fascism or Nationalism—Nazi for short, in Germany. This is perfectly true—very well known to Socialists—that the sure, certain way to Fascism is via a Fabian, Labour-reformist Government trying to administer capitalism under the false colours of Labourist "Socialism" and driving the workers, disgusted, into the arms of "leaders."

Incidentally, it was very well known to the I.L.P. politicians too. "Wheatley (Labour Health Minister) pointed out that the country was passing through one of its periodical cycles of depression. Within the capitalist system reduction in the standard of life would be inevitable. Wages would fall and the social services would be restricted. Did a Labour Government wish to be responsible for such things> It would necessarily become so if it administered Capitalism. Much better that it should throw the responsibility for the evils of capitalism on the Conservative and Liberal parties." (Page 198, "Inside the Left," Fenner Brockway.) Brockway and W. J. Brown actually proposed that the I.L.P. members of Parliament should resign before the resignation of the Second Labour Government; Brockway's one regret being that they did not.

The problem is how to saddle all this on to Marx. It turns out according to Shaw that the experience of Russia showed that "Marxian tactics broke down ruinously in Russia, and had to be replaced by Fabian ones." The real man in Russia is not Marx—but Sidney Webb. Lenin's new economic policy was Sidney's inevitability of gradualness. Here we might agree with G.B.S. Had he read THE SOCIALIST STANDARD  in 1917-18 or 1920, he would have been aware of the impossibility of Socialism in Russia then, instead of being taken in by it, and signing all those silly Communist statements, after his visit to Moscow.

We would have been interested if G.B.S. had shown us how the capitalists could use Marx's writings to establish Fascism. like they did his and Webb's (Fabian State-Control). Instead, all he does is to urge that all the extracts from Marx dealing with Dialectical Materialism and Economics should be cut of the new "Lawrence and Wishart" edition, leaving only the polemics like the "Eighteenth Brumaire."

His conclusion is that "Marxian strategy is all right, but what Marxian idolatry and bigotry can do without Fabian tactics may be learnt from Fenner Brockway's history entitled 'Inside the Left.'" The History of the I.L.P. "is a heartbreaking record," he says, but it is staggering that Shaw, who claimes to have read the book, can accuse Brockway, who in the course of 340 pages, betrays not the slightest inkling in Marx, of "Marxian bigotry." Brockway's effort is a tiresome lament that the I.L.P. did not know how to kick itself clear of the Labour Party's troubles quickly enough. Listen to this "Marxian idolator"—Brockway :—

The establishment of a revolutionary Socialist Party can be attempted in one of two ways. A few theoreticians can lay down a watertight programme and invite those who agree with it to join: this is the method of the Trotskyists and the Fourth International has remained in a vacuum. Only a party which already has its roots in the working-class movement can evolve, grow, to the revolutionary position by thought applied to experience, by learning its lessons from mistakes, by discussion, by the study of the history of the movement in other countries, and by a sincere and constant effort to find the right way. This second has been the method of the I.L.P. (P.237.)

Which is like saying a few draughtsmen can draw up blue-prints of an aeroplane, but we prefer to tie a pair of wings on you (the workers) and push you off the nearest cliff; we, the leaders, will then learn by "our mistakes."The statement is a typical piece of Brockway's political trickery—"thought applied to experience" IS political theory. His failure to grasp these elementary essentials has led Shaw into writing the stupid letters, published by Brockway, supporting the I.L.P. Not that this matters, as he has also supported everybody else, except the S.P.G.B.

The fact is, as Shaw himself says, his object has always been to "irritate and startle." If you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may just as well not say it at all, since nobody will trouble themselves about anything, that does not trouble them. ("Bernard Shaw," p. 106.) This is what "poor bankrupt Marx" would have called tautology.

Shaw has nearly always been wrong, as when he said the last war would last 30 years; and advised "Turn up the lights" in this one, in 1939. His simple plan has been to startle the capitalists, by kidding the workers that he is a reckless revolutionary. Nothing is further from the truth; in fact, he is a quiet conventional respectable bourgeois, most apprehensive of the ideas of Karl Marx—a Fabian.

Fenner Brockway tells how at the Finsbury Branch of the I.L.P. in Goswell Road in 1906. Bernard Shaw came to speak one evening.

"The question I put was this: Mr. Shaw, we are young, and want to make the best use of our lives. What is your advice? The answer came in a flash, 'Find out what the Life-Force is making for and make for it, too." How many times have I used that in perorations to Socialist (?) speeches,' says Brockway. ("Inside the Left," p. 22.)

Dear Mr. Shaw, much as we appreciate the third act of "Man and Superman," we still cannot allow your Nietschean "Life Force" (Shavian for "God") to substitute Marx's driving force of social evolution—the tool of production. Perhaps Brockway took your advice, and chased the "will o' the wisp"; we see the motor of evolution in the strong right arm of the working class.

Mr. Pearson, Shaw's biographer, recounts how, in 1915, Eugen Sandow, the physical culturist, tried to entice Shaw as a pupil. Shaw said, "You misunderstand my case; I have you seen you supporting on your magnificent chest twenty men, two grand pianos and a couple of elephants, and I have no doubt you can train me to do the same, but my object as to pianos and elephants is to keep them off my chest, not to heap them on to it." ("Bernard Shaw," p. 317.) The Socialist worker's object as to parasites is to dump them off his chest, by the aid of Karl Marx, not heap them on to it, even when they include Fabian literary elephants like Bernard Shaw.

Horatio.

Pathfinders: Immaculate conceptions (2015)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

What’s been happening lately with the people from Occupy, UK Uncut and the rest of the rebellious ‘noughties’ crowd? Whatever activity there is has sunk below the media horizon and therefore dropped off the political agenda, while the restless radical pool continues to evolve into new forms and outgrowths, clustering, merging and diffusing in ways that seem more organic than organised. The big splashes in the morning papers have given way to a grey drizzly afternoon of self-doubt, boredom and endless questions.

What is one to do with a world ‘absolutely in thrall to capitalism’, where most radical groups ‘coalesce around a hollow capitalist meliorism’ or else focus on the bogus rhetoric of having no leaders at the expense of any real strategy, democratic oversight or ability to adapt to changing circumstances?

Thus speaks Novara Media, an ‘outgrowth’ of this very milieu and a sort of alternative online news service cum political analysis show aimed at the young radical, non-state anticapitalist sector. Its founders are a likeable and highly articulate pair of young postgrads/postdocs by the name of Aaron Bastani and James Butler, and five minutes of their quick-fire patter is enough to make your head spin.

What does Bastani say about non-state communist strategy in the 21st century? That the 20th century of mass one-way communication was the great outlier and that today’s pathways of communication through disparate and affinity-based back-channels is more akin to the 18th century. What does Butler say about the activist’s disavowal of theory? He explains that doers are always suspicious of thinkers: ‘there’s a history of people thinking that thinking means that one should be in charge of things and lead things, and movements led by thinkers and intellectuals is [sic] always a bad thing and tends to lead to paranoia and narcissism and overidentification’. They observe that protest should be offensive not defensive because defensive strategies become conservative and ‘fail to stake a claim on the future’, and they make clear that ‘people argue about political power needing to be purified, but it doesn’t, it needs to be overthrown’. Butler adds poignantly ‘we have been losing for so long that we’ve forgotten to ask how do we win, and what would winning look like?’

Well, what would winning look like for Novara Media? It would look like something called fully automated luxury communism (FALC). The argument is simple enough. Machines are taking all the jobs, so the future should be one of luxury and leisure. People have said this before but Messrs B&B don’t make the elementary mistake of thinking that this will happen without a revolution to overthrow the powerful elites. What’s appealing about their argument is that it emphasises what you can have tomorrow rather than what you have to put up with today. Communism for them is a glittering prize and an orgy of abundance, not an exercise in hair-shirt asceticism.

Do they mean non-state communism the same way we do? Oddly, Bastani mentions a ‘living wage’, which doesn’t fit the picture. Wages and money presuppose property relations and markets, which inevitably give rise to states. Leaving that to one side, are they anyway overegging the pudding? When talking about post-scarcity socialism we tend to talk about sufficiencies, not luxury. We do sometimes speculate about shortages in the short term as farmers switch from cash crops to subsistence, the ‘bottom billion’ are prioritised for food and healthcare, and the world productive system learns to readjust. Is it realistic and in fact responsible to promise luxury as standard?

As is common with future-gazers, Novara may have been seduced by their own vision. One only has to recall the utopian predictions of early advocates of nuclear power to remember that technology is always rosiest at dawn.

When considering anything to do with automation, indeed any machinery, one shouldn’t ignore that unwritten rule of the universe, Sod’s Law. If it can go wrong, it probably will, and just when you least expect it.

People who can only afford to drive old cars will have noticed that the more sophisticated the technology, the more unfixable and often disastrous it is when it ages and breaks down. It may be that the rate of development of complex systems always outstrips our ability to diagnose failures within those systems or, in the vernacular, we’re too clever for our own good. Why might this be so? Because as you add new features, sensors, cruise controllers, drop-down displays and so forth in arithmetical fashion into a closed network, the number of potential failures and multiple-node failures tends to increase in geometrical fashion.

In the immaculate world of the futuretopians, nothing ever goes wrong and everything always works at its optimum. If you ask what happens when the system breaks you get the response given out about the Titanic and Chernobyl: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got a system to cover that’. There is just now a debate in airline circles about whether to develop fully-automated planes without pilots, controlled just by their on-board computers. This is how capitalism drives technology - the purpose is simply that the airlines would save a pilot’s wage. Would socialists be interested in this too? Opponents will point out that a driverless car which fails can just stop, whereas a driverless plane that fails has no good outcome.

How much complexity is too much? What is so endearing about clunky, old-fashioned, non-electronic cars is that there’s not so much to go wrong, and not much you couldn’t fix yourself given a shed, a few tools and a basic grounding in car maintenance. Socialism would have production plants and factories for the sake of economy of scale, but not to the exclusion of local, small-scale production and maintenance.

Socialist production, being non-market and not for profit, would work quite differently from the capitalist market process. If you’re giving up your time to build a bus, a power station or a piano, you don’t want to have to put in further work repairing it, nor create work for others by making it difficult to repair. You would use standardised and recyclable parts which could be swapped out easily. You would not bother adding features which looked impressive but didn’t do anything. You would only use quality components, not cheap ones intended to fail. And you’d keep it simple. But simple doesn’t have to mean plain, or plain ugly. Taking a cue from William Morris we could stipulate that beautiful things should be useful, and useful things should be beautiful.

Fully automated luxury communism is a vision based on two assumptions, that people want luxury and that they hate work. We suggest that neither of these is correct. Sufficiency is sufficient for security, and security is what people really want, not to live like Roman emperors, even if today capitalism makes people fantasise about getting stuff for the sake of having stuff. Second, there is the obvious fact that labour, even quite hard manual labour, can be a huge pleasure when freely and cooperatively engaged in. If that were not so there would be no art, no hobbies, and no sport. Full automation, where machines do everything, is probably more a fantasy of capitalism’s stressed-out wage-slaves than a healthy aspiration of free people. And let’s remember to ask, what if it breaks down?

Novara is keen to stress that their ideas are negotiable and do not come fully formed and fixed. It is a fact to gladden the hearts of socialists that people like Butler and Bastani are out there keeping revolutionary ideas alive and fresh, but when concocting revolutionary recipes we would always counsel a pinch of salt.

Paddy Shannon

The Story of the Socialist Party (1975)

Book Review from the December 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Monument, by Robert Barltrop, Pluto Press, £3.90 (see note).

It would be impossible for a Socialist to take up his pen to review the first-ever history of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, without a certain pleasure and sense of occasion. The task of writing such a history has been neglected by friend and foe for far too long. That the seventy-one years spanned have been eventful, interesting and challenging, as well as educational, can be seen from reading The Monument.

One could yield to the temptation to comment upon every point made; this, however, is not the purpose of a review. The task here is to assess the merits of the book and its account of the Party.

It is not easy to capture the mood of an era and to sketch in the many shades and subtleties, to look into personalities and situations and to express their contents and substance. This the author has done with a liberal measure of success. That the era and mood have changed repeatedly since 1904 (all within the context of developing capitalism) is brought out clearly.

The foreword says that the history of the Party

has been a matter not so much of policies as of the kinds of men, often remarkable, who made it.

Whilst as Marxists we would not deny that men make history, the Party has an identity represented by its Declaration of Principles and the ideas developed in them. These stand regardless of the coming and going of individuals. That individuals who wanted to go off at a tangent — and take the Party with them — have appeared from time to time has mainly served to highlight the fact that the Party has never wanted to go. But to have tried to tell the story without the characters, would have been a gross error.

All the major (and many minor) milestones in the Party's history are there. What stands out through everything is the Party's commitment to its Principles and its objective, Socialism. The thrashing out of attitudes towards trade unions in the very early days, was guided by the determination to avoid opportunism and not to put Socialism into cold storage while other issues were pursued.

With hindsight, we in the Party today might regard the "WB of Upton Park" controversy, as a hypothetical debating point. The Party in practice has never supported any reform, and the possibility of a lone Socialist MP. being elected in isolation is remote, to say the least. This kind of imbalance in the spread of Socialist ideas, does not really add up. The reply to WB (which is reproduced in full) makes this point. What is mildly amazing is that both the Party (in its reply), and the group that left, stressed that there could be NO COMPROMISE. When Harry Martin died in 1951, the Socialist Standard published a tribute to him. Although he had left the Party forty years before, he had remained a staunch advocate of Socialism.

The statement issued at the outbreak of war in 1914 is there in full, and the extreme difficulties suffered by members for standing against the war are well detailed. How, in the course of allegedly fighting for freedom, freedom to dissent is trodden underfoot, often quite literally together with the dissenters. The upheaval of 1917 and the Party's rejection of its socialist pretensions. The fact that we alone published the Bolshevik statement against the war in March 1915 shows that we considered the Bolsheviks' evidence before rendering judgement.

The electoral campaigns the Party has fought are dealt with in some detail, from the first contests in Borough Council elections in Battersea and Tooting during 1906 up to the Bethnal Green parliamentary campaign in 1959. The Parliamentary and GLC contests since then are not mentioned but the most important point, namely, our consistent appeal for only Socialist votes, is well registered.

The activities in the years of economic depression between the wars are related with a wealth of colourful anecdotes and description. The second World War, and the controversy over democracy, still has a vital lesson for the working class to learn. The Party had said: "Democracy cannot be defended by fighting for it." One has only to read the extract from Jacomb's reply to see how the years since the war have vindicated the position taken by the Party. Jacomb said:

If democracy cannot be defended by force then the power behind the machine-gun can (unless there is some other way of defending democracy) withdraw all democratic rights at will . . .

The fact is there are always more machine-guns and wars, but the cemeteries with which they have covered the world make no contribution to democracy.

In chapter twelve, which relates the story of the tribunals for conscientious objectors, there is a reference which says Clause Six of the Declaration of Principles is "a clear statement that the Party aimed at using the armed forces as an 'agent of emancipation'." However, that government machinery, including the armed forces must be CONVERTED from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation can be readily checked, as the Declaration of Principles and our Object appear in full on pages nine and ten.

The foreword makes clear that the greater part of the book was written while the author was away from the Party. The final chapter is a strong reaffirmation of his own identification with the Party. The history he has written proves the "anonymous sage" in the foreword was wrong. We are much more a movement.

Harry Baldwin

NOTE: The publishers are making copies of "The Monument" available to Party members and readers of the Socialist Standard at the reduced price of £2.60, including postage, until 31st January only. Cash and orders should be sent to the Book Department at Head Office.

An excerpt from 'The Monument' can be read at the following link.

Bermondsey and the Press (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fleet Street's descent further into the gutters was clearly demonstrated by the campaign of vicious character assassination pursued in the run-up to the recent Bermondsey by-election. The power of the media to persecute those who do not fit in with its smug capitalist values is proof that the much-celebrated freedom of the British press is all too often a freedom for journalists to imitate the tactics of their colleagues in Moscow and Johannesburg in defaming with impunity the characters of their opponents.

Much as the press attack must be exposed and deprecated the Labour candidate in Bermondsey, for all his sincerity, was defeated because of his own political opportunism. It was only because he was a candidate for a party which traditionally wins votes from ideologically conservative, nationalistic workers that the press attack was successful. The press labelled Labour's candidate as a homosexual; the old Labourite bigot, John O'Grady, went around the streets of Bermondsey singing a song accusing his Labour opponent of homosexuality; the Liberals, whose official policy is supposed to favour "gay rights", also used the homosexual smear. But the Labour candidate, seeking votes from workers who detest sexual non-conformity, refused to stand up and affirm his homosexuality.

Similarly, the Labour candidate was attacked for being a "draft dodger" because he refused to fight in Vietnam. All socialists would seek publicity for their opposition to all war, and would make it clear that those who fight cannot call themselves socialists. But Labour, when in office, supported the war in Vietnam, just as it has given its support to many other bloody capitalist battles. The Labour candidate had to appeal to nationalistic Labour voters who are all in favour of flags and armies and wars. When that sickening enemy of the working class, Frank Chapple, President of the TUC, was asked on Any Questions why Labour lost Bermondsey he replied, "Well, I ask you, who's going to vote for a gay draft dodger?" In short, the man at the top of the TUC and close to the top of the Labour Party, admits openly that Labour voters are too bigoted to vote for a man who is homosexual and too chauvinistic to vote for a man who refuses to kill Vietnamese workers.

The hacks of Fleet Street made much of the fact that the Labour candidate was not even English -  the ultimate crime. Ignorant people with nothing more sensible to say, were reported as running after the Labour candidate and telling him to "go back to Australia". It is doubtful whether the same workers will be urging the Duke of Edinburgh to return to Greece. The Labour candidate for Bermondsey will not be the first aspirant political leader to fall victim to his own political opportunism.

Labour's opponents in Bermondsey accused them of being communists and Marxists; and the Labour Party does not like that. The fact is that Labour has no more to do with Marxism or true communism than the Mafia has with fighting crime. Communism and socialism are, when properly defined, synonymous terms: they have identical meanings. The Labour candidate for Bermondsey was not unacquainted with the real party of Socialism (or communism), the Socialist Party of Great Britain. But, like his fifteen electoral opponents, he dismissed the aim of abolishing the wages system and creating a classless, propertyless, moneyless society as one not worth working for. Instead, he spent his time on the traditional path of capitalist reform—trying to gain a few more crumbs for the wage slaves of Bermondsey from the cake that they had baked. When the lie-makers of the press called Labour's candidate a revolutionary he protested with all the horror of a radical vicar whose belief in god has been questioned. Any real socialist candidate in Bermondsey would have proclaimed to all the electors that he or she is a revolutionary—not in the anachronistic sense of building barricades in the street, but in the social sense of aiming to end capitalism and replace it with worldwide production for use.

Where there are leaders it will always be possible for the media to direct their viciousness against personalities rather than principles. That is why the Socialist Party enters elections as a political party, advocating a clearly stated object; our candidates are simply put up to satisfy the electoral laws of Britain—a vote for the Socialist Party is a vote for socialism, not for any particular socialist. If the media wants to talk to us they will have to discuss serious ideas. The Socialist Party, unlike all other political parties in Britain, does not make promises or ask for votes. Indeed, we alone urge workers not to vote for our candidate unless they are convinced socialists. Those who we have convinced will not be persuaded to desert the socialist cause by the puerile tactics of the capitalist-owned press. The greatest strength of the working class is the strength of ideas; once we are consciously organised the propagandists of capital can pervert the truth until their faces are as blue as their rosettes—the workers will treat them with the contempt they deserve. That is why socialists are so emphatic about the need for political education. A single worker who is conscious of the system which exploits him and understands the realisable alternative is better than fifty floating voters with floating minds.

In Bermondsey, an apparently solid Labour majority of 12,000 was reduced to a total vote of just over 7,000: the voter who lacks class consciousness can be manipulated by whichever trickster is the most cunning.

Steve Coleman

Who do you think you are? (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let's get some things straight.

Being working class does not mean scrubbing front doorsteps of terraced houses on hands and knees, or wearing a cloth cap or a donkey jacket, does not mean smoking Woodbines, or playing darts, bowls or crib for the local pub team, does not mean watching Coronation Street and Carry On films, or speaking in a local dialect, heavy accent or slang, or passionately supporting a football team standing on the terraces, does not mean filling a mantelshelf with little ornaments from Blackpool, or keeping pigeons or greyhounds, does not mean shopping at the Co-op or reading the Daily Mirror, or . . .

Being middle class does not mean wearing a shirt and tie, having a mortgage, having a building society or bank account, or a nice car, or going to college or university, does not mean sounding your aitches, does not mean working in an office, being a foreman, a manager, a doctor, a teacher or living in a house in a quiet avenue, or having a bath twice a day, does not mean watching BBC2 documentaries, or supporting a football team and sitting in the stands, or slippers by the fire, or being polite, or being a self-employed plumber, window-cleaner or keeping the little corner shop, does not mean drinking wine, or reading the Observer or the Guardian or the Telegraph, does not mean . . .

Being a socialist does not mean voting Labour, or being on the "left", or being an "extremist" or a "militant", does not mean being an idealistic student who'll grow up in a few years, does not mean campaigning for a minimum wage, for more money to be spent on housing for the homeless, more medicine for the sick, more financial aid to third world countries, or waving banners urging governments to ban nuclear weapons, does not mean abusing policemen on the beat, or listening to Sham 69, or becoming hysterically emotional about "the Right to Work", or  . . . 

Being a revolutionary does not mean throwing bombs, barricading embassies, or violence in the streets, or listening to the Clash or the Sex Pistols, or taking heroin and cocaine, or wearing a Che Guevara beret and moustache, or shouting "Capitalist Pigs Die!" and raising a clenched fist in salute, does not mean becoming a rastafarian, or following the latest fashion, or going "underground", or dodging fares on British Rail, or . . . 

Get all this out of your head and you are ready to see things as they really are. Society is not split into thousands and thousands of little sections as a lot of misguided and ill-informed people would have you think. There are basically only two sections: the working class and the capitalist class. Being working class is an economic condition. The middle class, lower middle class, upper middle class, lower upper middle working class, and so on and so forth is all a myth. If you have to sell your physical or mental energies to an employer in return for a wage at the end of the week or a salary at the end of the month in order simply to survive, then you are working class. This is a fact,not an attitude. It doesn't matter a scrap what job you've got or wish you'd got. You are a member of the social class which produces all the wealth in society but which possesses nothing but its labour power, its ability to sell its mental and physical capabilities. The other class, the owners, are able to live as they please from the profits gained from the wealth that you contribute, directly or indirectly, towards producing. The capitalist class owns everything in society that is required for human beings to live (factories, railways, mines, land, raw materials, tools, machines), but they have no need to lift a finger. The working class are employed to do that. And all governments in all countries have no option but to act on behalf of this tiny owning section. Therefore all governments have no option but to perpetuate the exploitation of the workers—no matter what bull they try to feed to those they are governing.

A socialist is someone who recognises that this state of affairs is nothing less than continuous robbery, and who further recognises that there is bound to be a permanent antagonism of interests between the two sections so long as the present system exists, and who recognises that there can only be one possible solution: abolition of the present capitalist system and the establishment of socialism. Socialism: a classless, moneyless, stateless, worldwide social organisation based on the common ownership of the means of living, where everything is produced solely for use, and where everyone will be able to take freely from society whatever is available, whenever he or she so desires, and will be free to contribute to society to the best of their ability, whenever he or she so desires, purely because it will be in the interests of people as individuals and as members of the community as a whole. The transformation from capitalism to socialism will come when the vast majority of the world's working class understands and wants it and it will be voted for democratically because this will be how the new society will function. This transformation can be achieved no other way. It will be a complete change, a social revolution, the first conscious revolution in the history of the human race.

The only qualification to become a socialist is socialist understanding and the desire to bring socialism about as quickly as possible. In addition to being a socialist, I like hot baths regularly, Benny Hill, Dire Straits, Double Diamond and middle-to-low tar cigarettes. Some of my friends say I have bad taste.

Paul Breeze

Riot! (2011)

From the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

We take another look at the August riots.

Moral outrage ran riot across the pages of the tabloid press for six days in August this year while looting, arson and battles with the police spilled across the streets of London and other English cities. Angry condemnation of the rioters and promises of legal revenge emerged from the mouths of Westminster politicians, while the nightly television newscasts drip-fed the nation with a steady message of shocked disapproval.

‘These are sickening scenes. This is criminality pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated’ said an apparently affronted David Cameron (PM and former member of the Bullingdon Club).

In the first days and nights of rioting, David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, put the establishment case. The riots were: ‘an attack on Tottenham, on people, ordinary people, shopkeepers, women, children , who are now standing on the street homeless as a consequence’. It was a politician’s oily speech, carefully tailored to achieve maximum media effect, but it expressed a view which many of Lammy’s constituents might well have shared: the main damage inflicted by the rioters was on their own communities. The looting and arson attacks had been indiscriminate, directed at small local shops as well as banks, larger businesses and chain stores; people’s homes had been destroyed and members of the community were left traumatised and angry. Eventually, the rioting would also lead to the deaths of five innocent people. What Lammy’s comment also implied, though, was that the rioters were somehow not ‘ordinary people.’ By marginalising them in this way he was showing a desire to sidestep any need to understand what was happening.   

Revolution?

Unreported by the corporate media, another very different political commentary was also taking place. Its tone was not condemnatory but enthusiastic: ‘We are in a revolutionary moment’, proclaimed one blogger, ‘Prepare yourself…’ Several of the more excitable anarchist and leftist groups were in animated discussion about whether the long awaited ‘revolutionary moment’ had arrived; or, if it hadn’t, whether the rioting was, at least, an important step towards it; or, if it wasn’t, whether this was, anyhow, how revolution might begin?  Of the more ponderous political groups out on capitalism’s left-wing, the Trotskyist ‘Socialist’ Party of England and Wales (SPEW) preferred to censor the disorderly way young workers on the streets were expressing their frustration at the system. In its view, this was clearly incorrect. (The rioters, evidently, had not asked SPEW to stage manage the week’s events.)

Capitalism and the limits of tolerance

So, what did actually happen during those six August days and nights? Was it simply a sudden and inexplicable upsurge in criminality and ‘disgusting behaviour’ by urban youth? Or was it an inarticulate cry of the working-class stumbling blindly towards a revolutionary overthrow of the established order? Perhaps, of course, it was neither of these things.  Perhaps it was something else entirely.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that the rioting, wherever it occurred, had several obvious and consistent features: it took place almost exclusively in the poorer districts of cities; it had no obvious racial basis; the participants were young, sometimes very young; and where their voices were recorded in the dozens of published web videos, they delivered the same angry and unambiguous message: “it’s payback time.”

Payback

But payback for what? The answer which the rioters gave most frequently themselves was payback for years of indignity suffered at the hands of the police. And it was apparent that at the Pembury Estate in Hackney and at various other locations, many of those out on the streets were spoiling for a fight. ‘Kill the police’, they shouted. One man summed up the general mood this way: ‘[The police] are not all bad but most of them are; no-one around here has got any liking for the police’.   I’ve been wanting to do this to the Fedz for years, said another. Although the killing of Mark Duggan by police officers on 4 August and the insulting treatment meted out to his family was a powerful trigger for the riots, it was the longer-standing resentment felt towards the police in London and elsewhere that lit the powder keg.

For unemployed teenagers and young people in urban areas, regular harassment by police and the use of stop-and-search tactics has long been the source of that resentment. For black communities who feel themselves singled out for this kind of treatment, it is a double insult. But, black or white, the rioters universally expressed the view that the police “took the piss” on the streets.

There was, though, another aspect to ‘payback.’ It was about claiming what many felt society had denied them: the right to be treated equally and the right to a decent standard of living. They were not shy about it: it was about ‘the money’. Stafford Scott, in a Guardian comment piece made this connection: “looting comes from the belief that if you cannot get equality and cannot expect justice, then you better make sure that you get paid.” Though he was speaking of attitudes within the black community, his remarks chimed very closely with what all the rioters were saying.  For some, the collective nature of ‘riot’ was enough to legitimise the looting of shops and businesses. It was a moment of ‘freedom’ one teenager claimed.  And though not all spoke openly in these terms, the attitude is nevertheless implicit in the widespread notion of payback.  

Class war

So, were the rioters simply criminals, as Cameron, and others claimed? Certainly they were criminals. The law defines all attacks upon capitalism’s system of property relationships as criminal, whoever carries them out.  But the question that Cameron, as a defender of capitalist property could not raise, however, let alone answer, was what kind of challenge the rioters were making.

The significance of the August riots becomes clear only when they are set against the background of the conflicts of interest that are built into the social relationships of capitalism. Those conflicts are never far from the surface and are liable to break out at any time, visibly and destructively. That’s especially the case when the capitalist system, which is always unstable and unpredictable, puts large groups of people or even whole classes under pressure. And the rioters who came from Hackney, Tottenham and Peckham, and from dozens of other socially deprived urban areas around the country were certainly feeling the pressure. Many of these areas have for a long time been dependent on services funded by government and, as a result, are now being disproportionately hit by cuts in public spending. As the UK Coalition government continues its policy of making the working-class pay for the chaos and shrinkage in the economy, many families on low incomes now face not just the prospect of increasing unemployment but benefit cuts, higher prices, and the withdrawal of public services. All this is happening - and seen to be happening – in a society where the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, and conspicuous consumption by the rich continues unabated.  It is hardly to be wondered at, under these circumstances, that frustration is going to spill over into action on the streets.

The rioting was not an example of class conflict. There was no direct confrontation between workers and their employers, for example.  The indiscriminate acts of violence, and arson seen on the streets last August were purely destructive.  The looting was for individual gratification or to meet individual need.   And there was certainly no sign that any of this would lead to a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order.  But as damaging to their own working-class communities as the riots showed themselves to be, they were a response to the specific class conditions that the rioters fond themselves facing under capitalism.  The targets they chose to loot were the everyday embodiments of capitalist property relations, high-street shops and businesses that hand over their consumer goods only to those with the money to pay for them. Also targeted were the defenders of those property relations, the police. Looting in these circumstances is a way of breaking through the barriers that capitalism imposes. It’s a way of challenging capitalism’s institutionalised entitlement system (money) and asserting your own sense of entitlement to a share of what society has produced.  To that extent, rioting is a political statement.

What is striking, though, is how little sense of identification the rioters had with their own communities or with other members of their own class.  From a socialist perspective, they betrayed no real understanding of why they lacked jobs and had little prospect of getting them – or why they needed jobs at all.  They showed no understanding of why they led impoverished, disempowered lives in a world full of rich folk, expenses-grabbing politicians, greedy bankers and glitzy consumer goods. They were seeking payback and a means, individually, to survive.  They were not fomenting revolution.  But at the same time, they understood enough to know that their interests were not being served by the world in which they lived, and felt strongly that they were entitled to something more.

HUD.

Obituary: Tony Turner (1992)

Turner speaking at Hyde Park.

Obituary from the April 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

News of the death of A. W. L. (Tony) Turner in a Cape Town hospital in February at the age of 83 will awaken memories in many older readers. He joined the Party in 1931 and resigned in 1955 after a series of acrimonious disputes.

Tony was accused of an anarchism that was incompatible with Marx. He had taken up a completely pacifist view together with Tolstoyan ideas about the socialist future—small-scale, a vastly simple society, that anticipated subsequent thinking amongst people like Ivan Illich, Fritz Schumacher and Edward Goldsmith.

Many members felt the difference should have been containable in a party seeking world revoution. If market society was replaced with production for need it was inconceivable that the result would take the same form everywhere.

Tony Turner began life before World War I in the slums of Walworth, the child of an Irish-cockney woman and a Maori father whom he never saw. He enlisted in the Navy as a boy sailor and saw service in the Far East. He took up boxing because, he told me, he was being constantly teased for persistent bedwetting, an affliction which eventually got him discharged from the Service, Before this happened he won the Combined Services Championship in one of the light divisions.

He returned to Walworth in time for the Slump. With other unemployed men in a similar position he developed stratagems of survival, including taking the long view by joining the Party. The Walworth—Elephant & Castle contingent in the Party formed an axis with Jewish lads from Bethnal Green and the whole lot must have looked as if they had looted a theatrical costumiers. These were the days of reach-me-downs. This was none of your middle-class shopping for accessories in Oxfam. Turner, according to contemporaries, sported patent leather dancing pumps and a Magyar blouse.

When this band of Bisto kids didn't have money for a cup of tea at the caff they hung around the Public Library which was warm and dry. Many became bookish and took elocution lessons. They went and sat in the gods at the Old Vic when they could raise fourpence or knew the doorman, and used their leisure like gentlemen, learning dancing, fencing, chess, bridge—anything that was free to the unemployed, and taught each other poker and other disreputable activities.

During his time in the Party Turner was a remarkably active and successful advocate of the SPGB point of view, so much so that the Party was sometimes referred to as Tony Turner's Party, to the irritation of older, less ebullient members. For people who heard him on the platform in Hyde Park or debating public figures in the years during and after the war, his performances were hypnotising in the first arena and devastating in the second—as many politicians found to their cost and chagrin.

He appeared at the Fulham Conscientious Objectors Tribunal during conscription as an amicus curiae to plead the case of many members before Justice Hargreaves. The Judge very early on became satisfied simply with an assurance from Tony that the person was a bona fide member for their exemption to be granted. The Services didn't really want socialists upsetting the rest of the lads.

He joined the Hampstead Labour Party after leaving the SPGB but left after three weeks. He emigrated to Kenya where he built up a substantial book business but continued to visit Britain frequently. In recent years he renewed acquaintance with the Party, visiting branches and taking part in discussions. He clearly enjoyed the greater spirit of tolerance that he found.

Ken Smith

  

Editorial: Women and socialism (1979)

Editorial from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists argue from the basic fact that capitalism's private property relationships and class division are the cause of the oppression of both men and women. Women's Liberation movements put forward immediate demands such as equal pay, equal educational opportunities, 24-hour nurseries, free contraception and abortion on demand. Some of these demands may well be achieved, but now more than ever there is a need for a revolutionary change in society. It must be recognised that the subjugation of women does not exist independently but is related to economic structures in society. Men and women are oppressed together in an institutional framework that makes inhuman demands upon the, and inculcates destructive beliefs about themselves. They must be liberated together by changing society.

The choicest fruits of human society are denied to the working class, although they produce the wealth and operate and organise society's productive and distributive machinery. Once the majority of the world working class recognise that they can possess these themselves. they will establish socialism. It is not possible to have "little bits" of socialism or socialist "policies" and socialism does not exist anywhere in the world at this time.

The prerequisite for this new society is understanding and desire to co-operate.

Being world-wide, there will be no national barriers. There will be debates on the common aim, followed by organisation and action. Goods will be produced for use, so there will be no monetary system. This fundamental change in the basis of society will alter all social relationships and structures in our way of life. Police, lawyers and armed forces will give way to men and women doing useful work. Money, taxation and cheap goods will be replaced by production to meet human needs. With free access to wealth, there will be no starving millions, no poverty or degradation. Men and women and children will have complete equality in that they will have that free access to all goods produced. There will be freedom from want and fear. For the first time humanity will be controlling their environment.

New social relationships will form when socialism is established. There will be no husbands and wives because marriage derives from private property relationships. Men will no longer dominate women conditioned to be subservient. Today men and women stay together, often unhappily, because of economic necessity. The myth that child bearing and rearing is the fulfillment of a woman's destiny will be rejected. Men and women will shape and create their own lives. The alienating nature of work will disappear. The exploitation of women as sexual objects, which seems so normal to many men today will be swept aside. Equally important, the sort of spite and resentment that men as well as women show towards each other today, expressed in emotional blackmail, will pass away. People will relate to each other purely as human beings.

The problems of capitalism are not to be solved within the social and economic relationships basic to this system. Capitalism is unable to satisfy the needs and desires of the people of the world. Socialism is technically possible now. All we need is action by a conscious socialist majority of men and women to free us all, without distinction of sex.

We are all oppressed by capitalism and only by its abolition can humanity truly become emancipated. Only with the establishment of socialism can we become free—free to control our own lives, free to have or not to have children without regard to any financial considerations, free to work at any job we choose or to do as many different jobs as we wish in the course of a lifetime. The aim of the women's movement can only lead them into illogical impasses if they continue to pursue their goals within the framework of capitalism. Women should be aware that the Socialist Party of Great Britain has, since its inception 75 years ago, worked for the emancipation of the working class "without distinction of race or sex"—a rare phrase indeed in 1904, however much lip service may be paid to these ideas in 1979.

A quiet drink at the local (1966)

A Short Story from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I'd emigrate myself if I was a younger man. There's no initiative left in this country." He sipped at his half-pint of bitter, put it back carefully on the bar and stared straight ahead at the row of upside-down spirit bottles.

Maurice always start like this. He pretends he is not speaking to you, really, just in case you don't answer him. And I didn't. There is no point in arguing with him. His mind is as set as one of the pickled eggs in the jar at his elbow.

"After all, let's face it, we're all mollycoddled by the Welfare State." He half turned to the youth with the bad complexion who was standing behind him and beginning to look uncomfortable. "I admit it," Maurice insisted with a magnanimous smile, "I'm just the same. I'm soft! Why should I save for a rainy day? The state will take care of me if I'm ill. If I get myself the sack from work I can get nearly as much from the dole and National Assistance as I can for working. Why should I bother to work?"

"Have you tried it?" The young man had a Glasgow accent which made his question sound curt.

Maurice's eyes widened and he really turned round to look at him now. "Tried what?"

"Getting the 'labour' money and National Assistance instead of working? Two chappies in the paper last week were fined £90 apiece for it. Able-bodied y'see. They should have been in a job." The cigarette in his hand trembled.

"No, well of course most of us don't try it, do we?" Maurice laughed implying that he had only been joking. He turned back to his glass, including me in his laugh. "We are the mugs that keep so-and-so's like them in idle comfort." He switched off his laugh as abruptly as he had switched it on and was beginning to bristle with enough indignation to warn anybody that he did not like being taken up on what he said. "Sixteen and a penny a week you pay, National Health." He glared at me.

"Well," I said, trying to produce a jovial smile like his, "they want to make sure you don't waste it on beer." The sarcasm missed him completely. He never drinks more than three half pints. He almost choked on the last drop in his glass, and his neck went red. "Look here!" he said, "If everybody spent as much as I do on beer, they'd be all right, let me tell you." The barman had a faint smile at the corners of his mouth as he filled Maurice's glass again. "I know how to save my money, which is more than a lot of 'em do these days." He kept pressing down the short bristles of his moustache with his fingertips. "They've got no right to make you pay out—what is it?—about £40 a year just in case you need a doctor. I'll decide whether I need a doctor, thank you very much. When I need my doctor's advice, I pay, privately. I want proper attention and a bit of respect, and that's the only way to get it."

The youth scowled behind him and said, "It's your sort that keeps it one treatment for the rich and one for the poor."

Maurice turned round on him, almost crouching. "That's the way it always will be, my lad, and the sooner you get it into your head the better. If you'd got money, would you queue up with that crowd of coughing bronchitics and snivelling kids just to get a five-minute once-over and a chit for the chemist's shop?"

"You're lucky you can afford it."

"Look! I'm not rich, you know. That's just the trouble—I can't afford it—now. Since this bloody health service came in, it costs the earth to be a private patient. Now it really is lone law for the rich and one for the poor."

"You can't win, can you, Maurice." I think he knew I was digging at him, because he didn't even look at me.

"At least everybody gets some treatment now," the youngster insisted, "even if it's not the best."

"You shouldn't have picked a Sunday to say that," I said. I shook out the newspaper I had been trying to read and showed him the Personal column. "Here you are: 'R.S.V.P. You are invited to help 3,000 children whose only help is the National Children's home . . . ' Here's another: 'The British Heart Foundation . . . urgent research needs your generous support . . .' Look, they are all down this column. Royal London Society for the Blind, the Army Benevolent Fund, British Empire Cancer Campaign For Research, The Royal Association in Aid of the Deaf and Dumb, the British Epilepsy Association, the Arthritis and Rheumatism Council, the Chest and Heart Foundation, Muscular Dystrophy, Multiple Sclerosis. They're all appealing urgently for charity. All this is supposed to have been taken care of by the Welfare State."

"Oh, no! That's not fair! Give them time. They've got to deal with the main things first . . . "

Maurice wouldn't let him finish. "Give 'em time!" he said in a loud sneering voice. "They've been at it for 20 years now, and it's a damned sight worse than when they started. The surgeries got fuller, the hospitals get more out of date and understaffed. The whole thing's running down like an old car."

The young Glaswegian just lowered his heat and waited for it to pass. I don't think he really heard what Maurice said. "Look, you say it's one law for the rich and one for the poor, but what you forget is that poor people never had proper medical treatment before. When they had the 'flu or bronchitis or lumbago they couldn't afford to call in the doctor. They just had to stay in bed and wait for it to get better—if they were lucky."

He asked for another pint of mild, and I said to him, "Staying in bed is about the best sort of treatment for ailments like that. That's all we need sometimes—a few days in bed."

"Maybe, but there's not the time for that these days."

"Worse luck."

He looked at me with a trace of contempt in his expression. "Do you realise how many thousands of man-hours are lost through common ailments like that?"

"Well, I have some idea, yes."

"All right! You can't run a modern country by letting people sleep off their illnesses in bed. You need modern drugs—antibiotics, pain killers, tranquilisers—so that they can be back at work in a couple of days, maybe not have to stop work at all."

"This is what you call dealing with the main things first?"

"Certainly. What you must remember is that this is a country with a steadily increasing number of old people and a high density of population. The only way to increase production is to get more efficiency out of the labour force we've got. Take children, for example. Poverty and slums and lack of medical attention used to produce weak or disabled children. But these days it's being planned. The state can't afford thousands of invalids. So the mothers get free ante-natal treatment, maternity allowance, hospital care. If they produce more than one child they get children's allowances. The children get free milk and subsidised meals."

Maurice looked over his shoulder and said, "It's all done on the cheap. Hospitals, drugs, false teeth, spectacles—all cheap and nasty."

"At least it's something—and that's better than nothing."

"It is if you're useful," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, look here at today's paper again—this advert signed by Margaret Herbison, the Minister of Social Security. They've at last acknowledged that old age pensions are inadequate. So pensioners can now have a supplementary pension—if they apply for it—and if they've not got a part-time job earning more than two pound a week, and so on. They can have their income brought up to a guaranteed level. And look at it! £7 2s. plus rent and rates for a married couple; £4 10s. for a single householder; and £3 18s. plus 10s. rent for a single person. Who can live on that at today;s prices? And it's being brought up to that."

"But it's an improvement, isn't it?"

"Certainly! And it needs to be, because it still isn't keeping pace with rising prices. Look here at this bit in Michael Frayn's column: 'Some 7,500,000 people in this country live below what the National Assistance Board regard as subsistence level . . . ' One in seven of the population, as he says. What state of welfare is that?"

"It's bad, I admit, but you've got to agree that they're a dead weight on the state. Old age pensioners will never produce any more  . . ."

It was my turn to choke on my beer. "What! They've had the energy sucked out of them for 50 years of their lives, with nothing at the end to show for it, and you're complaining that they can't be worked until they drop dead! Whose side are you on?"

"They should save up for their old age, like I do," Maurice said. "There's too much state control, now—too many regulations and forms to fill in, too much interference. There's no freedom left. That's the price we've paid for all this. If you want a Welfare State, you can't complain when the state gives you a credit squeeze and a wage freeze as well. It's all part of the same thing. I mean, your life's not your own these days."

"As far as I can see," the youngster said, "the working man's life never was his own. Now, I think the ideals behind the Welfare State were good. For the first time, the worker had the chance of a new deal, the chance to live a respectable life. It's true enough that conditions—inflation and all that—have made a mockery out of most of it, but that doesn't make it a bad idea.

Bit by bit, we had all edged closer together, and the barman was leaning his chin in his hands, listening to us. Maurice glanced round to see who he had for an audience before he spoke. "Listen, my lad, I'm older than you. You don't remember the thirties. If you think this is a bad time for your Welfare State, just you wait until there's another depression and see how it works then. You're all right now as long as you've got enough stamps on your card, but you wait till you can't get any stamps because you haven't got a job even. I'm telling you this: what they give you they can also take away. And they will when it suits them. I've told you. I'd get out of this country if I was younger."

"Do you really think it's much different anywhere else?" I said. "You'd be in just the same trap."

"You two depress me," said the young man. "Don't they you?" he asked, turning to the barman.

"I haven't heard all of it, of course, but I must say, I think all this Welfare State business is a load of codswallop. You're no better off and no worse off, are you? I mean to say, you've still got to turn up at work tomorrow morning, haven't you? And you've got to take stingy-paid part-time jobs like this at the weekend to keep going. It doesn't alter that, does it?"

"That's the trap."

"Yeah, well, tell me some way to get out of that and I'll be interested."

"You can't alter that," said the Glaswegian contemptuously.

"That's the way it always will be, lad," Maurice said.

S. Stafford

Action Replay: What Price the 2022 Football World Cup in Qatar? (2015)

The Action Replay Column from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup, the first Arab nation to do so. Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president has already endorsed the bid and said ‘The Arabic world deserves to hold a world cup competition’. Qatar enjoys the support of the Arab league and the event is intended to bridge the gap between the Arab World and the West.

The first five proposed stadiums were unveiled in March 2010. The stadiums will employ cooling technology capable of reducing temperatures within the stadium by up to 20C. All of the five stadium projects launched have been designed by German architect Albert Speer and Partners. The air conditioning in the stadiums for the players and the spectators will be solar powered, carbon neutral and provided by Arup of England. The technology employed is remarkable but the labour required for its installation and the building of the stadiums has caused many deaths to migrant workers. Most of the workers are living in labour camps, enduring squalid conditions.

A Guardian article (25 September 2013) reported that a number of Nepalese migrant workers have faced poor conditions, as companies handling construction work for the 2022 World Cup infrastructure forced them to stay by denying them promised salaries and withholding necessary worker ID permits, making them illegal aliens. The precarious situation the various employers have created have forced the migrant workers to beg for food. Thousands of Nepalese labourers in Qatar face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery as defined by the ILO.

During a building binge to pave the way for the Football competition in 2022, Nepalese workers in Qatar have been dying at a rate of one per day. A report released in March 2014 by the International Trade Union Confederation estimated that 4,000 more workers could die as preparations for the World Cup continue.

The barbaric conditions that migrant workers endure, brings sharply into focus, that under capitalism, capital is considered more important than labour. The profits that will flow to the companies involved in the Qatar World Cup, when the games commence, are considered more important than ensuring that proper safety conditions prevail to protect the migrant workers.

Kevin

Rewriting Marx (1993)

From the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are used to various Leninist regimes distorting the views of Karl Marx to try to bring some kind of spurious legitimacy to their vile social systems. A recent, almost breathtaking, example occurred in the Beijing Review (no. 34, 23-29 August). An article by one Ed Rothberg, who is apparently a professor from New York, defends the changes in the Chinese economy over the last twelve years or so as being in line with Marx's views. From a centrally-planned economy, China has changed to one where prices and wages are controlled by the market; this is allegedly all within a Socialist system, whereas in fact it is a change from state capitalism to a mix of state and private capitalism.

Rothberg's "discovery" is that a planned economy violates Marx's ideas about the best way to run a commodity-based economic system. Marx described the way that capitalism operated, with competition, profits and the law of value. But he was not concerned with recommending how to run such a system, as he knew that capitalism could not function in the interests of workers. According to Rothberg, however, Marx advocated competition as the way to develop the means of production. On this topsy-turvy logic, the economic changes in China are a successful application of Marx's economic theory.

In fact, of course, the changes do constitute a tacit admission that even a centrally-planned economy cannot escape from the economic laws that Marx discovered and cannot avoid the booms and slumps that are inherent in capitalism. And that's the point that Rothberg has curiously missed: Marx emphasised that his economic findings were specific to capitalism, and never suggested that they would apply in Socialism too. Rothberg has a damned cheek (to put it mildly) in invoking Marx's name in defence of the Chinese ruling class and the butchers of Tiananmen Square.

Paul Bennett

The Confessions of A Clyde 'Red'. (1930)

From the September 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

The only time in my life that I have allied myself with the enemies of the workers has been since I came to the House of Commons, and that is by the order of the Labour Government. Almost every time I go into the Division Lobby I join such tried and trusted friends of the Labour Party as Lloyd George, his daughter, Sir Herbert Samuel, etc. They are keeping the Labour Party in office on condition that the workers and the Labour Party programme are deserted.

Thus writes the Labour M.P. for Shettleston ("Forward," August 2nd). He was, however, the official Labour candidate, and stood for the official Labour Party Programme. He was attacked during the election by another Labourite, Mr. C. Diamond, who has been on three occasions official Labour candidate, and who stated that he has supported the Labour Party because it is not committed to Socialism.

The Party that the Member for Shettleston—McGovern—stands for, is not out for the working class. Read his own words: -

There is no danger of chasing away the Liberal votes, as they have all joined us at Westminster. The Labour Cabinet coddle them too much to drive them away, and are more concerned about them than about the working class.

He became the official Labour Candidate—because it's the best way to get elected. "Getting in" —that's the game, even if it means going into the Lobby to vote against the programme he ran on.

The little conflict between the "wings" has now been settled at a joint meeting of the Labour Party and I.L.P., and the following terms were agreed upon: -

(1) That the I.L.P. accepts the Labour Party Annual Conference as the supreme authority of the organised political movement of the workers.
(2) That the I.L.P. wishes to remain in affiliation with the Labour Party. (Forward, Aug. 2.)

So, now Lloyg George, the I.L.P., and the Labour Party may continue their united front—in the same Lobby.

C.

Letter: The Fall of Keir Hardie. (1908)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir, I have stood by Hardie through the years. I have held him to be a man apart from the motley group of members and fakers of capitalism, to whom he has given political existence, and that he calls his Labour Party. I at one time allowed him to nominate me for membership of the National Branch, deciding that if his party was good enough for Hardie it should be good enough for me, and that if Hardie could do something with such elements I might. So I allowed myself to become a member of the Independent Labour Party, and have remained one up to within a week. I have hit out against the policy and tactics of the Party whenever I have occupied its platform, but I retained my membership simply because of my reverence for Hardie. Again and again I have contended with S.D.F. men: "Hardie is something bigger than these reform fellows. He means more than reform. He is a revolutionist—a kind of eagle among carrion crows." But since last week I admit myself beaten. I have been sold. Most of the workers are sold many times. You knock down their idol and they instantly get another. I have not been sold many times, but I admit I have been once—in Hardie.

Edward VII by the grace of the god Capital, and, in obedience to its will, that he might secure for it some sort of a basis to contract a further loan with Russia, was deputed to go and kow-tow with the bloody Czar.

Hardie had an opportunity to bring home to the House of Commons the horrors of Russia, and to fix them upon the Czar, backed by his "black hundred."

And Hardie got up his case well. Oh, yes, the facts were all right and the rhetoric also. Not for one moment do I think that I could have marshalled the facts as well, or have painted the pictures as vividly. He gave them the thousands that have rotted in Russian prisons during the last two years; he gave them the thousands that have been butchered by the emissaries of the "black hundred." And he brought the whole of the atrocities hone to the Czar telling the "House" how the Czar had thanked the "black hundred" for murdering wholesale the people of Russia, under the cry that they were Jews, and adorning himself and his child with the badge of their order as a token of his appreciation of their services to Russia. Then Hardie was called upon by the Deputy-Speaker to withdraw.

Well, with such a case, with such an array of facts, themselves completely pointing the charge, one would have thought that the mere human instrument, called upon to belie himself and deny them would have refused with quiet scorn, and have surrendered himself to any consequences.

But Hardie did not do this. He lost touch with the murdered in Russia, and the thousands groaning in its prisons. He commenced melodramatic word-play with the politician, Emmett. He ducked and edged and quibbled, and allowed horrible facts to be smothered in a play of words between himself and the Deputy-Speaker. And then when the latter insisted that the charge be withdrawn, Hardie withdrew the charge so far as it referred to the Czar and his Government.

Like Dan 'Connell, like Fergus O'Connor, like John Burns and a host of others—spouters, orators, fine rhetoricians, but not fighters, not revolutionists—so Hardie, when an opportunity arrived demanding that he should translate his speech into a bit of action, failed.

So Hardie has gone with the rest of them. The Socialist Movement has learnt that it must never trust him to use any great opportunity. Some of the papers had it that after "Artful Dodger" Asquith decided that he had bottled Hardie, he turned his face to his followers with a sardonic smile which said, "How's that for diplomacy?"

But had Asquith's man meant business, he might have retrieved his position even here, and the Whig lawyer might have had another unpleasant illustration of the fact that he who laughs last laughs best.

Had Hardie meant business, he might have proceeded with his speech, after the passage-at-arms with the Deputy-Speaker, he might have filled the ears of the "House" with the horrors of Russia; he might have piled fact upon fact proving what he had said, and then concluded: "the Russian Government is an autocracy, the Czar is a despot, and with these facts before me I say that the monstrous activities that I have laid before the "House" are the direct expression of the will of the Czar and his infamous Councillors, that he alone is responsible, being autocrat and despot, and I refuse to withdraw the charge." Then "Artful Dodger" Asquith would have smiled quite another smile.

But Hardie didn't mean business—and why? Was it his Parliamentary screw; or fear of not getting a seat in another Parliament, or fear of disrupting further that strange motley he calls the Labour Party, or what? It matters not. Once more some little political mote got into the popular leader's eye and blurred his vision as to the great matter for which he was pleading.

Then there was Grayson. He tells the people he wanted to say something. Why didn't he say it? Some of the papers say he was upon his feet before Henderson. Some of them say that the Deputy-Speaker called Grayson. Anyway, the pair got the floor pretty much together. Why did not Grayson proceed without it in the least recognising the existence of the man who had a compact with the Liberals to shut up the debate at a given time, or of it became in any way dangerous? Grayson may tell the mob outside, who have never been into the House of Commons, that he was prevented, but this will not go down with any man who has been into the Commons, and who knows that it requires a combination of circumstances rather more forceful than the ones of this debate to prevent a man in dead earnest from having his say in a hole like the House of Commons.

Anyhow, the debate upon the King's visit to Russia has been fruitful of much good to the English workers. It has smashed some more idols for some of us. It has shown us that the Labour Party is not independent at all, that it does make alliances with the Liberal Party to shut up debates when they become over verile. All this is education.

If the English Government would only try Russian methods on our spouters ever so little it would still further educate. But British capitalists are too wise for this. You mustn't frighten the popular idols of the people. Prospects of prison, disability, or banishment would turn most of these swans to geese. This would let people see too much. Disillusionment would set in fast. Therefore our Edward by the grace of Grab, going to one of Russia may say: "Behold I show thee a more excellent way to rule thy people. Do not murder and torture and crush in that old-fashioned way. Bamboozle thy people instead. Let them spout and have offices, and generally play the game, and soon you will find them so docile that, should any of their strong words annoy, you shall but threaten them with the least of these other things, so find them eager to withdraw.  Tut, tut, man, the father who has a child well broken in doesn't require to be always using the stick. He only requires now and then to show it, and this is more than sufficient."

But they do tell me that in Russia the people have gone beyond this spouting and office-holding and political game-playing, and refuse to have it at any price. They say that they have sighted the slavery underneath it all, and prefer prison banishment and death to it. And if this is so I don't know what Edward can say to Nicholas that will matter much. It seems to me that the same game played by both, with a people of this sort, must be nearly up. There are men and women in Russia of another sort than our Graysons and Hardies.

Yours, etc.,

John Tamlyn 

The slump in the nineteen-thirties (1978)

Book Review from the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

In The Slump (John Stevenson and Chris Cook. Jonathan Cape 348 Pages £8.95) the authors took a new look at "society and politics during the depression". They pose such questions as: "How depressed were the depressed areas? What, if anything, did the hunger marches achieve? Why were both the communists and fascists confined to the sidelines of British politics? Why did the electors vote as they did? Why was there no revolution in Britain?"

With its illustrations and numerous statistical tables it makes an interesting and useful survey, though some of the conclusions are open to question.

In answer to the belief that it was a decade of universal and unrelieved decline in living standards they show that after unemployment dropped by about a million from the 2½ million of 1932, and helped by the fall of prices, especially of food, there was "appreciable rise in the standard of comfort and welfare" of working-class families in regular employment. The persistently heavy employment was concentrated in certain areas and certain industries.

They tell the story of the MacDonald Government which entered office in 1929, pledged to conquer unemployment and restore "prosperity", only to be brought down by an unforeseen world depression which pushed unemployment up from something over a million to a peak of 3 million. But why were they so single-minded as to believe that they could operate capitalism without unemployment and periodical depressions? The Minister dealing with unemployment was J. H. Thomas, the railwaymen's leader. He stated that they "were going to do what they could to reduce unemployment while accepting the present order of society" (Daily Herald 6 July 1929). He complained afterwards that he took on the job because the economist, Josiah Stamp, had assured him that unemployment was on its way down! In the Socialist Standard (June 1929) we foresaw the failure of the Labour Government to reduce unemployment.

The Minister in the Labour Cabinet appointed to assist J. H. Thomas was Sir Oswald Mosley. He tried in vain to induce Thomas and the Cabinet to adopt a "bolder" policy, and the authors believe that mass unemployment could have been solved but for "the attitudes" of the Labour Cabinet. By this they mean that the Cabinet had not then adopted the "full employment" policy of J. M. Keynes. "Keynesian ideas still lay outside the view of most politicians, although Lloyd George and Mosley were prepared to implement policies along these lines".

The authors fail to notice that since 1945 we have had Cabinets which have all accepted Keynes, but this did not prevent mass unemployment — over 1,600,000 registered unemployed in 1977, with another estimated 250,000 not on the register.

In the Chapter "The Revolution That Never Was" the authors tell us that there was a very widespread belief in the nineteen-thirties that mass unemployment threatened a breakdown of the political system and the end of capitalism itself. "For Marxists, the great depression was clearly the 'final crisis' of capitalism".

The authors obviously do not know that in February 1932 the Socialist Party of Great Britain published a pamphlet setting out the Marxist point of view, with the title Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse.

They go to some trouble to minimise the extent of the Labour Party defeat at the 1931 General Election, though the fact is that if in 1931 they had got the same percentage of votes as in 1929, of an electorate increased by more than a million, their vote, which was actually 6,650,000, would have been nearly been nearly 8½ million.

The authors explain the 14½ million votes given to the "national" government as being due to "the massive middle class" vote having gone that way, while "the working class" vote largely remained with the Labour Party. This merely confuses the real situation. The overwhelming proportion of the electorate were wage and salary earners, that is working-class, and they constituted at least a big majority of the 14½ million votes given to the Tories and their allies.

The authors carry this confusion about 'middle-class' voters into their attempt to explain the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, thus obscuring the fact that when, in democratic elections in July 1932, the Nazis became the largest party, with 13½ million votes, at least several millions were working class voters, including many who had formerly voted for the Social Democrats.

Edgar Hardcastle