Summer Madness (1982)

Book Review from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Authors take sides on the Falklands, edited by Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson. Publ. Woolf. 1982. £1.95 paperback. £4.95 paperback.

Over the past few months the frenzied jingoism of the Falklands War has been dropped from the national press in favour of more traditional entertainments such as the Royal Baby, the World Cup, the latest slaughter in the Middle East and the "Battle at Home" against the health workers, who not only insist on working hard to care for people, but also bother  the government by wanting to be paid for it.

The Falklands War exposed both Labour and Tory as hypocrites, with Thatcher claiming that about a thousand people died for the sake of the "British" citizens of the Falklands, many of who are prevented from even coming to Britain by the Nationality Act, and the "inveterate peacemonger" Foot fighting to be first to send the gun-boats out. But quite aside from these aspects of the conflict, there is an underlying question which must be answered.

The murderous destruction of the Falklands War, like that of all wars today, arose out of the particular form of society in which the world is divided into nations, competing for profit in the world market. In each of the these countries there is a small class who own and control the factories, mines, offices, hospitals and other means of production, and there is a majority class who have to work in those places to survive. The owning class possesses without having to produce, while wage and salary earners produce accumulations of wealth which they do not possess.

Wars are fought by workers, but over the interests of employers. National sovereignty, lucrative markets, mineral resources and trade routes are matters of concern for those who profit from them. Despite the rhetoric about fighting fascism, defying aggression and loving freedom from governments who scorn democracy, thrive on violence and fear the freedom of their electors, wars are not fought over such ideals. The question is, are workers to defend our own interests by uniting across national boundaries to end war and the system which causes it, or are we to continue to be blinded by the ideology of nationalism?

In Authors take sides on the Falklands a number of writers have been asked whether they supported the government's action in sending the task force, and how the conflict should have been solved. A number of them. including Magnus Pyke, James Cameron, Peter Cadogan and Christopher Hill, put their faith in the United Nations to deal with these awkward little arguments over control of territory which naturally flows from a system of society based on property and profit. This hope is well answered, though, by John Papworth, who says that "the UN is an international league of warmongers and it is as unreasoning to expect it to secure the abolition of war as it is to expect an international league of the Mafia to secure the abolition of crime". This elite band of learned academics, imaginative visionaries and humanitarian philosophers come out with the same murderous rubbish which the Sun put more bluntly in its articles about killing "Argies". Piers Paul Read talks about the "Latin temperament", and Margaret Drabble, while recognising that the war was a modern form of "bread and circuses", says that she is patriotic enough to have been "embarrassed" by what happened.

Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, D. M. Thomas, Arthur Hailey, Muriel Spark and Melvyn Bragg all support the idea of workers in British uniforms killing workers killing workers in Argentine uniforms because an Argentine ruler took over some land which was largely controlled by Coalite through the Falklands Islands Company. They see the senseless slaughter as unfortunate, but necessary, because to them the present way of running society is the only way possible and must last forever, even though it has existed for only a fraction of past human life on earth.

Roald Dahl, in between writing pleasant stories to entertain and amuse innocent young children, had this to say:

Today, excessive socialism seems to have nurtured a flabby and idle breed of people who would rather compromise than fight. I would fight. Thank goodness there are some left who would do the same.

H. J. Eysenck, who is supposed to be an expert on intelligence, wrote:

I think the British government's response to the Argentine annexation of the Falklands Islands was entirely justified, and executed with exemplary determination, courage and competence.

Literary critic G. R. Wilson Knight obediently confessed that since these exemplary cases of burning alive young conscripts to the Argentine forces were ratified by all three parties in Parliament, he would not "presume to register any complaint". Keith Waterhouse "supported our response — but not its supporters". The historian Hugh Thomas says that "In the end, the British action was exemplary and I supported it with all my heart". The astronomer Patrick Moore wrote: "Of course the Government acted correctly". Spike Milligan, for all his war jokes, seems to think that the only ridiculous thing about war is the idea of trying to get rid of it:

I am for the Government's response to the Argentine annexation of the Falkland Islands . . . Utopia only exists in the mind . . . the only way to end wars is to have them (p.79)

and Alan Sillitoe hopes that by the time his reply to the questionnaire gets printed the Falklands Islands will be "back where they belong—under British administration".

There are a few contributors who are more realistic. Peter Fryer points out that "compared with the real problems facing humanity, which set of robbers control a tiny bit of land in the South Atlantic is a pseudo-problem". Michael Bogdanov asks:

A choice between an exocet and a hospital, a sea-king and a school. What sane person would not opt for welfare before war?

Michael Horovitz quotes Ghandi, when asked what he thought of western civilisation: "I think it would be a very good idea". More representative, however, is David Holbrook, who thinks that the Falklands campaign was "a form if 'useful hate', forced upon us by circumstances", or Arnold Wesker who, after eight points of qualification, makes point nine, that "The Task Force had to be sent", and point ten, that:

I'm driven to the desperate and uncomfortable conclusion that depressing and tragic though it is for the price paid, the task force have no alternative but to fight on until occupying Argentine forces surrender (p. 107).

The painful dilemma which so many of these writers seem to be suffering, between dislike of destruction and acceptance of a global system of competition rooted in violence, is being solved by them at the moment by suspending their dislike for destruction.

Clifford Slapper

Glorious Aldershot (1985)

From 'The Place Where I Live' series from the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Welcome to Aldershot — Home of the British Army" — so says the large sign on the side of the main A325 Aldershot by-pass. The town has been the "Home of the British Army" for the past century and a half and, as a native, I am supposed to be proud of this distinction.

Aldershot and the surrounding area can be described at best as plain, and at worst as a shoddy haven for the capitalist property developers whose architectural eye-sores spring up like noxious fungi in a town which has one of the worst housing problems in Hampshire. Many of the shanty housing estates are owned by the Ministry of Defence (there is not a great deal in Aldershot which is not owned or controlled by the MoD) and it is here that Our Boys and their families are expected to exist. Naturally, if and when an occupier of one of these salubrious shoeboxes is discharged from Her Majesty's Armed Forces he is unceremoniously discharged from the house — and while he is homeless the house is often left empty.

Apart from the squalid housing, Aldershot has another unique distinction, indeed attraction: it has more monuments, plaques, memorials and obelisks commemorating and glorifying war and death than any other town of comparable insignificance. Rarely does a week go by without the army-barmy Colonel Blimp reminiscing in the pages of the local rags about the glory days of mass slaughter, and how Our Boys sorted out Johnny Gaucho in the Falklands.

The jingoistic hysteria whipped up over the Falklands three years ago certainly had the desired effect in Aldershot; many young soldiers based in the town sacrificed their lives in order to protect the interests of capitalism and to advance the political prowess of Thatcher and her battalion of yes-men. Even today the patriotic drivel still abounds in Aldershot with all the reactionary gusto of 1982. A story in the Aldershot News (29 March) told of a group of ex-servicemen who bought some plots of land on East Falkland from the Coalite Group to sell them to the soldiers who fought in the war as " . . .  a perfect patriotic souvenir of a great moment in British history". On payment of just £12.00 the purchaser "  . . . will be allowed to plant trees, raise the Union Flag, place a plaque or wander freely on the site". Just in case the unwitting buyer cannot afford to travel 10,000 miles to admire his tree, flag and plaque he is compensated with a nice gold certificate, confirming his acquisition of a piece of wind-swept, sheep-shit-covered rock.

But what really stuck in my throat was the following quote from a soldier:

. . . we feel there are hundreds of soldiers who fought in the Falklands who will want some tangible memory of their war. (my emphasis)   

Whose war? All wars are fought, not in the interests of those conscripted to do the fighting but of those who own and control the means of living. Workers from various countries are merely used by their masters as expendable pawns in their campaigns to secure profitable  trade routes, natural resources and markets. When the majority wealth producers — the working class — understand and want socialism we can then abolish war by abolishing its cause — capitalism. In a socialist society there will be nothing to fight over because everything produced will be freely accessible; disputes over natural resources, trade routes and markets which lead to war in capitalist society will not arise.

The resources currently squandered in the pursuit of fighting and preparing for war would, in a socialist world, be diverted into the production of socially useful things such as houses, food, hospitals and medicines. Aldershot will certainly be a very different place — no barracks, no slums, no more monuments glorifying mass slaughter and no more silly road signs.

John Armstrong

Capitalism: the hate machine (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The army exercise Operation Lionheart, which took place in West Germany in September, was said to be the biggest war game since the end of the Second World War; altogether, some 131,000 NATO soldiers were involved along with their air-forces. These forces were divided into the Blues, representing the West, and the Orange, representing the Russian enemy. The purpose of the exercise was to test the West's responses to an invasion by Russian forces and the battlefield was West Germany right up to the Iron Curtain border. According to a report on BBC Radio Ulster, Soviet observers were to be present and 31,000,000 will be paid in compensation to German farmers for destruction resulting from the war game.

It might be a neighbourly gesture to have the Russians along to observe how the West proposes to slaughter them in the next war. Doubtless NATO's eastern guests will reciprocate with a military junket of their own and, in the best neighbourly traditions of propertied society—which imposes on the guests the need to surpass their hosts when their turn comes to throw a party—they will give an impressive display of killing capacities.

War, the threat of war, and the consequent need to give priority to "defence" budgets, has always been a feature of capitalism. In the past, it was aberrational, with periods of peace-mongering and disarmament high on the system's agenda. Armaments are financed by taxation and, directly or indirectly, taxation is a charge on capital; in the past, considerable segments of capitalism have lobbied for arms cuts and reduced taxation.

Since the Second World War that has all changed. The "defence" industries have become deeply interwoven into the fabric of the system and there are few large industries today — and, especially multinational industries — that are not associated with "defence" in one way or another. It is probably impossible to calculate the number of human lives that are bound up in some way with the killing and destruction business. Sivard estimates that they total almost a hundred million, while other estimates put the figure far in excess of this. Apart from the millions engaged in "defence" forces, and their reserves, there are further millions producing armaments, making uniforms, providing food and catering services; there are construction crews, scientists, surveyors — the whole range of occupations and professions. The aircraft industry, the shipbuilding industry, engineering, furniture industry, office equipment, telecommunications, together with such utilities as gas, electricity, coal—it would be difficult indeed to think of an industry that is not involved in some way with war and preparation for war.

Throughout the world, the nations representing the opposing power blocs are now permanently engaged in preparation for war. Vast arsenals of fabulously expensive war materials are continually being rendered obsolete, superseded by newer, more expensive, more threatening and more terrible weapons of mass destruction. In the countries concerned, the staggeringly vast amounts of wealth devoted to weaponry — often in the face of cuts in social welfare and in health care and in education — must be justified. What justification can a government and its pensioned news media give for such organised lunacy?

The only justification that can be given is the need for "defence" — no government has a Department of Offence. But even that will not suffice as a general excuse. The government must identify the potential enemy and, further, must provide evidence of the enemy's evil intent — evidence commensurate with the appalling outpourings of the "nation's wealth" on armaments. In other words, throughout the most technically developed countries of the world today there is the permanent need for preparing people psychologically to face up to the prospect of war; the definite need to inculcate hatred, distrust and fear of an identified potential enemy.

Imagine two families living in close proximity to one another adopting this attitude. Both sets of parents continually tell their children that the other family are preparing to harm them and that they must procure the most deadly weapons they can lay hands on to protect themselves. Every day, the parents upbraid their children with the warning that their neighbours are intent on destroying them: the neighbours are deceitful, untrustworthy, evil, heavily armed and constantly intent on destruction.

If such hatred and fear were constantly pumped into the children of both families is it not likely that, at some point, they will come into conflict? And, if the consequences of that conflict led them into court, can you imagine the comments of the bewigged buffoon who presides over the administration of capitalism's strange and ambivalent "law and order"?

Of course, this analogy is incomplete in that it fails to explain why two normal families should adopt such an attitude to one another. In the case of capitalism the answer is to be found in its unceasing, relentless competition for markets, for natural resources, for trade routes and the need to maintain military forces and strategic areas for the defence or acquisition of these markets.

Additional to these dangers is the permanence of war preparations, the vast expenditure on which needs injections of hatred and fear. Thus, the separate national segments of world capitalism need a Hate Machine — a combination of capitalism's politicians and the leaders of its institutions, together with its obedient media of mass communication — constantly poisoning the relations between peoples and creating the fears and insecurities essential to the popular acceptance of war and its vastly expensive preparations.

Whatever other deadly lessons capitalism's captains may have learned from the war game Lionheart, they can be satisfied that it is a valuable input for the Hate Machine. It will have served to show the boys at the front, the "nation" and the whole "free world" who the enemy is going to be; who to hate, to fear and distrust. If it is completely successful, it will have the added advantage of showing just how unpatriotic are those enemies of our civilised way-to-life who would dare to suggest that the wealth used to set up and carry through Lionheart might have been spent on building a couple of thousand houses or on saving the lives of the thousands who died of hunger or hunger-related diseases within our civilised capitalist world during the 22 days of Lionheart.

Richard Montague

(Belfast Branch, World Socialist Party)

Into the Crystal Ball (1949)

From the December 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

"When I dipped into the future as far as human eye can see."

Every generation produces at least one writer who sets upon paper his visions of the future. As early as the 13th Century Roger Bacon is reputed to have visualised a "horseless chariot." Tennyson in his "Locksley Hall" foresaw aerial warfare. Early this century H. G. Wells dreamed up all kinds of weird and wonderful phenomena which if nothing else, at least made an interesting film.

Many of these writers use this medium, as did Plato with his "Republic," as a vehicle for their own political and philosophical ideas. 1949 has produced two novels of the future which are in reality no more than their respective authors' views upon contemporary events.

For Aldous Huxley, "Ape and Essence" is a second attempt. His first, "Brave New World" with its pre-determinism and Malthusian belts was a sensation twenty or so years ago. Since then apparently this peculiar mystic of the Californian coast has developed and now instead of seeing the highly complex press-button society of the "Brave New World," he sees, as did Jack London fifty years before, the complete destruction of civilisation as we know it. Only with London it was the plague; with Huxley it is the atomic bomb.

About fifty years after the third world war has destroyed the rest of the world an expedition from New Zealand lands on the coast that was Los Angeles. One of their number is captured by the inhabitants whom he had found engaged in exhuming the corpses for their clothing and jewellery. He learns of the results of an atomic war. Machinery is unusable. Human beings instead of having a permanent potency have an animal-like sexual cycle. All the breeding takes place during a fortnight's orgy which is opened by the assassination of all deformed children and their mothers by a castrated high priest. Women are degraded and known as vessels of evil. In short, good has succumbed to evil to such an extent that their god is the devil and the sign of the cross has been displaced by the sign of his proverbial horns. The whole story is written in the form of a film script which enables the author to introduce many side issues, one of which is the picture of baboons leading humans resembling Einsteins, symbolising the degradation of the intellectual.

Summing up, if one can see through the thick clouds of erotic pipe dreams which seem always to surround the author, the warning that he issues is not a new one. It has been used to justify every war and struggle in history—that it is a battle between good and evil, though the purveyors of this argument are always careful not to define or describe the terms they use. Huxley presents what will happen if this particular form of evil triumphs. So children, gather around Uncle Aldous and his happy band of intellectuals, and lay down your lives that his "goodness" may live to fight again.

George Orwell, the other crystal gazer, takes us but thirty-four years hence to the world 1984, and thus his book his titled. He too had previously attempted satire with his "Animal Farm."

By 1984, Orwell visualises the world resolved into three states, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, who are all conducting long-distance wars against the other. The scene of the story is Great Britain, now known as Airstrip 1 of Oceania. In this society there are still two classes, Party members and "proles," and although the latter are in the majority they live as they do to-day and count for very little. The Party members are dominated by one "Big Brother" who is quoted, heard and pictured but never seen. In every one of their homes there is a television on reverse which conveys to the Party all that each member does and says. The language spoken is "Newspeak" in which no word has a definite meaning. For example, "war is peace," and "strength is weakness" are phrases they use. It os the intention of the Party to crush all individuality and permanency of ideas.

The hero, Winston Smith, is a member concerned with erasing contradictions in the Party's propaganda. He meets a young woman, a section leader in the Women's Anti-Sex League and they become involved with a secret revolutionary organisation led by one Goldstein. At the same meeting they become attached to each other—a crime against the State. They have clandestine meetings in the "proles" quarters and speak of the happiness to be found amidst the bug-ridden slums where they live as normal human beings. Unfortunately they are captured and Smith, like thousands before him, is tortured both physically and mentally until he is convinced that he loves "Big Brother." With the juggernaut of the State continuing uninterrupted he can only hope that one day the "proles" will rise and alter things.

Analysing the book, it seems that George Orwell fear the centralisation that is the trend of present-day society. We have seen the dictatorship of Germany which, with its lack of "left wing" jargon, was old-fashioned, and the more fashionable Russia, and now, with the advent of the Labour Government and nationalisation, to say nothing of the expulsion of Platt-Mills, Zilliacus and company. Orwell fear the same trend in Great Britain. His "Newspeak" is aimed at the new illiteracy wherein masses of words lack any different meaning. He offers no solution but hopes that one day the masses will rise. If his hope is to be fulfilled, then surely the masses would have been powerful enough to prevent that state of affairs arising in the first place.

Yet in spite of their difference of approach there is a great deal of similarity between the two writers. They both use the symbol of the sex instinct to portray the crushing of what is generally mis-named "human nature" — in other words, that the advancement of scientific discovery is making man less and less a conscious organism and more and more an appendage to a machine. Both of them are struggling in a mental morass. Huxley, having started with the post-1918 cynicism, has dabbled in psychology and all the other fads of the inter-war years and finally, along with his contemporary T. S. Eliot, arrived at the conclusion that God is the answer — that there'll be pie in the sky when you die. What a lie! Orwell, like so many of the other self-styled left wing intellectuals has finally decided that the system in Russia is not all that he thought it was and is now groping in the dark for some new axe to grind, and for the moment is content, instead of offering false hopes to issue unmerited warnings.

But both of them are agreed on one point—the need for intellectual leadership, and like every other advocate of this will-o'-the-wisp, they are the boys for the job—the figurehead in whose wake the masses will rally.

What tripe! As members of that mass let us do a little crystal gazing of our own and inform these two worthies that leaders, whether they style themselves as practical or intellectual, are no more than reflections of the ignorance of their followers. Just as the gods and hobgoblins are fading as men solve more of their problems, so will the need for leadership die when men decide exactly where they want to go. Gradually they are finding the correct road. As slumps and wars grow more frequent, each one more vicious than its predecessor, more and more are rejecting the excuses and finding the cause. With the cause comes the cure. When there are enough of us with that understanding, the Huxleys and the Orwells will be left at the post. Men will march forward together not to a 1984, or to destruction, but to a new society where all men and women can live full and happy lives.

Ronald. 

Seventeen and Counting (2015)

Book Review from the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Harvey: 'Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism'. Profile £9.99.

We’ll not state all the proposed contradictions here, just list the three kinds that David Harvey identifies. Foundational contradictions (such as those between use value and exchange value, and private appropriation and common wealth) are at the very heart of capitalism, essential aspects of it. Moving contradictions are continually changing (for instance, between competition and monopoly, and inequalities of wealth and income) and dangerous ones threaten capitalism’s existence. This last category includes the relation to the natural world and, because of the ubiquity of alienation, to human nature: capitalism will simply become unacceptable to the majority of the population. 

Along the way some interesting points are made. One is that, despite the supposed emphasis on competition, monopoly is in fact central to capitalism, since the capitalist class exercise a collective monopoly over the means of production. Yet potentially monopolisable skills, such as computer programming, are countered by increased avenues to acquire them, thus undermining the chances of relatively high wages for workers who possess these skills.

Other claims are less convincing, though. There are frequent references to the existence of a class of rentiers, who own the land, mineral rights, and so on. However, it is not clear whether these are claimed to constitute a separate class of owners, or just a sectional interest within the capitalist class. The landlord class are described as unproductive, in contrast to ‘productive capital’.

But it is particularly in regard to what he means by the end of capitalism that Harvey is unclear and inconsistent. There is an early reference to ‘the utopian aim of a social order without exchange value and therefore moneyless’, but this is quickly dropped, apparently in favour of Silvio Gesell’s bizarre idea of money that goes out of date and so cannot be accumulated as happens now. Harvey also advocates what he calls ‘revolutionary reform’, which involves reducing the inequalities of wealth and income to the extent that the reproduction of capital is threatened. But he hardly makes any case for this, and capitalism can after all operate with far less inequality than currently exists. 

The final chapter lists seventeen ‘ideas for political praxis’, one for each contradiction. These are something of a hotch-potch, though: abolish all inequalities except those implied in ‘to each according to their need’, and introduce equal entitlements to health care, housing, food security and some others. In place of the class division of capitalism there would be associated producers freely deciding what to produce and how. Yet there would still be some means of exchange (Gesell-style money, perhaps, but why?). Maybe the proposals here are not intended to form a consistent whole, but they do not equate to socialism. After all, it would be easy enough to advocate a moneyless society without exchange if the author shared our conception of future society. 

Paul Bennett

Why I joined the SPGB (1975)

From the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the nineteen-thirties it was commonplace for meetings to be held at street corners. Many sites became well-known. There were fewer cars and no TV. The audiences were attentive, asked questions and took part in discussion. Many workers became interested in politics at such meetings. I was an example. Apart from a critical attitude to Religion, as a youth, I took most things for granted.

It was in 1933 that I first stopped to listed to a meeting. I was eighteen years old. When I heard the speaker say we were "slaves" I stayed to hear more. I may have heard words like "capitalism", "socialism", "wage-labour" before but never thought much about them. The speaker urged workers to organize themselves as a class and end the system that exploited them and was the cause of their poverty". This impressed me as I had often wondered what gave other people the right to order me about, so I was in the right frame of mind. I stayed until the end. I bought a pamphlet for 1d called From Slavery to Freedom and that title suited me fine. I could use a bit of freedom. It gave me an inkling as to what Socialism was all about. I went back to Rushcroft Road time and again. Meetings began to act like a magnet. I was drawn to them. I was out every night listening and learning. I was soon familiar with the various parties. Amongst them the SPGB and I listened to their speakers. It was one of them that I heard the first time. I had become a "Political Animal".

However, if there was a wrong turning, I took it. I was going to have to learn the hard way. I was attracted by the rallies in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square which were always "Against Fascism". I got the idea that this was helping Socialism. This was unfortunate as I was going off at a tangent. But I wanted action. I wanted to be in the middle of things.

At the time of the Spanish Civil War, whilst crossing Westminster Bridge, our long rambling columns were confronted by arm-raised lines of BUF (Mosleyite) supporters. There were thousands in our demonstration and we outnumbered and out-shouted the "Blackshirts". We held up clenched fists in reply to the "Hitler salute". With our chanting and banners proclaiming "Arms for Spain" we felt we had won a victory for the forces of "peace and socialism".

In 1936 I joined the Labour Party because I considered it "the mass party of the working class". I was not sure what they meant, but it sounded fine at the time. Anyway I was only joining to help turn it into a genuine socialist party. My fellow members were reformists and I was going to win them over to socialism. I now regarded myself as a sound revolutionary. I did not entertain any doubts on that score.

I soon found myself engaged in other activities. Soon after becoming a member of the LP I came into contact with the "Militant Labour League" and joined. They were one of several Trotskyist factions. I was in fact a member of a party within another party. The atmosphere was very conspiratorial. Secret meetings were held regularly to decide strategy. The object was to try and get control of local Labour Party Branches. The so-called Communist Party was playing a similar game. According to the MLL the basis of socialism had been laid in Russia in 1917 by the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky, but Stalin had betrayed the October Revolution, usurped power and built up his bureaucracy. The USSR was a "degenerated workers' state". The object of the League was to defend the basis of this "workers' state", build up a fourth International, work for world revolution and overthrow Stalin, at the same fighting against the Labour leadership in Britain. We sure had plenty to get on with. But we were not deterred: we were Bolsheviks ready for any task. With the "deepening of the crisis of world capitalism" the working class would rally to the Vanguard of the Masses. That was us. We were all set to win the "leadership" stakes.

We did not bother to explain to other workers what socialism was. That was a waste of time. The workers would trust and follow us. We would raise the right slogans at the right time and we were the right leaders. Had not the mantle of Lenin and Trotsky fallen on us? The tasks in the "coming period" was immense. Programmes dealing with "perspectives" were constantly issued. We would be dealing with world-shattering events. Hitler came to power because of false leadership of the German workers. Victory for the world working class would come, under the Banner of the Fourth International. Each of us saw himself as a potential Trotsky directing Red Armies all over the world. We did not have long to wait for events to start moving. "The death agony of capitalism" started getting under way, or so we thought, when World War Two began in 1939.

During the war, at a conference, all the groups united to form the "Revolutionary Communist Party". We listened to a recording of Trotsky's voice. Delegates were overcome and had tears in their eyes as they heard the "Old Man's" voice. We, the self-appointed leaders, then all shook hands and sang the Internationale. The ruling class did not have time to tremble, however, for this new party sank soon after this emotional launching. All the "perspectives" were wrong. None of the forecasts of world revolution materialized. It was the RCP that collapsed and not capitalism. There was no turning of the masses to the vanguard, and there was no death agony of capitalism.

Disillusioned, it came to me in 1945 that the workers of the world were not class-conscious. They did not want Socialism. I had to adjust my thinking. After the dust settled it was clear the post-war world was not going to be different. The working class supported capitalism and it was going to continue. At the end of the war it was "back to work" as usual for wages. The only crisis that occurred was if workers could not get their old jobs back.

My pipe-dreams were coming to an end. I could not agree with the Trotskyist slogan "For a Third Labour Government". I refused to vote for it at the 1945 General Election. I left the Labour Party and, at the same time, broke with Bolshevism although this was regarded as "impossible". It was like breaking out of a stifling prison and coming back into the real world.

I avidly started reading the SOCIALIST STANDARD again. In the light of bitter experience, I had to re-learn all the fundamentals of Socialism. I listened again to what the SPGB had to say. Hearing their speakers was like a breath of fresh air. I went to their lectures and classes. I was thoroughly routed in arguments about Russia. I felt confused when members of the SPGB asked me what a "workers' state" was; why did the Russian workers pay themselves wages? Did Karl Marx write a book called Capital or a book called "Dialectical Materialism"? And much else besides. Understanding, at last, the materialist conception of history I was able to refute the "workers' state" nonsense, and beginning to see the Trotskyite so-called "theories" were ridiculous.

I never met one Trotskyite who advocated the abolition of the wages system or understood its implications. No-one ever spoke about production solely for use. They do not know the difference between the common ownership of the tools of production with democratic control by the whole of society and what they call "nationalization under workers' control". The followers of Trotsky are anti-working class because they distort the meaning of Socialism. They hinder the spread of genuine Socialist knowledge.

I could see now how wrong I had been been, and I had much to learn. Despite my mistakes I had not turned sour about Socialism. I applied to join the SPGB and was accepted in 1946. Socialist understanding expands when you become a member. I recall meeting again in the Camberwell branch our late Comrade Frank Dawe, whom I had known very slightly over the years. He had asked me what I had been up to, and I told him. He gave me a quizzical smile and said: "You have been doing what I call 'boring' in the Labour Party. All you do in fact is to 'bore' in at one end and then 'bore' out again at the other, without achieving anything. Put it down to experience!" That just about sums it all up.

J. C. Gormley

Food for Thought (2015)

From the July 2015 Socialist Party of Canada Newsletter

- In mid-town Toronto a building is being demolished so they can build condominium apartments there. That's nothing new but what is unusual is that some people are upset that this is the only building in the world built during the brief reign of King Edward VIII that bears his logo. To satisfy these outraged citizens, the developers have agreed to preserve the facade. We have global warming, war, terrorism, poverty and hunger, Ebola, and so on, and these people get upset at the supposed disrespect to the memory of a playboy/parasite, a guy who was not up to the herculean task of shaking hands and making boring speeches prepared by someone else, and used his girl friend as an excuse to get out of those onerous tasks. For a system built on 'value', Capitalism sure distorts people's values.

- An analysis by Andrew Powell-Morse of ticket market place Seatsmart showed that lyrics of pop songs have fallen to the intelligence of eight year-olds. This was his finding after analyzing 225 songs that had spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard charts for pop, country, rock, R & B, and hiphop for any given year in the last ten. In the final reckoning, it's a degenerate culture reflecting a degenerate economic system where anything goes as long as it makes money.

- The New York Times of June 21 included an article by a Brazilian commenting on his country's economics in the last few years. He, Like many others were optimistic in 2003 when Lula de Silva and his Workers' Party came to power with the expectation that the old inequality and oppression of previous administrations would blossom into an equal and just society. Now the old disappointment has returned as corruption scandals, an economic recession, and opportunistic alliances with former rivals have returned the working class to virtually where it started. The Brazilians should have known better – as long as you have capitalism, you will have inequality, insecurity, and, of course, the class system.

- Pope Francis has used his position to speak out for the poor and to put an emphasis on serving the poor. He has invited Latin American priests who founded a movement for social change (once scorned by the church authorities as Marxist, can you believe!). Murdered arch bishop Oscar Romero, shot to death in 1980 has bee beatified (?) and is one step away from sainthood. Pope Francis wants to create a 'poor church for the poor' to get closer to the masses. All this, of course, will do nothing to alleviate poverty and cynic might say the church is looking for more people they can frighten into believing.

- The International Monetary Fund has issued a report detailing the high cost of burning dirty fuels (New York Times May 31). It says that many countries are compounding the problem when their governments subsidize the price to below cost and not taxing the products enough to account for the damage that burning fossil fuels causes to human health and to the climate. The IMF calculates that subsidies this year will amount to $5.3 trillion or 6.5% of the world's gross domestic product. Not surprisingly, the biggest polluters such as China and the US account for $2.3 trillion and $699 billion respectively. Staggering figures when we are so short of cash for health, education, proper infrastructure etc. But even worse is the estimate that eliminating subsidies and taxing higher would reduce premature deaths caused by air pollution by fifty-five per cent, or about 1.85 million yearly!

- In the journal of our companion party in the UK, mention is made of the fact that in Qatar thousands of labourers from Nepal are treated no better than slaves. Companies handling construction work for the 2022 World Cup of Soccer infrastructure forced them to stay by denying them promised salaries and withholding necessary worker ID permits making them illegal aliens. The precarious situation created by the employers has forced the workers to beg for food. Thousands of Nepalese workers in Qatar face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern day slavery as defined by the International Labour Organization. So whether its slave labour camps in North Korea, sweat shops in the third world, or workers in Qatar, slavery continues, not to mention wage slavery. Capital will find a way to keep nineteenth century conditions going in the name of profit. Socialists advocate not the abolition of these conditions, but the abolition of the economic system that causes it.

- Bill and Hilary Clinton recently revealed that since January 2014, they have received more than $25 million for giving one hundred speeches. Contrast that with the fact that millions are trying to survive on less than a dollar a day. Surely one must wonder if there isn't something wrong with the way society works. What were the Clintons saying in their speeches? Whatever the content, the theme never changed, 'preserve the status quo'. Socialists say damn the status quo, let's work for a world without such outrageous extremes.

- A recent edition of "America Unearthed" took place in Rockwall, Texas, so named for the underground wall in a rural area that is thought to have once been above ground. The limestone wall measures three miles by five and a half feet and is seven stories high. Is it man-made or natural? We do not know. Many geologists and archeologists have analyzed it and do not publish their findings because big developers do not want the site to become an archeological attraction, presumably because it could be a lucrative development. Money talks, good intentions walk.

- Here's an example of how a government or an influential (read wealthy) person can get their agenda across to the masses. The Toronto Star (May 30), reports, "Deep inside a four-storey marble building in St. Petersburg, hundreds of workers tap away at computers on the front lines of an information war, say those who have been inside." Known as Kremlin trolls, they work twelve-hour shifts flooding the internet with propaganda aimed at stamping Putin's world vision on Russia and around the world. One worker referred to going to work as entering an Orwellian universe. Bashing out 160 blogposts on each shift, they simply repeat what they are told. For this they are relatively well paid at 40 to 50 thousand roubles a month ($950 to 1,250 Canadian). Obviously, Putin has large amounts of cash at his disposal. This type of activity is used by big capital such as the coal industry in the US touting that coal is clean and environmentally green, or tobacco or sugar soaked food is good for you. The ideas of an epoch are those of the ruling class.

- "Plan to rehire 4,000 Greeks leaves Europeans aghast as a 1.2 Billion Euro bill becomes due." was the secondary headline in an article in The Toronto Star (May 30). Imagine, how horrifying it must seem to the economists that four thousand cleaners and civil servants who lost their jobs to austerity cuts ordered by Greece's creditors, should have a chance to earn a living again! Apparently, according to economic think tanks, German and French families (of four) would be on the hook for 4,350 Euros given that the total figure will be $160 billion of French and German exposure to Greek debt should an exit from the European Union be necessary. Why the families would foot the bill when the capitalists expropriate most of the wealth is another matter.

- The World Health Organization recently reported that air pollution is killing hundreds of thousands of Europeans each year and released figures to prove it. Six hundred thousand died prematurely in fifty-three European countries in 2010 due to fine particles in the air. Nine out of ten Europeans are exposed to a concentration above WHO guidelines. The annual cost to governments is $1.6 trillion due to the premature deaths and related illnesses. That figure represents ten per cent of Europe's gross domestic product. The worst country is Georgia that lost thirty-five per cent of its GDP for this reason. Some point to Sheffield's efforts to clean its air and Sweden's clean-up of its lakes, but it's a case of too little too late. However, it's not too late to support socialism and get cracking on the right track to solve the problem.

- The Toronto Star (May 23) reported that after ISIS took control of Palmyra two hundred and eighty soldiers and citizens loyal to the Assad regime were executed and let their bodies lie in the streets as a warning to all who would oppose them. Shades of Bloody Sunday, Tiananmen square, and hundreds of other atrocities over the years. With a world still divided into competing entities this is bound to continue in one form or another. The end of capitalism and the establishment of socialism will be the end of humankind's prehistory and the beginning of our real history.

- Well, at last we know why there are huge income gaps between the workers and the owning class. A team of (vulgar) 'economists' has put out a research paper that states that income gap is not due to differences between high and low earners in one company, but rather the difference is due to the widening gap in wages between different companies. Take Apple and McDonalds, for example, pay differences are not because the executives are getting greater increases than the ordinary workers but because the average pay at Apple rises faster than at McDonalds. Obviously another attempt by capitalist toadies to explain away the gap. It's still there and getting bigger, but notice no mention is made of the idle investors who are raking in the money faster than anyone and giving no equivalent for what they get.

- It sometimes seems that the environment and global warming have disappeared from the news, from election platforms, from the public consciousness. This is a result of a major planned effort on the part of think tanks and editors in many places. Also, the doubters were handed information from a UN study in 2013 that claimed that warming of the earth was slowing down. Now a research paper from the scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that contradicts the UN report has been published. According to NOAA the rise in temperatures since 2000 have been 'virtually indistinguishable' from the rate of the previous five decades. "A whole cottage industry has been built by climate skeptics on the false premise that there is currently a hiatus in global warming" (Toronto Star, June 6). Strange how that kind of news can get into the media.

- Under Ontario's Employment Standards Act, that is now under review, there is no limit on how long a company can employ workers as temporary before giving them permanent status. There is nothing to prevent employers from paying temporary workers less than those on permanent status (if there is such a thing today!). There is nothing to prevent them from hiring their entire work force on a temporary basis if they wish. To quote the head of Toronto's Workers' Action Centre,"If the employer knows he can hire you and doesn't have to pay benefits, doesn't have to pay you a pension, and can hire you for a lot less, there's no incentive for him to hire you permanently." This is especially so as the average wage for temporary workers is $15 per hour compared to $22.40 for permanent workers. Making workers permanent would, naturally, cut into profits. Changes to the above act, if legislated, could improve conditions for some temps but socialists say let's legislate the act to put capitalism out of business where squabbling over meagre handouts from capital will be a thing of the past.

- Barack Obama is calling for federal legislation that would require companies to guarantee workers' paid sick days. At present, forty million American workers do not get paid if they are off work sick. Since San Francisco started sick pay for city employees in 2007, nearly twenty cities and three states have also passed sick pay laws. McDonald's and Walmart stores are both making changes to their sick pay policies. We can only guess that this is to stem the growing discontent among the work force experiencing the stress that capitalism creates.

- The good news from the city of Toronto is that the city has a $190 million surplus from the 2014 budget year. Don't get too excited, though, much of that surplus comes from not hiring staff to fill positions when city workers retire or quit, a total of 1,200 jobs. This fact is not as newsworthy as a surplus so it doesn't make the headlines. Now, transportation services say they cannot repair the roads and Parks and Recreation will not be able to prune the trees. Our services are continually being cut back in spite of greater wealth being produced so that more of the profit can be taken by those who simply hand money over to professional investors and contribute nothing.

- On May 28, political and business leaders from fifty-eight countries came together for an economic conference that included Middle East youth unemployment on the agenda. The rate for unemployment there is the world's highest at 29.5%. As a former Jordanian labour minister said,"If the unemployed do not find a decent living, they look for the alternatives and the alternative is the so-called Islamic State." A delightful choice for the youth anywhere and a typical one under capitalism where those in need do not get much choice at all.

- As a school bus driver for nine years, one SPCer notes that the younger the students are, the more they chat, interact, and enjoy each others' company. Conversely, the older they are, the less they socialize and become engrossed in their electronic devices. With internet, email, texting, etc. people are less interested in each other. That is proved by the fact that membership in historic social clubs has decreased all over the world. The technology is wonderful but has de-humanized us. It is interesting to speculate how this and future technology will be used in a socialist world.

For socialism, John & Steve.

Chicago aftermath (1971)

Book Review from the June 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trial by Tom Hayden. (Jonathan Cape. Paperback. 70p.)

Television gave us almost the ultimate in exposure of the Chicago conspiracy trial. To anyone who saw the box's account of the blatant partiality of Judge Hoffman, the gagging of Bobby Seale, the clowning of Rubin, can a book offer any more? Perhaps; the trial began a determined marketing of its personalities and here is another episode.

In truth Hayden's account of the trial (a small part only of the book) is compellingly written with his anger flooding out of him. Gagging Seale, for example, was an obscene thing to do; now, says, Hayden, they are researching a plastic booth for troublesome defendants.

But apart from the anger what else is there? Well there is the predictable mysticism about youth, which has it that

. . . "youth" is more important than "economic class" in analysing the American struggle.

(Note those quotation marks. Is "economic class" a reality of capitalism or not?) There is confusion over the uses of violence in politics, when the Nazis and the Klan and the Chicago police should have cleared it all up—Hayden writes admiringly of the Weathermen. And there is the customary, wearisome left wing preoccupation with "tactics"—tactics for everything, for the trial, for the day-to-day struggle, for the revolution except that we are so strung up with tactics that we never actually get there.

Hayden makes some suggestions which can only have originated in a left-winger's private cloud-cuckoo land. This, after all, is capitalism; yet he whines that his lawyers should have been allowed to argue, not just about his guilt, but about the merits of the laws under which he was charged.

He is starry-eyed about the emergent capitalism of North Vietnam and about the patriotism of its people (as if that made them right) and thinks that it all has something to do with Socialism. There is a long, rambling section on the "New American Revolution" which talks about "self determination for our internal colonies" and "Free Territories in the Mother Country", which Hayden elaborates as "liberated zones"—if that makes it any clearer or more feasible. One wonders why, when the simple sanity of Socialism gets hardly a mention, such crackpot ideas should be so popular.

And finally there is this statement, which Hayden considers sufficiently brilliant and penetrating to merit italics:

The chief contradiction in America is between a moribund, decadent system and all those people with a stake in the future.

Such vacuity is easily recognised by anyone who understands the contradictions of capitalism and who knows that they can be defined simply and undramatically. While there are people like Hayden to push for other forms of capitalism instead of Socialism, capitalism can hardly be described as moribund.

Read this book only of your boredom tolerance is pretty high, or if you have ever wondered what lefties mean when they talk about crap.

Ivan

The Cult of the Professional Revolutionary (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

A cult is generally considered to be a group that indoctrinates its members into regarding themselves as a select group different from the rest of society. Some, but by no means all, such groups seek to isolate themselves. A typical example would be the closed Plymouth Brethren who avoid association with “the ungodly” (you and me). But others, such as the Scientologists and the Moonies actively engage with the rest of society in order to gain new recruits.

Cults are organised around a charismatic leader whose views are regarded as authoritative. The leader is surrounded by a group of seconds who transmit his or her views to the other followers. New members are encouraged to break off all relations with their previous life, often to change their name and surrender their property to the group; they are encouraged to identify totally with the group and to subordinate their individuality to it.

In some cases so total is the identification that the followers can be persuaded to voluntarily follow their leader in committing suicide, as notoriously in 1978 when some 900 members of the “Reverend” Jim Jones’ People’s Temple cult committed mass suicide in Guyana and in 1997 when 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult did so in California. The 7 July suicide bombers in London could be another example.

But how can humans be persuaded to kill themselves for what most people can see is a delusion? A recent attempt to explain this has been made by Janja Lalich in her book Bounded Choice, subtitled ‘True Believers and Charismatic Cults’ (University of California Press). Her explanation is given in the book’s title: by means of a number of psychological techniques to which the cult members voluntarily, and often eagerly, submit, they come to so identify themselves with the cult that their freedom of choice becomes limited - “bounded” - to those offered by its ideology, however bizarre this might be.

Thus, for instance, in the Heaven’s Gate cult, which is one of her two case studies, the members came to believe that they really were aliens who had assumed human form and who were striving to return to their previous higher level of existence. Given this core belief, it was a logical - “bounded” - choice to decide to leave their human bodies, considered as mere “vehicles”, to await rescue by an alien spaceship their leader told them was hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet that was then passing by the Earth.

From 1975 to 1985 Lalich was a member of a Maoist group in San Francisco called the Democratic Workers Party. This is her second case study. Having ourselves been many times labelled a “sect” we are naturally wary about the concept of a cult being applied to political organisations. But Lalich makes out a good case for describing the DWP as a cult - in view of the type of organisational and psychological techniques employed, as by some religious groups, to weld the members to their organisation and its leaders - though one, of course, more like the Moonies than the Closed Brethren. And it is true that the Leninist principle of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries does, outside the political context of an openly repressive regime, lend itself to the would-be professional revolutionaries being organised as a cult.

We are of course opposed to Leninist organisational methods but we can see how, in the context of Tsarist Russia, a vanguard party organised on hierarchical and secretive lines would be one political option for anti-Tsarist revolutionaries, even if not a socialist form of organisation. The Bolshevik Party could not legitimately be called a cult; it was a political organisation. But why, in conditions of relative political democracy allowing people to organise openly, would some want to organise on such a basis? Why would anyone want to organise a corps of professional revolutionaries when there was no political necessity to do so?

The DWP aimed to be a party of disciplined, full-time professional revolutionaries under a strong leader, dedicated to serving the cause of “the proletariat” (perceived, in accord with Leninist theory, as being incapable of acting by and for themselves). The party was organised on a hierarchical basis with the Leader at the top surrounded by a small staff, an intermediate level of department heads (appointed and revocable by the top leadership) and the ordinary rank-and-file members.

There were three levels of membership: trial, candidate and general:

“All General Members had full voting rights and were considered full-time, which meant they were to be on call, at the Party’s disposal, twenty-four hours a day. Trial Members had no rights; they were to learn. If the Trial Membership stage was passed (based on study, level of participation and good behavior), then appropriate leadership personnel commended that the young militant be moved up to the status of Candidate Member, with partial political rights”.

As in the Heaven’s Gate cult, all members had to adopt a new name:

“Once a Party name was chosen, only that name was to be used; and immediately new members learned others’ Party names. Militants were never to reveal their real name to other members, not even to roommates. Party names were used in all meetings or gatherings, in all DWP facilities and in all houses where members lived. For the new member, taking on a name was the first stage in losing his or her pre-Party identity and assuming a Party-molded one”.

And to sacrifice their income and property:

“The dues structure was set up so that each militant gave over all monies received above a group-determined living amount, set at approximately poverty-level standards. All monetary or substantial gifts (such as a car), job bonuses, legal settlements, and inheritances were turned over to the Party”.

The poverty-line income forced members to live together in communal houses, thus making them even more dependent on the party and its leaders. Its leader (one Marlene Dixon) did not have to live on the poverty line, but had other members assigned to cook and clean for her.

The DWP was committed to the Leninist concept of “democratic centralism”. On paper this means that there is a full discussion of some policy document but that, when it has been adopted, all members, including those who voted against it, have to be committed to carrying it out. Some Leninist groups do try to operate on this basis, allowing the preliminary democratic discussion, but not the DWP. According to Dixon, in a document entitled ‘On the Development of Leninist Democracy’:

“[D]emocracy is a method for the selection of leadership and a method of assuring that the most developed and tested comrades, the cadre, the bones of a Leninist party, govern the party”.

What this meant in practice was:

“[T]he leaders would give a presentation on a change in direction of some work, or would open a denunciation of a militant for some error. Each militant present was expected to say how much he or she agreed with what was just said”.

Members were subject to public sessions of criticism and self-criticism in which they had to confess to any “petty bourgeois” failings or lapses the leadership pointed out to them. There were also sanctions for breaches of discipline (and even a security service trained by an ex-Marine):

“Given the emphasis on obedience and discipline members understood that they could be sanctioned for not following rules or for in any way breaking the discipline. Militants were ‘punished’ in a variety of ways besides submitting to collective criticism sessions and writing self-criticisms. More practical sanctions, for example, were increased quotas, extra work duty, demotion from a particular position or function, removal from a practice, and instructions to leave a workplace or cease contact with a particular person. In more serious cases, there were periods of probation, suspension, or even house arrest (which could mean being confined and guarded by security forces)”.

It might be wondered why the members put up with such a regime. Lalich’s explanation is, once again, “bounded choice” in that they had convinced themselves, and had had this conviction continually reinforced by the group’s practices, that such a hierarchically-disciplined party was necessary to further the cause of the proletariat. In the end they didn’t put up with it. When Dixon was away on a trip to Europe in November 1985 the other leaders, including Lalich, met and decided to expel Dixon and dissolve the organisation.

It’s a disturbing story but is one consequence of the application of the Leninist theory of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries in conditions other than a political despotism. All Leninist groups engage in some of the practices described by Lalich, for instance, different levels of membership, leadership-dominated meetings and a willingness on the part of the members to be told what to do. That doesn’t mean that all Leninist groups are cults in the sense that the DWP was. But some are. It is clear, for instance, from their external behaviour that the Sparticist League (who publish Workers Hammer) must be and there is documented evidence that the French Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvrière and the 'left communist' International Communist Current are. In his 1999 book La vraie nature d’Arlette (‘The True Nature of Arlette’ - Arlette Laguiller, LO’s permanent presidential candidate) the journalist François Koch describes LO militants as “soldier-monks”, because of their self-imposed life-style (marriage and children are discouraged so that the professional revolutionary has only a loyalty to the group). In 2000 a group of ex-members of the French section of the ICC published a pamphlet Que Ne Pas Faire? (‘What Is Not To Be Done?’) which exposed similar practices to some of those described by Lalich in the DWP (an older, charismatic leader; adoption of a new name; an order-giving hierarchy; interrogations; a security service).

Because these organisations use some of the same terminology as we do - even to the extent of allowing us to engage in an apparently rational debate with them over the best way to get rid of capitalism - this sort of thing discredits the whole idea of socialism and organisation for socialism. Fortunately, a Leninist vanguard party of professional revolutionaries is not the only way that those who want socialism can organise. There is another way, which we in the Socialist Party have adopted and practice: an open, democratic organisation in which all members have an equal say and in which policy is made by a conference of mandated branch delegates or by a referendum of the whole membership; in which there is no leadership and where the executive committee’s role is merely to carry out policy decided by conference or the membership, apply the rulebook, deal with correspondence, pay bills, etc without having any policy-making powers.

With such an organisational structure it is simply inconceivable that anything remotely like what happened in the DWP could happen nor indeed like what happens in non-cultic but still leadership-dominated Leninist organisations such as the SWP.

Leninists imagine that workers are only capable of reaching a trade union consciousness and flatter themselves that their consciousness as a vanguard is higher. Actually, it’s the other way round. Most trade unions have democratic constitutions, even if largely these days only on paper. The Leninist theory of organisation is a throw-back to political conditions such as existed in Tsarist Russia, and its introduction into more politically-developed Western Europe following the coming to power of the Bolsheviks in Russia has been an unmitigated disaster for the working class and socialism. As a theory of leadership it is anti-socialist and to be rejected on political grounds. In practice it can easily lead to such aberrations as the DWP and so is to be rejected on grounds of human dignity too.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Capital Needs Labour (2015)

The Cooking the Books Column from the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tories, Labour and UKIP all say that immigration is a ‘problem’. As this is repeated by the media most people seem to think so too. But it is not immigration that is the problem. It’s xenophobia that sees it as one. Even from a capitalist perspective – let alone the socialist one which sees all workers as part of a worldwide class with a common interest – immigration is a good thing. This is well explained in the chapter on the subject in It’s the Economy, Stupid: Economics for Voters by Vicky Pryce, Andy Ross and Peter Unwin.

If workers are migrating to a country that means there are job opportunities there. In other words, that the capitalist economy is expanding there. As the authors point out:

‘ … if an area of the economy is expanding it will tend to have increased job vacancies and higher wages. Most fluctuations in migration levels are economic, and so such an area will tend to attract more immigrants and more incumbent labour’.

If they were logical – or rather, if they weren’t vote-catching politicians – Cameron and Osborne ought to be celebrating the figures showing increased immigration as a sign that the British economy is recovering from the slump. But they don’t, at least not in public.

Most migrants find jobs in the private sector, where employers only take on workers if there’s something in it for them – profit. The authors express this in this way (they are orthodox economists):

‘… immigrants are only employed in the private sector if they produce more than they are paid, so this ‘surplus’ productivity flows back into the rest of the economy’.

In other words, immigrant workers like local workers produce more than their keep, even if this surplus is pocketed in the first instance by their employers who hand over a part to the state as taxes before being able to re-invest any in expanding production with a view to profit.

One person who has openly recognised the link between immigration and an expanding economy is Tony Blair, but he’s no longer a serving politician who needs to think of votes. In the run-up to May’s election he undermined Miliband’s bid to garner anti-immigrant votes by saying, in the words of a headline in the Times (16 March), ‘I was right to let in eastern Europeans’:

‘The former prime minister rejected those, like Ed Miliband, who claim that the party was wrong to open the doors to workers from new EU members in 2004 rather than adopting temporary controls. He argued that, at the time of the decision, the UK economy was “booming” and needed “skilled workers from abroad”’.

Under capitalism labour, or more accurately labour-power (ability to work), is a commodity. Since new wealth, including more profits, can only be created by the application of this commodity a ready supply is essential to capitalism and its imperative to accumulate more and more capital. Before Britain joined the EU in 1974, while Germany, France and the Benelux countries got their extra labour from Italy and France’s colonies in North Africa, Britain got its from Ireland, the West Indies, India, Pakistan and other parts of its old Empire. After 1974 Britain’s source of extra labour shifted to Europe and, from 2004 when they joined the EU, to the countries of eastern Europe.

Even if British capitalism withdraws from the EU it will still need an outside source of extra labour. In any event, we will risk a prediction: Cameron won’t be able to cut back the movement of the commodity labour-power to Britain to the levels he has pledged, at least not unless he is prepared to hold back the accumulation of capital in Britain.

How the Liberals Lost London (1968)

Book Review from the March 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London 1885-1914 By Paul Thompson, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 63s.

From the passing of the Third Reform Act to the First World War the Liberals in London depended for funds and local organisation on Nonconformist tradesmen and for votes on the working class.

As Thompson puts it:

The Liberal Party . . . was based on a working class majority and a middle class religious minority interest. Its difficulty was to rouse the enthusiasm of the one without alienating the funds of the latter.

This book is the story of their failure to do this. They came to be replaced by the Labour Party, a thoroughly opportunist outfit which stood for much the same as them but insisted that "Labour" be represented in parliament and on the local councils by people independent of both Tories and Liberals. The best hope for the Liberals lay in the development of the "Lib-Labs", drawing trade unionists into their local organisations. Their greatest success in this was in Battersea where former Social Democrat John Burns, of the engineers, became the Liberal MP and later the first member of the working class to enter the Cabinet. There were also those who called themselves Socialists—the Social Democratic Federation, the ILP and the Fabians. So there was a chance that the Liberals might have been replaced by a working class party openly claiming (as Labour did not till 1918) "Socialism" as its aim. The Fabians, as Thompson shows, have been able, thanks to loudmouths like Shaw, to inflate their own significance in this period both on the Liberals (for at first they stood for "permeation") and on Labour.

The working class in London was largely indifferent to religion. It had no nonconformist background. Quite the contrary, for there was a long tradition of secularism amongst politically minded London workers. It was this, argues Thompson, that opened the way for the SDF with its crude Marxism as the most successful "socialist" party in London rather than for the ILP with its moralizing that went down so well in the North. The working class in London at least saw through that and the ILP found their nonconformist vocabulary out of place. The SDF was a peculiar organisation. It was set up in 1884 with Hyndman as leader; it accepted the class struggle and pioneered the spread of Marxist ideas amongst the working class in Britain. It had two great drawbacks from the Socialist point of view: Hyndman and its programme of "stepping stones" to Socialism. These immediate demands differed little from those of radical Liberals. When the Labour Representation Committee (to become the Labour Party in 1906) was set up in 1900 the SDF was affiliated to it but withdrew the next year. The SDF then tried its luck at becoming an independent force. This was not unrealistic since it was clear that Labour really depended on the Liberals for seats in parliament (We now know that for the 1906 election there was a secret pact between Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Gladstone to let some Labourites in if they would stand down in other places). However, the SDF attacks on Labourism were a little disingenuous since on the local level they too made deals with Labour and the Progressives (as the Liberals called themselves for municipal politics).

In 1904 some former SDF members set up the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain which rejected such opportunism, had no "reform programme and declared that the party seeking working-class emancipation must be hostile to every other party". When it contested local elections there were no deals or compromises (Incidentally Thompson is wrong when he says that the Socialist Party scorned trade unions: we have always considered the economic side of the class struggle necessary though limited).

Off the Labour bandwagon the SDF failed to make headway. In 1907 it changed its name to Social Democratic Party and in 1911 became, with a few ILP branches and others the British Socialist Party. By 1914 it was back in the fold but by now it was clear that the Liberals were to be replaced by the non-Liberal, non-Marxist Labour Party.

When the war came the BSP split, with a majority against. These later disappeared into the so-called Communist Party. The others formed their own National Socialist Party and later became the SDF again, lingering on till 1939. The Socialist Party of course opposed the war and is still an independent party.

Thompson's book discusses the subject in great detail, perhaps in too great detail for the ordinary reader. Nevertheless it will be useful to all students of working class history. Interesting is his argument that "London with its lack of working class nonconformity and its secularist traditions offered no strong resistance to Marxist theory". For, for good or ill, our Party is in this London working class tradition with our complete opposition to anything that smacks of religion, our emphasis on understanding, education and rational argument, our leaderless democratic organisation, our opposition to all censorship and our open meetings.

Adam Buick

From a Veteran (1964)

From the September 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

A member of the party for over 50 years, I can view the advance of real Socialist knowledge, from the early days of the proverbial soap box to our indoor meetings at large halls and the concentration of members at a rally in Trafalgar Square.

Our organisation derives its income from members of the working class; there is no  political levy to finance our candidates in parliamentary elections, nor grants from huge industrial corporations. The Declaration of Principles laid down by those few clear-thinking Socialists in 1904 has been the basis on which the policy of the party has been formulated. It has never been found necessary to alter them; they meet the conditions of today as they did in the early days of the motor car.

From the first issue of the Socialist Standard, our attitude to Capitalism has been one of opposition, with no compromise, whilst other organisations professing similar Socialist teachings have fallen by the wayside into the morass of reformism. Over the years we have combined forces with Socialist parties whose Declaration of Principles is based on our own—in Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada, Ireland, and even the small island of Jamaica. A tribute, this, to those pioneers who 60 years ago founded the Socialist Party of Great Britain and produced the first issue of the Socialist Standard, which is now sent to many countries abroad.

The ramifications of Capitalism are world wide, notwithstanding the new dictators who talk glibly of "Socialising" the new countries over which they rule. When the "liberation" chants have died away and the fireworks have fizzled out, the workers will still find themselves living in poverty. Only the formation of a Socialist Party in those countries will provide the means of exposing the fallacy of having dictators or leaders.

Those parties will be able to join with our fellows throughout the world to abolish Capitalism and assist in the birth of the next system of society, Socialism.

GRATTAN.

Obituary: Harry Gratton (1976)

Obituary from the November 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

We learn with deep regret of the death in Paignton of Comrade Harry Gratton at the age of 82. Although for the last twenty years or so he had been "out of the swim" he was an active member for many years.

His father was among the first to join the Party. When, in his teens, Harry asked him about his views, he was told to "go and find out about them". This he did and joined the Party not very much later.

Harry Gratton was not his real name. He was drafted in the Merchant Navy in the 1914-18 war. Granted compassionate leave for family  reasons, he changed his name and went to Dublin. There he worked first as a photographer's assistant and later on his own, lodging with a Party sympathizer. He was detained for questioning several times as a suspected deserter (Southern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom then). Once a guard recognized him as a navy man by the way he folded his coat to use as a pillow, but did not give him away.

Everyone who visited our 70th Anniversary Exhibition at Head Office or read that special issue of the S.S. will remember photos taken at the 1921 and 1922 Annual Conferences. These were Harry's work. He enjoyed telling how he offered copies to members at a shilling each, money to go to Party funds. When no-one took up the offer, he was in two minds: upset that no-one was prepared to pay (a shilling was a lot of money in those days when the SOCIALIST STANDARD cost 2d) but relieved because he couldn't really afford to print them free.

During the heavy unemployment in the early 1930s Harry (with no previous experience but plenty of self-confidence) applied for and got a job as a carpenter on a building site. From this he progressed to master carpenter and then builder in his own right. After being secretary of the old Dagenham branch he moved to Devon about 25 years ago and continued building houses until failing eyesight forced him to retire. Comrades in Jamaica remember with pleasure the trip Harry and his late wife Jean made there at that time.

Modest in his own requirements, he always generously responded to appeals on behalf of any Socialist cause. To the end he continued in efforts to convince friends and acquaintances of the correctness of our case. A knowledgeable Socialist, his fund of stories of the old days were endless. His kindness and sense of humour made him a wonderful companion. We shall miss him sadly.