Not Leaders — Delegates! (1976)

From the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

"But somebody will have to lead," say our opponents when told there will be no leaders in Socialism. What in fact they usually mean is that there will have to be administrators. Of course there will have to be administrators—who will obviously be people with a flair for organizing, and their job will be to help a Socialist world to run smoothly, ensuring that production and free distribution of the good things of life take place to the benefit of all. But they will not have power to dictate to, "manage", or give promises to the rest of the population as leaders do at present. They will be the agents—not the masters—of the people.

How can this be guaranteed? Simply through the knowledge and understanding of the majority of the world's inhabitants.

Under the present capitalist system different groups of owners and their hirelings with vested interests, select from their numbers their representatives (whom they consider will appear through the media the most sincere, altruistic and to have the interests of those they intend to exploit at heart) to go before the electorate. The latter returns some of them to power as leaders from where they perpetuate the capitalist system in a way which most effectively serves the financial interest of the group or groups they represent.

But they can only get away with this for as long as the working class—who make up the vast majority of the voters—do not understand what their game is and the social system which could replace it.

Even if such leaders wanted to introduce a socialist system after being elected—they couldn't; they haven't the mandate and the electorate would think they had gone mad if they tried to.

In Socialism there will be not leaders but delegates—the difference being that delegates carry out the instructions of—not give orders to—the people who voted for them. The moment a delegate fails to voice the wishes of a knowledgeable electorate but starts talking about something else—he's out!

And so, despite the frustrated cravings of those wanting the "quick way" to Socialism by the "right leaders", there is still no safeguard except the working class knowledge and understanding which makes them superfluous.

At present—nearly everyone prays for "good" leaders, but there is no such animal. Leaders just do what they are put there for by those business interests which nominated them.

There are no leaders in the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties in various parts of the world—there couldn't be and doesn't need to be, because all the members understand what they want and how to go about getting it. Any member could therefore serve as a delegate. And what we want is clearly published (see "Object and Principles") on every copy of our party literature.

R. B. Gill

Obituary: Edward Littler (1963)

Obituary from the April 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are sorry to record the death of Edward Littler who some older members will remember. "Ted", a Lancashire collier, emigrated to New Zealand where he first had contact with the Party during the first world war. (Party members working in the Merchant Navy frequently held meetings in New Zealand and it was at these meetings that he first heard the case for Socialism.) Whilst there he met Moses Baritz and helped him at his propaganda meetings. Later Ted Littler returned to England and for some years worked in the pits around Doncaster. Ill health, due to the atmosphere in the mines caused him to become a chronic invalid for some years. But always he put the Party case in his discussions with people with whom he came in contact. Also, he wrote lengthy letters to comrades, arguing and clarifying various aspects of the Socialist attitude to capitalism.

Comrade Littler died in hospital at Wigan on March 1st.

Blacklisted (2015)

Book Review from the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Blacklisted: The Secret War Between Big Business and Union Activists'. By Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain. New Internationalist Publications Ltd, 2015, £9.99.

This is about the industrial, mostly building construction, struggles between workers and the bosses, and their use of spies to inform on union representatives, thus resulting in their victimisation and unemployment.

It is a story of bitter class conflicts in which the employers were, and are, supported by the police special branches and MI5. Hundreds of building workers, and others, have been blacklisted just for highlighting dangerous conditions on building sites.

Some of the worst companies, listed by the authors, victimising union members, all in the interest of maximising profits, include the Kier Group, Balfour Beatty, Tarmac, Taylor Woodrow and probably the most notorious of them all, Sir Robert McAlpine, largely responsible for using, and encouraging, such spy outfits as the former Economic League and The Consulting Association (TCA).

The strength of this book lies in exposing the largely secret war of the bosses; the weakness, however, is the demand by the authors for a public enquiry. And all the TUC demands is that the employers compensate the blacklisted and victimised workers under the rubric: ‘Own Up! Clean Up! Pay Up!’.

Nowhere is it suggested that the workers should abolish the system of wage slavery, and the profit motive altogether, which gave rise and gives rise to the blacklisting and victimising in the first place. More’s the pity.

Peter E. Newell

An Apostle of Public Ownership. (1932)

From the January 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Right Hon. Herbert Morrison, the late Minister of Transport in the Labour Government, has been invited by the Soviet Government of Russia to go there and reorganise the passenger transport system. The Daily Herald, in reporting the matter, did not mention whether he accepted the offer. It is a curious commentary, however, on the fact that the Moscow International has for years denounced Ramsay MacDonald and his supporters, while the Russian Government seeks the assistance of one of the most notorious worshippers of MacDonald in Labour Party history.

Herbert Morrison has been very useful here in the Labour Party work of repairing capitalism for the capitalists. Transport is one of the most essential things in the life of great cities. The investing class leave no stone unturned to make it efficient as a profit-making business, whether it is owned privately by shareholders in a company or by stockholders in a municipal or public utility corporation. Political action is one of the methods used by the investors to aid their schemes.

The transport strike under the Labour Government of 1924 was "settled" by the Labour Government passing a Bill asked for by the London Traffic Combine. This London Traffic Act of 1924 enabled the Combine to drive competition out of the field. Even Herbert Morrison (not Right Honourable then) described it as one of the worst Acts ever introduced. In the next Labour Government the critic (Mr. Morrison) was silenced. Mr. Morrison had then become the Minister of Transport.

He took charge of the "nefarious" Act of 1924 and worked it so that capitalist organs praised him for his business capacity in smoothing the path of the traffic companies. Before the Labour Government resigned, he brought forward a London Passenger Transport Bill to combine all concerns working London traffic under a so-called public utility Board. Lord Ashfield, of the Combine, told his shareholders that their stock and interest would be more secure under the Labour Bill than their present shares and dividends. The Bill was a part of the usual work of "Labour" in making the present system more efficient and strengthening it—not abolishing it, as Socialists desire.

The Right Honourable ex-Labour Minister gave a lecture at the Workers' Circle, Aldgate, on December 18th, to explain the wonderful scheme of traffic unification. It was a typical company chairman's speech to shareholders. He deplored the number of empty seats in 'buses, and wished to save the waste of perfectly good empty seats and arrange just enough 'buses for the riders. He also explained that the companies could not spend money on improvements while there any possibility of competition. The solution was not Socialism or even Nationalisation. Modern Socialists, he claimed, did not favour State operation of services, but business control through public utility boards. The shareholders of the companies were to be given stock, the directors compensated, and interest would be paid.

The idea was similar to the Port of London Authority, so prominent in opposing dock workers and using machinery to supplant them.

The writer asked Mr. Morrison if he did not describe the "publicly owned" Port of London Authority as a Capitalist Soviet. He was further asked to justify his statement that the workers are to be considered, seeing that out of 34 members of the Advisory Board under his Bill, only three would represent the organised workers.  The capitalist character of the scheme was exposed, but the Right Honourable "Labourer," in reply, "justified" himself by talking about Russia's need for development and capitalist assistance.

The writer never mentioned Russia or the Communists, but this leading light of capitalist reform thought it sufficient to call him a Communist and ignore the subject of his own address.

Adolph Kohn

Between the Lines: Dispatches, News Priorities and GBH (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Men with baseball bats threatening their political opponents; whispering campaigns and smears leaked to the press in order to discredit certain MPs; statements to the police about physical intimidation. Dispatches (C4, 8pm, 12 June) has shown what life is really like inside the Tory party. And there we were thinking it was all tea parties with fairy cakes made by the W.I. and orgasmic rallies in Blackpool. Not so, it seems. Where there is power to be fought for these louts fight dirty.

One Tory referred to the infiltration of his party by a "sinister brotherhood of extreme right-wingers". These are known within Tory ranks as The Movement and comprise of a number of free-market ideologues who dream of a utopia where the fire brigade is privatised and every beggar has the freedom to become a self-employed rent boy.

We have debated against some of these jerks (in fact, your reviewer recognised quite a few of the faces in the Soho room where the camera caught them plotting) and they are the sort of people whose main crime is that they are open enough to admit in public just how stupid and nasty their social dreams really are. Their opponents, including the current Tory chairman, Patten, are despised as "wets" who hold "unsound" sympathies for such evils as the NHS and income support payments. The Movement kids await the second coming of Thatcher and write documents about the threat to democracy in South Africa.

As targets for a pre-election documentary they are easy to attack and worthy of all the contempt intended by the programme-makers. Underlying the programme is an assumption that these sinister extremists have brought politics into disrepute — if only it could be left to the good guys like  . . . ?

As if we would believe for one minute that the likes of Major and Lamont are any less cynical and machiavellian in their sordid struggle to run British capitalism on behalf of the exploiting class. The fact is that capitalist politics is a dirty, dishonest business. These people can only win by deceit and false promises. That certain younger Tories have introduced filthy smears and baseball bats into the equation is just accentuating the constant.

NEWS PRIORITIES

On the day that the National Childrens Home report stated that one in ten children in Britain on Income Support are not fed at least once a month because their parents are too poor to buy food, what do you think was the first item on The News at Ten (ITV, 10pm, 6 June)?

Prince William had been hit on the head at school. Shock! Horror! The cameras were on the scene at an instant. Look at the tears in the eyes of that compassionate millionairess, Princess Di. Her son suffered no brain damage, a neurologist reported, although even if he was so brain-damaged that he could never lift a finger it would make not a scrap of difference because wee Willy is in the class which never does need to lift a finger. The kids in Britain who are starving because of poverty do not have or need the tears of rich princesses. What they need is a society of production for use, not profit. What they need is action by you, dear reader.

GBH - PART ONE

We shall wait for the completion of the Channel Four series, GBH, before commenting extensively next month. To be sure, the series went off to a very promising start. The scene between the corrupt Labour leader and the headmaster of the Special School, in which the latter is filled with amusement and indignation at the former's audacity in calling himself a socialist, is one of those brilliant televisual moments that are shown all too rarely. We look forward to seeing how the plot develops and concludes. Here are two predictions (written in early June):

1. As the series goes on it will become harder and harder to tell the difference between the left-wing gangsters on GBH and the right-wingers shown on Dispatches.
2. There will be reference made to the real Socialist Party.

Steve Coleman

A Caution (1918)

From the April 1918 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the "Manchester Evening News" for Jan. 1st last, Mr. John Hodge, the new Minister of Labour, in the course of a speech at Gorton, blabbed out that "employers have begun to realise that welfare becomes a valuable asset in the productivity of the worker, and that it pays as well to treat men, women, and children kindly as it pays to treat cattle kindly."

Mr. John Hodge will really have to be more careful. Weak and long-suffering though the working have-nots are they decidedly don't like being likened to cattle, however apt and true that comparison may be. We know, of course, that Varro of old Rome divided agricultural implements into three groups—the talking variety, or slaves; the semi-talking variety, like oxen; non-talking, such as waggons; but the day has long gone when the real status of the working class could be openly stated as John has stated it, especially after the pints of slop which have been poured out during the war, on our glorious heritage of freedom and equality, and the tosh that we are "all one in the hour of our nation's trial."

Hodge's function is to bluff and fool our class—we know that. But gee! he had better learn his job or he'll lose it. If we are to have our welfare seen to by getting better managers, and the like, it is folly from the Hodge point of view to tell us that it is to add to our "productivity," or in the vulgar vernacular, to make us grind harder for our grub. "Our" Minister is going the right way to get invested with the ignoble order of the boot, which my be awkward if overweening confidence in the devil's reputation for looking after his own has led him to part with all his 30 inch waistcoats.

PLEB.

A Communist view of the S.P.G.B. (1943)

From the August 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few years ago a trade union known as the National Passenger Workers' Union was formed by busmen who had been members of the Transport and General Workers' Union, but were dissatisfied with the working of that organisation. The Communist Party has now decided that "no member of the N.P.W.U. is eligible for membership of the Communist Party." This declaration is contained in a leaflet headed "For Unity!—The C.P.G.B. and the N.P.W.U.," issued by the Communist Party. With the issues involved in the dispute between the rival unions we need not here concern ourselves except to say that members of the S.P.G.B. are to be found in both unions. The Communist leaflet, however, contains the following:—

The N.P.W.U. is itself a hotbed of every kind of anti-working class politics—S.P.G.B. members (who believe the fight for Socialism is hopeless until every worker is a Marxist) I.L.P.-ers and Trotskyists. . . . 

This is, of course, a gross distortion of the attitude of the S.P.G.B. In saying that the S.P.G.B. believes the fight for Socialism is hopeless until every worker is a "Marxist," the Communists imply that the S.P.G.B. is resigned to waiting until such time as every worker is deeply learned in the economic and other voluminous writings of Marx. This is a complete misunderstanding of the position. What the S.P.G.B. does hold is that the achievement of Socialism is hopeless until there are a majority of workers who understand that Socialism, not reformism, is the only solution of their problems. This is a very different proposition, and one the Communists invariably evade. What is the alternative to the S.P.G.B.'s attitude? The only alternative is that Socialism can be achieved by non-Socialists, by Liberals, Tories and others, under the leadership of what the Communists used to call an "intelligent minority." It is on this theory that the Communist Party tries to build up a mass movement by associating itself with all kinds of reforms of capitalism—at present it is demanding the Beveridge Scheme. Wherever this may lead, it does not lead to Socialism; it does not even lead to a Communist-directed mass organisation. The Tories, the Liberals, and the Labour Party have shown themselves infinitely more successful at attracting to themselves the support of the non-Socialist workers.

Editorial Committee.

The Passing Show: Scientology nonsense (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scientology nonsense

It's a far cry from the day when the American L. Ron Hubbard set down his early psychological theories in a slim book under the name Dianetics. Since then his organisation has opened centres in many parts of the world and the general body of his ideas is now called Scientology (The "Science of Wisdom" whatever that may mean), but the proposition of the Engram (harmful mental impression gained during extreme pain, exhaustion or other crisis) remains the basis of his methods. He claims. and perhaps in some cases has achieved, great success for his mental "processing" as it is called, although as far as I know, no independent assessment of Scientology has yet been made, and we have to accept Hubbard's word for it. However, to say that is one thing, but quite another to hear it said that the engram is at the bottom of all our problems, from illness to war and back again. Even a fall on the ice has an engram lurking around somewhere to explain it, I was once told. That the night was dark and the ice slippery, just would not satisfy scientologists.

Over the years the Hubbard organisation has tacked onto other and wilder concepts. There was for instance the "Church of Scientology" in support of the God idea, and attempts to prove the theory or reincarnation by discovering engrams carried over from a previous life. One of their spokesmen even assured me once that we can take on different forms in different lives if we wish it—so think of this the next time you are tempted to envy your cat stretched lazily by the fire without a care in the world.

In the political sphere, Hubbard has remained implacably "anti-communist." We don't know just how much engrams Stalin or Khrushchev are supposed to have had—the Scientology people were never allowed behind the iron curtain to find out. Apart from this, Hubbard's ventures into politics seem to have been rare, which is just as well, because on these occasions he doesn't add anything useful to our knowledge . . . quite the reverse if the Nov. 1964 issue of his journal Certainty is any guide.

Three of its four pages are given over to an essay in nonsense called "Socialism and Scientology" dedicated to "our friend the late Hugh Gaitskell." It contains various gems of unwisdom, such as:

The primary danger of Socialism . . . is that it seeks to remove all dangers from the environment, which it cannot do without a huge bureaucracy . . .
The degrees of Socialism are measured by the extent to which they arrange to deny reward for individual or group contribution . . .

And how's this for a bit of double-think:

So we have no quarrel with charity, we wave no quarrel with a state devoted to it. We quarrel only with the end product . . .

There are plenty more where these came from, but they are enough to show how little Mr. Hubbard really knows about Socialism. He equates it with just about everything except what it really is, and says really so little that we wonder why he bothered at all. But the last few lines may give us a clue.

Can the great dream of Socialism succeed this time? It can if it itself accepts the help of Scientology . . . 

Can it then be a thinly veiled attempt to "sell" Scientology to the Labour Party? Just think of the fillip to his organisation if he could claim the support of such a massive body. Good for Scientology; good perhaps for the Labour Party, but absolutely useless for Socialism.

The lunatic fringe

Perhaps we are better known than you'd think. What I mean to say is, we get all sorts of letters from all sorts of people and places. Some of them (the letters I mean) are sympathetic, some are hostile and some are frankly baffling, like those we used to get from one God-fearing old lady in Canada who hated all the Royal Family except Prince Phillip, and who never used a dot or comma, probably because she was unaware of their existence. "Why doesn't he come and live amongst us Canadians who would know how to look after him not like that lot back at Buckingham Palace from yours Mrs. A M."

Well we never did work out an answer to that one and perhaps the lady got tired of waiting, because she hasn't written for some time now. Or perhaps she managed to work out for herself the answers to the posers she set us with such vigour and regularity, and decided to save the postage. But at least she was not afraid to tell us her name and address, which is more than can be said for some of the other not-so-harmless nut cases.

A package was handed to me the other day. Attached to a variety of cuttings from such high quality newspapers as the News of the World and The People was a brief unsigned message, noteworthy again for its lack of punctuation: "HERES THE ANSWER TO THE COLOURED GUYS LET THEM GET INTO BATTLE AS BRITAINS GLORIOUS HEROES DID AND WE'LL HEAR NO MORE NONSENSE FROM THEM." So look no further for the solution to the racial problem—our correspondent has found it for us, and the heroes he has in mind are the boys who disappeared by the million in the 1914-18 trenches.

He's a bit out of date in his choice of wars, of course. Few people try to pretend now that the heroism of those days did any good or solved any problems. Since then, we have had another world war and some smaller ones too, with no shortage of workers—including "coloured guys"—to fight and die. Does our nut case think that the problems of capitalism are any less pressing because of this second lot of senseless heroism? If he does, he had better think again.

In the future, capitalism will develop the African states and they will have their own armies, coloured workers trained to kill in the interests of their ruling classes. The Congo is only a foretaste of what is to come, and it will not be a very pretty story. What is needed is a great deal less heroism and a great deal more hard thinking about the Socialist answer.

Jumble sales

A recent small article in The Guardian about the decline of jumble sales took me back a few years to my schooldays. It was the period just before the outbreak of the second world war when unemployment was much greater and every penny was precious; and so it was considered particularly daring of our headmaster to decide on a jumble sale as a means of raising funds for a new radio for the school. Useless to try and squeeze the money out of the education authorities in those days, anyway.

The sale was, I remember, a great success and the school got its radio; but wandering around the building seeing the heaps of accumulated junk, I can remember wondering just where it all came from and where it would all go to. At the end of the evening the helpers tried to give away the remains of their stalls, but with limited success—nobody wanted the stuff even as a gift—and eventually it was bought by a job lot dealer.

The jumble sale is perhaps symbolic not only of working class poverty—for who would buy but those unable to afford better—but of another horror of capitalism, the veritable mountain of rubbish which it throws up. Most of it is of poor quality even when new and even the jumble sale often does not mark the end of its life. Since the end of the war, production has increased in many fields and with it the incidence of trash ("built in obsolescence" is the modern euphemism for it); ironically this has assisted in the decline in the jumble sales because the stuff is so poor after a short life that it wouldn't grace even a rickety trellis table in a musty church hall. So the faint chance of a bargain buy is even fainter now, and workers are looking elsewhere.

In this little snippet of news is a lesson we should never forget. Trash is one of the many objectionable facets of capitalist society, and even the best it can give workers is not worthy of human beings. In fact it is trash for most of us, and a trashy existence to match. 

E. T. C.

Pathfinders: Enema of the People (2015)

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

Something funny is going on with the current craze for faecal transplants. For those not already in the know, this is the decorous practice of shoving someone else’s poo up your behind, an unlikely but ancient stratagem which is delivering an astonishing 90 percent clear-up rate for clostridium difficile and some other potentially fatal infections not treatable by any antibiotic.

Faecal matter transplanting (FMT) definitely seems to be the business, and because there are no issues with immune rejection nor, up to now, any clinical oversight, anybody can do it with a home-made enema, and anybody’s poo will do, provided the donor is fit and healthy.

Clearly the ‘yuk factor’ has been trumped by the statistical ‘Wow factor’ as clinical trials through the last two years have largely confirmed FMT’s efficacy in treating certain bacterial conditions and people have stampeded to get the treatment. In 2012 a group of MIT researchers opened the world’s first stool bank. Oral forms are being investigated for wider pill dissemination. For once, it seems, there’s a cure for something that’s natural, freely available, and out of which the drug companies simply cannot make any money.

But after the first flush of success, worries are now emerging. For one thing, the DIY nature of FMT makes it unregulatable, so there are no controls over who is donating what to whom, or in what circumstances, meaning that far from curing infections FMT might be promoting them. For another, the claims have got wilder. FMT doesn’t just cure c.diff, it cures everything from Parkinson’s to asthma to cancer to MS to mental disorders to obesity, according to unverified reports. Yet counter-signs have emerged. In February this year, a woman with a history of being thin became clinically obese after a FMT procedure in which the donor was obese (Link). In a recent New Scientist survey, 15 of 52 responses from practitioners reported ‘unexpected symptoms’ following treatment.

The US and Canada are now imposing regulatory guidelines (New Scientist, 6 June), after ludicrous efforts to have poo classified as a drug for regulatory purposes provoked an outcry. The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is following suit. But such measures are unlikely to achieve much, as the nature and seriousness of any ‘side-effects’ remain unknown while the FMT craze continues to run away with itself.

It would be a shame if the current ‘poo-rush’ mentality ultimately ruined the credibility of this useful form of treatment and demoted it to snake-oil status, as happened in the west in the 1920s with bacteriophage therapies. But it’s interesting how people can change their minds so rapidly over such unlikely things. Five years ago, you wouldn’t have put money on this treatment ever becoming acceptable. Social prejudice, you would have thought, would have been too strong.

Considering that people routinely shove other people’s shit into their heads on a daily basis through the news media business, perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. Yet people seem alarmingly resistant to changing their ideas when it is in their urgent interest to do so. In a recent study, 2,000 parents were divided into 4 groups and given different leaflets designed to determine whether pro-vaccination campaigns could change their attitudes towards vaccinations. One leaflet focussed on the lack of evidence linking the MMR jab with autism, the second emphasised the dangers of measles, mumps and rubella, the third carried photos of children with the diseases and the fourth was a case study of a child who almost died. A control group were not sent any of the leaflets. What was the outcome? Nothing. No change at all. ‘It’s depressing’, said one of the researchers, ‘we were definitely depressed’ (New Yorker, 16 May 2014).

Other studies show that people’s ingrained biases can be heavily resistant to change even when the facts are known to the subjects, suggesting that people resolve cases of cognitive dissonance by ditching the facts and sticking to their beliefs.

Well, not in the case of poo, apparently. And not if one takes a larger view either. The fact is, if people were as resistant to changing their ideas as some depressed researchers would have us believe, the human race would still be living in caves doing finger-paintings on the walls for amusement. Of course people don’t like being contradicted, or having their precious beliefs scrutinised, picked apart or mocked. Of course they feel threatened, and so of course they’ll resort to irrational defences like ignoring reality. Is the answer to this some sort of self-affirmative mollycoddling, as some researchers think, where you bathe the subject in a warm glow of self-admiration before gently encouraging them to think again about their assumptions? No, it’s not. The answer to people who won’t face reality is to slap them in the face with reality, very hard, and as often as possible.

A case in point arose just last month, when a Nobel laureate who should have known better was excoriated in the press for making jokes about women in the science lab being cry-babies who were always falling in love and, therefore by implication, not being very at science. The professor, no doubt thinking he was making a hilarious joke, was astonished to find himself forced to resign by his university. TV’s wonder boy of physics Brian Cox immediately leapt into the fray to describe the forced resignation as ‘disproportionate’, implying that the remarks while ‘serious’ were effectively a minor peccadillo and not worth making a fuss about.

But was the public reaction disproportionate? Was it a collective failure to appreciate a humorous moment of professional bonhomie? No, it wasn’t. Prejudice and bigotry never use their own names, they always pass themselves off as harmless jokes, trying to sneak under the radar of social disapprobation. That’s why, periodically, some out-of-touch lecturer thinks he can stand up and tell us that women are no good at science and get away with it, even though there’s nothing scientific about this statement and even though the treatment of women in science has historically been and continues to be a disgrace to the discipline.

Ideas like sexism, racism and all the other isms which get in the way of social progress are certainly resistant to change, but change they must, and not by being softly-softly or touchy-feely. The only way to do it is to expose these ideas for the shit they are, and then invite their exponents to shove them somewhere the sun doesn’t shine, preferably with a home enema kit. In the long run, it will certainly be good for them.

Paddy Shannon

Making and owning (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

They've built a new block of flats near where I live. "Fairview" is what they call them, although the view is actually over the North Circular Road, which for five to six hours a day is far from fair.

They started building the flats last summer. It used to be a small area of waste land where boys played football with tennis balls and teenaged girls stood around pretending not to be teenaged girls. Then last summer a lorry load of men, wearing clothes that had not been purchased in the Harrod's sale, turned up and started doing things.

It's funny, isn't it? You always read in the papers about how lazy British workers are. All those car workers sleeping at British Leyland while the cars build themselves and all those miners having a kip while the coal extracts itself from the ground. So, when I saw these builders turn up I expected to see them pull a few Slumberlands out of their lorry and pull on the continental quilt. Funnily enough, these builders had building equipment with them and before long the local streets were filled, not with the sound of heavy snoring, but hammering, drilling and demolishing.

At the end of June I went away on a working holiday and returned five weeks later. I went to have a look at the wasteland, but it was no longer there. It was a partially-completed building. These so-called lazy workers had been working hard. I wondered what the directors of ICI and Unilever had made during the same month.

In the centre of the building site was a hut. Quite often I would pop in there to have a chat with the builders. They took their jobs seriously — not least because there was a long queue of unemployed building workers to replace those who did not. An old carpenter called George told me that he was getting too old for this open-air lark, but what else could he do to keep his family surviving? I showed George a copy of Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and he said that he liked a read, so he borrowed it. One or two of the men bought copies of the Socialist Standard, but one stopped buying it because he voted Labour like his old man and wouldn't hear a word said against them.

By November the flats were almost completed. George said he was trying to make the job last a little longer because he needed the money for Christmas. Paddy, the plumber, told me that he agreed with everything in the Standard, but couldn't we put it more simply? I told him that he joined us he might be able to show us a simpler way of expressing our ideas and he promised to have a serious think about it. After Christmas most of the work was being done on the inside of the flats. Terry, a painter who spent his spare time listening to Motorhead tapes on the cassette stereo in his van, told me that he was getting married but there was no chance of finding anywhere suitable to live. He had answered all the advertisements in the local rag, but they were all either taken or too costly. He was going to sell his van and use the money as a deposit on a cheap flat—but he would only get a few hundred for that, even with his precious stereo.

At the time of writing, Terry still does not have a place to live with the girl he wants to marry. He has listened carefully to Thatcher's advice about the need for strong family life, but that does not seem to provide him with a flat. Terry is sick of the whole bloody system. Last week he asked me to let him have some more of that socialist literature — and could he borrow the book that George had read. Comrade Capitalism is doing a good job in recruiting Terry to the socialist cause; I just have to stand there and agree with him.

Produce to satisfy human needs

The flats are now completed. Last month they stuck "For Sale" notices all over the windows of the flats. At only £29,000 for a two-bedroomed home the flats are not very expensive. After all, they were built on the cheap—and with all that rush-hour traffic going past your window you're not going to pay a fortune.

Terry would like one of those flats. He worked for months building them. The owner of the building firm did not come on the site once while building was in progress. Now Terry has even sold the van that took him to work but those flats are not for him. George told me he would love to retire in a flat like that. For ten years George and his family have lived in the upstairs part of a terraced house in Kilburn that was originally built for one family. If George saved £10 of his wages from now until the day he died he could not even afford the deposit on one of the flats.

Under capitalism production is not for use, but for sale with a view to profit. Some of those flats could stand empty for months, but Terry and his girl could not have one.

In a socialist society production will be solely for human need. If people require houses, then builders will work to create them. And they will be the best houses that human beings can build. In socialism the world will belong to the people and those who produce the wealth will not be regarded as the inferiors, while those who possess but do not produce live in comfort and privilege.

But socialism will only be built like the Fairview flats were built: by human beings who know what they are doing. As builders of flats George, Terry, Paddy and the rest were experts. The working class are the experts because we, between us, create all the wealth of society. Most workers have ideas of how production and distribution could be organised, if only the barriers of the present system were removed.

Production for use instead of profit offers the only sensible alternative to the waste and anarchy and poverty of the capitalist system. Upon the huge wasteland of capitalist society we need to build a world which caters for human beings — where the best is produced not just for the few, but for all — where technology is converted from destructive to positively productive use. It is there for the taking.

Steve Coleman

The Russian ruling class (1971)

Book Review from the April 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Qui Gouverne à Moscou? By Florence and Ivan Brulé. Dunod Actualité.

This short book —Who Governs in Moscow? — covers much the same ground as our own pamphlet on Russia since 1917, and in not many more words. With one very important exception (the authors say that the Bolshevik seizure of power was originally a socialist revolution, a myth many times exposed in these columns), it gives an explanation similar to ours of the failure of Bolsheviks to establish Socialism.

"Socialism", the authors point out, "is a mode of production which allows everybody to receive according to his needs. Its establishment presupposes abundance". Scarcity, however, reigned in 1917 in technically and economically backward Russia. The immediate need to feed the population and then to develop modern industry meant a division into classes, one controlling the means of production and the other selling its ability to work — a situation Marx defined as characterising capitalist relations of production. The Russian ruling class is "a collective capitalist, a capitalist class which has a firm grip on the means of production as against those who do not". It controls production and its objectives; it imposes the condition of work and fixes the level of wages.

The absence of a legal right to property as in the West should delude no one, says the authors. For property is not "a relation between person and object, but the fact that one man disposes of the object while another does not:. Property, in other words, is not a relation between men and things, but a social relation.

The book also contains useful information on the privileges and composition of the ruling class, the role of the peasantry, the oppression of the working class, unemployment, discrimination against minority peoples and the lack of freedom of expression in Russia. It should provide a useful exposure of the myth of "socialist Russia" for workers in the French-speaking parts of the world.

Adam Buick

The Changing Temper of the Workers (1947)

From the March 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The industrial attitude of the workers since the Labour Government came to power strongly suggests a solid advance in appreciation of their wage-slave position; the stubbornness with which they advance their claims for better conditions, in spite of the appeals to desist from the leaders they placed in office, is an indication of growing class consciousness.

Immediately after the first world war the workers were also refractory, expressing their dissatisfaction with the leaders they had appointed and paid to work for them, in movements such as the Rank and File Movement. At that time the leaders were also appealing for a work speed-up and a shelving of wage claims and the like. But at least at that time the leaders formed part of the Government Opposition and had not the backing of the majority of the workers for the schemes they claimed would remedy the evils of the time.

How different is the position now! Less than two years ago the Labour Party obtained power by a sweeping majority, with a wagon load of nonsensical promises, but a mandate only to carry out their pettifogging schemes. In power they set about governing in the time dishonoured way, by jettisoning their promises and beseeching their supporters to got to sleep, hungry and homeless, whilst they prepared their five-year, ten-year, and fifty-year plans to make Capitalism run with the minimum of creak in the machinery. The revolutionary firebrands, Shinwell, Strachey, and others were metamorphosed by the tenure of Cabinet posts into the humble and contrite supplicants for the abandonment of industrial strife and the campaign for more hard work; whining for time to accommodate the lion and the lamb in peaceful and comfortable proximity. But the lamb has acquired a pleasant rumbling voice, powerful limbs, and a threatening attitude that is disconcerting to the advocates of submission. How far the lamb will go with his roaring and rending remains to be seen, and although we know he will not go as far as he could and should, at least he is making promising progress.

We are assured that the Government is deeply concerned with the interest of the community, but we notice that the Coal Crisis, which has brought suffering to thousands of workers, did not prevent the waste of fuel and labour involved in the Royal journey to South Africa for the customary soothing syrup tour, and members of the Government were able to tear themselves from their vital labours in order to attend the send-off. Talk of old Nero fiddling while Rome was burning, the Government were bowing and scraping and wasting fuel while London was freezing! Everything was arranged just as well as any other capitalist government would have arranged it; ships wasting tons of fuel, sightseers wasting vital traffic, and representatives of "Labour" wasting their time, though the latter is really nothing to shed tears over as they waste it anyway.

Right from the commencement of the Labour Government the workers have shown a determination to resist the attack upon wages and conditions that is very heartening in these dull times. We are particularly impressed with the steadfastness with which they have pursued a strike policy, striking again and again, in spite of the privations their actions have brought upon their families and their fellows, and with a total disregard of the solemn warnings about the imminent collapse of this rotten capitalist world.

One thing further may be said. The workers are receiving a salutary lesson in the futility of Labour politics which should go far to weaken their faith in programmes to reform Capitalism and in the parties that support these programmes. Maybe the time is not far distant when the workers will realise that is the Capitalist basis of society from which alone spring the evils that afflict them. From that point it will be a short step to the knowledge that their only hope of salvation lies in the establishment of Socialism.

Gilmac.

Obituary - Peter Furey 1913-1997 (1997)

Obituary from the October 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with profound regret that the World Socialist Party (New Zealand) inform members and supporters of the passing of Peter Furey.

Peter was one of the longest serving members. Joining the party in 1945, he was one of the nicest and genuine of persons I ever met. If ever there was a "misnomer", it was in Peter's surname, for I am sure a more gentler and honest person never lived. In world war 2 Peter was an objector going to what he referred to as the concentration camp at Ohakune, a very bleak and cold place in winter. Peter never said much about his sufferings behind the wire, and later on in Auckland's dungeon Mount Eden prison, but he referred me to a book in the library, and my heart went out to those brave men and women who refuse to bear arms against fellow workers who they have never met. Some of the things they did to them—for instance, deliberately turning off the hot water when they returned covered in mud from the fields after drain laying, road making, forestry work etc. One fiendish trick they tried was to take all the bedding and blankets  from the single person tiny huts, but placing the King's uniform with warm flannel underwear, greatcoat, etc. on a chair. However not one of them cracked. Not only Socialists but Quakers, Pacifists and other religious people offered this. After the war they were not allowed to vote for ten years. So much for their much the ruling class's rhetoric about democracy! Peter lived in Australian for a while where he taught Marxian economics at Victoria Labour College.

Socialists and supporters of the Auckland branch farewelled Peter in what I feel sure a ceremony he would have liked. The service was performed by a member of the NZ Society of Rationalist's and humanists. How refreshingly different from the usual claptrap spouted by the clergy. At the funeral parlour we sang "Imagine" very fervently and just as fervently at the grave, as Peter was laid to rest we sang the "Red Flag". Farewell Peter and one last thing (with tongue in cheek of course). If there is a Heaven, well it won't be contaminated with the capitalist class—for have not the bead-and-cassock brigade bashed our ears constantly about the camel and the eye of a needle!

Jim Ryder

Punishing the Poor (2015)

From the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a common feature of capitalism that those at or near the bottom of the social pyramid are attacked in specific ways by the state and its agencies. In many cases these are the people who are easiest to scapegoat and who find it hardest to resist. And such attacks often happen when capitalism is in some kind of crisis. Here we look at some historical and current examples.

Since the early seventeenth century there had been some state provision, including workhouses, for looking after the poor. Under the Speenhamland system, low wages were in effect subsidised out of the poor rate. The New Poor Law of 1834 was intended to reduce the expenditure on the relief of the poorest, which had increased enormously after the spread of enclosures and the growth in the number of the destitute. It required all recipients of ‘relief’ to enter the workhouse, which was deliberately made an extremely unappealing place to live. Families were separated, food was basic, and able-bodied men had to perform hard physical labour. Thomas Carlyle said the message was in effect that ‘whosoever will not work ought not to live’. The dread of the workhouse, in periods of unemployment, illness or old age, was for many years pervasive among working people. Workhouses were officially abolished only in 1930, on grounds of their expense.

The Depression of the early 1930s, with its drastic rise in joblessness and the consequent increased expense of unemployment pay-outs, saw massive attacks on the living standards of unemployed workers. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was explicit that unemployment benefit was not, and was not intended to be, a living wage, so the government had no compunction in cutting it. In November 1931 the benefit rate for an adult man was cut from the pre-decimal equivalent of 85p to 76p a week, for instance, and married women were generally excluded from unemployment benefit if they had not worked a specific number of weeks after getting married, no matter how long they had worked before marriage. These cuts were only reversed in 1934.

But above all it was the means test that constituted a vicious attack on the living standards of the unemployed. Under this people could have their benefits reduced or withheld if they had some savings or their household had some other income. So someone could find their benefits cut if they had a son who was employed, or if their mother lived with them and drew a war widow’s pension. The impact of all this varied from place to place: in Lancashire, for example, one-third of the unemployed had their benefits stopped completely. Some local bodies did try to alleviate the worst effects of the cuts, though. It was not just the financial impact of the means test that workers objected to, but also the intrusive and insensitive investigation into their family situation and finances.

The recent recession and consequent austerity measures have led to similar onslaughts on many of the poorest. One clear example is the notorious ‘bedroom tax’, as opponents have named what is officially called the under-occupancy penalty. People have their housing benefit cut if they are deemed to have ‘too many’ bedrooms. It has saved the government some money but, because of the lack of availability of one-bedroom flats in social housing, has largely failed to free up ‘under-occupied’ properties. Many of those penalised in this way are disabled, and in general this vindictive piece of legislation leads to poor health: people are forced to eat less in order to save money, and stress is caused by struggling to meet bills or having to move. One tenant had, after essentials, just £6 a week for food and travel; he then lost £15 a week because of the bedroom tax (Guardian online, 16 March).

More generally, reducing the amount paid out in benefits is a government priority, often coupled with offloading this dirty work to companies who make a profit from it. Atos, for instance, went to great lengths to cut the numbers on disability benefit by declaring people fit for work, even in some cases if they were severely paralysed. Even when some of the more absurd rulings were overturned on appeal, claimants had by then gone through longish periods of stress and destitution. In one case, a man who was half-blind and partially paralysed after a stroke died the day after being found fit for work and told that his benefits would be stopped (Owen Jones: The Establishment). There are plenty of other horror stories along such lines.

A4e is a company that treats job-seekers as just another means for their own profit, sending them on useless ‘courses’ and offering no real assistance in finding work at all. The Mandatory Work Activity programme forces the unemployed into unpaid work, and does not improve their chances of getting a ‘proper’ job. Just turning up late can lead to losing benefit and having to resort to foodbanks. All this is very similar to the workfare system introduced in the US in 1996, which forced people to work unpaid in return for benefits. Unpaid work undermines the wages and job security of existing staff, while of course increasing the profits of the companies concerned.

The prison population in Britain has almost doubled since 1993, and it is the poorest who are subject to the worst police harassment and the threat of jail. These developments though, have been even worse in the US. Earlier this year the Washington-based think-tank the Institute for Policy Studies published a report The Poor Get Prison, which looks at the ways poverty has been effectively criminalised there.

Debtors’ prisons were officially abolished in the US in 1833, but a very similar procedure still exists. For instance, people are often fined for low-level offences such as traffic violations; but if they cannot pay the whole of the fine, they may be imprisoned. If you are arrested but not convicted, you may have to pay to have your arrest record cleared when you apply for a new job. If you are put on probation, you may – depending on which state you live in – be charged for services provided by a private probation company (such as $12 a day for an alcohol-monitoring device); and if you can’t pay, you face prison. An estimated 600,000 people in the US are homeless on any given night, and they can be arrested for crimes such as public sleeping or begging. It is the poorest section of the population who are punished by fines or imprisonment for trivial misdemeanours, while those who are rather better-off get away with it.

From the Poor Law to the means test to the bedroom tax, capitalism has saved some of its most savage onslaughts for the most vulnerable, those who are hardly in a position to produce profits and so are little more than a drain on resources.

Paul Bennett

We are The Socialist Party (2015)

From the Socialist Courier Blog

The Socialist Party purpose is straightforward, and we do not hide it. We want to re-establish the genuine meaning of socialism. The socialist movement is a project for revolutionary change. Socialists want to overthrow today’s society based on exploitation, and build a new world where ordinary people have control over their lives and communities. The agent for this change is the working people themselves. Socialists seek to empower working people to change the world while trade unions are organisations for working people to defend their interests. An overlap of purpose is obvious. Capitalism is a system that serves to exploit. This exploitation changes and develops over time. To challenge capitalist exploitation, it is important for trade unions to be in all sectors of the economy. When workers are organised they can exercise their collective power by going on strike or refusing to over-time or working-to-rule to combat low pay, long hours, or bad working conditions. Socialists support trade unions as organisation for workers to fight for their interests. Therefore, socialists do not support practices that undermine unions. However, socialists have a vision that looks much further than limiting the forms of exploitation that working people submit to and socialists strive for the overthrow of capitalism and building a new world based on co-operation and social ownership. Socialists support unions because we believe in the power of ordinary people. The role of a socialist in a union can be varied. Socialists will always try to be good unionists at their work, but this can take different paths, depending on a range of factors. Being a union radical can mean assisting with initiatives in the union and building organisation for the next fight with the boss. It could mean opposing a corrupt leadership and building rank and file networks to challenge an entrenched union bureaucracy. Sometimes socialists may work for unions to contribute to building the organisation as an official. But always, socialists union activists seek to build the capacity for the working class to fight against their oppression.

The “disappearing working class” thesis in unsupportable. It was fashionable in the past to say it had been “bought off”, become “middle class” etc. etc. but hasn’t this recession exposed that myth. What is disappearing is the false idea that those in the middle class are not actually members of the working class.  It's true that waged industrial manual workers has shrunk in size and significance but you don't cease to be working class because you're serving burgers in a McDonalds rather than a factory worker. “Working class” denotes a position within the social relations of production. Socialists see the working class as the agents of revolutionary change not because it suffers a lot (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't), but because it's so placed within the capitalist system as to be feasibly capable of taking over. Who else but the men and women who create the system, whose livelihood depends on it, who are capable of running it justly and collectively, and who would most benefit from such a change, should take it over?

The central place of wage workers in the productive process gives them the social power to overthrow capitalism. No other social class or group has the power to achieve this. Because the system of private property is the source of its oppression, the working class can liberate itself only by abolishing this system and replacing it with a system based on social ownership of the means of production. The working class re simultaneously at the root and source of the capitalist system and incapable of being wholly included within it. Only another of the contradictions of capitalism.

The point Marx made over and over again is that the working class is revolutionary or it is nothing. Worldwide the labour and socialist movements appear to have been in retreat for several decades. Yet it is a mistake to see the workers movement as merely that section of the working class organised within the trade unions or worse still the union leadership. The predominance of racist and sexist ideas, the whole-scale belief in religion, and other socially conservative ideas that seem to belie any possible revolutionary role for the working class. Despite the rout of the traditional working class organisations, the class struggle continues unabated.

If our vision of socialism is simply a slightly modified version of what exists, don't expect it to embraced. The market cannot coexist with socialism because socialism means that society owns and controls both the means of production and the goods which result from productive activity. For the market to exist, some sectional interest (an individual,  a joint-stock company, a nationalised concern, a workers' cooperative and so on) has to be in control of part of the social product, which it then disposes of by entering into exchange relations with others. Exchange cannot take place when society, and none other, controls the means of production and the social product. Far from socialism being compatible with exchange and the market, the generalised production of goods for exchange on the market is the hallmark of an entirely different type of society - capitalism. We are not saying that absence of the market is the sole defining feature of socialism. On the contrary, socialism is not merely a market-less society; it is also a stateless society, a classless society, a moneyless society, a wage-less society. The fact that social democrats, Leninists, Trotskyists and other supposed “socialists” or “communists” accept a role for the market, tells us that they represent forces for maintaining capitalism, not for achieving socialism. Haven't they all had their share of power, and haven't they all proved totally ineffective in ridding the world of the problems which capitalism continually recreates? Other contenders for the privileges which accompany the administration of capitalism such as the 'Greens' are waiting in the wings, and are having some success in turning themselves into mass movements because of the illusory attractiveness of their promises to reform the market system. Like previous attempts at reform, these latest efforts directed towards making the capitalist system function in a manner which gives priority to human interests are bound to fail. As long as the world market remains, human beings will be forced to dance to its tune. Market forces cannot be tamed; only eliminated. The very existence of humankind is now threatened by the rivalry and the fixation on profit which are inherent in the market system.

In the society envisaged by non-market socialists, the people of the world would own the global means of production in common and would operate them communally for the benefit of humankind as a whole. Socialism in one country, or even one part of the world, is impossible. Since capitalism today is a global society which encompasses all parts of the world, the socialist alternative to capitalism must be equally global in its scope. Socialism is as relevant to the plight of those who are starving in Africa and other parts of the world as it is to the inhabitants of London or Paris. It is true that non-market socialists have generally seen the wage workers of those advanced, industrialised areas of the world which act as the power-houses of international capitalism (Europe, North America and Japan) as the force which is likely to initiate the revolutionary change from world capitalism to world socialism. Yet the establishment of non-market socialism could not be accomplished without the active cooperation of the majority of the population in those parts of the world which capitalism has consigned to underdevelopment. In contrast to the hopelessness and destitution which afflict the majority of the people in backward countries under world capitalism, the prospect of dignity and sufficiency which world socialism would open up for them would be overwhelmingly attractive. It is also worth mentioning that several of the non-market socialist principles closely resemble the principles of social cooperation found among hunter-gatherers and other supposedly 'backward' people. People in their social position would take much less convincing of the desirability of non-market socialism than would many of those in 'advanced' countries who are currently steeped in the values and assumptions which capitalism encourages. Socialism would be a global solution to the global problems which have accompanied the rise of world capitalism.

If Socialism is worth struggling for, it is precisely because it will be based on the principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". And capitalism, with its reliance on exchange, utterly fails to satisfy the real needs of the vast majority of the humanity.