Why just land? (2003)

From the February 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Land is a natural resource that existed before mankind walked the earth. Every person on the planet has a right to share in its wealth.”

So declared the winter 2001/2 issue of Land and Liberty but the article then went on to argue that sharing in the benefits of land could be realised through a tax on land. But if we agree that land is a common inheritance of all humanity then surely this must lead to only one conclusion – not that land ownership should be taxed, but that all the land of this Earth should be held in common by all people.

Let us be clear on what is meant by common ownership. We certainly don't mean nationalisation, which is state ownership and control. Nationalisation is a complete distortion of the idea of common ownership. We mean that all people will stand in equal relationship with each other about the land, and that it will be a common resource available to all communities, to be used solely for providing for the needs of people.

This can only happen as part of a general non-market economy in which people co-operate to produce goods and provide services directly for needs without the economic constraints of ownership or buying and selling. A non-market economy is a moneyless, non-exchange economy which operates only with useful labour co-operating to produce useful goods directly for consumption. With the equal relationships of common ownership, not just about land but about all the means of life, people will co-operate to produce food and other necessities which will then be distributed to stores where people will have free access to it without the barriers of buying and selling and without any of the economic constraints of the profit system.

From a common sense view it does seem daft that, whilst people need things and whilst the labour and machinery exists to produce those things, at the same time workers become unemployed, factories are made idle and people go without. However, this assumes that under market system production is able to respond directly to people's needs, but this is the last thing it is able to do. That would only be possible in a production for need system based on common ownership.

Of course, for a thing to be produced there has to be a need, but just because there is a need for something does not mean it will be produced. The market operates with what is now called “effective demand,” which is about ability and willingness to pay. So production stops, not when needs are satisfied but when sales begin to fall.

Throughout history, in previous societies, mostly they produced to their full productive capacity and then distributed what was produced. Distribution was determined by production. But with the development of the capitalist system and its markets, this was reversed. Production came to be limited and therefore determined by what could be distributed on the markets as sales for profit. Production came to be determined by market distribution and this means that there is always less than optimum production and certainly always less than what would be required for needs.

But this constraint on the use of productive powers has got nothing to do with the arrangement of the tax system. It is the operation of the markets that constrains production and we can see this clearly in the present use of land.

Land's greatest use as a productive resource is for the production of food commodities but there are increasing numbers of people in the world who suffer malnutrition. For example, the Food and Agricultural Organisation was set up in 1945 to assist in trying to solve the problem of world hunger. But if we look up its website now we find that during the last quarter of the 20th Century the numbers of starving people doubled. Between 1974 and 2000 the numbers of seriously undernourished people increased from 435 million to 820 million.

Despite the millions of people who are starving, most developed countries operate policies which restrict food production. We all know that it is part of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy to set tight quotas for most food commodities and that farmers have to adjust their production to these quotas. What is produced under this quota regime is nothing like the amount that could be produced with greater use of land resources in Europe. And the fact remains that what is produced is always much less than what would be required for people's needs.

During the 1980s to deal with the problem of falling cereal prices, the American government negotiated with farmers to take 82 million acres out of cereal production. At the same time newspapers were reporting that “32 million of the (American) population of 233 million are graded as living below the poverty line, but the mayors say that soup kitchens are not keeping pace with the hungry”.

The economic and social history of land ownership is rotten with theft, privilege, cruelty and exploitation but this should not blind us to the fact that the vast fortunes made from the accumulation of industrial and manufacturing capital also tell a nasty story of exploitation that still continues throughout the world in today's global capitalism. Income solely from the ownership of land is in fact only a small percentage of total property income in all its forms. This fact pushes the question of a land value tax even further to the margins of political interest.

The wealth of this world is produced by labour – there is no other way it comes into existence – but it is substantially owned and used by a rich social minority who have never been part of wealth production. These are just as much parasites as are land monopolists. It is their ownership of means of production and resources that has to be dealt with.

It is not only land that is the common inheritance of all people. We depend on the richness of all the Earth's resources, industrial as well as natural. What is vital are all the means of producing and distributing wealth. These means of life are also a common inheritance. They result from the development of productive techniques that began at the dawn of history with flint implements and continued down to the automated systems and electronically controlled robots of today. These are not the products of individuals or of a tiny class. Each new advance rested on the accumulated efforts of many previous generations. This has been a human achievement and that is why it can be said to be the common inheritance of us all.

Surely, therefore, the fact that these means of life are owned and monopolised by a tiny section of society, and used by them for their own enrichment whilst the vast majority of non owners have to struggle to live and countless millions live in desperate poverty and many starve, is an obscenity that cannot be defended in any kind of moral or rational sense? It can only be remedied through their common ownership.

Pieter Lawrence

Editorial: Socialism and work (1986)

Editorial from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Paul Lafargue wrote his well-known pamphlet The Right to be Lazy he chose this title to parody the demand, still current today, for "the right to work", In one sense he was right. The "right" to be employed by a capitalist is not something worth fighting for (quite apart from being unachievable). Given the demeaning and exploitative nature of employment it would indeed be better to demand the right not to work, the right to be lazy. In another sense, however, this title is misleading in that it suggests social life could continue without work, not in the sense of employment but in the sense of productive activity.

The sixties and seventies saw the growth and circulation of the idea of "the abolition of work", of a work-less society in which production would be fully automated leaving human beings free to engage in "play" or "leisure" or "creative activity" as it was variously put. This was reflected not only in the number of books, pamphlets and articles on this theme but also in the extraordinary popularity, mainly on the strength of its title, of Lafargue's pamphlet which went through edition after edition in nearly every West European language.

The spread of the idea of the abolition of work was positive in that it reflected the rejection, in practice also, of the capitalist "work ethic" by an increasing number of people. But it eventually became clear that the idea had not been fully worked out. Was it work as such — the expenditure of human physical and mental energy — that was being objected to, or was not the objection rather to work as employment, to work for an employer, to wage-labour? Was it not possible that the exercise of humans physical and mental faculties might even be a basic human need? Was, in any event, a fully-automated society a desirable objective? Would it be compatible with the need to conserve resources and to maintain a sustainable balance between human society and nature?

These reflections led some to conclude that the objection was indeed to wage-labour rather than to human productive activity as such and that the aim should not be to automate all productive activity but rather to achieve a society in which productive activity would become enjoyable and "creative". This was in fact the position taken up by Lafargue's contemporary, William Morris. And of course Fourier too had argued that work could and should be made attractive and that this was the answer to the questions, aimed at advocates of a free society, "what will be the incentive to work?" and "why would anybody want to work?".

Some of those who came to this conclusion then went to the opposite extreme and rejected not just the aim of full-scale automation but all modern technology, suggesting that the solution was to go back to a "simple life" based on handicraft production. But this is to make a fetish of "machines" and "technology", to attribute to them a consciousness and a will which, as inanimate objects, they don't have. Machines and technology don't and can't do anything on their own. The type of machines that are constructed and the use to which they are put depend on the social context. Machines in a society geared to maximising profits will be used differently (and will tend to be different) than in a society geared to serving human needs, including the need to engage in satisfying, creative activity.

Achieving the goal of turning the necessary task of production into creative, enjoyable activity does not have to involve rejecting all modern machinery and industrial techniques; it will be attained if production, both its aims and its methods, is brought under full human control. This can only be done through the abolition of property (private and state), production for sale and profit, and working for wages. In other words, through the establishment of socialist society, which wiIl not have to abandon industrial production, but adapt it to serving human needs.

A strong case can be made out for seeing satisfying, creative work not just as a desirable aim but as a vital human need. In any event some kind of activity, some physical and mental exercise, is necessary from a purely biological point of view since the chemical energy we acquire in the form of food must be used up in ways other than merely maintaining body temperature. So it is in the nature of humans to expend their physical and mental energies, to exercise their faculties, to work.

There is another reason why humans must expend physical and mental energy and that is to obtain from nature the food, clothing and shelter they need to survive. Since transforming nature to satisfy needs is the definition of production, this activity is productive activity and is a necessary human activity in any system of society, socialist as well as capitalist.

Etymologically, productive and creative should mean the same: the transformation of materials found in nature into something useful to human life. When something is produced by transforming nature something new, that didn't exist before, is created. Productive activity and creative activity should therefore be synonyms but it is a measure of the extent to which productive activity has come to be debased that we should be raising the demand that it be converted from the unsatisfying, externally-imposed burden that it is for the great majority of people into a satisfying, freely-chosen activity, that productive activity should once again become "creative".

The term "once again" is appropriate in this context since the evidence from the anthropologists is that in the original propertyless, classless - communist - condition of humanity productive activity was creative in the sense of being a satisfying, freely-chosen activity. It only became the unsatisfying, externally-imposed burden it has been for most people throughout history with the corning of propertied, class society where it became forced labour, an activity imposed by ruling classes to serve their needs.

In the sense that this original situation with regard to productive activity can be regarded as being the natural human condition then satisfying, freely-chosen productive activity ('creative activity'') can be regarded as being just as much a human need which human society ought to satisfy as food, clothing and shelter are - and the various class societies of history, including existing capitalist society, which denied this need must be regarded as being contrary to human nature and the kind of productive activity they have imposed (slave labour, serf labour, wage-labour) as unnatural, alienated labour.

This means that there cannot be any question of distinguishing in socialist society between a "realm of necessity" (of externally-imposed activity) and a "realm of freedom" (of freely-chosen activity), where the aim would be to reduce supposedly externally-imposed productive activity to a minimum in order to have a maximum of "free" time to engage in other activities. All time must be free, otherwise society will not have escaped from the tyranny of having to economise labour-time — which is precisely the economic logic of capitalism and what is meant by the term "externally-imposed". All productive activity, including the most routine, must become freely-chosen, work in a socialist society must be entirely voluntary.

In a society where humans are free to choose both the pace and the length of time they work, not only would the blind pressure to reduce to a minimum the labour-time needed to produce a product no longer exist, but it would become perfectly meaningless to measure the "value" or the "cost" of a product in terms of the labour-time socially necessary to make it. A society based on voluntary work would be free from such considerations. And if productive activity is enjoyable how can it be regarded as a cost?

Punk was proletarian (2012)

Originally posted on the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

The New York Times reported that Tom Morello, of the metal rap band Rage Against the Machine, described Romney's pit bull, Paul Ryan thus, "He is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lot of rage in him; a rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically, the only thing he is not raging against is the privileged elite he is grovelling in front of for campaign contributions." And metal is not the only type of music to offer meaningful social comment...

Jowe Head and the Demi-Monde (featuring singer and multi-percussionist Catherine Gerbrands) played a short set in July at Club Integral at 'The Grosvenor' in Brixton in London. Jowe, resplendent in an exploding psychedelic tie-dye shirt and a top hat with feather performed a Kevin Coyne song with Gerbrands on theremin, a 12th century ballad beautifully sung by Gerbrands, and a cover of Oscar Brown's 'Rags and Old Iron'. Jowe Head played in the bands Swell Maps, Palookas, TV Personalities, and was one of the pioneers of low-fi DIY music production which represented punk's swipe at corporate and monopoly capitalism.

Punk was proletarian at musician level but the capitalist manufacturers of music were major labels like EMI who also had commercial interests in the defence industry. Punk was critical of capitalism, consumerism and commodity fetishism (X-Ray Spex's 'Oh Bondage Up Yours!'), alienation, and the selling of oneself in wage slavery (The Pop Group 'We Are All Prostitutes' and Vic Godard sang “Everyone is a Prostitute”). Punk was also concerned with a sense of existential authenticity in life criticising “poseurs”, and The Clash sang of “bullshit detectors” to identify inauthenticity.

The first low-fi DIY production was the Buzzcocks 'Spiral Scratch' EP in 1976 whose cover detailed the means of production; recording process, takes, overdubs, and the catalogue number ORG 1 (ORG ONE) was a playful reference to Wilhelm Reich.

Green, a member of the British Young Communist League playing as Scritti Politti also 'appropriated the means of production' for the pressing of the single 'Skank Bloc Bologna' in 1978. The single cover demystified the process of production by listing the complete costs of studio hire, recording, mastering, pressing, and printing. Green made reference to Leninist thinker Gramsci idea of a 'bloc' of classes in opposition to capitalist hegemony. Green was inspired by 'il movimento' in 'la rossa' city of Bologna in 1977 where a cultural revolt and political uprising of autonomists (Marxists and Anarchists) and counter culture radicals took control. There were clashes with the police, protesters killed and eventually the Italian Army went in to suppress the revolt.

The Desperate Bicycles pressed 500 copies of their single 'Smokescreen' in 1977 on their own label Refill Records. The cost of production was £153 (studios, pressing, sleeves), and a profit of £210 was made in 4 months which went to a second pressing of 1,000 and with profit from these sales a further 2,500 copies pressed and capital investment in equipment made.

Jowe Head and the Swell Maps booked Spaceward Studios in Cambridge and pressed 2,000 copies of their single 'Read About Seymour' in 1977. Jowe Head recalled “the thrill of feeling empowered by our realisation that we could seize the means of production”. Low-fi DIY music production was about making your own entertainment and selling it to other creative, autonomous and like-minded souls. It represented authenticity and a purity of intent, and was an exercise in anarcho-capitalism.

Steve Clayton

This article was originally posted on the Socialism or Your Money Back blog on September 12th, 2012. Click on the link for the original article with comments.

Neighbours (1999)

A Short Story from the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

I recently went to a party where the hostess, whose eightieth birthday it was, had invited a number of elderly neighbours. As her next-door neighbour I had planned to have a celebration for her in my own house, for my understanding was that none of her close relatives would be visiting her on the day and I felt that her advanced age deserved some recognition. But she would have none of this. "I would rather throw my own little party," she told me, imperiously.

The guests were due to arrive at six o'clock in the evening it being generally accepted that the aged would be content to partake of one or two glasses of wine and a twiglet before retiring from the party and to bed. But it was to be an "assorted bunch" my friend told me. Knowing her partiality for gentility I realised what she meant by this was different accents, different lifestyles, and readers of different newspapers. In this way many of us seek to define those people we think may be interesting to know and those we decide are hardly worth the effort. A mixture of intellectual and social snobbery few of us would care to admit to.

On the night this young thing (me!) answered the door to a little queue of old people and conducted each of them to various comfortable, or at least, supportable, seats and sofas. Several people were suffering the aftermath of operations and one man, who had spent some time in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War, came in on crutches. I collected up walking sticks and found a suitable corner to park them in while the hostess, looking svelte in a black dress and pearls, requested the services of a man of sixty-something to take charge of the drinks and refill glasses when they became empty. Knowing this man's capacity for alcohol I worried somewhat for him but even more for the people whose glasses he would be replenishing.

Conversation was a bit slow, the weather being discussed in desultory fashion. We were all neighbours, acquaintances and familiar faces but otherwise we knew little about each other. I disappeared into the garden to refuel my nicotine addiction. Re-entering the house about ten minutes later I was happy to find white heads bobbing up-and-down as neighbour chatted to neighbour. Jokes were being told and there was much laughter. A wartime experience was being recounted. The history of this road we all live in was being revealed by people who have dwelt here for yonks and interesting comparisons being made with how it is today. Politics were discussed but without enthusiasm. It was agreed that politicians couldn't be trusted no matter of what political colour. And six hundred quid demanded for Council Tax and nowt to show for it! Everybody peered into their empty glasses and sighed unanimously. Man in charge of drinks came round again. Then "Speech, speech" someone cried (I think it was me). The hostess was only too eager to oblige but after about fifteen minutes everyone stopped listening to her and talked to each other. Suddenly the opportunity to escape television soaps from behind lace curtains night-after-night seemed an attractive proposition to men and women who no longer got invited to "smart" parties. I know about smart parties I've done the rounds over the years—sitting on hard chairs at dinner tables forced to endure conversations about other people's careers, cars and mortgages, until I wanted to scream "I'm a socialist!" at the top of my voice. Once I did.

Not this time. I revelled in the sociability of people who were grateful to be together, these days perhaps not being seen as party material and so finding the unexpected chance to mingle enjoyable. There can be a dignity in old age, the aged knowing they no longer need to compete (if they ever did) with the young ambitious; having discovered that it is a pretty worthless pursuit anyway.

Ten o'clock. Man in charge of drinks came round for last refill. There were cries of "Whose eightieth birthday is next on the list?"—one or two admitted to having already had theirs. I collected up walking sticks, handing them round, often to the wrong people and it took a bit of time sorting it all out. Down the path they all went talking nineteen-to-the-dozen. The hostess was beaming. "It's been such fun," she said, "we must do it again sometime."

Heather Ball

Planning the road to nowhere (1978)

From the November 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Professor F.A. Hayek, in his recent lecture on "The Market Economy" (published in the Listener, 3, 10 & 17 August), performed one useful service, though it was not intentional. Hayek wants to go back to the open competitive market as envisaged by Adam Smith, with a minimum of government interference. In particular he denounces the vogue for government planning of the economy that came to the fore with the acceptance of Keynesian doctrines thirty years ago. He has no difficulty in showing that the attempt has been a failure. Two examples will suffice to show how great the failure has been. When the Labour Party pledged itself to "plan" jobs for all, did it also plan for over a million and a half unemployed? And when Labour (and Tory) Governments planned the investment of hundreds of millions of pounds to expand the steel industry did they also foresee the current plan, reported in the Sunday Telegraph (24 September 1978)? 

British Steel Corporation & Department of Industry officials are believed to have reached a private agreement to reduce the State-owned concern's work force by 140,000, nearly three-quarters, over the next five years.

This is in addition to the many tens of thousands already made redundant. 

Hayek calls this Keynesian fiasco a failure of "socialist" planning, but does not deal at all with the real concept of planning in a socialist society. He does not notice that his open market doctrine and the Keynesian doctrine are both of them attempts to plan the capitalist market, while Socialism is concerned with a non-market society. 

Hayek's useful contribution is that he spells out the unforeseeable and uncontrollable factors that dominate the market in both sets of circumstances, his own and the Keynesian. 

His argument, the familiar laissez-faire case of Adam Smith, is that if prices are left to find their own level with no government interference or planning, each worker and capitalist will be guided by changing wage levels in each occupation and by changed selling prices to seek new jobs and change production lines, in harmony with the overall total demands of the market, and that this will minimize unemployment and maximise production. But he candidly admits that nobody knows or can know in advance what the overall result of all these separate judgments is going to be: it can at best be only a question of trial and error, or partially informed guess-work. He says, for example, that "all economic problems are caused by the occurrence of unforeseen events". He calls price (and wage) changes arising out of market forces the "guiding signal" but admits: "even the most perfect market prices do not take into account all the circumstances we would wish to be taken into account"; he lamely adds that "a signal that takes account of most of them is better than none". 

So his case for the open market as against the Keynesian planners boils down to the argument that while both of them mean operating largely in ignorance, the government planners, through greater rigidity, are likely to fare worse. His example of the success of the open market is the second half of the 19th century, which included, though he does not mention the fact, the Great Depression of 1875-1895. 

The people, especially the Labour Party, who have thought they could plan capitalism have relied on the big increase of statistical material in recent years and the numerous governmental and private bodies engaged in forecasting. The record has been one of almost consistent error. It was population "experts" who forecast for the government in 1956 that by the end of the century the population of this country would be 53 million; but amended it in 1962 to 68 million. Their short term forecasts were equally wrong. 

It was a commercial Market Survey in 1939 that,in line with current fashion about population trends, forecast a population for Great Britain of 39 million in 1961: it turned out to be 51 million. 

Samuel Brittan in his The Treasury under the Tories 1951-1964 has a chapter headed "Crystal gazers in Chief" in which he describes the dismal record of the government's economic advisers in the field of forecasting. A typical comment is:

Export forecasting has a particularly bad record - even worse than forecasting in general. In the last few years shaking dice might actually have led to better results. 

One outstanding failure of the Labour Government was the National Plan of 1965. It planned for a growth of the National Product of 25 per cent between 1964 and 1970. Apart from the problems of coordinating all the separate industry plans into a comprehensive national plan, it overlooked that the products had to be sold at a profit, which depended on uncontrollable world market factors. The actual increase in those years turned out to be 15 per cent. Of course it is a hopeless endeavour. In order to know how British Companies and the whole economy will fare in future years the government would need to know the secret plans of all companies and governments in the world, to know which harvest would fail, what wars will break out and at what point the world market will lurch into one of its periodic depressions. They can guess but they cannot know. 

Looking ahead 

Professor Hayek gives the impression that while company market planning is not perfect it is nevertheless pretty accurate. This is not borne out by the forward planning of Royal Dutch-Shell. Mr. Frank S. McFadzean, a managing director of the group, in Galbraith & the Planners not only made scathing criticism of the National Plan, but admitted the limitations of planning by his own company. 

Except in the very short period ahead, we are not really impressed by the detailed results shown by our plans. It will be the sheerest fluke if we ever achieve them Looking back to 1962 and what we then prognosticated . . .  we were wrong on many counts. We were wrong on volumes, we were wrong on prices, we were particularly wide of the mark on our estimates of the demand for and price of naphtha, we were wrong on our cost projections, we were wrong on the level of investment we would need to make. We did not fully foresee the increase in the size of tankers; we did not foresee the extent of Libya's crude oil production; we did not foresee the dominant role that natural gas would play in Holland . . . we did not foresee the closure of the Suez Canal."

(Sunday Telegraph 6 April 1969) 

What of planning in a world socialist society? 

Here the problem is quite different because production will be solely for use, not for sale. There will be no market curtailments of production, such as happen under capitalism, because particular industries have over-produced for their market and can no longer make profit. There will be coordinated planning of production and distribution to meet known human needs. It will have to provide safe margins for growth and to allow for harvest failures and other natural disasters. It will have access to all the world's productive resources not, as under capitalism, have many of these resources not used because there is no profit in their use. 

Here also Professor Hayek provides us with the evidence about capitalism, where he condemns "the fatal mistake, frequently made by engineers, to imagine that there are long-lasting, technically determined production methods which are superior to all others". Hayek says that under the guidance of price changes the production method favoured by capitalism may not be the one favoured by the engineers; "This is an academic and not a technological problem", in other words, one determined by profitability. 

Edgar Hardcastle

What is Morality? (1960)

From the February 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Morality is not, as High Court Judges and Humanists would have us believe, a firm base of fixed, immutable rules of behaviour, by which all decent men should lead their lives. Rather it is a quicksand of changing shape, colour and size. Yesterday's moral precept becomes today's flouted rule, and yesterday's music-hall joke can become today's unwritten law. To look upon moral and ethical rules as constants is to ignore social change, which itself changes the content, and sometimes the form, of these rules.

The doctrine " Thou shalt not kill," for instance, is not an eternal ideal thought up by some good holy man. It is the application of a common sense rule of behaviour made necessary by man's very social existence. Even then it is a rule which is subject to numerous qualifications, and in time of war it is almost wholly ignored. Even so, it is an ethic which arises from man's collaboration for social production, and in the absence of this and similar rules, social organisation would be impossible.

To understand why morality and ethics change, we must look at the social organisation which forms their background. For instance, in primitive societies where simple agriculture forms the basis of production and where there is no competition with other tribes for the means of subsistence, one is likely to find that murder and the slaughter of war are almost unknown. On the other hand, in hunting communities where there was population pressure on the hunting grounds available, it was usual to find warlike tendencies in evidence, and also to find that the ability to kill members of rival tribes was a highly respected attribute.

Morality then, is no more than a set of rules, established during the course of time and designed to protect and preserve the productive relationships in operation at any one period. Under capitalism, with its class ownership of the productive forces, one finds a corresponding class morality, with its sacred Ark, private property.

Christians will object that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount provide ethics that are timeless, and which existed long before capitalism. The fact is, however, that these Christian principles do not represent the current moral standards, and as Bernard Shaw pointed out, the literal following of such principles would lead to the collapse of capitalism. What use does a competitive society have for the injunction "Love thy neighbour"? The practical ethics of capitalism are" get on," "keep up with the Joneses" or "may the best man win." Where would capitalism be if people followed Jesus's injunction to share their worldly goods? In actual fact, of course, such ethics have no practical application in modem society at all, and have no chance of becoming generally held in a property society.

Modern society, with its morality, prevents human nature from fulfillment, in the sense that it chains the mind and body with economic and mental fetters. The practical ethics of the modem world are the real fetters, and not the professed morality of the Christian or the traditional " good man."

Take a look at the way in which these practical ethics depart from the so-called fixed moral codes. The prohibition against taking life, as already mentioned, is important in the prevention of civil disobedience and the maintenance of capitalist law and order, but does not extend far enough to prevent the execution of certain classes of murderers, or the slaughter of the troops and civilians of an enemy state. "Thou shalt not steal " is perhaps the most important of the ideal ethics and the one with which the powers of the law are most concerned. The meaning of this one is distorted so as to prevent people taking property from the ruling class (who have the only property worth stealing), but on the other hand, allows the exploitation in the factory and office by which the ruling class acquires its property. It also sanctioned the annexation of land and property from the Colonial native populations. by which the great Christian British Empire was created.

If, then, the form and content of morality is twisted and distorted to fit the social pattern of a particular society, why should its form remain at all? To answer this, one has to look into the basis and origin of morality itself.

Co-operation 

Morality is as old as human social organisation. Its origin is in co-operation. The members of a tribe who depended upon each other for their survival, obeyed the social injunction to defend the tribe and to perform their social tasks. The imperative "protect your kin" arose out of the necessity of the situation, and certainly not from idealism or abstract thought. In a situation such as this. members of a tribe recognised their dependence on each other. Thus to perform one's social tasks promptly and efficiently had merit, and to fail to perform them was bad, because it threatened the tribe. In time, injunctions such as these formed the basis of an organised morality.

So society passed from primitive tribal culture with its primitive ethics, through the Judaic tribes and the elaborate rules and doctrines of the Talmud, down to Christianity with its slave ethics of humility and love of one's neighbour. Then, after 1500 years of Christianity, industrial society appeared, and made nonsense of Christian doctrine. Society became a jungle, where the fiercest survived and the weaker perished. Thus terms like " blessed are the meek" were mocked by the reality of the situation. Efforts of well-meaning people to stem the tide were akin to the traveller who tries to placate a tiger by reading biblical texts to it. However, the Churches themselves didn't try too hard to alter the pattern of capitalism, for they were practical people, and they knew that to compromise was the only way to survive.

The Catholic Church, for example, which was the original Christian church, has a mass of impressive dogma which urges the holy to be good, kind, peaceable and so on. Nevertheless, the Church itself was not so foolish as to take these injunctions too literally, and followed the same practical morality as the world outside. This is the explanation of the apparent contradictions between Christian teaching and the Inquisition, and between the ten commandments and the "holy" wars.

Basically, it is the division of mankind in to classes which today creates the split between the kind of morality which most people would consider desirable, and the day-to-day activities of a competitive world. After all, morality is only the form of expected behaviour within the framework of a particular social system. Therefore, morality has relevance only to the practical possibilities of a social situation, and not to ideals. Where the possibilities are, as today, limited by economic circumstances, it is inevitable that morality also becomes limited and one-sided.

In other words, because there is a ruling class, today's morality is of a kind dictated by, and in favour of, that ruling class. This does not mean that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. It merely means that today's morality favours the privileged, and is designed to preserve that privilege. Some examples of this one-sided morality have been given. Another example is that of the tax-dodgers, bilkers, people who avoid paying their fare and so on. This is something that government spokesmen say is undesirable, and yet is, to a considerable extent, regarded as fair game. The man who pays five pence for a sevenpenny fare feels be is gaining a victory at the expense of a vast impersonal organisation, but his gain is hardly worth the trouble involved. On the other hand, practically all business-men conduct a ceaseless war with the Inspector of Taxes, in order to avoid payment of tax, and a vast complicated machinery of Inspectors, Collectors, Commissioners, Accountants, clerks and so on, exists because of this. As everyone else does this, the business-man does not feel that he is doing anything immoral, although it is impossible to reconcile his behaviour with those moral principles that be probably believes in.

Thus, although mankind is neither "naturally" good or evil, the prevailing social circumstances determine to a large extent the way in which they will conduct their lives. It is because man is organised in a social way and because his survival depends on co-operation with others, that most people recognise perfectly well what is the right course in a particular situation and what is the wrong course. The trouble is that the practical circumstances of modem society make it almost impossible for people to behave in away that is to the common good.

In other words, a truly human morality cannot exist in a world where people's bodies and minds are imprisoned by the amoral "morality" of a sick society. Neither can the social circumstances be made more favourable by trying to convert people to a selfless and more human morality, for this is like trying to uproot a tree while resting in the top branches. 

First, man must free himself from economic domination. Then, and only then, will he be able to take the tremendous strides in morality necessary for him to achieve full stature as truly human man.

Albert Ivimey

"Dictatorship of the Proletariat": what did Marx mean? (1973)

From the August 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat". 

This statement by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, has been seized upon by followers of Lenin to justify the idea of the existence of a coercive State machine after the establishment of Socialism. The leaders of Russia claim that Marx advocated the establishment of a "proletarian state" and that this now exists in Russia. The various Bolshevik groups in the advanced capitalist countries believe that we must go through a lengthy transition of "socialism" before "real communism" can be brought about. 

Before these ideas are examined it must be clearly stated how we, along with Marx, envisage the establishment of Socialism. For Marx, there were two essential prerequisites. The first of these is a clear understanding of the principles of Socialism by the working class and an unambiguous desire to put them into practice. The second is an advanced industrial economy which has developed the forces of production to the point at which free access is technically possible. 

Marx however was over-optimistic on both these points, especially in his earlier writings. He assumed that developing a socialist consciousness in the working class was a relatively simple matter, that socialist ideas would arise more or less spontaneously out of a trade union consciousness. It was not for some time that he grasped the extent to which capitalist ideas influenced the workers and the enormous task which faced Socialists in winning over the workers. 

On the question of the level of capitalist development, Marx was again somewhat mistaken. He studied the capitalist system largely in relation to the Lancashire textile industry, which was at the heart of the English industrial revolution. Today there appears very little modern about the textile industry—it tends to flourish in relatively backward countries with a predominantly agrarian population. Capitalism, in other words, had certainly not reached its zenith in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed it had hardly even begun. 

Given, then, that Marx believed the means of production had been developed far enough to provide an abundance of goods, it therefore followed that the working class could not establish Socialism as soon as it captured political power. A transitionary period was necessary, in which the means of production would be developed as rapidly as possible. There would exist a coercive State. Consumption would be regulated by means of labour-time vouchers. This state of affairs would be replaced by completely free access as soon as possible. 

Marx's idea of the form of this transition period did not remain static throughout his life. In the 1840's, he saw it as a Jacobin-style political dictatorship in the manner of Robespierre and St. Just. He later came to envisage a system of elected delegates to local committees, as in the Paris Commune. Towards the end of his life he saw it as a democratic republic based on a majority of delegates from a socialist party elected democratically to parliament. 

It is perfectly plain, therefore, that Marx's views on the need for a transition between capitalism and communism was a product of the time in which he was living. From Marx's own point of view, it is only possible to see the world from a particular time and place in which one lives. Bearing in mind his over-optimistic view of the readiness of the working class to institute Socialism during his life-time, it is not surprising that he expected a lengthy transition would be necessary. Since Marx's death the forces of production have been developed immeasurably; the possibility of a world of abundance has long been technically feasible, held back only by the political ignorance of the working class. Although Socialism certainly cannot be established at the drop of a hat, there is no need any longer to visualise a lengthy transition. 

Marx, then, did believe that a period known as "the dictatorship of the proletariat" would separate capitalism and communism. However, this phrase was consciously and dishonestly distorted by Lenin. Firstly, it must be understood what Marx meant by the word dictatorship. He used the word in an explicit sense to mean the domination of society by one class through its control over the state machine. He often, for example, referred to Britain as a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", though he was freely allowed to write and work in the country. Lenin, however, made what can only be construed as a quite deliberate play on words, using the term dictatorship in its popularly understood sense, to mean the denial of. basic democratic freedoms, the maintenance of rule by force and the ruthless suppression of political opponents. A year before the revolution of 1917 he wrote: 

And in the twentieth century . . . violence means neither a fist nor a club, but troops. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. (Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 95.) 

Elsewhere, he wrote: 

Dictatorship is based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie." (Collected Works, Vol. 28, p.236). 

Lenin's conception of "the dictatorship of the proletariat" is not, therefore, based on Marx's, but is a gross perversion of it. The type of society which exists in Russia today is the logical outcome of Lenin's thinking. Though they may deny it, this is also the type of society advocated by leftists when they rant about "fighting for socialism", "socialism" being defined as the transition period before "communism", 

Our case is clear and simple. Socialism (or Communism - we use the words interchangeably) is a society based on common ownership with free access, without money or wages. This can be established as soon as the working class see the need for it. Talk about "transition periods", based on Lenin's dangerous writings, does nothing to bring this end one minute nearer. 

B. K. McNeeney

Livestock liberation (1979)

From the June 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Were Socialists an endangered species, a society for our protection would soon emerge, for there is no shortage of people ready to deplore the exploitation of, and cruelty to, the four-legged and feathered in our midst. Recently, a group of animal welfare and protection societies combined into the General Election Co-ordinating Committee for Animal Protection (GECCAP). Now is the time, they claim, to "put animals into politics". They asked those interested in animal welfare to seek an assurance from all General Election candidates that they would support action on animal welfare, and to ensure that all MPs returned in the new Parliament were aware of the strength of the animal welfare lobby. 

The next government must accept its responsibility for animal welfare. We hope that MPs of all parties will press the next government to set up an independent Council for Animal Welfare—there is urgent need for legislative reform in all our areas of concern.

But successive legislation on maltreatment of animals has not contained the problem, which spreads and takes on new forms, is global in extent, and ranges from deliberate cruelty and exploitation to indifference and ignorance. Is it surprising that in a society whose basis is the exploitation of one section of humanity by another, that the same attitudes reveal themselves in the treatment of animals? Just as members of the working class are regarded primarily as mere productive and service units—"factory hands", "staff' , "labourers", "machinists", "assemblers", "typists", "domestics", so animals are primarily commodities produced for buying and selling, and the fact that they are able to suffer discomfort and pain becomes secondary to the realisation of profit.

CAGES FOR ANIMALS—BOXES FOR WORKERS

Modern farming has little in common with the cosy image derived from our nursery rhyme books. Capitalism draws all forms of production into its orbit, undermining and destroying traditional methods. Stock rearing has produced the factory farm. Battery hens are kept four or more in a cage 15in x 19in, where they spend day and night on steeply sloping wire floors, unable to stretch their wings and legs. Veal calves are kept in individual cubicles or multiple calf pens where movement is severely restricted. They are maintained on slatted floors and fed exclusively on milk substitute liquid (although their ruminant stomachs crave roughage) so that their flesh will not lose its pale colour. Pigs stand on concrete floors, in total or semi-darkness day and night, and pregnant sows are kept permanently in cubicles unable even to turn around. To prevent epidemics, animals incarcerated in such conditions require routine doses of drugs which can be transmitted to the consumer.

The same callous treatment occurs in the transport of animals for slaughter or further fattening. Cattle sent to mainland Europe or North Africa are crammed into open transporters, exposed to extremes of temperature, for long journeys by road and sea; sometimes left unwatered, unfed. Members of the working class who endure rush hour travel in buses, trains, and underground, will know the feeling. 

But bad living conditions are not suffered by animals only. Look around the world and see the shanty towns, tenements, back-to-back slums, tower blocks, and jerry built council and private housing estates. The majority of the working class live and die in. cramped, overcrowded, unhealthy conditions, lacking privacy or quiet, and often in an environment of depressing ugliness. There are some workers who can negotiate a level of wages that enables them to live in some degree of comfort, rather as the race-horse or pedigree breeding animal may be housed in special quarters. More than a century of agitation and legislation have not however eradicated cramped and inadequate living conditions for the majority of humans.

Yet it would seem a simple matter to provide comfortable living conditions for people—and for animals. The arguments against doing so are couched in accountant's jargon—alternative methods are dismissed as "uneconomic", "too labour intensive", "not viable", "unprofitable". Members of the working class hardly need reminding that resistance to higher wages is the first principle in the code of every employer. Economic self-interest and competition override all finer feelings.

WHOSE BEST FRIEND?

The single largest industry in the world today is the killing industry and enormous quantities of raw materials and human energy are poured into the manufacture of weapons of destruction. In a civilisation where people can be persuaded to don uniforms and fight and kill each other—and where such action is justified and glorified—is it any wonder that there are people who justify killing animals for fun?

Practices involving the needless slaughter of animals include the hunting of threatened species for the luxury fur trade so that Madam can parade in rare pelts. Experiments on animals to assess testing cosmetics and other non-medical products. Some of the experiments in the realms of Behavioural Research are so bizarre one must question whether the scientists concerned require behavioural investigation. Many psychological experiments involve subjecting the animal to severe deprivation, abject terror, or inescapable pain. A "will to live" experiment forced animals to swim non-stop until they gave up and allowed themselves to drown. How relevant is this work to humans?

Most humans feel an affinity to creatures that live and breathe as ourselves, and many humans take a delight in animal companionship. But even in the treatment of pets, where the motive is not profit and exploitation, we find many aspects of the neurosis and sickness of capitalist society. The novelty of a pet wears off and unwanted cats and dogs are callously abandoned. Some pets are used as a status symbol with the docking of tails, the clipping and dyeing of coats, to suit the owner's vanity or whim. Selective breeding takes place, especially of dogs, in order to emphasise some feature which appeals to the eye of the breeder but is biologically damaging to the animal. Guy the gorilla—a social animal—died in 1978 after thirty years in a cage in London Zoo. Was his confinement consistent with a regard for animals?

PUT SOCIALISM INTO POLITICS

Can there be an explanation, a solution? Capitalism is a society where the ownership of wealth production is concentrated in the hands of a minority, and where the ethos of competition and self interest permeates all social relations. Change that foundation to one where production is determined by the needs of society, where economic competition ceases to exist, where the means of production are commonly owned and democratically controlled and people will live in harmony and co-operation—with each other as well as with other species.

There the analogy between the treatment of the working class and animals ends, for while the latter must rely on the goodwill of human society, members of the working class can and must look to themselves to solve their problems by organising politically.

The human race and society are not superior to, or apart from, nature but a product of the universal process of evolution. As the only living creatures on this planet capable of consciously changing the environment and with an insight in to the laws of nature we have a special interest in protecting and conserving the earth which is our means of life. Such an outlook will permeate socialist society—a true respect for our environment and fellow living creatures.

Alice Kerr

After apartheid, what? (1990)

Editorial from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

So. after the nomenklatura in Eastern Europe, it is now the white minority in South Africa that has been forced to agree to negotiate on giving up its "leading role" and "guaranteed monopoly" of political power. For this is what the release of Mandela means. 

It means that those in charge of the South African state have at last publicly admitted what they have long realised in private: that they cannot maintain the law and order necessary for the proper functioning of the capitalist system they preside over without including the majority of the population in the system of political representation. Their hope is that Nelson Mandela will be able to command sufficient support among the black population to be the person with whom they can negotiate an orderly transition from apartheid to the new "non-racial democracy" that capitalism demands, indeed has been demanding for decades. 

The failure of apartheid, as an attempt to impose on a capitalist economy a caste system based on skin colour, is underlined by the fact that the party in charge of the South African state—the Afrikaner nationalist National Partei—is the same party that, under such hateful figures as Malan, Verwoerd and Vorster, introduced apartheid after 1948 as a rigid codification, and intensification, of the existing discriminatory practices against "non-whites". 

Already in 1948 apartheid was an anachronism, even from a capitalist point of view but. with the franchise restricted to "whites" most of whom were Boers in all senses of the word, the succession of parties directly representing the capitalist interest—the United Party, the Progressive Federal Party and, today, the Democratic Party—were unable to win a majority in the white parliament. Political power was exercised—and has been without a break since 1948—by the representatives of Afrikaner nationalism whose original policy was to try to reconstruct the master and servant relationship between whites and" blacks their forefathers—the people who organised the Great Trek from the Cape Province in 1836 to avoid the abolition of slavery in the British Empire—had known in the pioneer days of white colonisation. 

What the Afrikaner nationalist government sought to keep "apart" capitalism brought together. More and more Africans were drawn into capitalist industry, and not just as labourers in the mines but as workers of all kinds—clerks, accountants, bank employees as well as foremen and skilled and semi-skilled production workers—until today they form the majority of the urban working class of South Africa. 

From the 1970s onwards the development of capitalism forced the government to abandon apartheid bit by bit. First to go was the industrial colour bar under which certain skilled manual jobs were reserved for whites. Then Africans were allowed to form trade unions. Then the Pass Laws were abolished and Africans allowed to own property in the townships. Then the so-called "petty apartheid" of separate park benches, beaches and the like was relaxed. Then "coloureds" and Asians were granted some political rights. Then the Mixed Marriage Act—which criminalised sexual relations between the different "races"—was abolished. Then mixed residential areas emerged in some cities. 

All that remains—and of course it's a big all—are the laws which classify every South African into one or other "racial" group and which reserve areas for the exclusive habitation of these groups, but the De Klerk government has declared, as it had no choice but to, that these too are negotiable. 

Like all decent-minded people, Socialists are pleased at the coming demise of the obscene system of institutionalised race discrimination of apartheid. Although the coming of a non-racial regime in South Africa will allow the "non-whites" there a dignity and respect as equal human beings which they have been denied up to now, the ending of apartheid will not amount to "liberation" for the working class in South Africa. Capitalism without apartheid—which is all even the ANC wants, despite its talk of "socialism" (in reality, nationalisation, or state capitalism)—will remain capitalism and so exploitation for profit, bad housing, inadequate health care, cheap schooling, unemployment, poor transport, police brutality, pollution and all the other problems workers have to endure under capitalism will continue as well. 

The end of apartheid will not mean the end of working class problems. At most it will result in the creation of the best conditions under which the working class can struggle to protect its interests within capitalism and, more importantly, can struggle alongside the workers of the rest of the world for the non-class as well as non-racial society that socialism will be.

The Philanthropists (1965)

Book Review from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (Panther Books, 7s. 6d.)

Robert Noonan spent the latter part of his life at Hastings working, when work was available, as a house painter and decorator and sign writer. He was a member of the local branch of the Social Democratic Federation. During the first decade of this century he devoted his leisure time to writing a novel which, in his own words, was to be " . . .  a readable story full of human interest and based on the happenings of everyday life, the subject of Socialism being treated incidentally." 

Noonan completed his task in 1910 and soon afterwards entered hospital, where he died of tuberculosis early in 1911. He left his manuscript to his daughter who, like many girls of her time, went into service, taking the manuscript with her. Three years later, following a chance conversation with a member of the staff of Punch, the work was brought out of her tin trunk and published under the author's title, The Ragged trousered Philanthropists and in his pen name, Robert Tressell. 

The earliest editions were abridged or, more correctly, emasculated.. Chapters were left out and the remainder rearranged, phrases were altered and deleted, characters omitted and a tragic ending imposed to meet the commercial demands of the publishers and pander to current literary and political conventions. 

Years later a group of enthusiasts recollected the missing chapters, reconstructed and rearranged them in the form the author originally intended. A more complete edition, with only one chapter missing, was published in 1955 and it is this fuller edition that is now published in paperback form. The original manuscript was presented to the TUC in 1959 and is now held at Congress House, London. 

A book that can command continuous editions and reprints for over fifty years must surely qualify for the title, of a Classic. Thousands of workers have claimed that their political ideas were first stimulated by reading it. 

In the story the author casts himself in the role of Owen, a house painter who devotes every opportunity to explaining to a group of workmates how they are exploited in all directions. Despite their abject poverty and insecurity of livelihood they defend capitalism with heat, using arguments that have long since disappeared from the vocabulary of all but the most stupid of anti-socialists. . 

Those who remember working class conditions during Edwardian days will know that Noonan writes fact into his fiction. He weaves into his story chapters on charitable organisations, religious bodies, unemployment, a parliamentary election, a workers' social outing, the Clarion cyclists, Public houses, public meetings and the seduction of a worker's wife, much of which was omitted from the earlier editions. 

But Noonan did not expound Socialism. When he does propose an alternative to capitalism it turns out to be the woolly reformism of the Social Democratic Party, now in part inherited by the modem Labour Party. The characters that Noonan portrays as Socialists are advocates of nationalisation as the solution to the workers' problems. They visualise a benevolent State operating industry in the interests of the whole of the people, reducing working hours, removing undesirable institutions and increasing wages so as to provide an equitable distribution of wealth. Noonan ridicules religious organisations but accepts the idea of a Great Spirit as creator of natural raw material.

It is astonishing that a man who so obviously realised that it is the private ownership of the means of wealth production from which stem the social evils about which he wrote so satirically, should halt his thinking on the threshold of the socialist alternative. 

We have read this novel a number of times and with this recent reading we find that age has not staled it. We still smiled at the antics of the workers on their beano, we were still sad at the death of Philpot and we were still angry at the stupidity of Crass and the schemes of Sweater and Sir Graball D'Encloseland. With all its faults and limitations we shall probably read it again someday.

W. Waters

At all costs (1986)

From the July 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

A favourite expression among the High Command on both sides of the conflict in 1916 was, "at all costs". Falkenhayn, the German commander-in-chief, ordered that Verdun must be taken, and Joffre ordered that it must be defended, "at all costs". Haig was to use the expression later, in the Battle of the Somme, and it was to come up again and again. A position must be held, or a wood must be captured, again at all costs. It was a change from the usual "regardless of losses", but it meant the same thing. The cost was certainly paid, but not by the people who issued the orders. 

This month brings the 70th anniversary of one of the bloodiest days in British history, the first day of the Somme. On Saturday 1 July 1916, some twenty thousand men died, This would represent the entire male population of a sizeable town. Thirty thousand more were wounded, many of them maimed for life. This was just the first day — the Battle of the Somme lasted from 1 July until 18 November when, bogged down in mud and exhaustion, it was finally called off. By that time one million, two hundred thousand men — British, French and German — were dead or maimed; the British total was over half a million. 

The use of the word battle to describe what was in fact a long campaign illustrates just how out of date the ideas of military strategists were. Until the middle of the last century battles, on however large a scale, lasted only a day, sometimes only a few hours. Even in the mid 19th century, as at Gettysburg, they lasted only two or three days. The Somme lasted over four months and during that time at least twelve massive engagements, that in any other age would have been called battles, took place. It was the same attitude that sent masses of men in waves against machine guns and modern artillery, as though against muzzle loading muskets. Nowhere was this more obvious than on the first day of the Somme. No doubt the anniversary will be marked by TV programmes, some of which will be critical of the whole ghastly mess up and there will be ceremonies. But not many of the survivors remain, time having taken most of those the German machine guns missed, 

Germany opened the war on the Western Front with a massive attack on France and Belgium. In an attempt to repeat their victory of 1870, they poured a million and a half men into a great sweep to encircle Paris and knock France out of the war. They failed, and the war settled down into a static affair, with trenches extending from the North Sea to the Swiss border. But Germany had achieved great advantages. Their front line, apart from a small quiet section near the Swiss border, ran entirely through conquered territory. Thus all the destruction was away from their own borders and the coal mines and factories of Belgium and Northern France were at their disposal. Because the line was in foreign territory they were prepared to make strategic withdrawals to more favourable ground and there construct strong defences. But for the French army fighting on their own territory, public opinion would not allow any further losses, This was the theory that Falkenhayn was working on, when in early 1916 he decided on a mass attack on Verdun. He calculated that the French would never give the place up and he could "bleed the French army white". 

So in February 1916 a massive attack was launched on Verdun, a small town surrounded by forts. These the French, by a massive miscalculation, had stripped of their guns to use elsewhere. The logical thing for the French to do was to abandon the place and withdraw to a more easily defended line. But as with the British at Ypres in Belgium, Verdun had become more than a town. It had been built up by mass propaganda as a symbol of French resistance, which must be held at all costs. The battle raged right through until 18 December. The French army was indeed bled white but German losses were as great. Falkenhayn was sacked as a result, but this was no consolation for the seven hundred thousand dead. It was to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun that the Somme offensive was launched. 

The Somme battle marked a watershed in the general attitude to the war. Until then the wild hysteria with which the outbreak of war had been greeted still persisted. It was from 1 July 1916 that war weariness began and to this period belong the bitter war poems and the cynical war songs of the front line soldier. During early 1916 attempts were made to end the war with a compromise peace. Germany, realising that its gamble had failed, made several attempts to call it off. It was becoming obvious that the cost to the participants was outstripping the gains. But modem war is such that it can be fought only if the whole population is involved and this requires massive propaganda. Once having got the masses into a belligerent frame of mind it is difficult to get them out of it. After all, if the enemy are monsters who must be stopped at all costs, committing every type of barbarity, it is difficult to suddenly suggest a compromise peace instead of totally defeating them, 

Before the outbreak of the 1914/18 war, many people believed that it could be prevented by a general strike across the frontiers. This was however a pipe dream, for having no knowledge of the system under which they lived, or how it worked, the workers could not accept such action. Instead they cheered in the streets. In 1914 Britain was the only European power not to have conscription. Its army, although highly efficient, was small, even when reinforced by reservists and territorials. A call went out, spearheaded by the famous poster showing Kitchener's pointing finger. A hundred thousand volunteers were asked for, and over a million responded. In some cases private individuals or organisations raised unofficial companies that were later absorbed into the army. One practice was to form regiments of "Pals", in which men from a factory or mine or sometimes a street or club joined together in one company. This was to have a devastating effect when a battalion was almost wiped out and whole areas were flooded with the dreaded telegrams. It took two years to weld this mass of volunteers into an army and they were ready just in time for the Somme. 

The battle took place in Picardy in Northern France — an area of chalk hills, resembling parts of Wiltshire and Hampshire and crossed by the River Somme. It was an area of beechwoods and sunken roads but also of wide open downland, the hardest possible type of country to storm across, devoid of cover of any kind. This area had been a quiet part of the line, where battle weary troops had been sent for recuperation. The main reason it was chosen for the attack was that, as the British and French lines joined at this point, it could be a joint effort. This was as much for propaganda reasons as any other. The overall plan was to punch a hole in the German lines and then pour cavalry through to roll up the German lines. Large forces of cavalry were kept in the rear for this purpose but it was an impractical dream, which died on the Somme. The new cavalry, the tank. was only in its infancy and was slow and lumbering. 

The main obsession of the high command was that artillery alone would do the trick. And by this time modern artillery had become devastating. The amount of high explosive used during the war was enormous, but the hopes that were placed on it were exaggerated. It was believed that the effect of a prolonged bombardment would so shatter the defenders that they would be unable to resist and the infantry would have a walk-over. But the Germans had constructed strong dugouts and defences that were able to withstand the bombardment. For days the German lines were pounded and a large number of massive mines were exploded under the enemy lines. The Allied commanders believed that this had destroyed the defenders but when the barrage stopped, the German soldiers emerged from their dugouts and set up their machine guns. It was against this that the British troops were sent, each soldier carrying a heavy pack that slowed movement, told to advance at a walk. They were mowed down in lines. 

After the battle was over the Germans withdrew to a new prepared position, the Hindenburg line. It took a long time for the truth about July 1 to reach the British public but when it did it was to have long-lasting effects. 

The Battle of the Somme has now passed into capitalism's bloody history and the area where it was fought is restored, apart from the cemeteries and, in a few places, the shell holes which are covered in grass. But capitalism is still with us and wars still rage across the world. And so many workers, across the world still do not understand the system that kills them. 

Les Dale

Day of Remembrance For What? (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Early on the morning of July 1 1916 the barrage which had been crashing down upon the German lines on the Somme lifted and, in a short eerie silence, waves of British soldiers left their trenches and began to. walk across No Man's Land. They had been told to do that — to walk across because the guns would have cut all the wire, wiped out all the defences, killed all the Germans. They had only to walk across and wait for hot food from the field kitchens which would be rapidly following them. 

It was not like that at all; before the day was out something like twenty thousand of the men who had climbed out of their trenches in such optimism in the morning had been killed. The battle dragged on for same weeks more, eventually to be disguised in history as a general's blunder, as if the "correct" decisions had any more to recommend them, as if it were better to kill twenty thousand German workers than the same number of British. 

The First World War was a succession of such horrors, marking out like grisly milestones the long road of murder among the deadlocked trenches. To the people on both sides who, drunk with patriotism, had cheered the start of the war, the slaughter was a shock they could barely absorb. They had gone to fight in such heroic style; now there was only the mud and the guns and the rats and lice —and finally, all too often, a line in the casualty lists. The war reached out beyond new frontiers of terror, with the aerial bombardment of civilians, There had been nothing before to prepare the workers for this sudden experience of total war. 

For decades afterwards Europe lived in a state of shock, a massive grief and bewilderment that the frantic response to the war propaganda — the songs, the posters, the white feathers — could have contributed to this. At the same time as the war had spawned more powerful weapons to smash human bodies it had also developed better medical services to patch up and send them back onto the streets in wheelchairs, on crutches, or to keep them only part alive in perpetual hospital. There were political dangers in this situation and to avert it something had to seem to be done to redeem the many promises to make the land fit for such heroes to live in. 

This was all happening in an atmosphere of deep disillusionment, Post war Britain, unexceptionally, was a country of unemployment, bitter poverty and cynicism. Disabled ex-servicemen who were naive enough to expect same recompense for what they had suffered found instead that their claims for pensions were met with delay, muddle, niggardliness and sometimes blank refusal. Those who had come through the war in one piece tacked themselves onto the end of their local dole queue. This is the story of one man, whose unit was badly cut up in machine gun fire on July 1 1916: 

When I was out of work, I had to go before a Means Test Panel. There was a very fat lady on the Panel, cuddling a Pekinese on her lap. She said, "We've all got to pull our belts in a hole or two these days." I was fed up and told her, "Your words belie your appearance. That bloody dog's had more to eat today than I've had." There was a lot of argument and it ended in a row. My chair went over; papers and inkwells went flying and the dog was yapping and squealing. I was charged with common assault and got three months in Wormwood Scrubs. (The First Day on the Somme — Martin Middlebrook.) 

Such men often found their way into one or other of the organizations which were springing up with the aim of fighting the case of the ex-servicemen. At first these split on political lines, with one linking with the TUC and another - the grandly titled Comrades of the War - attracting ex-officers and therefore considered fit for a good Tory patriot to join. There was some rivalry between the organizations, which did not inspire any confidence in their ability to improve matters, as Europe slid into the first slump of the post-war years. 

It was to stem this despair, to sell the ex-servicemen the idea that there was more to the life of a returned hero than the dole queue and the Means Test, that a movement began to unite the opposing organizations. Leader of this movement was none other than Douglas Haig, the general who had organised that slaughter in July 1916, a man famous for his trust in God and who was ready to blame his soldiers for not being able to survive a simple walk across No Man's Land. Haig was still, then, wallowing in the glamour of the super returned warrior; for organizing the killing of all those men he had received a title and £100,000. He supported the move for unity among the ex-servicemen because he hoped this would be a stabilizing influence which would avert what he saw as the threat of social revolution. In May 1921 the British Legion was formed. 

The Legion declared — as it had to — that it was non-political, politics being associated with nasty squabbling over sectional interests at the cost of humane rescue work. It is not surprising, though, that they saw no inconsistency in adopting distinctly political attitudes — their patriotism, their servile royalism (they have always been unable to refer to any aristocrat without stringing out the full title and when mentioning royalty they never miss a Royal Highness or a Majesty), their assumption that capitalism is basically a decent society with just one or two problems which any well-intentioned person can sort out. 

In the General Strike the Legion advised its members " ... to come forward once more and offer their services in any way that may be needed by the authorities." This caused something of a row, since many of the strikers were ex-servicemen who had been driven into it by desperation at the conditions they had faced when they came back from the war. "Non-political" attitudes were also evident when the Legion sent a delegation to Germany in 1935. They saw the concentration camp at Dachau, where the Nazis were holding their political prisoners, and then they had a "quiet family supper" with Gestapo chief Himmler who was, they thought, "...an unassuming man anxious to do his best for his country." 

The first Poppy Day was in 1921, with the Legion hesitant about its chances of success, However it pulled in so much money that a year later the Legion were making the flowers themselves. They now have a factory in Richmond, Surrey, where disabled ex-servicemen turn out something like forty million of the flowers each year. Selling the poppies is the Legion's main source of income. 

Between the wars the effect of Poppy Day was immense. To begin with, it was always on the anniversary of Armistice Day — November 11, which often meant that the working day was interrupted by the two minutes' silence. Schools, factories, transport, offices — they all marked the occasion in this way and the sombre ritual became established. It was very powerful and it was no unusual sight, to see people in tears as the maroons sent out their melancholy booms into the cold mists of a November morning. 

But since the Second World War the occasion has been moved to the first Sunday in November, which has deprived it of much of its effect but which means that there is the minimum interruption of the steady exploitation of workers, ex-servicemen and all. As Poppy Day has declined, the British Legion has felt itself losing some of its relevance, its style of patriotism as much of a joke as Colonel Blimp, (There is, alas, no evidence that current attitudes are any less patriotic than those they have modified, that there is no longer a well of patriotism waiting to be tapped by the appropriate war propaganda, at the appropriate time.) But the Legion was slow to grasp this; it continued to live in its heyday of the Thirties. When eventually realization dawned, they made frantic efforts to catch up, with a campaign bearing all the signs of having been designed by a slick advertising agency. 

The collecting boxes were revamped into the plastic age, a dolly bird showed her legs beneath a tray of poppies and the slogan Wear Your Poppy With Pride was coined, aimed at the doubters who were wondering whether a CND march was a better use of their time. Last November the Cambridge University Rag Day decided to cut the Legion out of their list, on the grounds that it was an "unpopular charity with the students". At the time the Daily Telegraph, in a check on British universities, found this attitude to be widespread; the British Legion, with its image of old soldiers, has been replaced by more trendy appeals for community action trust funds. 

There was some anger in the Legion at this slight, which probably confirmed many members in their prejudices against the alleged laziness and ingratitude of students and there must have been many a call, over the glasses of bitter at local British Legion clubs, for the re-introduction of conscription to shorten these students' hair and teach them to act like men. They need not have worried for, in whatever shape, the ethos of rehabilitation lives on, with its implicit support for capitalism. This ethos interprets the casualties of capitalism as unfortunate, unavoidable accidents who, after the event, need to be patched up and helped to cope with their disabilities. It is difficult to imagine a more insidious bolster to capitalism than this avoidance of reality. For capitalism is not a succession of accidents; wars are not mistakes and poverty is only one segment of the many in capitalism's mosaic of social malaise. There are numerous organizations wearily trying to deal with separate problems in isolation from their common basis. They make appeals, they sell their paper flags and flowers and they claim their successes. They are convinced that they appeal to something they call our better nature when in reality they are a persuasion to avoid the issue. 

There were poppies growing in the fields of Flanders when the war started in 1914 and they clung on as the devastation became complete; they were in the ground and poking out of the soil of the trenches when the men went over the top that day in July 1916. But there is more to it than the popular symbolism, for the poppy is the colour of blood and it has its association with opiates. Those who buy a poppy are helping the workers to deaden their senses to the facts. War is not to be remembered with pride; it is to be feared and hated. Capitalism kills workers in their millions, then lays them out in regimented cemeteries, raises huge monuments to tell us they are dead. And all this to protect the position of the ruling class, to keep in being the very society which ensures the next bloodbath.

Ivan