Cooking the Books: Good capitalism, bad capitalism? (2011)

The Cooking the Books Column from the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“There is good and bad capitalism,” wrote Will Hutton in a recent article for the left-of-centre think-tank, the Policy Network

He argued that

“The left has to understand what capitalism properly managed can deliver: and then to demonstrate that the paradox is that only the left can provide the political tension that biases capitalism towards the good. While the right is the indiscriminate friend of all capitalism, the left’s mission is to hold capitalism’s feet to the Enlightenment fire – and thus make it work best to meet the ambitions and needs of ordinary people.”

This – apart from the philosophical stuff about the Enlightenment (the 18th century intellectual ferment that provided the theory for the American and French bourgeois revolutions) – is what the reformists of the old Labour Party always stood for in practice, despite their talk of socialism (in most cases, actually state capitalism). They believed that it was possible, through legislation and government intervention, to humanise capitalism, to smooth off its rough edges. Only that was not how they (or those of them interested in more than just getting into office and taking on the day-to-day running of capitalism) expressed it. They talked in terms of these measures being stepping stones to something beyond capitalism rather than creating a “good capitalism”.

What Hutton is doing is bringing the theory into line with the practice. As far as Ed Miliband is concerned, he’s preaching to the converted as the Labour leader is already on record as saying he wants “a capitalism that works for people and not the other way around” (Observer, 29 August).

“Bad capitalism”, according to Hutton, is “a universe of bloated incumbents, politically fixed markets, productive entrepreneurs forced to the sidelines and too little public investment. It cares little for the condition and risks of the people.” And good capitalism? It, says Hutton, has

“two key properties – a system of business ownership in which the returns to owners and managers is proportional to the risk being undertaken rather than winners taking all, along with politically and socially constructed institutions that help mitigate risk, thus allowing more to be taken.”

This is how capitalism according to its theorists is ideally supposed to function. But even if it did function in this way, there would still be minority class ownership, production for profit, and the division of society into rich and poor. In fact, for Hutton, there are also good capitalists and bad capitalists:

“Social democrats should properly distinguish between the deserving and undeserving rich.”

He then added, curiously:

“They should also be prepared to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving worker – and the deserving and undeserving poor. Marx made this point to the French socialists in his critique of the ‘Gotha Programme’.”

Hutton may know about the Enlightenment but he clearly doesn’t know about Marx. The fact that Gotha is in Germany should have been a hint that Marx was addressing German rather than French socialists. And there’s nothing in what Marx wrote there about deserving and undeserving workers. Hutton has presumably misinterpreted the labour-time voucher scheme Marx mentioned.

What Hutton fails to understand is that capitalism is based on the exploitation of wage-labour for surplus value and is governed by the imperative drive to accumulate more and more capital out of this. Which is why it can never be made to work “to meet the ambitions and needs of ordinary people” and why it can only work as a profit-making system in the interests of those who live off profits.

There is no such thing as a good capitalism.

Anthropology and politics (1999)

From the March 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the late 1920s and the 1930s a series of books by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead created a tremendous following among the general public. Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing up in New Guinea, and other blue Penguins still to be found on second-hand bookstalls thrilled generations of readers who wondered, after reading the accounts of free love among the people of the Pacific islands, whether they were getting their share. Then came spoilsports to interrupt the dream of what was reported to go on under the swaying palms and around the sleepy lagoons of Polynesia.

The whole thing was a hoax, these academics argued. Margaret Mead spent very little time in the Trobriand Islands, didn't bother to acquire the language, only learned what she wanted to learn, and her interpreters obliged by making it up.

There is a long tradition of hoaxes and forgeries in the human sciences. The fossil of Piltdown Man provided British archaeologists with something home-grown to offer against the French and Spanish with their sumptuous finds of Cro-Magnon people, their art and artefacts at Lascaux and Altmaira. By the time the Piltdown fossils had been identified as the skull of an ape mixed together with the skeleton of a not very prehistoric man the perpetrators were long dead.

The psychologist Sir Cyril Burt was discovered after his death to have produced some very original home-made statistics in his anxiety to prove that people are differently equipped with intelligence. He was one of a long line. A recent book The Bell Curve by another psychologist named Murray and an economist, continued this sterling work among social Darwinists to prove that the poor are poor because they are stupid. A sceptic might argue that if Natural Selection was a reliable hypothesis, then the most intelligent and robust should be sought among those who were products of the most testing circumstances—the historically poor.

These distortions mattered less in the nineteenth century before psychology was invented and anthropological research was carried on by chair-bound scholars like Sir James Frazer in his Golden Bough, which was a hotchpotch of classical mythology, and stories brought back from the Empire by missionaries like Dr Livingstone and army officers like General Pitt-Rivers. This cosy world was burst open by a new breed who took research out into the field. The Pole Bronislav Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands and brought back to the newly-founded London School of Economics his findings published as Argonauts of the Western Pacific. This was a materialist account of the daily lives of the people. He supplied the sex himself by getting his leg over the nubile Margaret Mead.

American anthropology of this time was dominated by the German scholar Franz Boas, much of whose work had been concerned with the American Indians. The Frenchman Marcel Mauss had also written about the native Americans of the north Pacific coast in his classic essay The Gift, but like the amazingly prescient, and home-grown Lewis Henry Morgan with his Ancient Society of a century earlier, he had come up with conclusions of primitive communism which were clearly unacceptable and mostly ignored in the US. An added disability for Morgan was his being taken up by Engels in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. It was not until the women's movement in the 1960s that either could be mentioned in academic circles.

Boas was much more interested in a cultural approach and pressed his student Miss Mead for details of the sex lives of her subjects. Her publisher was also pressing for juicy details which would guarantee big sales. The result was a succession of best-sellers which guaranteed her a mass following. Margaret Mead became a living embodiment of the Statue of Liberty. Enter the villains, in particular the Australian Derek Freeman, to the hisses of American academics.

The Australians are frequently anti-American, we are warned; although Margaret Mead "did provide misleading embellishments" to her accounts of native life, they did not materially affect their accuracy. Freeman, for his part charges her with being anti-evolutionary and stuck in a rut of cultural determinism. He pleads for an interactionist view of things. Her defenders counter that he is viewing 1920s' anthropology through the glasses of the 1980s with the benefit of hindsight.

If Americans are charged with reductionism, with ignoring the interaction between factors, then it would not be the first time that they laid themselves open. More recently than Margaret Mead, the biologist Garrett Hardin argued in The Tragedy of the Commons that medieval common land was destroyed by overgrazing until private property arrived to save it. But Hardin's unregulated free-grazing was as false an assumption as Mead's Polynesian lovelies being available to all-comers. There were rules, as wiser American counsels urged, also Karl Heinrich Marx:

"Men make their own history, but not just as they please. They do not choose the circumstances for themselves, but have to work upon circumstances as they find them, have to fashion the material handed down by the past."

Ken Smith 

Party Activities (1930)

From the February 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Head Office

The Sunday evening lectures that were commenced at Head Office in the autumn have continued through the winter with considerable success. These lectures are given mainly by members who are developing as speakers, and this offers a splendid opportunity for beginners. The questions and discussion that follow have been usually on a high level and cannot fail to provide valuable information to those present.

We would like to see more members in attendance.

WEST HAM. Meeting at Stratford.

In spite of very bad weather there was an interested audience of 250 at Stratford Town Hall on Sunday 12th, when our speaker dealt with the subject, "How to Get Socialism." Questions and opposition centred chiefly round the problem of doing something in order to check the worst effects of Capitalism. It was interesting to notice that even those who spoke in defence of the Labour Party policy were not prepared to speak enthusiastically about the Labour Government's actions. Instead of the usual Communist telling is that the workers must use armed force, the one Communist opponent who intervened did so in order to deny that the Communists hold any such view. Fortunately the speaker had available the report of the last Communist Congress where that policy was reiterated.

The members of the West Ham Branch who organised the meeting had used it as an opportunity of making the party more widely known. Some 3,000 handbills were given away and 1,000 specimen copies of the Socialist Standard were distributed prior to the meeting.

There was a collection of £2 6s. 9d., and literature was sold to the value of 9s. 4d.

EAST LONDON.

The East London Branch have been very active during the winter and are making good progress. Open-air propaganda in Victoria Park has been maintained and indoor public meetings have been held each month. In addition, the branch is conducting lectures in the branch room at 141, Bow Road, on alternate Fridays in the month.

Potential speakers have been discovered among new members, and are being given opportunities for training. Sales of literature are good.

BATTERSEA.

The monthly meetings run by Battersea branch in their branch room at Latchmere Road Baths have been a great success. Attendance has been good and considerable interest taken in the party point of view. Open-air propaganda has been maintained on Clapham Common, except in very bad weather conditions.

SHEFFIELD. A BRANCH FORMED.

Efforts to form a branch in Sheffield have met with success, and we are looking forward to early signs of propaganda activity in that neighbourhood. Those wishing to get in touch should communicate with E. Boden, 44, Edgedale Road, Millhouses, Sheffield.

EDINBURGH.

Edinburgh members are trying, in spite of difficulties, to make the party known and get a branch going. Not the least of the difficulties is the bad weather, which frequently prevents open-air meetings. When the weather improves their efforts are likely to meet with success. Those wishing to lend a hand should communicate with D. Lamond, at 15, Barclay Place.

GENERAL PROPAGANDA.

Regular open-air propaganda stations are being well maintained. Glasgow especially has been showing good results.

As so much depends on the Socialist Standard to link up the party with friends and sympathisers, and to keep our position before the public, members are urged to make special efforts to increase sales. One way of doing this, we would suggest, is to get subscribers for a period of one year (the cost is only 2s. 6d. per annum, post paid). If each member of the party made it his or her job to get only one or two subscribers annually, our sales would increase by leaps and bounds.

All shoulders to the wheel to forward the good work.

Propaganda Committee. 

Material World: Cars and Socialism (2013)

The Material World Column from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month’s Material World examined the terrible price that society pays for the motor car – in pollution and disease, ugliness and noise, social atomisation, injury and death. Does it follow that a socialist community is likely to decide to stop producing cars? How compatible would such a decision be with the idea of socialism as a world of material abundance and free access?

First point. Socialism will make a lot of car travel unnecessary. This applies especially to commuting. Many jobs to which people now commute will disappear with the abolition of money. Over time geographical patterns of habitation and production can be changed to enable most people to live close enough to their work not to need a car to get there.

We can expect new forms of public transport and the restoration of environment-friendly old forms such as trams and perhaps even canal barges (for non-perishable supplies). Sizeable urban areas can be made safe as pedestrian precincts. Some towns in Germany are already car-free and accessible only by rail.

Second point. Replacing petrol-guzzling motor cars by electric cars should reduce pollution from cars and their contribution to global heating, provided that the electricity comes from low-carbon sources (not from coal, as it often does at present).

Sharing systems

Third point. Free access to car transport as a service can be achieved without permanently assigning a car to each family or individual. In social terms, the current arrangement, with most cars sitting unused most of the time, is extremely wasteful. The total number of cars required can be minimised by relying on a pool of cars available through a network of depots.

When people want to go on a trip that cannot conveniently be made by public transport, they will borrow a car from the nearest depot. When they no longer need the car, they will return it to the network (not necessarily to the same depot). The depot staff will recharge, repair and maintain the vehicles and monitor their use.

Such arrangements already exist, though not for cars. The public lending library provides free access to books and cassettes. A free-access sharing system for bicycles was pioneered in Amsterdam by the Provos in the 1960s and now exists in Paris, Hangzhou and many other cities. In socialism sharing systems will expand to cover specialised tools and other things that people need to use occasionally.

In a free-access society people will develop a different psychology. They will view the goods being held for their use in public stores and depots as already belonging to them. As they will have free access to those things whenever needed, they will feel no urge to transfer stuff to their homes in order to make it “theirs”. Such pointless behaviour will appear pathological. People will feel a need for exclusive and permanent possession only of those things which have a special personal meaning for them.

Electric cars still a problem?

So it may be possible to provide free access to electric cars at a social cost lower than that now paid for motor cars. Much lower, perhaps, but still considerable. Switching to electric cars would not prevent road accidents. Electric cars also pose environmental problems of their own.

There are two types of electric car: one runs on a battery, the other is powered by a stack of hydrogen fuel cells. However, the manufacture of both devices depends on the availability of rare earth metals (REMs). These substances occur in very low-concentration ores from which they have to be separated out by means of acid baths and other processes, generating vast quantities of highly toxic waste.

The REM smelting plants in Inner Mongolia dump the waste into a large pool. From there the ‘radioactive sludge’ seeps into the soil and groundwater, destroying local agriculture and the health of local residents. A socialist society could not tolerate such poisoning of the environment, even in a single locality. No local community would voluntarily sacrifice itself to provide the world with certain raw materials. And the world administration would lack the coercive power to sacrifice a local community against its will.

So the waste would have to be reprocessed, stored in sealed vessels and buried in stable geological structures deep underground. This is not done under capitalism because it would cost too much. But even in socialism it will surely be impracticable to store more than a certain quantity of waste in this way, especially as it will be in addition to hundreds of thousands of tons of accumulated nuclear waste in urgent need of similar treatment.

That constraint will limit the amount of REMs extracted. And as REMs will be needed for many other uses (including energy-efficient fluorescent lamps and magnets for wind turbines) it will be necessary to set priorities for their allocation.

Free access to everything?

Thus, we cannot be sure whether socialist society will be able or willing to provide free access to car transport. The social cost associated with maintaining an adequate pool of electric cars may still be judged unacceptably high.

It’s doubtful that there could ever be free access to everything – to space travel, for instance. The world socialist community will have to decide, through its democratic institutions and procedures, what free access will and will not cover, and how to distribute things to which free access cannot be provided.

Stefan

The "Labour Movement" (1967)

Book Review from the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Left edited by Gerald Kaufman (Anthony Blond, 18s.)

This book is a collection of essays by supporters of the Labour Party, mainly journalists, on what is called "the labour movement": constituency Labour parties, trade unions, the co-ops, the left-wing press, the "fringe left" and so on. The essays are of varying quality and interest.

In recent years Labour has shed its old confused ideology (trade unionism, nationalism, anti-imperialism) and become "a classless, radical, pragmatic Party". Roy Hattersley, now a junior Minister, describes the changeover which was completed in the years after the 1959 defeat: the determination to get power at all costs; the jettisoning of old slogans because they didn't appeal to voters; the employment of public relations techniques to catch votes.

Efforts were concentrated on what came to be known as 'target voters', that tiny percentage of the electorate whose decision to vote for one party or the other (and whose decision to vote at all) can be changed by persuasion and propaganda. Their habits, their hopes, and their aspirations were projected as the keynotes of Labour's campaign.

Could Labour's opportunism be stated more frankly?

Over 70 per cent of Labour's money comes from the Unions which raise the money through a political levy. All members of affiliated trade unions pay this levy unless they can be bothered to contract out. Many don't bother. Many, perhaps most, don't know they are financing the Labour Party (and organisations like Anti-Apartheid and the British Committee for Peace in Vietnam). In other words, much of Labour's money is got by subterfuge. Yet one writer discussing this issue on connection with the co-ops, tries to contrast the Tory and Labour attitude to the matter:

Though the Tory Part has never shown qualms in accepting money from companies who give their individual shareholders no option in the matter, it would not be in accordance with the democratic principles of the Labour Party to act in the same cavalier manner.

This is hypocritical to say the least. If Labour is so concerned with democratic principle on this matter, why did they, so soon after getting power in 1945, replace contracting-in by contracting out? If they are so sure that no-one is giving money to their party through apathy, ignorance or fear, why don't they restore contracting-in? Or, are they afraid of what might happen to their funds?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain gets a brief mention in an essay on "the fringe left" by Llew Gardner. Gardner has the illusion, obviously inherited from his days as a member of the so-called Communist Party, that:

Involved in a strike, an SPGB member is likely to stand up to tell his fellow workers that their wage claim is pointless and that they must unite to destroy the capitalist system.

While it is true that Socialists always draw attention to the ownership of the means of production by a privileged class, the Socialist Party does not say that strikes are pointless. We have always urged workers to keep up the struggle for higher wages and better working conditions all the time, under Labour as well as Tory governments, in war-time as well as peace-time. In fact, no other party has given such unqualified and consistent support to this economic side of the class struggle. Gardner's lie is particularly insolent from a member of the strike-breaking Labour Party who now writes for the Daily Express.

And talking of insolence, how dare the publishers ask 18 shillings for a mere 180 pages?

Adam Buick 

Is Bernard Shaw a Judge of Socialism? (1941)

From the April 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

Commenting on Mr. W. J. Brown's broadcast "Is Hitler a Socialist," Mr. Emrys Hughes, editor of Forward (March 15th) takes Mr. Brown to task and warns him against underestimating Hitler. Mr. Hughes does not disagree with Mr. Brown's proof that Hitler is not Socialist: "Of course Hitler is no more a Socialist than is Winston Churchill, and Brown had no difficulty in disposing of that delusion." So far, so good, but Mr. Hughes backs up his opinion by calling in Bernard Shaw's recent opinion of Hitler. But is there any reason to suppose that either Hughes or Shaw is competent to recognise a Socialist when he sees one? Mr. Hughes, it is, who for years has told the workers that nationalisation or State capitalism is Socialism. Indeed, it is highly probable that Mr. Hughes is one of those in the Labour Party who told Churchill that he was supporting Socialism just after the last war, when Churchill was reported to have spoken in favour of nationalisation of the railways. Mr. Hughes is certainly a bad guide and Shaw is even worse. Writing in the Sunday Dispatch (March 9th, 1941), under the head "The Amazing Winston Churchill," Shaw discovers that Ramsay MacDonald was at one time a "revolutionary Socialist," and praises Mussolini and Hitler (along with Lenin and the ex-Kaiser) for their contempt of the Parliamentary system and for the "revolutionary social changes" they brought about.

The truth is that Shaw, whatever merit he possesses in other directions, and in spite of much pertinent criticism of capitalism, is a most untrustworthy guide to Socialism. Before Mr. Hughes again advises anyone to take Shaw's advice on Socialism, or on Hitler, he should take to heart the following statement made by Shaw in an interview given to the Sunday Referee (October 2nd, 1938):—

You know what I think of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini—two  highly capable revolutionary and proletarian leaders, who are giving their people as big a dose of Socialism as they can stand.

It looks as if Shaw's answer to the question "Is Hitler a Socialist?" would be: "Yes he is, he is a Socialist like Churchill, Lenin, the Kaiser, and Ramsay MacDonald.

Edgar Hardcastle

Some Notes On Party History (1954)

From the May 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

The meetings of the Provisional Executive Committee were concerned with all the arduous spade work involved in starting an organisation literally from scratch. The Party members had nothing but knowledge and enthusiasm; no office, no literature, no meeting places, no organisational system and no funds. All the plans had to be made and the bricks gathered to build a structure that would serve as a jumping-off ground. There were few members with time to do the work; all committees and sub-committees were made up by ringing the changes on members from the same small group. In the circumstances what they accomplished was astonishing, and a tribute to their energy.

For a long time there was no central office and the E.C. used to meet fortnightly in a room at the Communist Club in Charlotte Street.

At the first meeting of the Executive Committee, after the Inaugural Meeting, it was reported that the following branches had been formed: Islington, Battersea, Wood Green and Paddington. A committee of four was appointed to organise the membership into branches, and another committee of three to consider and report on the question of a Party journal.

As the new party had come into existence without literature of its own a list of pamphlets was drawn up and sent to branches with the recommendation that they confine themselves to this literature for the present.

The E. C. were not happy about some of the pamphlets on the list but they had a limited choice. Members and speakers were complaining about how frustrating it was to hold meetings and have no literature to distribute explaining the Party's views. The titles of some of these pamphlets sound rather curious now. Here is the list: —

"Socialism and the Worker," George.
"Wage, Labour and Capital," Marx.
"Socialism and Radicalism," Aveling.
"No Compromise," Liebneckt.
"The Social Revolution", Kautzky.
"How I became a Socialist," Morris
"Jones Boy, " Spokeshave.
"Commune of Paris," Marx.
"Socialism and Drink," Russell Smart.
"The Meaning of Socialism," Widdup.

A Committee was appointed to draw up a Manifesto to the working class of Great Britain and a Manifesto to the Second International; Reeves were to be approached to see if they would dispose of the copyright of the Communist Manifesto. In due course Reeves replied that the Communist Manifesto was still in print and they had no intention of selling the copyright.

It was decided that Party letter headings must have the Object of the Party printed on them but the selection of address to be used as Central Office was left to the General Secretary. The latter decision was unavoidable because the address had to be wherever the General Secretary was lodging for the time being. As he was almost penniless he had a habit of moving frequently.

Finally Kautzky was to be approached about permission to translate the Erfurt Programme. We will have more to say about this later.

At the second meeting of the Executive, on the 25th June, arrangements were made for a series of mass meetings to be held in different parts of London for the purpose of raising funds and making the Party known. The General Secretary was further instructed to write for delegates credentials for the forthcoming Congress of the Second International to be held in Amsterdam. It was taken for granted that the Party would automatically affiliate to this body. Later developments brought about a reversal of this attitude.

A Resolution was also carried at this meeting that the special meeting of members to discuss the attitude to trade unions to be held on Saturday, July 9th, and that only those who had signed the Party's Declaration of principles be admitted to the meeting. The Special Meeting was held at the Food Reform Restaurant, Furnival Street, E.C. There was a considerable conflict of views on the attitude to be adopted towards trade unions, and the meeting adjourned without coming to any definite decision. The E.C. was requested to arrange a further meeting. As the trade union question was a thorny subject for the first two subject for the first two years of the Party's history, before a definite attitude was agreed upon, we will consider it at some length in later notes.

The International Socialist Bureau was the body that conducted the business of the Second International between Congresses. As the Bureau declined to recognise the Party a letter was sent to H. M. Hyndman and H. Quelch, as representatives of that body in this country, requesting them to use their influence in the direction of securing due recognition of the Party by the International Congress.

Eventually the Credential Forms arrived, and then the fun began; the problem of finding members who could make the journey, and raising money for expenses. J. Kent was approached to represent the Party, on the understanding that all or part of his expenses would be paid. He replied that he was willing if part of his expenses was paid. Money was collected and sent on to him, but he subsequently wrote that he could not travel as the amount subscribed did not help much. This letter came before the Executive meeting of the 15ht August. Lehane (the General Secretary) reported that immediately he received Ken's letter he proceeded to the address of the Party Treasurer, R. Elrick, who advanced the sum necessary to cover the expenses. Lehane made an appointment by wire with Kent for the following day, Friday the 12th August, and handed him £2 18s. which, with the sum of £1 11s. 4d. previously collected, made up £4 10s. in all. Kent then undertook to proceed to Amsterdam the following morning, The state of Party finance may be gathered from the difficulty in raising such a small amount as 4 10s. Part of it came from a collection at the Special Meeting of members.

A few days later Kent notified the Executive that he had arrived in Amsterdam and that A. Pearson, who was paying his own expenses, had turned up and joined him as a delegate of the Party.

The report the two delegates brought back from the Congress was a shock to the members and fundamentally altered the Party's attitude to the Second International. At first attempts were made by correspondence with the Bureau to get our views on the unsatisfactory state of affairs put before the parties affiliated to the Congress. The basis of the complaints was (1) That representation at the Congress was chaotic and (2) That delegates from organisation with no socialist basis were admitted to Congress.

At the first General Meeting of the Party on the 18th September the following resolution was carried unanimously:

"That the E. C. be instructed to prepare a statement of the position in Great Britain, go into the whole question of representation at the International Socialist Congress and carry on an agitation throughout the world for the purpose of clearing the air of confusion regarding the true basis of the Socialist Movement."

The E. C. carried out the instructions contained in this resolution as far as they could. The January 1905 number of the SOCIALIST STANDARD contained copies of correspondence with the Bureau. The front page had a message "To the Socialist Working-class" in English, French and German which, after a general criticism of past Congresses, contained the following:

"The Socialist Party of Great Britain is strengthened in this opinion by facts well known here which show clearly the principles animating many who took part in the recent congress at Amsterdam. Our delegates thereto found such organisations as the Independent Labour Party, the Labour Representation Committee, the Social-Democratic Federation, and the Fabian Society claiming and obtaining admission as Socialist organisations. Thus were seen the defenders of capitalism, the upholders of Child-slavery, the friends of Compromise and Reform, and the catspaw of the Bourgeois reaction generally masquerading as Revolutionists, prostituting the name and spirit of Socialism, and confusing the workers on questions of vital importance"
"With the object of placing future International Congresses on a definite Socialist basis, and securing proper and proportionate representation of all bona fide Socialist Parties thereat, the S.P.G.B. is preparing a memorandum for the consideration of the International Bureau and the Socialist Parties affiliated in the hope that measures will be adopted to as far as possible prevent the recurrence of past confusions and place the working-class of the world on a united and revolutionary platform."

The Executive Committee reported on their efforts to the first Conference in April 1905. The Conference then passed the following resolution:—

"That only Socialist Organisations recognising the class struggle in theory and practice should be represented at the International Socialist Congress.
"That disputes between the various parties in each country as to the genuineness of their respective organisations be settled by Congress itself."

After further correspondence with the Bureau we eventually withdrew from the International as our points were not conceded. From that time on a critical attitude developed towards prominent champions of social democracy and we had, at times, to dissociate ourselves from some of their actions. In 1906 we called A. Bebel to book for a telegram he sent to "Reynolds" hailing the Liberal victory as a triumph for the progressive forces. Bebel, along with Karl Liebknecht, had been an outstanding figure in the German Social Democratic Party during the last quarter of the 19th century. The correspondence we had with him on the subject occupied six columns of the SOCIALIST STANDARD in 1906. The STANDARD was then double its present size.

In the next contribution we will come to an important landmark in the Party's history; the production of the first number of the SOCIALIST STANDARD in September 1904.

Gilmac.

(To be continued.)

Buying the baby (1988)

Film Reviews from the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Babies, it would seem, are big business. Having first tried to sell us the glossy lifestyle of the young, upwardly mobile careerist, unencumbered by little more than a filofax, two recent films (and others are on the way) are now trying to humanise the stereotype with the addition of a baby or two.

Diane Keaton's latest film, Baby Boom, is about a successful young businesswoman who is suddenly landed with a baby — not her own — and discovers that life a s high powered management consultant is more difficult when nappies and bottles have to be combined with brief cases and business meetings. When ultimately faced with the choice between baby and career, not surprisingly the oh-so-cute baby wins. Keaton leaves Manhattan for a dilapidated farm house in Vermont. That is in the autumn. By spring she has not only fallen in love with the local vet (Sam Shephard), but she's also turned a recipe for apple sauce into a million dollar baby food business. A typical story of life as a single parent.

Three Men and a Baby offers us essentially the same kind of story. Three men-about-town, living in a shared apartment, have a baby dumped on them which messes up their lives in all kinds of predictable, if faintly amusing ways. But again, sentimentality will out. Despite all the complications the baby causes, they can't part with her.

Apart from the presence of a baby, there are a couple of other features that these two films have in common. Firstly, there's the manner in which the heroes/heroine come by the baby in the first place. In both cases the child is simply dumped upon them. In much the same way that soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty expand their cast by one of the main characters suddenly discovering that they have a child/parent/spouse that they didn't previously know about. How can these people so carelessly lose relatives all the time? In Baby Boom this part of the story is particularly implausible. We are supposed to believe that Diane Keaton "inherits" the baby from distant cousins. The implication, I suppose, is that a woman in her position would not actually choose to have a child and so has to have one thrust upon her in order that she can discover the maternal feelings that lurk just below the surface. Why they didn't just resort to the stork or the gooseberry bush, I don't know. It would have been about as believable as "inheriting" a child. 

Secondly, there's the rather curious idea that, having tried to sell us the life-style that goes with being young, rich, independent, successful and so on, we should now "buy the baby" to complete the package. In other words, having been kitted out with the executive brief case, the designer clothes, the Porsche and the penthouse, the next step is to acquire the baby as a means of humanising what is otherwise seen as a soulless existence.

Buried somewhere underneath all that gooey sentimentality there's probably a positive message of sorts, namely, that human relationships are important. But these two films are cute, not incisive. They address a tiny minority of people who have pursued a certain kind of life-style at the expense of all else. The majority of us didn't need to be told that human relationships are important — many people in capitalism have little else of value in their lives — nor that children are simultaneously frustrating, demanding, messy and also a source of joy and fulfilment. Or maybe I'm being too generous and the truth is much more simple: that films about cute kids make money.

Janie Percy-Smith  

Dystopia (2012)

Book Review from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Intrusion by Ken MacLeod. (Orbit 2012)

The science-fiction author John Wyndham was known for his novels about the “comfy apocalypse”, where great catastrophes would wipe out all the “wrong” sort of people and lead to a renewed existence.  Ken MacLeod presents us with what could be called a comfy dystopia, where by intricate layers of pressure and compulsion a government forces people to do what it judges to be in their best interest - whether they want to or not.

The novel focuses on Hope, a woman who refuses to take “the fix” – a genetic medicine pill designed to correct any genetic defects in her unborn infant.  Everyone agrees it is in the best interest of the child and totally safe.  Yet, she still refuses, and refuses to give reasons for her refusal.  The “social and free” society cannot tolerate such a refusal in ways that are reminiscent of the totalitarian village of sixties TV show ‘The Prisoner’ (where Number Six refuses to say why he resigned from espionage).

The novel details the way in which people implement their own imprisonment (placing cameras throughout their own homes to protect them from accusations of abusing their children, for example) and how their compliance is used against them.  It is a skilful account of the ways in which surveillance technology and the erosion of civil liberties could be used to control people.  Grimly, it also shows how a sense of solidarity and of wanting to do well by our fellows can be used against us: time and again Hope is urged to comply for the sake of others, for her doctor’s insurance ratings, for the other kids at school and, ultimately, for the child in her womb.

What makes the story particularly chilling is that it is so mundane, the incidents so everyday.  There are no grand heroics or statements of high ideals, there are simply people trying to live under conditions of a claustrophobic paternalism.  It deploys a touch of SF magic, though, to suggest, ambivalently, that the outcome of such submission and control might be a form of civilisation-ending nihilism.  

The tale roots itself in contemporary preoccupations, sometimes taking a reductio ad absurdum, slippery-slope view to suggest, for example, a future fear of fourth-hand smoking.  It illustrates how, when the cheapening of the means of policing is coupled with populist demands for someone to ‘do something’ and for information to be used against people whether or not they are formally convicted, can lead to levels of control undreamt of by the old totalitarian states.  In this, it shows how technology is a dual-edged tool that can enslave as well as liberate.

PJS

Man's degradation (1963)

From the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Degradation! What degradation?"

The neatly-dressed grey-haired woman at the edge of the lunch-time crowd at Tower Hill had seemed genuinely surprised at the use of such a word by our speaker to describe her  condition and that of the other office workers listening to him. Engrossed in his topic, he had not heard her interjection; she had not pressed her point; and so it had been lost.

The scene came back to my mind some weeks later, when I found myself with time to kill in a suburb of Nottingham. I had called in the morning at the house of a comrade—only to find that he was out. As it was a lengthy bus-ride back to the centre of the city and I had no other commitments, I had decided to await his return. The local branch of the Public Library was in a pleasant, spacious building, furnished with some imagination, and it was well stocked. An hour or two passed in browsing.

I had already had a cup of coffee and a sandwich at the only cafe in the district, and did not in any case feel like a hot meal on this warm summer day. I decided to buy some fruit and sit outside somewhere in the sunshine to eat it. I was soon looking for a small park or road side seat with perhaps a patch of grass around it. Half an hour later I was still looking, having walked up and down almost every street I could see.

I began to realise that I had been brought face to face with a fact which the everyday familiarity of the suburban scene normally causes one to overlook: that with rare exceptions, suburbs have nowhere for the passing stranger to sit. They have parks, commons, recreation grounds, yes—but these are usually some distance from the centre of the district, and are provided for specifically recreational purposes. The neighbourhood as such makes no provision for the stranger. If he is lucky he may find a Public Library in which to pass his time; otherwise he must pay for the space he occupies, by buying something to eat or drink.

That this is a fact I was able to confirm several times over in other parts of the country; and anyone can see it in most of the suburbs he knows. But it is more than a curious fact; and it is certainly no coincidence. We have all around us, the first kind of human community in history which makes no collective provision for the traveller. The village has its green, with a seat or two; the most primitive and the most transient of past human settlements considered it a general duty to greet a stranger (unless he were believed to be hostile) and offer him hospitality. How it is that this small but age-old community function has been able to disappear almost unnoticed from the typical dwelling-area of the affluent society?

The answer can only be that these areas are not communities at all, in any but a shadowy and nominal sense. The local-authority housing estate or the collection of private "desirable residences" is not built for human beings to live together in; it is an aggregation of living-boxes for the purveyors of labour-power—places to and from which they can be shuttled before or after making their energies available to the owners of capital.

So conditioned are workers to capitalism that they have come to accept this state of affairs as normal and natural, and can usually think of improvement in their mode of living only in terms of getting a bigger box with a bigger bit of land around it. The house-builders, concerned only with the profit to be obtained from their operations, find this all to their advantage: far more money is to be made from putting up mazes of indistinguishable dwelling-units for the Council, or from selling the featureless semi-detached to the socially isolated white-collar worker, than could possibly accrue from creating a well-planned community with adequate amenities. The social expense, in loneliness, neurosis and the sense of leading a meaningless, frustrating existence, does not hit the builder's pocket or affect the Councillor's political security.

The woman in the Tower Hill crowd probably lived in just such an area; yet she did not see that it involved her in a degradation of human existence. It is just possible that she had an enjoyable, useful, meaningful job; but if she did she was fortunate. The degradation of having to devote our talents and our powers of concentration to boring or ultimately futile activities was presumably no more to her than the inevitable daily round of everyone's life.

This is, perhaps, the ultimate degradation itself of the working class; that they are induced to believe that the kinds of lives they lead, the houses they live in, the clothes they wear, the work they do and the way they travel to and from it, represent the best that any reasonable person could hope for. Yet it is at best a pitiful, and at worst an insulting mockery of the potential of human nature and wealth and society, this life that we are condemned to live; we could sweep it all away if only we could see that it has ceased to be in any sense necessary.

So I mused, trudging up and down the streets with my bag of apples and oranges. Eventually I did find somewhere I could sit and eat them—on a stone in a graveyard. The moral was all too plain: only the dead occupy space they don't pay for. Only for them is there no degradation.

P. R. Collins  

The Left: Once more boring from within (1977)

From the January 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Left" is pidgin-political for reformers babbling of green fields, syndicalists, and advocates of state capitalism. Socialists reject it as a label because we want none of those things, and there is one other conspicuous difference. No Socialist would touch the Labour Party with a barge-pole; the "left" fall over one another getting into it.

In the past two or three years there have been repeated alarms about the activities of allegedly Marxist (usually Trotskyist) groups in the Labour Party. On one hand they agitate for new programmes of reform; on another, they are said to plot within constituency parties to get rid of MPs who do not suit them. in November 1975 the Labour national agent presented a report called Entryist Activities to the party's national executive, defining "entryism" as "a decision by an outside organization ineligible for affiliation to the Labour Party that its members shall enter as individuals, to carry out activities as directed by the outside body". In the first week of December 1976 The Times had a series of articles on Trotskyists in the Labour Party, and Callaghan and Wilson made speeches denouncing "infiltrators who seek to take over local parties and unseat respected Labour MPs" (Sunday Times, 5th December).

These reactions are revealing in themselves. To the Labour leaders and their naïve supporters, the "left" are bent on socialist revolution; and that is the last thing the Labour Party wants. The Sunday Times report quoted Callaghan as saying "the most hateful slogans he had heard recently were: What do we want? Everything! When do we want it? Now!'" A party which lives on promises of a little jam tomorrow is bound to object to demands like that. Nevertheless, some vital questions are raised. Should democracy permit wreckers to have their way? What would happen of the "left" became the majority in the Parliamentary Labour Party? Is it likely?

Controlling Influence

From the time the "new left" began to form, about 1960, "entryism" was a widely talked-of tactic. The Labour Party has maintained a list of proscribed organizations, i.e. groups and parties which are refused affiliation with it. Technically, a member of one of them may be refused admission or expelled if his membership can be proved; however, some "left" groups  have no formal membership — the "Militant" group which is said to be specially active in provincial Labour Parties presents itself as a collection of devotees of a weekly paper.

Such a situation creates a problem in voluntary organizations. Each exists for a particular purpose which its constitution is framed to further. If a section with unacceptable ideas finds its way into membership it can make use of the procedures and rules to further its own purposes instead. As a parallel, the Socialist Party of Great Britain does not admit to membership people who hold religious beliefs, are interested in our anti-war case more than in Socialism, or think we should join forces with other parties. If such people joined, it would be possible for them eventually to out-vote the rest of the membership and alter the purpose of the SPGB. It is absurd to suppose that they should be admitted and permitted in the name of "democracy", democracy is related to a given framework.

But the prospects of "left" groups being able to take charge of the Labour Party are remote. That they have been successful so far in campaigns against MPs in two constituencies — Prentice in Newham North East and Sandelson in Hillingdon — chiefly reflects apathy and non-participation by other members. However, the fact is that constituency parties do not run the Labour Party. They are only a small fraction of the membership; though they provide half the representation at conferences they have about one-sixth of the votes (the remainder being in the hands of the trade unions). In 1930 Beatrice Webb recorded a conversation in which her husband, Sidney Webb, said

that the constituency parties were frequently unrepresentative groups of nonentities dominated by fanatics and cranks, and extremists, and that if the block votes of the trade unions were eliminated it would be impracticable to continue to vest the control of policy in Labour Party Conferences.

This is quoted in Robert McKenzie's British Political Parties (1964), and McKenzie adds: "there can be little doubt that he accurately reflects the conviction of the great majority of the parliamentary leaders then and now. The conference could not be accorded even nominal authority in determining the long-range goals of the party if it were subject to the overriding influence of the constituency party delegates. But the parliamentary leaders have little to fear from the party conference as long as they retain the confidence (and the block vote support) of the traditionally moderate and conservative leadership of the big trade unions." This contrasts with the claim made by a Labour Party organizer, quoted in The Times (2nd Dec. 1976) of an "immediate threat" in "Trotskyist-inspired resolutions" put forward by constituency parties at the annual conference.

Shapeless Fringe
Webb was a member of the second Labour Government, and he was referring mainly to the ILP which disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932. The ILP's militant slogans at that period have a familiar ring today — "Socialism in Our Time" and "The Living Wage Policy". In disaffiliating the ILP believed it would hold the bulk of its MPs and local members, particularly as the Labour Party was in disarray in 1932. However, only a handful of the 156 MPs who were nominally members of the ILP remained with it, and the great majority of constituency members rejected it for the Labour Party. A "left-wing" confrontation would produce the same result today. Indeed, it is plain that the infiltrators are in the Labour Party because they see no prospect of success standing on their own feet. The election results for International Socialists, International Marxist Group, Workers' Revolutionary Party etc, have not alarmed anyone except their wealthy supporters who provide the money.

What do they hope to achieve by infiltration? "Left" is a muddled, imprecise term covering many ideas and motives. The groups working inside the Labour Party are not at all united in their aims. IS and IMG have been called "middle class centrists" by the WRP, who want Labour on power so that Labour "will be exposed and will be driven out" (1974 Election Manifesto). Andy Bevan, the Trotskyist Labour Youth Officer, wants only a different policy — "a programme that can really show the way forward to the Labour Party" (TV interview reported in Sunday Times, 28th Nov. 1976). In May 1972 a "left" Labour agent debating with an SPGB representative at Canterbury asserted that "revolutionaries" would take over the Labour Party, then get it while in power to engineer an economic crisis of which they could take advantage. (He was a Labour candidate in the last general election, and the crisis took place without the Government even trying.)

The demands made by the "left" are sadly familiar: soaking the rich, nationalization, the right to this and that. A letter to The Times in 7th December from the editor of the Militant paper protested against a "scare campaign" and said:

What frightens you and the class you represent is that the Labour Party rank and file should have the temerity seriously to wish to implement Clause IV, part 4 of Labour's constitution, which calls for the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy. Militant has concretized this part of Labour's programme with its demand for the taking over of the woo or so monopolies which control 80-85 per cent of the economy, with the compensation to the shareholders on the basis of proven need, under democratic workers' control and management.

Let The Times and some of its readers be frightened for the right reason, at any rate — not that these demands have anything to do with Socialism, but that they seek to run capitalism with a new degree of ineptitude.

"Left-wing" leaders with political power are in the same position as "right-wing" ones: they have to meet the realities of managing capitalism. On 16th November a group of Labour MPs who call themselves the Social Democratic Alliance pointed a finger at 33 other Labour MPs who, they allege, are under "Marxist" influence. In most of those cases the likelihood is that the MPs are no more than idiots who court popularity as bold radicals. Possibly others are secret members of Trotskyists groups. But what are the preoccupations of all of them now? Trying to cure unemployment by reviving those sections of industry which need it; looking for a formula to check inflation; improving the balance of trade — in short, doing the best they can for British capitalism.

Each generation of radicals believe there has been a sell-out by the previous generation. Most of the 1923 "wild men of the Clyde" became respectable establishment figures. Michael Foot, who in 1966 was reported in The Observer as saying he would teach his grandchildren to say "I am an anarchist", is now Labour's Deputy Leader and opposes "extremists" on the grounds that party unity is essential. What is not realized is that the let-down comes at the beginning, not the end. Early Labour leaders who were aware of the nature of Socialism put it aside in favour of getting mass support quickly. Some at least of the "left" today reject Socialism for the same reason, and because of the excitements offered by the militant scene. Yet, despite the professions made, the only alternative to Socialist politics is capitalist politics. If he makes that choice, the "extremist" of today is already the trimming statesman of tomorrow; if it comes to it, the possessing class will make terms with a Trotskyist state as with a Tory one.

The appearance of a fresh political faction enables the press and party leaders to try to impress on the working class that who runs capitalism is all-important. It is not. The one issue that matters is exchanging capitalism for Socialism; besides ending the problems of society as we know it, that will make democracy in the widest sense a reality.

Robert Barltrop

Ballot-Box or Baton? (1922)

From the April 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

An "Unemployed Demonstration" is one of the most saddening spectacles that civilisation can provide. Most of the industrial towns have their daily débâcle in front of the Union, but the futility of their actions does not seem to strike the demonstrators; in fact, all that seems to strike them is the policeman's baton. The humanitarian must turn aside in pity at the sight of a few hundred, or maybe thousand, starving and physically weakened individuals parading their distress and wretchedness up and down the streets, to be eventually sent scampering down back streets and alleys at the word of command from a police inspector. If only it were an equal combat, one would not feel its injustice quite so much. But there you have it. The master class takes the best from amongst the working class, feeds them and clothes them, strengthens them physically, enslaves them mentally by exercise and military discipline, and uses them to protect its property against the turbulence of the dispossessed. Indeed, so imbued with Capitalist notions are these working-class protectors of their masters' property that the authorities do not even fear that they will shirk the task of clubbing their mates and fellow-townspeople into obedience. This was exemplified a little while back, when Scotch soldiers were detailed to quell disturbances in Glasgow! As for the demonstrators, they play into Master's hands in just the right fashion. They don't know anything about the Capitalist wirepullers but "Here's a policeman; let's heave a brick at him!" Thus we get the working class busy fighting each other and the Capitalist maintaining his hold on the wealth that he steals from them!

Yet the remedy is so simple, and the method more simple still. The cause of poverty is the ownership of the means and instruments of wealth production by the Capitalist Class. The remedy, therefore, is to dispossess that class of its ownership. It maintains its ownership by virtue of its political control. Its economic domination would cease the moment that the working class captured the political machinery that sends the police and the soldiers against them. Curiously enough, the working class never seem to discover that it is they who gratuitously give the Capitalist Class the power to enslave them every time they go to the ballot-box! It is obvious, then, that the method of recapturing political control is going back to the ballot-box and voting for Socialism! It doesn't hurt as much as a whack on the head from a baton, anyway!

Stanley H. Steele

Observations: Tales from Africa (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once upon a time (in August 1871 to be precise) the German Karl Mauch explored southern Africa and found what he thought were King Solomon's Mines and one of the homes of the Queen of Sheba. Having landed on the east coast in 1865, his original intention was to explore and map the territory. He did indeed produce the first complete map of the Transvaal and in 1866 was one of the first white men to discover gold. However he decided to forego prospecting to continute exploration "to add honour to the name of the German nation".

When, after many dangers and delays he reached the impressive walls and ruins of the ancient fort of Great Zimbabwe he was, based on old chronicles and knowledge at the time, entitled to think he had indeed found them. Later visitors to the site confirmed, admittedly with scant evidence to back them up, that although possibly not King Solomon's Mines or the home of the Queen of Sheba, the ruins had definitely not been been built by black people.

In 1902 R. M. Hall cleared the site of undergrowth and started digging. He found many items which, because, unlike previous explorers, he was a local resident, he recognised to be of African origin and similar to those still in regular use. Nevertheless he put the evidence aside also to claim non-African origins.

Shortly after Hall, David Randall-MacIver, a young archaeologist, one of the first to be properly so called, worked on the site. In the trenches he dug up he found many layers of artifacts of definite African origin and wrote: "It is impossible to resist the conclusion that the people who inhabited the 'Eliptical Temple' when it was being built belonged to tribes whose arts and manufactures were indistinguishable from those of the modern Makalanga (Shona) . . . These dwellings are unquestionably African in every detail". Digging in 1929, Gertrude Caton-Thompson found the layout and remains were so similar to those of still existing villages as to leave no doubt about the African origins of Great Zimbabwe.

These conclusions did not suit white settler politicians who had argued that the "proof" that white people had lived and traded there hundreds of years ago entitled them to their current superior colonial position. The myth continued to be taught as history in Rhodesian schools and Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines was required reading. Tourist posters featured the Queen of Sheba at Great Zimbabwe and films depicted white "superior" beings performing strange ceremonies in front of suitably prostrated blacks.

As late as the 1970s, shortly before a backward capitalist state changed from white to black rulers, broadcasts and television, while admitting that Great Zimbabwe had possibly not been built by whites, would not concede to the evidence that it had been built by indigenous blacks. It would not do to admit that supposedly inferior people had, so long ago, been able to build every bit as skilfully as those in "civilised" parts of the world.

Of course this is not an isolated example of the shading, if not total fabrication of history. Stories of Belgian babies impaled on German bayonets were concocted to encourage men to kill and be killed in the 1914-18 war; misinformation now admitted to have been given out daily in World War II; patriotic claptrap for the Falklands; biased history taught in almost every secondary school throughout Europe. Unemployment figures are massaged before being issued by the government. Those representing the ruling class will always try to bamboozle the rest of us into accepting conditions favourable to the rulers' minority interests. Forewarned is forearmed: it behoves us to regard with utmost scepticism information put about by those whose interest it is to maintain the status quo.

Eva Goodman 

Was Kinnock always a Tory wet? (1991)

From the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Restless is hardly the word to describe members of the Labour Party as they contemplate Neil Kinnock's abandonment of the left-wing ideas which he professed in those far-off days when he was coming up through the ranks of the party. They are unlikely, however, to be consoled by one of our readers who thinks that they— and we—have got it wrong because Kinnock has not changed: he was never a left-winger in the first place. E. H. Evans, of Newport, Gwent, writes:

You keep on repeating that Neil Kinnock used to be a left-wing firebrand. Can you prove that? I knew Neil 30 years ago. In fact, he used to be my tutor in TU weekend schools in Porthcawl, and I never had the impression that he was a "leftwinger". Far from it; apart from the fact that he was a member of CND, he was always on the so-called "right" of the trade union and Labour movement. This so-called "left" myth is nothing but a Tory plot, supported by the media. How can a person be a leftwinger when he supports and admires Clem Attlee? Unless you can supply proof you'd better let this fairy tale rest.

So what are the facts? Was Kinnock a left-winger or is it all got up by the Tories and the media—and the Socialist Standard? To begin with, it is not unusual for left-wingers to admire Attlee for the huge programme of nationalisation and other measures his government pushed through. And, of course, Kinnock is also an admirer of Nye Bevan, who for much of his political life (until he too outraged his supporters on the left) was a left-wing scourge of the Attlee government. Kinnock contributed a foreward to a reprint of Bevan's book In Place of Fear in 1978. After you have hacked away the dense verbiage (not for nothing is Kinnock known as the Welsh windbag) this is revealed as an eulogy that condemns as "lame-brained and prejudiced" anyone unable to accept Bevan's proposition and practice.

Whatever E. H. Evans's experience of Kinnock in the 1960s it is clearly at odds with that of others, who knew Kinnock and worked with him, and with that of those who observed him later in his career. Eric Heffer in his book Labour's Future says that Kinnock "was known in the party as a man of the left who was a close personal friend of Michael Foot and much influenced by Nye Bevan". In his diaries covering 1977-80 (Conflict of Interests) Tony Benn records a Tribune Group meeting in January 1977 when "the whole left was there: Ian Mikardo was in the chair, Neil Kinnock, Dick Clements, Mark Sanders" and a party he threw at his home in 1979 "with about forty people of the left" who included Neil Kinnock.

Of those who observed him, David and Maurice Kogan in The Battle for the Labour Party say that "he has held left-wing views on most matters" and "talked in the language of the radical post-Bevan left". In The Tragedy of Labour Stephen Haseler describes the Labour Party NEC swinging "further to the left with the addition on it of Dennis Skinner, Neil Kinnock and Douglas Hoyle". Kenneth O. Morgan, in Labour People, says that by 1974 Kinnock "was a vocal advocate of the standard left wing position on nuclear weapons, the Common Market, public ownership, incomes policy, arms to South Africa, Chile, El Salvador and much else besides".

Capitalism "a failure"
What had Kinnock done to deserve such assessments, from people who are hardly Tories or media dupes? Although he has never been famous for outpourings of gems of political theory, Kinnock did put enough on record to establish his reputation as a left-winger. In an article on nationalisation in December 1974 in Labour Monthly he wrote, in a bitter criticism of the then Labour government and in particular its Treasury ministers:

The future of Britain is with socialist nationalisation and not with pensioner capitalism . . . British governments have fruitlessly been trying to bribe British capitalism for forty years. There is no need to be apologetic about the extension of public ownership or the establishment of workers' control. They are now prerequisites of the economic survival of Britain . . . there is no alternative in the capitalist system—it is a failure.

At the Labour NEC in October 1978 Kinnock proclaimed, in another attack on the policies being pursued by the Labour government, that "we should reflate, put money into health, go for the job-swap scheme, better housing, end stock relief for businesses". After the defeat of that government, in May 1979, Kinnock condemned it:

"For the third time the Labour Party had saved capitalism, and lost", Benn Diaries

Times Change
As late as October 1984, after he had been elected leader of the Labour Party, he was able to reassure the left with statements like "the short sighted, speculative market system . . . never will produce the plenty necessary to meet human need" (Marxism Today). Well times have changed because at the Labour Party conference in October 1988 Kinnock was telling his members of his intention to run the same market system which fails to satisfy human needs:

The fact is that the kind of economy that we are faced with is going to be a market economy. It will be the one that we have to deal with when we are elected. We have got to make it work better than the Tories make it work . . . Even after that has been the implemented programme of a Labour government for years, there will still be a market economy.

Times have changed, too, about nuclear arms because it is quite clear that if Kinnock ever becomes Prime Minister he will not arrange, in deference to his past membership of CND, for the immediate abandonment of British capitalism's nuclear arsenal.

Kinnock is not the first Leader of the Labour Party to tread the well-worn path from left-wing to right, even if in some cases in the past—such as Harold Wilson—the left-wing policies existed more by virtue of wishful thinking of a power-hungry party membership than in reality. For a Labour politician on the way up a reputation as a staunch left-winger has been almost essential as an apprenticeship. Kinnock, though, has been different in one respect; he has not waited to get into office before moving from left to right, but has carried this through while still in opposition—clearly he decided that if he did not make the move now this would stay that way.

Winning political power to run capitalism, which is the aim of the Labour Party, has to be a process of deceit. How else could they justify their present policies and presentation, which are in opposition to what they have claimed to stand for in the past? Running British capitalism is not a job for anyone who is encumbered by the embarrassments of what they had to do and say in order to get to the top. This is a harsh system which must operate against the interests of the people who vote the leaders into power. If Kinnock ever makes it to Number Ten, and settles down to run his bit of the market economy and the British nuclear forces, he will enrage his followers. But he will always be able to argue that when they voted for him they knew what they were letting themselves in for.

Ivan 

Enlightening realism (1997)

Theatre Review from the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

East Is East by Ayub Khan Din (And Roots by Arnold Wesker)

East Is  East is a delight. It is described in the programme as "the first play to be produced on the British stage that really gets under their skin of what it is to be of mixed race origin with the Asian community, growing up in a culture which is predominantly British". In it, Asian father, George Khan, petty bourgeois owner of a fish and chip shop, faces problems with his English wife, Ella, and his children, as he tried to impose the cultural mores of Pakistan on his reluctant family living in 1970s' Salford. Rebellion is in the air as he insists that his two eldest sons marry women of his choosing whom they have never met.

This is the first play of actor Ayub Khan Din, and the author has managed to fashion a moving play out of an old-fashioned family comedy. High-spirited children intent on deceiving their father at every turn; young son, Sajit, who locks himself in the coal shed whenever he feels threatened; Ella and her sister, Annie, gossiping over endless cups of tea; daughter, Meenah, hiding an unacceptable (to father) bacon sandwich under her father's chair and scattering curry powder about to cover the smell.

There is fun in the air, and the author seems to invite us to smile. But Khan Din clearly wants our sympathy not our condescension. Separately the details seem comic; together they invite our understanding and compassion. Kenneth Tynan attributed the technique to Chehkov. Here it is applied not to members of the failing Russian aristocracy and their associates, but to the urban working class living in near contemporary Britain.

The ending of the play is as funny and as moving as anything I've seen on stage for a year or more. The conventions of the theatre demand that the father should get his come-uppance and indeed he does, But in asserting their rights his family manage to preserve his dignity; to show him the love and the respect which they evidently feel. The young mixed race audience responded in kind, as well they might. The virtues of autonomy, freedom and humanity were almost tangible.

East Is East is arguable part of the tradition of theatrical realism associated with the so-called Manchester School. It is part of a group of plays which began with Hobson's Choice by Harold Brighouse, and continued with Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood and A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney. Seeing it at the Duke of York theatre, the temporary home of the Royal Court whilst the latter's headquarters at Sloane Square is being re-furbished. I was reminded of another transfer from the Court to the Duke of York in the late 1950s: Arnold Wesker's Roots. 

Roots is a definitive play for socialists. It is about ignorance and self-discovery. Like the author of East Is East, Wesker's early plays suggest that the function of drama is to interpret history. Roots is part of a trilogy of plays written about  another Kahn family (the Khans in East Is East; the Kahns in Wesker's trilogy).

Beatie, who is courting Ronnie Kahn, returns home to Norfolk to prepare for Ronnie's visit. She is critical of her family and bursting with ideas about the importance of thinking for oneself, of not surrendering to the diet of pap and irrelevance fed to us by the media; of education being "not only books and learning but asking questions all the time". They are of course Ronnie's words and in the final scene he jilts her, sending her a letter instead of arriving to meet the family. Like George Khan in East Is East Beatie should capitulate. Instead she rounds on her family, blaming them for their conservatism - for their inability to nourish their own, and her, roots. It is a magnificent tirade and at its end Beatie realises that for the first time she is using her own words and not Ronnie's.

I know of no play written in the English language in the 20th century with a better last act than Roots. And that blazing finale with Beatie, triumphant in adversity, standing centre stage aware for the first time that isn't just quoting Ronnie, is inspirational stuff for anyone who believes that people, both individually and collectively, can change their own lives and fashion the world to their own desires.

"Listen to me, I'm talking . . . It does work Ronnie . . . I'm beginning. I'm beginning!"

Michael Gill