Tabloid justice (2000)

Editorial from the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

UK Civilisation, 2000—An ugly, wretched mob spews its anger towards the waiting cameras: “HANG PAEDOPHILES” say their scrawled banners. They scream for vengeance and teach their kids to cry out for the bogey men to be driven from their houses and then hanged.

Meanwhile, the putrid News of the World, where scantily-clad teenagers are paid to get 'em off for Murdoch's semi-literate customers, runs a campaign to Name and Shame sex offenders. The President of the US, who exploited the pathetic loyalty of an intern young enough to be his daughter and then lied about it for a year, is not mentioned. Neither is the dinosaur Pope who bullies his followers into fearing birth control and runs an organisation which requires young men and women to live as sexually repressed priests and nuns. Named and shamed are sick people who will be driven by the publicity to pursue their perverse sexual desires in shadowy secrecy.

The aim of the terror tactics against alleged sex offenders (several of whom have proved to be quite innocent of any crimes or even allegations) is to drive them away. It is a remedy with all the sensitivity of a pogrom. The truth is that anti-social behaviour cannot simply be cast out or exorcised, but will only disappear when its cause is treated. So, let's look at causes.

The overwhelming majority of cases of sexual abuse occur inside families, where children fall victim to more powerful relatives from whom they cannot easily escape. Very few offences are committed by strangers.

Most convicted sexual abusers were themselves abused as children. They are continuing a pattern of abuse and unless the cycle is broken this can carry on through several generations.

The kind of therapy needed to treat sex abusers is very expensive. It is cheaper to either leave such problems unattended or to lock offenders up in special wings of prisons. As ever under capitalism, money is the issue. It costs far less to spread scare stories about wicked men in dirty macs than to start the patient process of helping offenders to see their sexuality differently.

Money stands in the way of a proper response to sex offences. And it is the direct cause of other kinds of abuse of children. What about kids who have to work ten or twelve hours a day in Third World sweat shops producing cheap imports for multinational companies? What about kids who are forced on to the streets of Bangkok and many other cities to provide purchasable sex for visiting businessmen? What about kids who are pushed into armies and slaughtered for someone else's profits? What about kids who are allowed to perish for lack of food—millions of them every year—while food is dumped into the sea to preserve profit levels? When will the News of the World name and shame those responsible for such disgusting crimes against children? A conspicuous silence from the Murdoch lie factory is drowned out by its self-righteous shrieking in favour of vigilante justice.

Anarchist advocates of spontaneous "people's justice" should watch the scenes of recent weeks and recognise the danger of uneducated mobs trying to sort out the problems of capitalism. The people involved in these sordid protests are running on frustration and aggression fuelled by poverty and tabloid bigotry. Only an educated working class can solve its own problems, not chanting rednecks with a taste for vengeance.

Obituary: Nancy Kersley (1978)

Obituary from the August 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Old members will be sorry to hear of the death of Nancy Kersley, on June 19th, about two months before her 90th birthday. Although her activity was of a different kind from that of her late husband Ted, she was, in her quiet and unassuming way, deeply attached to the Party and its work. Comrades who knew them will remember how hospitable their home was, and how readily they were welcomed, with something, more often than not, to eat and drink. Her roots were in the working-class movement. Her father and her grandfather, going back to Chartist days, had both been active. Before the first world war she employed in the clothing trade, and, while still in her teens, became a Trade Union organiser. Nancy had been crippled for some time with arthritis — though no-one could have borne it with less complaint or more cheerfully — but her sight and hearing remained excellent, and her mental powers were unimpaired. Only a week before her death she was discussing an article in the Socialist Standard, every issue of which she looked forward to and read. Shortly before she died she said — uncharacteristically — that she felt very tired; a few days later the end came quite peacefully and without pain.

CD

Action Replay: From Ashes to Ashes (2015)

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

The first Australian cricket team to tour England was in 1868. It was made up entirely of Aborigines selected from western Victoria and coached by Tom Willis (the founder of Australian football).

The colonial view was that involving the indigenous population in sports created a kind of imperial glue that wedded the natives to their new British identity.

Despite an onerous schedule, and having no history in the game and playing in a foreign culture, the team managed 14 wins, 14 losses and 19 draws.

The Ashes originates later, from a satirical obituary published in a British newspaper, The Sporting Times, immediately after a White Australian team’s victory at the Oval in 1882.

The obituary stated that English cricket had died, and ‘the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.’ The mythical ashes immediately became associated with the 1882–83 series played in Australia, before which the English captain Ivo Bligh had vowed to ‘regain those ashes.’ The English press dubbed the tour ‘the quest to regain the Ashes.’

It has stuck ever since. In winning the fourth test at Trent Bridge by an innings and 78 runs at the beginning of August, England regained the Ashes from a below par Australian side. The standout moment of the whole series was the dismissal there of the Aussies in the first innings for a paltry 60 runs with Stuart Broad taking 8 wickets for 15 runs. The Australian fans were shell shocked into silence while the English supporters were ecstatic.

This was regarded as a national disaster in Australia where support for the national cricket team has become a glue to wed the population to their new postcolonial identity. The Australian captain, Michael Clarke, had to fall on his sword, like the leader of a political party which loses an election. Which is appropriate since the job of captaining the Australian cricket team is commonly regarded down under as more important than that of the Prime Minister of Australia.

Nowadays few Aborigines play cricket. Rugby and Aussie Rules football are more popular.

Kevin.

Glasgow: New slums for old (1962)

From the May 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Glasgow recently, the press gave a great deal of publicity to the collapse of a tenement in the Gorbals. Photographs of this victim of old age and disrepair were spectacular, showing one side of the building minus a wall and exposing a rabbit warren interior where the tenants lived, ate and slept. To the newspapers it was a one-day sensation. To the Socialist it was something much more.

Glasgow Corporation's publication Industry on the Move (January, 1959),  has this to say about the nightmare living conditions of workers in the city:

There are over 80,000 people living at more than three persons to a room.

And dealing with certain parts of Glasgow:

These central districts home more than half a million people. In these areas most of the people have to share toilet facilities; only one house in five has an an internal water closet—and few of the houses have a bath.

The promise of better housing for the working class was, of course, in the programmes of all the reformist parties in the recent municipal election. Indeed, the last Labour-controlled council had the audacity to boast of their record and point to the new housing schemes on the city outskirts and their "overspill" programme, as solutions to the workers' plight.

"Overspill" is a scheme to get Glasgow workers housed in another town. It is proving far from popular, even among the desperate, as it sometimes involves moving great distances, and suitable jobs are not always available in the new areas.

A sorry commentary on the housing schemes in the outskirts can be found almost daily in the Glasgow newspapers, in the forms of warrant sales. These are sales of household effects of workers hopelessly in debt. Many of them are in the homes of workers who live on the new housing estates and it is not hard to understand why. Although these houses are superior to the slums (it would be difficult for them to be inferior), the rent is almost invariably higher. This, coupled with the increase expense of travelling to and from work, lands many workers in the position of seeing their sticks of furniture compulsorily sold. In a single day recently in Drumchapel, there were five warrant sales in one street.

To those who have lived in a single room, the change to a three or four roomed dwelling with interior water closet and bath must seem like Utopia. But when you consider that such places were built mainly of the cheapest possible materials, it does not take much imagination to recognise them as the slums of the not-too-distant future. Already, peeling plaster, shrunken doors and badly made window frames bear silent witness to the shoddiness of production for profit.

And the grim irony of it all is that a physical shortage of houses does not exist in Glasgow. Like so many problems confronting Glaswegians and their brothers elsewhere, it is really one of poverty—the sheer inability to afford a decent place to live in. How then can this problem be solved within the present social set-up? The answer is a simple one. It cannot.

But this is not something which our Tory, Labour and other opponents are telling workers during the current local elections. They can be safely trusted to carry on flying in the face of fact and promising to remedy this evil which is as old as Capitalism itself. It is left to the Socialist candidate contesting North Kelvin Ward to point out the unpalatable truth and to give the only answer, Socialism.

Glaswegian.

Editorial: Back to the 70s? (2015)

Editorial from the September 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty years ago, the Labour Party agreed on a new version of Clause IV of its constitution which removed the reference to the ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange’ (see this issue, page ten). This was hailed as the moment when the Labour Party abandoned its commitment to ‘socialism’, or rather to wholesale nationalisation. This decision was arrived at after suffering four electoral defeats at the hands of the Conservatives, who had successfully pursued free market policies. Thus the Labour Government from 1997 to 2010, introduced policies which were not radically different from those of the Tories.

Yet the unexpected front runner for the current Labour leadership contest is Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP for Islington North, who calls himself a socialist and pledges to end austerity by measures such as raising taxes for the rich, including corporation tax, tackling tax avoidance and tax evasion and introducing a ‘People's Quantitative Easing’, where electronic money would be created by the Bank of England to be invested in ‘new large scale housing, energy, transport and digital projects’. He would also bring the railways and the energy companies back into State ownership.

How did he get to this position? Aside from some Trotskyists and Conservatives who have exploited a new rule that entitles non-Party members to vote in the Leadership election provided they register as supporters of Labour, most of his support comes from grass roots Labour supporters and others, many of them young people, who have had enough of the effects of austerity, the decline in the standard of living for many workers, the proliferation of food banks, while on the other hand, the rich continue to enjoy rising prosperity. Moreover, Corbyn is seen as being honest and principled, whereas the other three candidates come across as supine mouthpieces of a Labour establishment that supports the current consensus on austerity. 

In a BBC news article, Corbyn says, in response to accusations that he wants to take the Party back to the 1980s, that he'd go back to the 1970s Labour government. In 1974 the new Labour Government declared that they wish to ‘bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families.’ This was to be achieved by increasing spending on pensions and other benefits, extending state ownership and tax rises on the better off. However, capitalism was hit by a recession which resulted in a sharp rise of unemployment. Inflation was rising rapidly. The government had to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund, and was compelled to implement a programme of spending cuts. James Callaghan, the Prime Minister at the time, came to this conclusion at the Labour Party Annual Conference in 1976:

‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting Government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.’

Jeremy Corbyn will have no more success in trying to reform capitalism in the interests of the working class. Production under capitalism is geared towards profits, not human need. Corbyn's proposed tax rises would cut into profits and discourage investment. Even his proposed people's quantitative easing is likely to fuel inflation, which would put pressure on interest rates to rise.

While we welcome that more people are becoming politically engaged and are looking for alternatives, it would be a mistake to follow Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, otherwise we may well end up back in the 1970s, rather than moving forward to abolish capitalism and establish real socialism.

Marxism or Machiavellianism? (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a familiar principle of capitalist politics that that means justify the end and so any "tactics" can be used in order to achieve political power. Machiavellianism is alive and well in 1977, and the old master of deceitfulness would be quite proud of his modern disciples in the Palace of Westminster.

Scholars have disagreed as to what Machiavelli's political intentions were. Jeffrey Pulver, writing in 1937 on what constitutes Machiavelli's contribution to political thought, answers plainly: "Nothing at all." It is true that, unlike Marx, Machiavelli did not apply himself to any revolutionary view of society and that his historical observations were less than profound; his advice to aspiring politicians, however, is a frank admission of the way in which leaders win and retain power.

All of Machiavelli's major works—The Prince, The Discourses, and the Florentine Histories—are concerned with political power: the establishment of states, the maintenance of effective governments within them and reasons for, and preventives against, their decline and fall. Unlike Plato and Thomas More they are not concerned with describing a future utopia, but with considering Renaissance Italian society as it was. He was not the first to deal with this subject: many of his contemporaries' writings dealt with

the problems of kingship—countless treatises with such titles as 'De Regime Principum', 'De Officio regis', or 'The governal of princes'—copied and recopied, translated, revised, enlarged and adapted for century after century. (S. Anglo, Machiavelli: a Dissection, p. 189.)

In short, they were writing text books for rulers on how to rule successfully, in the same way as modern advertisements offer free booklets on "How to Influence People and Become Rich". It was Machiavelli's frankness in his advice to princes which has since been seen as shocking by liberal theorists. Alberico Gentile and Garret Mattingly saw The Prince as an outrageous satire; Spinoza and Rousseau saw it as a warning against tyranny; Prezzoloni and Haydn regarded it as a shocking treatise because it attacked Christianity and defended paganism; numerous other philosophers, politicians and social theorists have demonstrated outrage against the views of Machiavelli. And all of them have one thing in common: they do not challenge Machiavelli's fundamental statement that it is virtuous to trick the majority in order to retain power, but have continued to support the capitalist system which depends on obscuring the interests of the majority to safeguard the security of the minority. Perhaps Bertrand Russell is right when he says:

Much of the conventional obloquy that attaches to [Machiavelli's] name is due to the indignation of hypocrites who hate the frank avowal of evil-doing. (History of Western Philosophy, Bk. 3, p. 491.)

The outcry over Machiavelli is, therefore, because he paints a portrait of his ideal ruler (based in fact on Cesare Borgia) which is too accurately descriptive of the way political leaders behave. How well does Laurence Arthur Burd's description of Machiavelli's ideal prince remind one of residents at Number 10, Downing Street:

He must in the first place be entirely free from emotional disturbance; he must be ready to take advantage of the existing state of things; he must be strong enough to sin boldly, if his country's welfare depends upon it; he must be shrewd enough to understand human nature in whatever form he finds it, and, overcoming evil by evil, play with the passions and impulses of men, use them as he pleases, force them to his purpose, manage them. And above all he must be thorough: a single hesitation, a single half-measure might compromise the whole result. He must depend upon himself and his own soldiers; he must abolish all mercenaries and establish a national army of his own subjects. If such a man could be found, of unflinching purpose, dead to every sentiment but the love of his country, willing to save his fatherland rather than his own soul, careless of justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of honour or disgrace, he might perhaps . . . begin the regeneration of his people.

Machiavelli was not the first to argue against the established belief that the State should be run in accordance with fixed (Christian) moral principles and to propose that rulers should be guided by political and economic expediency. Pontano believed that for the good of the State (i.e. the ruling class interest) a ruler should tell lies (it will be of some comfort to modern political leaders to know that they have Pontano's permission); Patrizzi believed the same, so that people would not know if the nation was in ruin; and Platina claimed that even private citizens could forget about morality if it was for the benefit of the State. Machiavelli realized that:

If morals relate to human conduct, and men are by nature social, Christian morality cannot be a guide for normal social existence. (I. Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," in Studies on Machiavelli, ed. Myron P. Gilmore) 

In this respect Machiavelli held a similar position to Marx in realizing that morality is socially determined by the needs of the ruling class, and that as society is constantly changing so is morality. The difference between Marx and Machiavelli is that whereas Marx told workers to forget moral values and view society materially, Machiavelli, as an adviser to the rising bourgeoisie of late medieval Italy, sought ways to manipulate existing moral values.

Today workers are still swallowing the morality of the capitalist class—a morality which condemns robbing banks, but encourages mass murder during war time, which censors books but shows every night news of disgusting crimes against humanity in the name of profit, which shows contempt for the workers who produce the wealth of society, and idolizes useless parasites who reap the profits of production. The Machiavellian advice that deluding the masses is the way to retain power is still cherished by political leaders throughout the world. Stalin, Nixon, Mao, Churchill, Thatcher, Powell—all successful masters of the art.

But the delusion of the working class relies upon one factor: the workers' capacity to be deluded. When the working class of all countries unite in class consciousness no attempts, either by force or political cunning, will stop the revolution for Socialism. For the establishment of Socialism lies and deceit will not be necessary. The only words which the Socialist Party of Great Britain have for the working class are simple: toss aside the morals of your masters and organize for a rational society.

Steve Coleman

"Darkness at Noon" (1932)

Book Review from the September 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

Darkness at Noon by H. Carlisle (Jarrolds. 7s. 6d. net. 288 pages.)

The central figure in this story of mining is a miner, called "Red."

"Red" is no ordinary miner. Of great physical strength, he is much admired by his mates, chiefly because of his ability to earn double their wages; he is the champion hewer.

But "Red" is not satisfied. He hates the mines. He yearns for the "green earth above, lovely with sunshine." He longs furtively for the warm love of women but, conscious of his awkward body and simple mind, he avoids them. To escape from the mines and to satisfy the cravings of his body became the dominating purpose of his life. He conceives the idea of buying a cheap and dingy "pub" with his savings, and with it to attract a barmaid to be his wife. He succeeds. Then begins disillusion. "Red" does not leave the mines. His mercenary barmaid-wife uses her charms to prevail upon him to remain at his work until the "pub" is a success. The "pub" becomes an inn, enlarges, and engages a staff. Still "Red" remains a miner.

The threads of the story are drawn into a swift and dramatic climax. "Red," disillusioned, maddened with jealousy and doubts of his wife's fidelity, almost blinded by an eye disease contracted in the mines, murders, in the mines, a mining engineer, he suspects to be his wife's lover, strangles his wife, sets fire to the inn, and, in his mad flight from the scene, hurls himself to destruction down a disused mining shaft which his failing eyes prevented him from seeing.

The story, which sags in parts, is graphically written and with simple literary force. "Red" is read. The sanctimonious labour leader, the union official, the agitator and the Ruskin man, who are impelled into the book without essential connection with the story, are all real and can be met among any section of organised workers. It has been said that this book is socialist propaganda. It is not. One is left with the feeling that Mr. Carlisle's talents has been wasted on a sex-baffled miner.

Don. 

New Labour: forward to the past (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard 

Blair has claimed that this century the battle will not be between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and conservatism. But his concept of a non-socialist party of progress is a throw-back to the 19th century.

At the Labour Conference last October Tony Blair delivered a messianic oration. He spoke with great fervour about the fact that he and his party are on the side of progress, identifying the progressives as a vast political movement of high-minded and fair people, who believe in the future, and against the dread-hooded minions of conservatism. Or, as Peter Sellers, put it, that we must go onward in a forwards direction to the future, because time waits for no man, and onwards is the way forward to the place in which we will one day arrive. Or some such.

Blair declared that the Labour Party had thrown aside Ideology, but would stay true to its values. Quite how he thinks values and ideology are dissociable is anyone's guess, specifically since he uses ideology in its meaning as a system of ideas or creed, which is exactly what one should have thought values would mean. Then again, political speeches are not about logical intellectual rigour, nor about clarity or sense. Blair was pulling the biggest ideological dodge in the book (one much beloved by pre-Thatcher Tories) that he is being pragmatic and free from ideology doing what is "objectively" right for the national interest, while his opponents are blinded by their ideological commitments. What matters is not the substance of what is being said, but the appearance. No-one wants to think of themselves as an unreasoning fanatic, which is what ideologue is code for, nor would they wish to vote for one.

Tony Blair also deployed other, simple, logical fallacies in order to try to bolster his political position. Most notably, he baldly deployed the logical fallacy of bifurcation: the presentation of a false set of options, an exclusive either/or option when that isn't necessarily the case. In this instance he has been trying to portray the choice as being solely between a Labour government (of nice sensible progressive types) and a Tory government (full of evil lunatics who drink babies' blood, etc), insisting that the only choice for people who dislike Tory rule is to vote Labour and join his movement of lukewarm progressives.

Lukewarm progressives

Progress does have a warm, fuzzy feel to it, though. The feel of things becoming better, of rational people making sensible decisions, without being shackled by tradition or history. Progress, also, is indissolubly linked to the mindset of the industrial revolution, and the ideas that it spawned about an ever-upward increase in wealth and quality of life. Such ideas were closely linked with the Radical movement of the 19th century; and Blair and his cohorts have repeatedly linked themselves in with that 19th century Radicalism. Gordon Brown styled the labourites as "Credible Radicals", and Blair repeated the word in his speech unto inanity. Indeed, Blair stated that the 20th century had been dominated by the Tories, precisely because the Labour Party had split the moderate-progressive bloc that existed in the Liberal Party of the 19th century.

Blair seems to feel a great affinity for the 19th century radicals. A curious attitude for a moderniser to be trying to resurrect a political movement that died over 100 years ago. For much of the 19th century, Radicalism was closely linked with "middle-class" political agitation, and took place very much in the shadow of the French Revolution. Within the Liberal Party, formed officially in 1859, the Radicals were drawn from the commercial classes, with Richard Cobden and John Bright, of the famous Anti-Corn Law League, among its free-trade luminaries. At certain points of the century Radicalism had some popular support, but there was always a distinct split between its necessarily well-heeled parliamentary leaders (MPs, being unpaid, needed to have substantial private incomes) and its supporters on the ground. By the late 19th century, the Radical formed a distinct camp within the broader movement of Liberalism, and early socialists held out hopes of those Radicals coming over to their side.

The maximum programme of the Radicals was one of political reform: enlargement of the franchise, abolition of the House of Lords, the rule of law and contract, and the abolition of trade protection. The Radicals were largely committed to the market, and laissez-faire capitalism, and their programme was largely about freeing up the power of capital to exploit labour without the old social-restrictions imposed by feudal power and, as with Tony Blair, they deployed a bifurcating argument of the middle and working classes uniting against the aristocracy. Indeed, the Liberals under Gladstone (the idol of Roy Jenkins, the ideological soul-mate of Tony Blair)—who was the political leader most instrumental in bringing about the nearest thing to laissez-faire to Britain—were a disparate group, often only united in their opposition to Toryism.

What is noticeable about their programme is that it bears more than a little resemblance to that of Thatcherism—as do the values and programme set forth by Gordon Brown fighting monopolies (what greater monopoly than a nationalised industry?), fighting fraud and rip-offs, protecting people from unscrupulous bankers; in effect: trying to make the market work properly. Blair is, then right that this is entirely in keeping with the history of the Labour Party.

Branding of identical products

The clear reason for Blair's risible sophistry is that the Labour Party has become concerned that people do not feel an attachment to it. Labour are worried about the next election. The false choice of Tories or Labour is a way to try to fool voters into trooping into the ballot booths to give assent to spinach over cabbage. When there is little discernible difference over policy, then the politicians have to appeal to feeling, and attitude: we cut welfare out of "tough love", they cut welfare to be mean and spiteful. It's like the differences in branding between two almost identical soft-drinks.

The Labour politicians are worried that they may have to work hard to win the next election despite the contemptible and patronising sophistry applied by spin doctors; as the Labour Party has been stung by the low turn-out in recent elections. Their pretence that the voters are just too satisfied with them to vote holds no water—satisfied voters turned out in the 70s percent range in the fifties and sixties at by-elections.

It's clear that the reason voters are not turning out is because they think it's pointless. This is an inherent flaw of representative democracy: voters are infrequently called upon to cast a vote, which seems to be far removed from any action or result; there is no immediate reward for the vote. The voters thus feel, correctly, that their influence is slight. Traditionally this was overcome by political parties being closely attached to identifiable social groups, with the members of these groups being able to feel a part of the ongoing political process. The party represented, in one way or another, the aspirations of that group; thus they would turn out to vote with a strong feeling of involvement.

Once the political structure is unable, as now, to accommodate any semblance of reforms so as to be able to give any vent to the aspirations of more dispossessed sections of society, then politicians can no longer rely on that sort of support. They have to resort to trying to scare the electorate into supporting them, into fooling them into voting for them. They know that to keep the system functioning, they have to persuade people to turn up, and give their support for it. That is the politicians' job; since they cannot actually make or change events, they have to work hard to pretend that they can. Their function is to win and maintain public confidence. At the end of the day they are merely actors, and our modern media-driven politics could be easily called a thespocracy, rule by actors.

This is also the reasoning behind Labour's new-found devotion to local mayors: a single person contest, wherein the personality of the candidate will be all important, and which will be more of a media event. It's about trying to return public interest to a system where there are no significant policy differences.

Moderate party of obstruction

We need only look across the Atlantic to Canada or America, where the Liberals (or Democrats) did not suffer the same collapse in the 20th century as their counterparts in Britain, where they have held power for proportionately more of the century than Labour has managed, to see that no real gain is to be made by building the grand-movement of progress. Rather, such a force would be solely a pretty bulwark by which the current corrupt system is defended, a Great Moderate Party of Obstruction, to appeal to rational people who want to see change, and direct them off into the hopeless quagmire of personality politics.

So long as the press continue to look into whether Tony wants to block Ken, or how Gordon and Tony might be having a tiff, or whether Peter Mandelson has been brought back too soon, they continue to ignore the desperation of poverty, the wanton and authoritarian cruelty of the government, and ignore the unspoken iron-rule of the dogma of capital.

There is, though, hope to be drawn from Blair modernising the country back to the 1890s. It shows the real face of the Labour Party, how it is still, how it has always been: how many Labour governments have called for partnership from the unions, or have seen making the market work as the way to improve people's lives? All of them, only now this one is dropping the façade of socialism—leftists no longer have any justification whatsoever for asking us to follow these insulating sophists. Labourites who think themselves to be socialists have had their illusions thrown back in their faces with a rude wake-up call. 

                                                                                                                                                  Pik Smeet                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Horror story (1986)

Book Review from the May 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Postman of Nagasaki by Peter Townsend (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985).

Some forty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it is easier to objectively assess the circumstances in which those actions took place. Townsend reminds the reader of the individual caught up in such circumstances and provides a vivid account of the life of Sumiteru Taniguchi who was a sixteen-year-old postman delivering letters in Nagasaki at the time the bomb was dropped. Townsend's intention in writing this biography is to suggest that "if the deterrent is ever used, it will be the end of us and our planet". It represents a moral plea on behalf of one man as a symbol of the many who suffered. At the same time it provides a useful, brief history of Japan's involvement in the Second World War and catalogues the atrocities perpetrated by that nation in the course of its attempted expansion in Asia.

Townsend's work is a reminder of the contempt with which working people are treated and how this is epitomised during a war. His analysis of the circumstances leading up to the two nuclear attacks is one in which the majority of the population are pawns in a game played by detached leaders:

such were the men who debated the vital issue, war or peace — the elect and the all-powerful in whose hands lay the fate of the ordinary people, young Sumiteru among them, boys and girls and all the rest as innocent as he. The trouble with the top men was that they saw the people whose destiny they sought to shape as an anonymous mass or a bunch of statistics.

Sumiteru is a victim of the propaganda of the education system, of a government which refused to acknowledge the inevitable defeat to which it was being subjected and, for Townsend particularly, the callous indifference to the Japanese people exhibited by President Truman. Even before the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it ought to be remembered that Japan had been subjected to horrendous aerial bombardment. Nagoya was bombed after an earthquake. General Curtis Le May had initiated a programme of napalm attacks because of the dispersed private workshops that marked the nature of Japan's industry:

Le May despatched, on the night of 9 March, over 300 B29s. Their orders were to set fire to the heart of Tokyo, where, in houses made of wood and paper, there lived, until that awful night, a quarter of a million low-paid workers. By dawn, 130,000 of them with their families lay strewn about the city in heaps of charred, unrecognisable corpses.

Similar attacks were also carried out on Kobe and Osaka. Japan was a defeated nation. Its steel and chemical industries were on the verge of collapse and it was running desperately short of oil and food. Truman's advisors had misgivings about the atomic bomb and that included Secretary for war, Harold Stimson, and General Eisenhower, Commander-in-Chief of the allied forces in Europe, but according to Townsend "Truman made the dropping of the atomic bomb a certainty—as indeed he had always intended".

The second part of this work concentrates on the plight of Sumiteru. It is not for the squeamish, as Townsend spares no detail including for instance Sumiteru "lying in a sea of pus" as a result of the hatching of maggots from the eggs laid by flies in the raw flesh of his back. He also catalogues the prejudices exhibited against the atomic bomb victims by the Japanese, who feared the consequences of the radiation to which the victims had been subjected as well as being appalled by their physical injuries. Similarly the US occupation authorities imposed heavy censorship as regards the death and destruction wrought by the new weapon, although references to the weapon as being of unprecedented power were welcomed. There was also suppression of details concerning the medical treatment of the victims. This was particularly applicable to Japanese doctors and scientists. Since then a fuller picture has emerged. Those exposed to radiation were found to have a greater susceptibility to leukemia, cancer of the thyroid was five times more common, lung cancer was twice as common, breast cancer four times higher than the national average and the young were vulnerable to cancer of the salivary glands. Added to this were such effects as an increase in eye cataracts among victims and an increase in still births and birth deformities among those pregnant at the time of the explosions.

Townsend argues that "the magnitude of destruction amounted, as no other weapon has ever achieved, to genocide as well as sociocide, ecocide and biocide—in brief, the negation of life" and that may well be correct. But it is the circumstances that gave rise to the use of that weapon that must be examined. The atomic bomb represents an atrocious addition to capitalism's panoply of weapons. The willingness to use that weapon, and the way in which it was used, highlights the total indifference with which human beings are treated during war and that only highlights the way in which the vast majority of people are treated in capitalism generally. There is a tendency to simplify and Townsend quotes Sumeritu as seeing the world as being "divided by political ideologies and the lust of a few men — and women — for power". It is the conflict arising out of the competitive nature of capitalism that legitimises the activities of world leaders who act out the logical consequences of that system. We can be horrified and disgusted by those actions and even morally repelled but nonetheless they must be seen as an outcome of capitalism. In that respect our outrage ought not to be directed solely at the weapons or the leaders but against the system of society which would contemplate, let alone use, such weapons. Sumiteru is the victim of a society in which he is expendable in the conflicting interests within the capitalist system. He is a witness to the extent to which the system us prepared to defend itself.

Philip Bentley 

Imperialism (1981)

Book Review from the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism by Bill Warren, Verso, £3.95

It is not difficult to see why this book has been the subject of a virtual conspiracy of silence in left wing circles since it challenges one of their deep-rooted prejudices: anti-imperialism. Warren argues that, far from keeping the underdeveloped countries underdeveloped imperialism, in paving the way for the development of capitalism, has precisely provided the framework for their modernisation and development.

Warren confuses "socialism" with state capitalism and claims to be a Marxist; in fact his argument with his left wing colleagues is merely about which form of capitalism—private or state—is best for the underdeveloped countries. Clearly not an argument in which we are called upon to take sides.

We must take issue, however, with Warren on one key point and, perhaps surprisingly, come to the defence of Lenin. Warren criticises Lenin's pamphlet Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism not only for its faulty economic analysis (which we do too) but also for arguing that capitalism had become, by about the end of the 19th century, "reactionary" in the sense of having fulfilled its historical role of developing the means of production.

Warren argues in effect that capitalism still had, and still has a progressive role to play. Hence his defence of imperialism as the "pioneer of capitalism". He is here taking up the same position as Marx, who considered that in his day capitalism had a progressive economic and political role to play; he even accepted that colonialism (he never used the word "imperialism") in spreading capitalism beyond Europe had a progressive aspect.

But within a generation of Marx's death in 1883 capitalism can be said to have fulfilled its progressive role in the sense of having become the dominant world system and of having built up, in the world-wide productive system capable of turning out abundance for all, the materialist basis for a socialist world. This was what Social Democratic thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin were trying, however confusedly, to convey when they talk of "imperialism". This is not a word we generally use ourselves since it can suggest that what is bad is not capitalism itself but only its "imperialist" excesses, but the basic idea that, by around the turn of the century, capitalism had become reactionary is one we accept. Lenin, incidentally, was not consistent here: while accepting that capitalism had become reactionary in the developed capitalist countries, he still claimed that it had a progressive role to play in Asia, Latin America and Africa. But capitalism is a world system and when it became reactionary it became so for the whole world.

In trying to argue that capitalism/imperialism still has a progressive role to play Warren is quite wrong. Certainly, as he shows, capitalism is still developing the means of production but this development is in the form of the accumulation of capital, and the attendant problems and miseries this form brings. It is no longer necessary since socialism, the next stage in social evolution, has ling been materially and technically possible.

Adam Buick

Tolstoy 'Impossibilist'. (1905)

From the November 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

As against those professing Socialists who endeavour to secure the kudos and advertisement attaching to the identification with their position of individuals who have, by diverse methods, attained to prominence in the public eye, we are concerned that the message we bring to the working-class shall be assessed on its own merits. Just as we, knowing its harmfulness as well as its futility, are opposed to the endeavour to obtain support for Socialism by tactics of compromise and the propagation of something less than Socialism, so we are opposed to the endeavour to create for Socialism a standing of greater "respectability" by covering it with the glamour of great names—whether of monarchical countesses or mystic counts. Hence the publication in another column of the letter from Tolstoy.

Tolstoy's disclaimer may come as an awkward pronouncement to those notoriety-mongers who, having claimed to be Socialists, have claimed Count Tolstoy for their supporter and widely advertised the connection. Tolstoy, of course, is simply a Christist who has failed to understand—because perhaps he never studied—the materialist basis to human thought and activity and who thinks that human loves and hates can be divorced from material conditions when, of course, it is precisely the material motive—the desire for material improvement and the methods of realising it—that brought men into association, into groups and tribes and nations, an association that has given birth to, and moulded, their thoughts and aspirations, their loves and and hates and fears.

Generally speaking, man's capacity to love his neighbour will depend upon the economic relationship of both. It is sheer fatuity to expect one to love the other when they are mutually engaged in a grim struggle for the wherewithal to live, a struggle that the conditions governing industry forces upon them. A man may understand that industrial conditions render it impossible for his fellow to do other than battle with him for bread, but he cannot love unless it is possible to conceive of a love that finds expression in a fight in no respect dissimilar from the fight between men who hate and hate whole-heartedly. The law of self preservation impels the fight and the lesson is soon learnt that the victory is to the best hater rather than the best lover. It is quite possible that the participants in the struggle may prefer to love each other, but they will understand if they give heed to the Socialist that the only way by which love can be made possible is through the removal of the conditions that necessitate hate. They must first of all remove the conditions that set them at each other's throat. Tolstoy has laid hold of the wrong end of the problem, and it is because his gospel can only have mischievous effects upon the endeavours we are making to organise the working-class upon the basis of class interests, that we take the opportunity this letter affords to make it clear, upon his own showing, that he is outside the Socialist movement at the same time that we echo the quaintly worded regret of our Japanese comrades that "Tolstoy is yet in error as to Socialism and the solution of social problems just in the same way as the common shallow people do."

Literary Curiosities. No. 2 - Tolstoy on Socialism. (1905)

From the November 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Reprinted from "The Chokugen" (the plain speaker), the organ of the Socialist Party of Japan)

Toula, Yasnaya Poliana.

Dear friend IsooAbe (Editor, the Chokugen).

It was a great pleasure for me to receive your letter and your paper, with the English article. I thank you heartily for both.

Though I never doubted that there are in Japan a great many reasonable, moral and religeous men who are opposed to the horrible crime of war, which is now perpetrated by both betrayed and stupefied nations, I was very glad to get the proof of it.

It is a great joy for me to know that I have friends and co-workers in Japan, with which I can be in friendly intercourse.

Wishing to be quite sincere with you, as I wish to be with every esteemed friend, I must tell you that I do not approve of socialism and am sorry to know that the most spiritually advanced part of your—so clever and energetic—people has taken from Europe the very feeble, illusory and fallacious theory of socialism, which in Europe is beginning to be abandoned.

Socialism has for its aim the satisfaction of the meanest part of human nature, his material well-being and by the means it proposes, can never attain them.

The true well-being of humanity is spiritual i.e. moral and includes the material well-being. And this higher goal can be attained only by religeous i.e moral perfection of all the units which composes nations and humanity.

By religeon I understand the reasonably belief in a (general for all humanity) law of God, which practically is exposed in the precept of loving every man and doing to every body what one wishes to be done to you.

I know that this method seems to be less expedient than socialism and other frail theories, but it is the sole true one. And all the efforts we make in trying to realise false—and not realising their aim—theories only hinder as to employ true means to attain the degree of happiness of mankind and of every individual which is proper to our times.

Excuse for the liberty I take to discuss your creed, and for my bad English and believe me to be your friend.

LEO TOLSTOY

See also 'Tolstoy "Impossibilist."'

Fifty Years Mark-Time (1950)

Book Review from the February 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Francis Williams, one-time Editor of the Daily Herald, has written a history of the Labour Party. "Fifty Years' March, The Rise of the Labour Party", published by Odhams Press, Ltd. We suspect that Mr. Williams wrote with a distemper brush. He has certainly given the Labour Party an unblemished white-washing. The main theme of this history is summed up by Mr. Attlee in the foreword to the book. He says:-

"It is a story very characteristic of Britain, showing the triumph of reasonableness and practicability over doctrinaire impossibilism."

Mr. Williams insists that the Labour Party is a Socialist Party, claiming that after years of endeavour by the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society and the Clarion Scouts, it finally became a Socialist Party when it was re-organised by Arthur Henderson following the war of 1914-18. He says that the programme contained in "Labour and the New Social Order" put the seal on its Socialist character. But Mr. Williams does not give us even an attempt at a definition of Socialism. He writes on various pages of Christian Socialists, Marxist Socialists, Guild Socialists, reformists who were Socialists, industrial actionists who were Socialists, in fact, all sorts of different Socialists until we are forced to wonder if the word Socialism has any meaning at all for Mr. Williams.

Here, according to Mr. Williams, is Keir Hardie's brand of Socialism : —

"Only if men were moved, he believed, by the warm hearted, idealistic gospel of Socialism could there be created a new social order . . . " (page 13.)

The author quotes Bruce Glasier : —

. . . "It is from the prophets, apostles and saints, the religious mystics and heretics, rather than from statesmen, economists and political reformers, that the socialist movement derives its examples and ideals . . . Socialism means not only the Socialisation of wealth, not only the Socialisation of the means of production and distribution, but of our lives, our hearts—ourselves . . . " (page 105.)

That Mr. Williams tells us, "was the spirit that made the early I.L.P.". That spirit, he continues, "when harnessed to the intellectual integrity of the Fabians and the practical idealism and economic experience of the trade unions" made the Labour Party. Well, we knew that there was something wrong with the Labour Party, but we did not know that it was that.

Of Ramsay MacDonald, a man who, we are told on page 169, was suspected by trade unionists of being too Socialist, we learn that "he was a Socialist of a peculiarly philosophical and inactive—indeed one might say non-political—kind. His Socialism was not based on an understanding of the economic forces at work in society. He had little knowledge of economics . . . What made him a Socialist was a romanticized conception of natural history, acquired during his early biological studies and transformed without amendment to the political struggle" (pages 198-199).

Later in the book, the author quotes with approval from Robert Blatchford: "We can't have Socialism without Socialists" and, Mr. Williams says: " . . . that was the true answer . . . " Having read in his book of the different brands of "Socialism" expounded by Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Robert Blatchford, Victor Grayson, Tom Mann, J. H. Thomas, Philip Snowden and a shoal of others including the Communism of John Wyclif, we are left astounded that the author can quote that short passage from Blatchford and continue to call the Labour Party a Socialist Party.

One thing the author does make clear, although possibly without intending to do so. That is, that the founders of the Labour Party wanted to build a political Party with a substantial numerical strength and they were quite prepared to sacrifice their respective "Socialist" principles at the altar of a large membership. He tells that most of the prominent early workers in the Labour Party were far-seeing enough to build an organisation with numerical and financial strength and a firm foundation of mass support. He proceeds to show us throughout the pages of the book, how the so called Socialists of the Labour Party have had to compromise, twist, wriggle, turn, betray and mis-lead the non-Socialist mass support in order to hold it together. And after studying that sort of thing for years, seeing the struggle between the mass support and the leadership, the desertions, the betrayals, the collapses, and the failure to prevent the evils of capitalism, Mr. Williams still thinks that the Labour Party is a Socialist Party. He still has not learned that the strength of a working-class Party lies not just in its numbers but in its understanding of its objective and its determination to achieve it.

The first few chapters of the book present an interesting story of the early struggles of the workers in this country and of the efforts leading up to the foundation of the Labour Party, although the author betrays his prejudice when he writes of men like Hyndman and Karl Marx. Altogether the book is very readable providing the reader does not get as confused as the author as to what Socialism really is. If this book can be read in conjunction with the SOCIALIST STANDARD for the years that are covered it makes instructive and interesting reading.

W. Waters

'Points for Patriots'. (1917)

From the March 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

Breathes there a man with soul so dead —
   Some modern slave at factory gate
Who never to himself hath said,
   In cynic bitterness and hate:
"This is my own, my native land" 

Breathes there a man with soul so dead —
   A numbered hand in a factory hell
Who never to himself hath said,
   When hurried to toil by the factory bell:
"This is my own, my native land"? 

Breathes there a man with soul so dead
   Mocked by flaunted wealth and power
Who never to himself hath said,
   As he sold himself for sixpence an hour:
"This is my own, my native land"?

F. 

The Warmakers (1999)

From the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

A TV documentary series, "The Century," with Peter Jennings, shown recently in Britain on the History Channel, reviewed some of the most significant aspects of the 20th century. One segment, on the development of the atom bomb, made a point well worth stopping to think about.

Late in the Second World War, the generals and the politicians made a tactical decision with chilling implications: they switched from striking at military targets (without regard for the "collateral damage" this might inflict on civilians) to the deliberate, premeditated mass murder of civilian populations. They were able to make this switch, which they did quietly and without fanfare, because TNT-based weapons technology—delivery vehicles included—had evolved so rapidly under the lash of war. As one of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project put it, with the atom bomb the government's interest shifted from simply making a new weapon for winning the war to making a new weapon. Having gained the ability to manufacture and deploy large numbers of bombs quickly and efficiently, the government began to go in for destroying not merely military targets but the economic infrastructure on which weapons manufacture and deployment was based—indifferent to the fact that this meant targeting ordinary non-combatant populations for annihilation.

Winning the war was the justifying obsession where TNT bomb technology was concerned. But the interest in developing a weapon of unprecedented destructive capabilities—initially by the scientists themselves, so horrified by the Nazi war machine, who proposed it as a "humane" alternative to a war of incredibly vast destruction—set up a drive to test it under battlefield conditions. If you could use something so powerful, why should you not use it? The generals and the politicians had become so blunted to the emotional impact of directing a process of mass murder that the human implications of this radically new tactical emphasis escaped them: some involved in the Project reported having "misgivings," but their vacillations were easily neutralized.

Only Leo Szilard actively went on the offensive, campaigning against the new weapon as an error of judgment on the part of the scientists; but the government, having accepted the initiative of the scientists, wrapped in its humanitarian rationale, stonily turned them out when they did protest. Truman, along with his generals, was already moving so fast that it was quite impossible for the protesters to catch up with them, and the decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima raced arrogantly ahead on the assumption that what the protesters had to say regarding policy did not matter politically or militarily. And very few of them turned against the Project or their connections with the government's war effort. Edward Teller, in fact, even went on to invent that great pseudo-scientific monstrosity, the hydrogen bomb, "800 times more powerful than the atomic bomb" which had so appalled its own creators.

The only possible use weapons of such numerically huge destructive ability could have was to terroristically murder (or threaten to murder) enormous numbers of people—still, of course, on a military justification. The convenient tactical switch of emphasis had become a strategy expressing the highest degree of insanity. All of it had become possible because the process of technological development had gotten so thoroughly socialized that the designers and users of bomb technology could almost innocently devise weapons of mass destruction entirely in the absence of exposure to the latter's effects. In ancient times, generals and politicians practising the "art" of war had had firsthand experience of its impact; turning the human imagination to inventing better weapons, evil though it was, at least registered a direct, emotional sense of awareness. The monsters who clawed their way to the top in Imperial Rome nevertheless retained some basic sense of humanity in their behavior, if only because it was still not yet technologically possible to go off the deep end.

With the Second World War, however, the separation between warmakers and civilians had become a sort of proscenium arch made of steel, complete with war rooms and theatres of combat. Emotionally, the warmakers showed that ruling classes had finally lost the ability to relate to the effects of their own efforts. Since almost no wars in history have ever been decided on by the people who were called on to fight them, this represented a radical step forward in the emotional implosion lived daily by warring élites: their peculiar occupational hazard. These élites could no longer relate humanly and emotionally to their targets. With the Manhattan Project, war stopped being hell for those who decided to have a war fought by other people, to whom they gave orders; with the result that the outcome of global thermonuclear war would at last show the world there really was a Hell after all: the planet Earth. The blunting emotional impact of mass murder had finally attained schizophrenic proportions in the minds of the warmakers.

Thus, the capitalist class of today, corrupted as they are by this emotional sickness, have acquired an absolute and terrible decision-making power that autocrats and emperors could once only have dreamed of even as the relative numbers of the warmakers among them have dwindled to extraordinarily tiny proportions. Capitalist intelligence has entered a world that no longer recognises its own origins in human intelligence, with which human beings are naturally endowed to promote the survival of our species. But the capitalist class will only recognise those fragments of that larger intelligence as long as these support their power or promise to extend their advantage. Since capitalists in general all have this warmaking sickness that only "breaks out" in the highest circles, where it assumes such forms as the military-industrial complex, we humans down here below can expect to find no security in their adopting responsible policies on warmaking.

War is the problem, and capitalism promotes—encourages—the situations that result in war. We do not need capitalism, but we do need to protect ourselves from their unsanitary habits by bringing the world back into line with ordinary human emotions. The only solution to war is a system of society that people control, one in which élites cannot appear. The only way to lay the foundations for this is to eliminate the twin contagions of capital and wage labor, on which the whole structure of capitalist élitism has come to rest.

Ron Elbert