Editorial: The attitude of the London Dockers (1949)

Editorial from the August 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

The action of London dockers in coming out on strike over two ships that were concerned in a dispute originating on the other side of the Atlantic is a gesture that must be applauded by all those interested in the solidarity of labour. Whatever the merits of the dispute these London men were prepared to make sacrifices in a cause that had no direct influence on their own wages and conditions of labour. It is this aspect of the dispute that is heartening to socialists as it is one of the harbingers of that wider and more pregnant solidarity that will herald the triumph of Socialism. This particular strike has occurred at a time when prominent trade unionists and all the Labour Governments, including the Russian, are stressing the importance of nationalism.

It is true that trade union internationalism is a long way from the internationalism in which socialists are interested but it still expresses, even if at times unconsciously, a recognition of the identity of the workers' interests all over the world as opposed to the interests of the international capitalist class.

The attitude of the dockers is in striking contrast to the views of the Government. Whereas the dockers were, in their action, giving expression to an international outlook the Government's is almost entirely national as witness the following statement by the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross:

"These unofficial strikes are an act of economic treason to our trade unions, to the Socialist movement and indeed to our country." (News Chronicle, 14/7/49.)

As "our country" does not belong to us but to those who own the means of production and distribution, the Labour Government definition of "economic treason" is one that should not worry the dockers or any other workers. The fact that it has not done so in the present dispute is one that must give satisfaction to the socialist.

Inequalities in Russia (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

A member who has recently visited Russia sends us his interesting observations. Ed. Com.

The July Socialist Standard quoted John Mossman of the Daily Mail as saying that whereas Russian women street cleaners get about 12 a month, space and atomic scientists bring home more than 20,000 a year. These are only "dry statistics," our local Communists will try and explain them away . . . All animals are equal, only some are more equal than others!

But to an observer—particularly a Socialist one—even with just one open, it shows that class divisions are rapidly developing in the Soviet Union.

A few weeks ago I returned from Russia; and it was the wide difference of dress between the poorest and the more affluent that struck me. For example, in Leningrad one sees many elderly women street cleaners, poorly dressed and shuffling along the gutters with their brooms. It is not a particularly happy sight; and is in complete contrast to the well-dressed officials, diplomats and "important" people that one meets in the Astoria hotel or on board the M.S. Michael Kalinin, a Soviet luxury liner. Most of these "important" people travel first class, dress well, carry expensive ciné cameras and do not have to worry if there is a shortage of butter or meat (which there is at the moment in the Soviet Union), or if prices rise.

It is obvious to the observer in Russia that there is a growing gulf between the average worker and the emergent bourgeoisie; the one looks shabby and drab, and travels by bus, trolleybus or tram; the other has a Moscovich car, or uses Aeroflot or a luxury liner. The privileged few have a large modern apartment or a Dacha (or both), whilst the majority in a city like Leningrad live in slums every bit as bad or worse than those of Liverpool or Glasgow.

Some people are lucky enough to get a flat in the suburbs. According to a recent issue of Moscow News, "families that are still housed in overcrowded and substandard dwellings will get new flats before the end of the first decade." And the experts say that approximately 86 million flats will have to be built within the next twenty years! We seem to have heard all this before—in Britain.

Soviet apologists tell us that life is getting better. And it is. A little better for the majority; and a lot better for the few.

A British visitor to the Soviet Union said to me: "If this is Socialism, I don't want it." But, of course, it is not Socialism.

Peter E. Newell  

The Heart of England. (1923)

From the June 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who was the great traducer who once said, "The Daily Mirror for those who can't read, and the Daily Mail for those who can't think"? Surely that was in the nebulous period now referred to as "before the war."  Should he have evaded the Roll of Honour, and have attained either the "dole" or the O.B.E., it is devoutedly to be hoped he will emerge from his deserved obscurity and revise at least the second half of his glib, but glaucous epigram. For does not the Daily Mail devote two columns each dat to "What Our Readers Think"? It does. For the expenditure of one poor humble penny, any day, one can be stirred to one's inmost wave-lengths by the spectacle of our nation doing its thinking. Heart-throbs by the hundredweight, and thinking by the rod, pole or perch. Any issue will do.

Take this one of January 13th. Mr. Sumner-Jones, hailing from proletarian Piccadilly, leads off with:

"France, through your invaluable pages, can see into our hearts, and recognise the fact that the blind policy of our Government is not approved by the British people."

There now. You'd never have thought that, would you? But this is more thoughtful:

"May I thank you for your splendid stand for France, almost alone as you are and in opposition to the section of the Press, which has learnt nothing and forgotten everything."

That is from Mr. Brenton Gray, a gentleman with two names, but only one brain. You might possibly suggest that the "section" he speaks of having learnt nothing, could not possibly forget everything; but there you see, we cannot all be thinkers. Then there's Samuel Willie, from Yeovil. He says: "Your leading article, 'God Speed to France,' "should re-act on the heart and conscience of every unselfish patriot throughout the Empire."

Is it necessary to add that Sam Willie is an unselfish patriot?

Then "Regular Subscriber" insists that "all that is best in the British Empire will be with you."

Can one doubt that "Regular Subscriber is included in "all that is best"?

"If Bonar Law could only read the minds of the people he would get a surprise," says another original possessor of grey matter. Let H. S. take heart. The feat is not an easy one, and "surprise" is quite an inadequate term of it were accomplished.

Mr. Davis, of Brighton, is a true Briton. "I thoroughly agree with the French action as, I hope, does every other true Briton."

As W. S. Gilbert phased it:

"For he himself has said it,
And its greatly to his credit"

Mr. Sadler is flattering. "It is, indeed, like you to side with common-sense and justice."

The Editor's blushes are not recorded. Perhaps he was looking for an antemetic. Modesty you will see is equally the possession of the Editor and his readers. As F. H. puts it: "Every intelligent patriotic man is behind you."

We are, indeed, a great nation; though it is sadly to be feared that modesty will prove our undoing. Capt. James Murphy reminds us of the saying of the German officer to the British Officer: "You will always be fools, and we shall never be gentlemen." Notice the implication. Modesty forbids our dwelling on it. As that poet of pacifism and true British modesty, Rudyard Kipling has enshrined it:

"Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
   An humble and a contrite heart;
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
   Lest we forget—lest we forget."

W. T. Hopley

More Union Bashing (2015)

From the September 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July the government published details of its Trade Union Bill which is expected to have its second reading in the House of Commons in September or October. The Bill contains wide-ranging measures designed to restrict the organised working class acting collectively and taking industrial action.

The main proposals are thresholds for turnouts in strike ballots, restrictions on the right to picket and the removal of the ban on the use of agency workers to replace striking workers. The government is also extending the role and powers of the Certification Officer who is responsible for regulating trade unions, including providing this official with a new power to impose financial penalties on unions.

Industrial action, including strike action, will only be lawful if there is a minimum 50 percent turnout amongst trade union members who are entitled to vote, 40 percent of those who were balloted must vote in favour of industrial action. In addition, the Bill lays down that abstentions should be treated as 'no' votes for industrial action; which contravenes the policy of the International Labour Organisation which states that only votes cast should be taken into account. The 40 percent yes vote requirement would apply to four 'essential public services': health, the fire service, transport and education. This is in fact far more wide-ranging than it appears at first glance as transport services include roads, rail, aviation, maritime, border security and Transport for London (i.e. London Underground). There will be time limits for strike mandates which will reduce the momentum in union campaigns, reducing or removing trade unions' rights to facility time, specific and bureaucratic requirements for picket lines, the introduction of new criminal offences and sanctions for picketing although unlawful picketing is already regulated by both civil and criminal law.

The removal of the ban on agency workers to replace striking workers (a ban in place since 1973) will permit employers to use 'scab' labour to break strikes. This is manna from heaven for the capitalist class. Jack London, author of The War of the Classes wrote 'after God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumour of rotten principles. When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and Angels weep in Heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out' (The Scab).

Frances O'Grady, the TUC general secretary, responded that 'the government’s proposals on union ballots will make legal strikes close to impossible. Union negotiators will be left with no more power than Oliver Twist when he asked for more. After five years of falling living standards the prospects for decent pay rises have just got a whole lot worse' (Guardian 12 May).

The new Trade Union Bill follows the capitalist class onslaught on the organised working class in the 1980s and 90s. Alan Budd, the economic adviser to Thatcher has said 'raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes – if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since' (Guardian 23 April 2012). In the 1980s and 90s a series of trade union laws were introduced that removed immunities in industrial action, imposed restrictions on the right to picket, increased legal interference into the internal affairs of the unions, the closed shop was made unlawful and the definition of a dispute was narrowed, including restricting industrial action to disputes between workers and their own employer, thus outlawing solidarity action.

The current capitalist crisis and recession has seen production cut back and large numbers of workers lose their jobs, and as a result of high unemployment and job insecurity trade unions become less effective as bargaining organisations, meaning that laws restricting trade unions are easier to implement. Keith Ewing, President of the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom said in May there had been a 'shocking decline in collective bargaining with just 20% of workers covered by an agreement, compared with 82% in the 1970s. In 1978 I was one of 13 million trade unionists and I am now one of only 6 million. Our collective bargaining structures are collapsing' (Morning Star 14 May).

All this presents the working class with a problem in maintaining real wages. A pay increase which does not keep up with the cost of living represents a fall in 'real wages'. The capitalist class know this and will exploit it to their own benefit. Marx pointed out that 'the general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages' (Value, Price and Profit). It should be remembered that wages can never, for long, rise above the level which allows the employers to make a profit. The times when the workers can hope to gain an improvement are when the capitalists are doing well, expanding production and accumulating capital. The most successful strike is the one that never happens because when trade is brisk employers may yield to the mere threat of a strike interrupting production and profits.

The wage which the working class receive is the price of their labour-power and the price of this commodity fluctuates, like that of all commodities, around its value as determined by the amount of socially-necessary labour incorporated in it. If competition between the working class for jobs was unrestricted then wages would tend to fall below the value of labour-power, as often happened in the 19th century before effective trade unions existed. Combining together in unions to exert collective pressure on employers is a way the working class can prevent their wages falling below the value of their labour-power and below the subsistence level. To resist the intensity of exploitation and to maintain real wages against inflation workers will have no choice but to struggle for higher wages even if this means using the strike weapon. The strike, during an economic depression, though, is a blunt instrument to wield. It is difficult to use the strike to gain more pay when production is being curtailed, workers being laid off and the business facing bankruptcy.

Trade unions, then, are defensive organisations of the working class against what Marx called 'the never-ceasing encroachments of capital' but they cannot stop the exploitation of the working class. This exploitation is inherent in the wages system and can only be abolished along with it through the conversion of the means of production into common ownership under the democratic control of the whole community.

As Marx wrote: 

'at the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wages system!' (Value, Price and Profit).

As socialists, we stand with our fellow working class in their necessary battles to defend themselves, but we point out at all times that the real victory to be achieved is the abolition of the wages system.

Steve Clayton

Abolish money (1983)

Book Review from the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Contemporary Political Philosophy: Radical Studies. Edited by Keith Graham. Cambridge University Press. £4.50

This short book (160 pages) contains six essays by "young British philosophers"—professional university philosophy teachers. The essays are of varying quality and it is unfortunate for the other four that the first two are so weak as to risk deterring the reader from continuing. But this would be a mistake as the others are much more interesting, particularly the last two where Keith Graham refutes the "philosophical anarchist" view that no "rational moral agent" can accept majority, democratic decisions, and where Anthony Skillen states the case for the fullest freedom of speech against groups like the SWP who advocate physical violence (and, presumably, if ever they got power, state censorship and violence) to prevent certain views being expressed.

The two remaining essays, and it is these we concentrate here, deal with Marx's views on political democracy under capitalism and on the democratic nature of socialism. They confirm that Marx did not denounce existing representative institutions (the vote, parliamentary control, civil rights) as "bourgeois democracy" fit only to be replaced by a one-party dictatorship, but regarded them as sufficiently democratic to be useful to the economic and political struggle of the working class.

The two authors also discover (much to their embarrassment) that Marx regarded socialism as necessarily a moneyless society. Russell Keat, whose essay analyses in detail a part of Marx's The Jewish Question (written in 1843, just as he was becoming a socialist), is forced to admit:

it seems that Marx is unwilling to accept that the social relationships involved in (economic) exchange can properly be said to display genuine freedom. This is so, whether or not these exchange relationships include the sale of labour-power itself.

Adding in a footnote:

It follows that, for Marx, full human autonomy cannot be achieved in "market socialism", since, despite the absence of class exploitation, alienation continues through the existence of exchange relationships.

Richard Norman comes to the same conclusion:

There is a strand in socialist thought which seems to envisage the eventual abolition of money. This might seem to be encouraged by a passage in the "Critique of the Gotha Programme" where Marx suggests that true equality would be attainable only when there had been achieved an economic condition of sheer abundance.

After this rather cautious and grudging admission that Marx stood for the abolition of money, Norman goes on to state that, while he can accept that "an appropriate egalitarian principle would be one of free provision of basic needs", adding that "as well as health care these basic needs might include, say, housing, basic foodstuffs and education", he cannot

imagine that all needs and desires could be met on this principle of free provision. Marx's vision of total abundance smacks too much of nineteenth-century optimism. There must be inescapable decisions about using limited resources for this purpose rather than for that, and therefore in any society there will be relative scarcity in at least some respects. One cannot realistically imagine a situation where people, whether individually or collectively, simply go and help themselves to a rare wine or an artistic masterpiece or an exquisitely carved piece of furniture whenever they feel like it.

This objection to a moneyless society of free access is put to us every week, though the example used is more usually a luxury yacht or a Rolls Royce (we hope Norman does not take this as an insult since, after all, what has always been the task of philosophers if not to express more logically and more coherently points of view held by the population in general?). 

There are two answers to this. The first is that the objector assumes that people would have suddenly been transformed from capitalist to socialist society without changing their ideas or attitudes. Thus the Hyde Park heckler would still dream of living like the rich he reads about in the papers (and the university lecturer would still dream about living a "cultured" life surrounded by beautiful things). But in fact, of course, socialism is not something that is going to be, or could be, introduced for people, but something that they are going to have to establish themselves in full awareness of what they are doing and why. The people who establish socialism, in other words, will no longer want to ape the rich and understand that, in a society where goods and services will be freely and permanently available in relative abundance, hoarding or grabbing (or investing in rare wines or masterpieces) will be pointless.

The second answer is that in  socialist society everybody will have a Rolls-Royce and the best wines! Not literally, of course, but in the sense that whatever is produced in socialism will be of the best quality, though, once again, without any of the prestige that attaches to the best things today just because they are out of reach of the vast majority and only available to the rich. The fact is that, while it is true that resources are limited in an absolute sense, it is not true that human wants are limitless. It is technically possible today (much more than it was in the "optimistic 19th century) to produce enough of what humans, as rational beings, are likely to reasonably want in a rationally-organised free and equal society.

Before examining Norman's suggestion to keep money in "socialist" society for certain purposes we are going to have to digress a little to explain what money is. Money is not, as Norman appears to think, some sort of voucher that can be used, at the discretion of the holder, to acquire particular goods according to choice. Money is a social relation in the sense that it is a product of a particular kind of socio-economic system, one where goods are produced as commodities; that is, as items produced to be sold on a market; which in turn presupposes non-social, or private, ownership of products since exchange can only take place between separate owners. Money is a special kind of commodity, the one which can be exchanged for all or any other commodity. Money and commodity production go together; they are parts of the same set of social relationships which also include exchange and private property.

But socialism is a system of society which outdates commodity-production and money precisely because it is a society based, as Norman himself puts it, on "the common ownership and popular control of the means of production"; in other words, a society where what is produced is also commonly owned and is directly appropriated by the community. Consumer goods produced under such circumstances cannot be sold to the members of the community which already owns them; all that can happen to them is that they can be shared, allocated, divided, handed out or made available to the members of the community in accordance with a democratic decision.

If Norman had understood the nature of money, it is in these terms that he could better have expressed his point of view, as an argument about how consumer goods should be allocated in socialist society.

Marx, like us, realised that the essence of socialist distribution was free access according to needs as judged by the individual members of socialist society, in other words, that consumer goods and services should be freely available for people to take and use as and when they needed them. With the fantastic development of the forces of production since Marx's day, this stage could be reached fairly rapidly after the establishment of socialism.

Marx, as is understandable, given the lower level of development of the powers of production in the 19th century, envisaged this taking somewhat longer and suggested that, while awaiting the stage where full free access ("from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" as Marx puts it in the passage from the Critique of the Gotha Programme Norman mentions) would have become possible, consumer goods in socialist society could be distributed by some system of voucher or tickets. He himself mentioned, following an idea of Robert Owen and others, a system of "labour-time" vouchers which would have linked the consumption of the individual members of socialist society to the number of hours of working time they had contributed to the common productive effort.

It is easy to think up drawbacks to such a system — and Marx only mentioned labour-time vouchers as one possible way of distributing consumer goods in the early days of socialist society — but Marx was clear that such vouchers would not be money, could not be money in fact, since money implied commodity-production which socialism precisely abolishes in favour of production directly and solely for use.

Thus when Norman doubts that full free access to all consumer goods and services will be possible and suggests as an alternative "satisfaction of the basic needs of all, plus equality of monetary incomes over and above that", what he is suggesting is a distribution system where basic needs (housing, basic foodstuffs, education, health, transport) would be provided free, but where other less basic needs (what? Surely not rare wine, artistic masterpieces and exquisitely-carved  furniture!) would only be satisfied on production of a voucher, equal amounts of which would be distributed to each member of socialist society to use according to their individual choice. Put this way, Norman's scheme would be an alternative to Marx's, but the problem which Marx felt socialist society would certainly have had to face had it been established in his day has since been to all intents and purposes solved by the subsequent development of the forces of production.

Today there is no longer any need to think in terms of vouchers as a means of distributing goods in socialist society. This is why we emphasise free access to consumer goods and services according to individual needs as the socialist mode of distribution and as something that could be implemented very rapidly once capitalism has been abolished.

Having said all this, it is nevertheless encouraging that "contemporary political philosophers" should have begun to discuss a moneyless society.

Adam Buick

A Quotable Quote (2001)

From the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

"There are no nations! There are no Russians! There are no Arabs! There is no Third World! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems—one vast and immanent, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichsmarks, roubles, rin [???], pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural [sic] order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things . . .
"You . . . howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT, and AT&T and Du Pont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world now. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions like the good little systems analysts they are, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do.
"We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies . . . The world is a collage of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable laws of business. The world is a business . . . !!"

(Part of a speech by the American tycoon Jensen, in the novelisation of the film Network, Sphere Books Ltd, 1977, pp.130-1.)

Bloggers Note: Jensen's - played by Ned Beatty - actual speech can be viewed at the following YouTube Link.

There's a good time coming (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

What a spectacle! Jim Callaghan receiving a standing ovation after telling the TUC Congress that restricting wage increases, plus reduced taxation, was in the best interest of trade unionists. Some at least, remained seated. Could it be that they have seen through the myth that pay increases are the cause of either inflation or unemployment?

Referring to "free collective bargaining" the Prime Minister claimed: "the race is to the swift, the lion's share goes to the lions". The real "lions" are the capitalist class with their built-in advantage of ownership of the means of production. An advantage which puts the debate on "industrial democracy" into perspective. As for members of the working class, though their level of wages can be influenced by strong unions, they are paid for the value of their labour-power. We agree with Callaghan that high wages have nothing to do with Socialism—a social system yet to be established in which money and trade unions will not have any role to play.

In the manner of his predecessors, regardless of party, the PM's message was not all belt-tightening. The Government wants a steady rate of expansion and given the right conditions, there would be no further reduction in the standard of living. In fact there are good times coming—"we have the best chance since the end of the war to make this year the best since the end of the war". Do not get too excited: capitalism with all of its problems will continue as usual.

Introducing the debate on pensions and welfare benefits Jack Jones, Gen. Sec. of the TGWU, said that too many pensioners were condemned to live below the poverty line. In 1906 J. R. Clynes MP declared "that the Labour Party would have been well worth creating if in the next ten years they did nothing more than settle the question of old age pensions". At the time the proposed settlement was for five shillings per week. 

Socialism was possible in 1906—in 1977 it is imperative.

Pat Deutz

Blair's Place in the Sun (2001)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just in case he was in any doubt about whether he should have the election soon or wait for a bit, Tony Blair has had some help in making his mind up from the Sun. “It's in the bag Tony. You might as well call the Election now” he was recently urged by that newspaper, apparently on the basis of its less than penetrative analysis of Gordon Brown's budget. Furthermore the Sun, after some dithering, has at last decided about where its readers should put their cross on the fateful day: “Blair gets our support for a second term. Blair has done enough to get our backing” was the message, in appropriately heavy typeface. It was enough to have them punching the air in relief at Number Ten.

Well it would not be the Sun without some crafted, instant impact front page. Remember the word GOTCHA, which exulted over the killing of hundreds of Argentinean sailors on the Belgrano? Remember the crushing request on polling day in 1992, that “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn off the lights”? And the triumphant, if perhaps overblown, claim, after Major's dramatic win at that election, that “It was the Sun wot done it”? By 1997 when John Major, whose victory the Sun claimed to be responsible for, went to the polls amid the near ruin of his government, things were a bit different. For one thing there had been a lot of work from New Labour's leaders, sucking up to Rupert Murdoch and other press barons. “The Sun Backs Blair” was their reward, screamed the front page on 1 May 1997; a few days before that an editorial had encouraged Sun readers with the advice that they needed “a leader with vision, purpose and courage who can inspire them and fire their imagination. The Sun believes that man is Tony Blair”.

Pandering

Well, as it happened Blair also thought he was that man and since then he has put a lot of effort into keeping Labour locked onto support from the tabloids, using a technique appropriate to the assumed prejudices of their readers. This has entailed the government pushing policies and attitudes which have outraged many of its supporters, who cling stubbornly to the quaint notion that the Labour Party has some connection with protection of the poorest and most vulnerable in society and an historical obligation to stand up for the international unity of all human beings. Ideas like that exist in defiance of the fact that the support of people in the position of Rupert Murdoch has to be bought. There may be some who, apart from needing urgent psychiatric care, believe that Murdoch would allow his newspapers to support a party because its policies would significantly benefit the majority of people in this country. The reality is that he wants to back the winner as the most effective way of protecting and expanding his interests. In 1997 the Sun thought the Tories were “tired, divided and rudderless”—in other words not the kind of government a global capitalist would want to do profitable business with.

Now that he has the Sun on his side Blair has only the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph to persuade. These are rather tougher nuts for him to crack but doubtless he will try; in fact that is what his government have been doing since they came into power. For some years now, carefully watching the circulation figures, New Labour have been busily pandering to the crass prejudices and political neuroses which are regularly stimulated in the Daily Mail, with the result that that paper has steadily climbed the sales ladder. Now the Mail is a leader among the papers for those who are frightened, not of what capitalism actually does to them but of what a newspaper tells them could happen unless they are protected by the more primitive of government policies. Some Labour supporters might have expected their government to stand up against this; in fact Blair and his ministers have pursued issues like asylum seekers, benefit fraudsters and public order offenders with a zeal which has given comfort to people who are suckled on the Daily Mail.

Disillusioned

It is unlikely that the Mail will change sides (although after what happened with the Sun nothing, it is clear, is impossible) but it is certain that if this were to happen Blair and his minions would not be put off by the content of that paper. For example on the day it came out for Blair the Sun devoted almost a page to such tedium as : “Randy Owl Savages Dad On Way To Pub”, “Major Can't Stand To Attention: Bungled Army Op Ruined My Sex Life, Claims Dick . . .” If that kind of rubbish did not persuade Blair to renounce the support of the Sun there is no reason to assume that if the Mail also supported Labour he would object to the kind stuff it publishes regularly:

On Crime: “The untouchable. This boy of nine is a thief, arsonist and vandal...Yet he is beyond the law”.On Asylum Seekers: “We didn't need the extraordinary pictures in yesterday's Mail of the luxury that certain Romanian 'refugees' leave behind to come to this country to know that there is no repression in Romania. When will the government stop being so naive about these people, who travel here to wolf down our precious resources?”On Foreigners in General: “William Hague's speech about Britain becoming a 'foreign land' was precisely the sort he should be making close to a General Election”.

The question, however, is what happens when Blair has won the election with the help of Murdoch's Sun and perhaps other papers? Well we have seen the answer to this, in what has happened since 1997. This has had its effect—a perceptible disillusionment among Labour supporters, who regularly complain that they have missed the thrill of Blair's “vision, purpose and courage” and feel definitely uninspired with their imagination anything but fired. Here. for example, is one grumble in the Guardian of 10 March:

“I have been a member of the Labour Party for 37 years and I first wrote to Tony Blair in 1999 expressing concern at the way my party was developing and gave the arrogance of Peter Mandelson as just one example. This letter was not, and never has been, acknowledged . . .”

Traumas

Perhaps they were wondering, in Millbank, how they could possibly reply to a man who has been in the party since 1963 and is so stubbornly unresponsive to experience as to maintain his membership through the traumas of those previous Labour governments. For example Wilson and his battles with the unions . . . Callaghan and the Winter of Discontent . . . support for the war in Vietnam . . . genocide in Biafra . . . Faced with that kind of discontent, what is Blair supposed to do? Well, he carries on trying to do whatever is necessary to run British capitalism in the interests of its ruling class, which means him ignoring irate letter writers while grovelling to the likes of Murdoch. On Breakfast With Frost on 7 January he spelled it out: “it is a good thing”, he said, for Labour to accept donations from their rich supporters, he was “absolutely proud of the fact that we have got successful entrepreneurs and disaffected Conservatives . . . who support the Labour Party”. What he did not say was whether he was proud of the fact that the people who give that kind of money—or, in the case of Murdoch, give an expensive endorsement in their papers— must expect some return on their investment. It may be the Sun wot will do it but there will then be pay-off time.

Ivan

Clause Four Resurfaces (2015)

From the September 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we go to press, it is with the Labour Party leadership battle raging and its four contenders spouting all manner of promises to secure votes. At the forefront of this contest is the long-serving and perhaps unusually principled left wing MP, Jeremy Corbyn. For a Labour MP, he is as radical as they come and a genuine throwback to the days when Labour was considered by many in Britain to be ‘socialist’. His attack on everything Blairism has come to represent, his stance on nuclear weapons, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and many social issues, has won him much support, a lot of it from other parties on the left.

In early August came news that Corbyn was championing Labour's old Clause 4 – its supposed socialist commitment to common ownership of production, distribution and exchange. ‘Corbynmania’ kicked in almost overnight, with social media sites buzzing with news that ‘socialism’ was back on the agenda, whilst the rightwing press, big business and big Labour donors have done all in their power to discredit him and anything to do with old Labour.

Liz Kendall, another Labour leadership contender and avid Blairite said: 'Life has moved on from the old Clause 4 in 1994, let alone 2015. We are a party of the future, not a preservation society.' Big Labour donor and businessman Assem Aklam, who swelled Labour’s coffers with £300,000 in donations, said he would stop funding the party if Corbyn became leader, announcing that he would not back a 'dead horse'.

Fabianism

Nostalgic workers, who mourn the demise of Clause 4 in the 1990s, would do well to remind themselves of its authors and who they actually were – the Fabian Society – and what they actually thought about the working class. Perhaps the closest we come to a definition of the Fabians is Engels' description of them as 'a clique united only by their fear of the threatening rule of the workers and doing all in their power to avert the danger.' What danger? A danger that had been prophesised by the ILP when they wrote 'that should there be a workers' revolt in Europe, there is nothing save a narrow strip of sea between us and what would then be the theatre of a great human tragedy.'

With Engels description in mind, however, we can begin to set Clause 4 in its real context. For it was penned in November 1917, when news of the Bolshevik takeover in Russia was still making news in Britain, when there were uprisings in Germany, Hungary and Ireland, when the Bolsheviks were arguing the case of peace with Germany, when workers all over Europe were war weary and sick of the social problems the war was creating, when crime rates in Britain were spiralling and when the ruling elite were beginning to realise that the Britain the soldiers would return to would not be, as Lloyd George had promised, 'a land fit for heroes'.

The fear of insurrection amongst the ruling elite – amongst whom the Fabian Society considered themselves – was real enough. The Fabians had in fact felt such qualms for thirty years, seeing in the working class not a mass of exploited workers, impoverished workers, in whose united strength resided their own emancipation, but rather a seething mass of potential revolutionary fervour that must be contained at all costs.

In the 1890s, Beatrice Webb could expect 'no hope from these myriad of deficient minds and deformed bodies – what can we hope but brutality, madness and crime?'  Two decades later, her views had not changed, for she saw unions as nothing but 'undertrained and underbred workers'. Bernard Shaw even toyed with a solution – 'sterilisation of the masses' – an idea later to be taken up by Churchill and Hitler.

From the outset, the Fabians did not wish to abolish capitalism and thus remove themselves from their privileged positions. They wanted to reform capitalism, to soften some of its harsher effects, to make capitalism worker-friendly. They wanted peaceful, gradual change from capitalism to what Shaw was to describe as 'state socialism'.

Rejecting the Marxian view that the state was a manifestation of the domination of the capitalist class, the Fabians believed the state to be impartial, neutral, to be used by anyone who could take power. However, the idea of the workers taking control was anathema to everything they stood for.

Their idea of socialism was one in which the state was controlled by experts and professionals 'like themselves' – trained in the new social sciences. They were, it appears, technocrats, believing that the technical administration of society should take the place of party politics. They certainly did not believe that the upsurge of protest against capitalism could be led by a class-conscious majority intent on social change in their own interest.

Moreover, the Fabians did not care who took their ideas on board and even harboured the notion of selling their wares to the Conservatives and Liberals.

They were arrogant, held the workers in contempt, feared them and were more than guilty of the charge of blatant class collaboration. Neither was Clause 4 written out of a genuine sympathy or empathy with the workers and with a view to changing the existing social system. It was penned to assuage, to pacify that section of society that was beginning to nurture the idea that it was time it took matters into its own hands.

Clause 4 was penned in an attempt to persuade that section of society that posed a threat to the ruling class that their lot could be bettered if they put their faith in an elite, an intellectual vanguard, who would work on their behalf in parliament and at a time when workers elsewhere were attempting to change society themselves, even if this was proving to be without any foresight.

State capitalism

Clause 4 did not mean socialism, only ever state-run capitalism, the nationalisation of capitalist industry, which would continue to be run according to the dictates of the profit system, only by a state-appointed board, not by private capitalist firms.

The 'common ownership' clause, which would eventually be reproduced on every Labour Party membership card was nothing short of a Fabian blueprint for a more advanced, as they saw it, form of capitalism, and with its adoption the Labour Party became the foremost advocate of state action to control and humanise the operation of private enterprise – which has nothing to do with socialism, because the profit system and its myriad shortcomings still exist and workers are always subject to the worst excesses of its contradictions.

To be sure, the idea of 'socialising' the means of production and distributing wealth was by no means a new idea in 1918. The notion had been mooted by previous Labour Party conferences and, although the idea attracted a lot of support, it never appeared in the party's constitution. Whilst many a delegate regarded themselves as socialist, it was believed that such a blatant expression of 'socialism' would be a vote-loser.

This is an important point, as it shows that the Labour Party then, as now, was not so much interested in promoting ideas that threatened the hegemony of the capitalist class, but in securing the most votes. What made it possible, and indeed urgent, that the Labour Party should adopt Clause 4, without it being an electoral liability, was the radicalisation of workers brought about by war. But the time would come when Clause 4 was seen as an electoral liability.

Electoral liability

In 1955, Labour had lost 1.5 million votes compared with the 1951 election. Conservative seats rose from 319 to 345 seats and Labour's share fell from 293 to 277.  At the 1959 election, Labour lost a further 196,000 voters, whilst the Tory tally rose by 448,000. One Labour commentator, Douglas Jay, speaking of nationalisation, said: 'We are in danger of fighting under the label of a class that no longer exists.'

After the 1959 defeat, the then Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell decided there had to be some serious changes in Labour Party policy.  At a specially summoned post-election conference, previous defeats were discussed. Gaitskell declared: 'In my opinion capitalism has significantly changed, largely as a result of our own efforts and the changing character of the Labour Party. Importantly, he argued, Labour had lost votes through its identification with common ownership – Clause 4'. Conference listened quietly, but cries of derision greeted his next words: 'Standing as it does on its own, this clause cannot possibly be regarded as adequate ... it implies that the only precise object we have is nationalisation, whereas we have many other socialist objectives.'

Although Gaitskell's idea to drop Clause 4 was supported by many, including Bevan, it was quickly rejected.

Seemingly, it was Mrs Thatcher who eventually brought the question of Clause 4 back to the debating table, when she decided to privatise anything that stood still long enough to be privatised.

In 1983, the Labour Party manifesto claimed that common ownership would be expanded. The following year, the party conference passed a resolution on a show of hands that reaffirmed: 'Clause 4 Pt 4 of the Labour Party constitution is the central aim of the Labour Party,' and called for 'repossession of all parts of the public sector privatised by the Tories.'

At the 1985 conference, Roy Hattersley asked for support for a resolution on 'the need to extend social ownership and democratic planning into a significant number of key organisations, in banks, manufacturing, new technology and the service sector.' Conference obliged. It also supported a resolution which called on 'the next Labour government to return all privatised services ... and all privatised industries to public ownership, and to repeal any privatisation legislation.'

By the time of the 1987 election, though Labour pledged to take back only BT and British Gas under 'common ownership', neither company would be in line to be nationalised. Instead, existing shares would be converted into new bonds, including varieties of ‘deep bonds’, designed to be attractive to institutional shareholders. Again, at the 1987 conference, the NUM moved a resolution to renationalise all industries privatised by the Tories. The union block votes were wheeled in and the motion was lost 3,869,000 to 2,397,000 votes. Within a few short years there was a gradual acceptance of Tory ideas that would continue.

Another nail in the coffin of 'common ownership' through nationalisation was the support for increased share ownership. Bryan Gould, Labour's campaign manager in 1987 argued, in an amazing piece of Tory logic: 'The idea of owning shares is catching on and, as socialists, we should support it as one means of taking power from the hands of the few and spreading it more widely.'

Enter Tony Blair

After three successive defeats at the polls, many in the Labour Party were now intent on burying Clause 4. One thing was certain, argued new Labour leader Tony Blair – if Labour was to stand a chance of winning the next election, Clause 4 as it stood had to be ditched. Blair declared this to be his intention at Conference 1994 and the party's new Clause 4 appeared in March 1995 in time for a specially summoned conference on April 29th.

The vote was put to the membership whether Clause 4 should be reworded. Jarrow CLP became the first to vote in favour of holding on to the original Clause 4, but only three more would oppose it.  Blair's new version won the day. A discussion document – Labour's Objectives: Socialist Values in a Modern World – had been available before the vote. If Labour Party members had studied it – Clause 4 aside – many would probably have resigned in the belief that it was penned by Margaret Thatcher. The document explained that the idea of common ownership only came about because 'there was a genuine revulsion at the sheer anarchy and exploitation associated with the free market of Victorian capitalism.' The reference to 'Victorian capitalism' was a clever piece of trickery, giving the reader the idea that capitalism in the 1990s was no longer 'anarchic' and was now worker-friendly.

And what of the new Clause 4? Again we could see regurgitated the same old lie that 'The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party'...which aims to put 'power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many' which was something Thatcher had claimed privatisation was doing. This startling new 'socialist' objective claimed 'we work for a dynamic economy' in which ' the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and cooperation to produce the wealth the nation needs.' Little wonder the Sun could announce (of Blair) 'He speaks our language.' Little wonder that when Labour took power, Thatcher could proudly inform a gathering of the Tory faithful that Tony Blair was her 'greatest achievement'.

It was a mammoth achievement for the Tories, so much so that Labour continued to lurch further to the right year on year.

Never was socialist

For over a hundred years this journal has been arguing that Labour was never socialist. Even with Clause 4 being held up as a sign of its commitment to real change in the interest of the many, it has always been a party of capitalism and, in office, ever willing to serve as the executive arm of the capitalist class, never hesitant to use the might of the state to club the workers into submission whenever they became uppity, whether using troops to break strikes, creating the Special Patrol Group, internment in Northern Ireland or supporting and indeed initiating myriad conflicts throughout the world, from World War I, right through the Vietnam War and up to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. For over 110 years, Labour has hoodwinked the workers, and endlessly led them down the blind alley of reformism, always mindful that its real allegiance was to the master class who own and control society.

Make no mistake. A Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn would make no departure from the historical record. Its task would be primarily to try to make capitalism – a system based upon the exploitation of one class by another – work in the interests of the exploited. Labour, under Corbyn, would not really control the economy, it would control him. The historical record shows that if the dictates of capital demanded, the workers would have to be lied to, betrayed and made out to be villains of the peace and a threat to the economic interests of the country. No Labour leader to date has failed to be cast in a mould created by the capitalist class, no matter how noble their intentions.

If workers are really attracted by ideas of common ownership they would do well to realise that a party which has stood uncompromisingly and unwaveringly for real common ownership and, more, real democratic control of the earth's natural and industrial resources, is still in existence – the Socialist Party.  Moreover, you will find no aspiring leaders within the Socialist Party, slugging it out and making rash promises to the membership, only a membership of equals in which Party affairs are decided democratically by the membership.

Neither are we keen on reforming capitalism or prostituting our principles on the high altar of opportunism as Labour has been doing since its inception and will continue to do even with Corbyn as leader. We seek the abolition of capitalism and all it represents, replacing it with a system of society in which money has been abolished, class antagonism eradicated and in which each person has free access to the necessaries of life.

John Bissett

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Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution, as originally drafted in 1918 and subsequently amended

Objects

1. To organise and maintain in parliament and in the country a political Labour Party.

2. To cooperate with the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, or other kindred organisations, in joint political or other action in harmony with the party constitution and standing orders.

3. To give effect as far as possible to the principles from time to time approved by the party conference.

4. To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

5. Generally to promote the political, social and economic emancipation of the people, and more particularly of those who depend directly upon their own exertions by hand or by brain for the means of life.

Inter-Commonwealth

6. To cooperate with the labour and socialist organisations in the commonwealth overseas with a view to promoting the purposes of the party, and to take common action for the promotion of a higher standard of social and economic life for the working population of the respective countries.

International (Gaitskell amendment in 1959?)

7. To cooperate with the labour and socialist organisations in other countries and to support the United Nations and its various agencies and other international organisations for the promotion of peace, the adjustment and settlement of international disputes by conciliation or judicial arbitration, the establishment and defence of human rights, and the improvement of the social and economic standards and conditions of work of the people of the world.

Now for pro-socialism (2000)

Editorial from the November 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 26 September the latest in a series of events under the banner of anti-capitalism took place. This one was in Prague, and it followed similar events over the past two years in Seattle, Washington, London, Melbourne and elsewhere. The term "event" is used loosely to cover various forms of protest. According to the UK Prague edition of People's Global Action (PGA), protests include:

Strikes - demonstrations - critical mass bike rides - carnivals - street parties - reclaiming streets, government land or office buildings - music - dancing - speeches - handing out flyers - banner hangings - distributing community-controlled newspapers - street theatre - guerrilla gardening - handing out food - mock trade fairs - offering no-interest loans outside major banks

Faced with such a multi-faceted onslaught, it might be thought that capitalism would have felt shaken to the core. In the event it turned out to be what the New Statesman of 8 May said of the London carnival: "Just a pinprick for capitalism." It could not have been otherwise. PGA describes itself as "not an organisation but aims to support and strengthen the many growing grassroots struggles across the globe." Struggles against capitalism? Well, yes, as a declared aim.

In practice, all groups like PGA are doomed to fail to achieve their stated aims because those aims are entirely negative. They say they oppose capitalism, they are going to get rid of it, but they do nothing to put something fundamentally different in its place. So they end up at best with a slightly modified version of the system they "oppose". At worst, the time and energy wasted on reforms enables those who run capitalism to brush aside, to patronise, and even laugh at the protestors.

What do the capitalist media think of anti-capitalism protests? Of course they don't like the associated violence. The protestors "besmirch the Czechs proud history of peace", complains the Daily Telegraph (27 September). The Independent (28 September) notes that the approach of the IMF and the World Bank towards the opposition has been to debate with it. The head of the IMF said that "he welcomed the protests because they have made the IMF aware of poverty". Really? It just hadn't noticed it before, was that the problem?

The reaction of the Trotskyist press to the protestors is unsurprisingly two-faced. Rightly they recognise that the forces gathered for mass action in Prague were a very mixed bag: "insurgent youth mixed anti-authoritarianism, utopianism, and idealist third-worldism with liberal, single-issue reformism . . . a default political identification for dissident youth is 'anarchism', which can mean anything from vegetarian lifestylism to syndicalist trade unionism". (1917, Journal of the International Bolshevik Tendency, September).

But in that same issue the "deformed" workers' states of China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea are to be defended against "imperialist aggression".

We repeat what we said in a leaflet Against Capitalism?, produced and distributed in response to the London May protests:

"For a revolution to be any good, you have to be FOR something, besides being AGAINST capitalism. Any fool can be against capitalism. Some people are just against BIG capitalism (WTO, IMF, World Bank, GATT, etc) as if somehow 'small' national capitalism is a completely different thing, and perfectly nice. It's not. They're the same . . .Capitalism is commodity production for sale on a market. Instead of that you could have co-operative production for use and free distribution on the basis of need. This would involve no markets, no money, no commodities, no private property, no rich class and poor class, no Third World and First World, no profit-led profligacy of any description, and amazingly, no ecological destruction, no famine, virtually no crime, and no war."

New World Order (2015)

Book Review from the September 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Deluge: the Great War and the Remaking of Global Order', by Adam Tooze. Penguin £12.99

Which side won the First World War? The straightforward answer is that it was the Entente – Britain, France, etc – that prevailed over the Central Powers, mainly Germany and Austria-Hungary. But, as Tooze shows here, it was rather more complicated than that, and the true victors were the United States and, to a considerably lesser extent, Japan. We should add the kind of provision that he does not make, that it was the ruling class in these countries that really won.

The lengthy fighting, with its incredible costs in materiel and its disruption to industry and agriculture, had greatly weakened the major European powers, with even the ‘winners’ owing vast sums to the US. In 1923 the British government agreed to repay $4.6bn to the US, with interest, over 62 years. Most of the reparations paid by Germany to Britain and France in fact ended up being passed to the US.

It can be said that the real end of the war came, not with the Versailles Treaty, but with the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–2; holding it in the US was itself symbolic. There Britain in effect conceded naval and hence global power to the US, Japan was allowed a Pacific fleet, and other countries were relegated to the status of minor players in terms of their navies. In 1928 a British Foreign Office memo recognised the new situation: ‘Great Britain is faced in the United States of America with a phenomenon for which there is no parallel in our modern history – a state twenty-five times as large, five times as wealthy, three times as populous, twice as ambitious, almost invulnerable, and at least our equal in prosperity, vital energy, technical equipment, and industrial science.’ Even the fact that the US did not join the League of Nations gave it a kind of veto over the decisions of the major players who were in the League.

Not that the American ruling class had it all its own way, even in its own backyard. There were widespread strikes in 1919, often opposed violently by the employers. At US Steel, twenty workers were killed before the company won a comprehensive victory in January 1920. Immigration was drastically cut, and a ‘Red Scare’ led to many non-US-born labour activists being deported. All this was, says Tooze, ‘a shock from which the American labour movement was never to recover.’

Moreover, the official end of the war by no means meant anything approaching peace. From the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 and the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923 to the British military defence of Shanghai in 1927 and other examples, fighting and preparations for fighting continued right down to the bloodbaths of the thirties. The outcome of the Great War was not Peace without Victory, as trumpeted by US President Wilson, but Victory without Peace. 

Paul Bennett

Class warriors? (2000)

Editorial from the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month, new Labour's credibility plummeted to new depths as they attempted to play the so-called “class card”. By focusing on the unsuccessful application by a comprehensive school pupil to Oxford University, one cabinet minister after another were trotted out to lambast the “forces of conservatism” which apparently lay behind this country's elitist educational institutions.

The fact that the aforementioned ministers were commenting on the specifics of a particular case to which they were not privy only underlines that this was a pathetic display of populist opportunism. Coupled with the fact that it is becoming increasingly more difficult for people from poorer backgrounds to attend university, New Labour could be charged with the more serious political crimes of cant and humbug with a large dash of hypocrisy. The politics of spin seems to have finally caught up with them.

And herein lies the rub. New Labour's honeymoon is clearly over. The Conservatives are closing the opinion poll gap as was proved by the local election results and grass-roots labour supporters increasingly cry that they have been forgotten as the government have played to the needs of “middle England”.

New Labour is well aware of this. The first two to three years has been characterised by financial orthodoxy, or “prudence” as Gordon Brown refers to it (sticking to Tory spending targets, the budget surplus, the cutting of the national debt, etc) much to the delight of the City and some sections of industry. However, this has meant that new Labour conceded ground over the NHS and education.

This is why the government may start to ease off the brakes and “left turn” slightly in the run up to the general election. This is the real context of the “class card”. Already the Chancellor has begun to earmark more money for hospitals and schools as Blair and co attempt to reposition themselves towards a more traditional populist approach.

In any case, this is all very cheeky. Not so long ago, Blair told us that the class war was over (although he never announced the winner) and that we were all on the same side. Indeed, this was the theoretical basis of the “Third Way”.

The class war is not over and will continue for as long as we have capitalism. By seeking to deny the class nature of capitalism, New Labour reveal themselves as one of the deadliest enemies of the working class. Such is the contradictory nature of capitalism that even they had to admit to the continued existence of class. But be under no illusions as to which side of the class struggle they are on.

The Human Condition (2015)

From the September 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human society today consists of 7.4 billion people, each needing food, shelter, clothing, travel, education, health care and entertainment. The obvious, rational way to proceed would be for us to use all of the planet’s resources and technology to produce wealth and services to meet all of those human needs. However there is one obstacle to this which must be removed first. At the present time the bulk of our world’s resources are in effect locked away from us, and withheld from such use. They are under armed guard, controlled by a tiny minority. That small fraction of the population who own and control the vast majority of productive resources have shown time and again that they only ever allow them to be used when to do so will lead to their own further enrichment and empowerment.

This year’s the Sunday Times Rich List showed that in the UK the richest thousand people, or 1 in 30,000 of the adult population, own between them £574 billion, an average of over half a billion each. Their collective wealth has more than doubled in the past ten years despite the world recession during most of this period. The important point about this is that it represents actual control of society’s resources: minerals, land, machinery, and also the vast 'army' of human labour which they purchase day after day to generate further surpluses with which to further cement their complete monopoly over vital global resources for human survival.

From where does this huge surplus keep flowing? From the constant hard work of the 99 percent without that social power. There is no other way in which useful produce and wealth can be created, other than through the joint efforts of people like ourselves. As long as this extraordinary situation continues there is no point even discussing what 'we' should do with society’s resources, as they are not yet 'ours' to discuss the use of.

Obviously the increasingly extreme concentration of wealth and social power in so few hands is not limited to the UK. Look at Forbes magazine’s international research and reports on the global situation. Despite talk of 'everyone' having suffered in the recessions of recent years, there are 1,500 billionaires around the world, whose net worth has increased in the past few years.

Access denied

Let us be under no illusion. If any individual or group of people try to access or useany of those privately held resources – whether land, factories, transport or anything else – that 1 percent have never had any hesitation in using the brutal armed force of the state or private militias to deal with such a transgression. If the broad human community try to access those resources we will be threatened with armed force. And generally speaking, that use of force is quite legitimate because in most parts of the world today the electorate has given their permission and acquiescence to this, however passively, by voicing the view that this system of property relationships is the only way in which society can be run. What is urgently needed is for that majority who give their political support to that system – or at least vote on the basis that 'this is the only possible way of running human society at the present time' – to instead develop and express the opposite view, that there is indeed a viable alternative now, and that the current social system must be ended.

The richest man in the world is no longer Bill Gates, but Carlos Slim who owns Mexican telecoms. His wealth, now at 73,000 million dollars, also vastly increased in the past year. Figures like these mean something real; they represent a huge chunk of the Earth’s resources. That is the simple reality of the social system which political parties like Labour, Conservative, Liberal, Greens, UKIP and others are asking you in effect to vote for, to give your endorsement to, to recognise as the only possible way of running human society. Their policies are all based on this lie. The truth is that it is not the only possible foundation for human society today.

A recent report from Oxfam showed that the richest 85 people in the world – just one ‘busload’ - own £1 trillion, as much as the poorest 3.5 billion people. Their researchers said it was likely wealth ownership was even more skewed, with more than £11 trillion held unrecorded and off-shore. 7 in every 10 people live in countries where inequality has increased since the 1980s.

For over 99 percent of the population, on the other hand, the largest transaction they ever enter into throughout their lifetime, if at all, is to muster all their resources to implore those with wealth to loan them a mere few hundred thousand with which they might secure their own individual housing. On what terms would Carlos Slim allow us access to, for example, even just one percent of his wealth, or 730 million dollars, so that we could start producing food, housing and other resources for those who need them? The answer is very simple: never.

This is not about jealousy or bitterness toward these people: what makes these statistics about the social elite both important and infuriating is simply that their ownership is the same fact as our poverty and inability to make rational use of the planet’s resources. Technology has advanced exponentially, but social relationships have not kept pace. We are still stuck in the model of employment – which allows capital to accumulate in the hands of a minority, supplied from the unpaid labour of the active and working, majority class.

What capitalism is

So we have to end capitalism before we can even begin to discuss the rational use of the world’s resources. What is capitalism? Contrary to the confusion peddled by politicians, it is not a tendency or an attitude, a style of life or even a political regime – it is the actual way in which society is currently organised, and it encompasses every country, every company, every government department and every individual, regardless of their activities, lifestyle or individual choices. It is not an attitude or a state of mind, it is a system – the social system which currently exists throughout the world and needs to be ended, if humanity is to flourish or even survive.

Capitalism’s key features are: class division – 1 percent or so own and control almost all productive resources whilst the rest of us work for them directly or indirectly to create further wealth – and production for profit, rather than for use. Wealth is not produced simply to be used according to human needs, instead it is produced only if and when it can be sold in a way which will generate financial surpluses or profits for those who own and control the production process.

The many problems which result directly from the existence of the capitalist system as our current way of running human society include the relative impoverishment of the great majority who do all the work – ranging from hundreds of millions literally starving, to billions more whose lives are blighted by constant struggle and stress. It also creates constant war and the threat of war as rival ruling groups and profit-takers in different parts of the world enrol the rest of us to fight their battles, to determine which of them controls which minerals, land and trade advantages.

In particular capitalism has created a crisis in the very environment itself. Climate crisis is perhaps the most pressing example of capitalism’s madness. Naomi Klein, writing in New Statesman (29 Oct 2013), cited many of the world’s most respected scientists all reaching the same conclusion, that capitalism has to be swept aside if ecological catastrophe is to be avoided: ‘It makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity’.

How to end capitalism

How do we go about ending capitalism? We need urgently and rapidly to build a majority who reject the entire system which exists, who see that it is no longer viable, that it can and must be replaced with a system of common ownership and democratic control of all productive resources. A majority who will no longer look to politicians or leaders but are developing the knowledge themselves to see through this huge con-trick which has evolved, the lie that capitalism equals freedom and is the only option for society.

Anyone who sets out to look at society, to debate how we should live, to campaign for change or human rights, has three blindingly simple questions which they must consider and answer before all others. What resources do we have to fulfil the task of meeting the human needs of the global population? The natural resources, land, crops, minerals; the human labour; the machinery we have built. The World Health Organisation and the United Nations have reported over and over that current resources are actually sufficient to meet the needs of several times the current world population, if properly accessed and used rather than being laid to waste whilst high enough financial profits are awaited. For example, the UN has found: 'Growth in world cereal production has steadily outstripped world population growth. Yet each year there are more people in the world who do not get enough food. Global agriculture has the potential to grow enough food for all, but food is often not available where it is needed.'

Secondly, we must ask: what prevents this from happening, then? Because ownership and control of those resources is in the hands of a tiny fraction of the world’s population. They allow those resources to be used by the rest of us only under the most strict and anti-social of conditions: if and when further production might increase their wealth and power further. The third and final question we must ask is: do we stand for the retention of that kind of regime, or for its abolition?

Revolution is not a wild idea – it is an imperative. And this is why: human needs are not being met. Billions of children, men and women are in varying degrees of deprivation, and those of us in the more developed parts of the world who work for salaries or wages continue to be exploited and to face a huge array of unnecessary problems. In order to meet human needs universally and comfortably, we need first to repossess the Earth we inhabit. To do that we must first dispossess the minority who currently own and control it. And to do that necessitates a complete revolution and the democratic use of what structures we currently have, purely to enact that. And the only groundwork we can lay for that is the education of ourselves and our fellow workers to recognise that capitalism cannot ever serve our needs, in any form. Any other political programme than this, any attempt to improve or patch up capitalism, is futile, doomed to failure, and maintains the suffering which this system continues inevitably to cause.

Clifford Slapper