Soft soap opera (1981)

From the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a mark of the level at which political journalism is conducted when what seems to loom largest in the minds of some press commentators is the dress-sense, hairstyle, and love-life, of Shirley Williams. While all manner of things may be germane to our political and social condition, does the existence in William's one-time Oxford rooms, of seven photographs of Peter Parker, (Guardian, 10 February), have any possible bearing on that condition? What, one is entitled to ask, will these newspaper hacks cobble up for us next?

The reason for printing such irrelevant hogwash is a determination in Fleet Street and broadcasting to build up the Labour Party's latest defectors as the beautiful people of British politics (even if that means the inclusion of Roy Jenkins). We are to be persuaded that these dilettantes are more concerned with the "moderate" decencies of political life than with its intrigue and infighting. In fact, what primarily motivates the media is the perpetuation of privilege and patronage among an "in" group who are assured of a comfortable ride on one or other of the band-waggons operated in the interests of our masters (who can recognise a loyal servant when they see one.)

The "sacrifices" such as Shirley Williams and her friends are flaunting in our less-than-terstained faces are those of the true class -collaborator, who would be (Roy Jenkins and Lazards, for example) received into almost any boardroom in the country. Neither would such people have much difficulty in being accepted by their Fleet Street friends, or by the BBC or IBA. To these latter they are very much a commodity, produced for sale with a view (that of the media) to profit. So naturally they can afford to play ducks and drakes with the organisation which provided them with so very lucrative a platform from which to mislead, and betray, the class they purported to represent.

The point about the whole sorry mess is that the defection from the Labour Party of a handful of disaffected class collaborators must essentially be a matter of indifference to us of the working class. It is a true measure of the sort of organisation the Labour Party is (and always was) that it can contain so motley a crew of the misguided, the careerist, the opportunistic and the sycophantic. The real surprise is that Williams and Co. have decided that their political fortunes lie elsewhere. After all, as will become increasingly plain as the months pass by, the Labour Party will revert to type: a reformist hotch-potch; a "broad church", complete with its pocket-lining priesthood, offering the working class nothing more nourishing than the same old mixture of pious platitudes and shop-soiled placebos. Right up Shirley Williams' street, one would have thought: but no—she's off; even if she has to be seen standing an awful long time upon the order of her going. (But then she would no doubt wish to maximise both the damage to her erstwhile colleagues and the publicity to herself.)

It is certain, should the beautiful quartet represented by Williams, Owen, Rogers and Jenkins, manage to play in tune, we shall shortly discover that their music has a remarkably familiar ring. Before so very long the cynical rhetoric will begin to fly. No amount of thumbing through Roget's Thesaurus will disguise the old shibboleths: the inevitable "incomes policy", even should it be further euphemised as, say, "rational rewards", or "restructured reimbursements", will remain an attempt strictly to control wages. A Centre Party, or as they may prefer to call it, a "Social Democratic Alliance", will, willingly or unwillingly—wittingly or unwittingly—run capitalism in the interests of those who primarily benefit from it: the capitalists. And if this means—as it will—a continued toleration of all the inequalities, frustrations and miseries so familiar to those who collectively produce all wealth, then our "social democrats" may confidently be expected to remain dry-eyed as they toast each other in their Limehouse redoubt.

Rodgers, Jenkins, Williams and Owen.

For make no mistake about it, Williams and Co. are quite unable to do anything more effective than jerk on the ends of the strings the ruling class have strung them with. The nearest mention of Karl Marx's name would be enough to send our Shirl scurrying for her crucifix (or whatever equivalent she might prefer). These people have deliberately chosen not to arm themselves with the sharpest weapons available to us. Again this is natural enough, for there is no career to be carved out of the ripping away of the mask from the face of capitalistic exploitation. So they turn to the likes of John Maynard Keynes and, using his tool-kit, they tinker with what has manifestly become a clapped-out old banger. Oh, yes: it can be made to cough and stutter on almost indefinitely; but how many of us are to be asphyxiated along the way?

So, should a "Social Democratic" Party start to roll it must merely mean that the politics of capitalism will have been further fragmented. The divisions and sub-divisions; the shades of meaning already virtually numberless, and to be found both within the parties and outside them, will have been further increased. Understanding of our class position will have been even further confused. Workers, offered once again a multiplicity of predictably mendacious "solutions" to the inevitable crises of capitalism, may well be tempted to turn to a shiny new grouping; (well, dusted off and refurbished, anyway). They might as well resort to a chiropodist to cure a hopelessly gangrenous leg. For it is the capitalist system itself which is solely responsible for the contradictions and absurdities, the cruelty and waste we see all around us. Capitalism works on a cold and irrational cruelty which leads to a total disregard of the cost as measured in human lives; it is under a compulsion to behave in this way. And capitalists, while exploiting the working class, must also gobble up each other: it is their only way "forward".

Labour's Gang of Four (or however many they are by now) may be the beautiful people of British politics but they are trying to do the same ugly job as all the others.

Richard Cooper

Another question, Mr Morris (2006)

Book Review from the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Pinkney, ed: We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885-96. Spire Books £19.95.

In the 1880s the interview was a fairly new journalist technique, and a range of publications, from Justice to the Daily News and Bookselling, wanted to have William Morris’s views on a variety of topics. Most of the thirteen interviews gathered here took place in Kelmscott House, his residence in Hammersmith. The result is an interesting view of Morris as a person (generally dressed in a blue serge suit and smoking incessantly) as well as an insight into his opinions on political and other matters.

In 1885, Morris gave his reasons for leaving the Social Democratic Federation to help form the Socialist League. The SDF had been run ‘arbitrarily’, and it was heading towards ‘political opportunism tinctured with Jingoism’. The League, in contrast, would ‘uphold the purest doctrines of scientific Socialism, and + educate and organize towards the fundamental change in society’. In an interview from 1890, Marx is given credit for starting off the Socialist movement on scientific lines, and for showing that Socialism is ‘the natural outcome of the past’. There is a pleasant image of Socialism having ‘a public library at each street corner, where everybody should read all the best books, printed in the best and most beautiful type’. An 1894 criticism of anarchism is backed up by the argument that it is important to get control of parliament rather than attempting an insurrection (a contrast with his earlier opposition to parliamentary methods).

But this same interview acknowledges ‘the wisdom of the S.D.F. in drawing up that list of palliative measures’, i.e. a policy of reformism, something which Morris himself had previously rejected. In 1885 he also talked of the need for leaders, though it is not entirely clear what they are to do other than explain Socialist ideas, so this can hardly be taken as support for a Bolshevik-style vanguard. An interview with a woman journalist reveals some views which, to put it kindly, show that Morris was a man of his time: ‘I feel very strongly that a working man’s wife is needed in her home, and it is a pity when she has to leave it to compete in the labour market.’ (Shades of News from Nowhere, where it seems to be the women who do the housekeeping.)

It helps to have some previous acquaintance with Morris’ ideas and writings, but this is a well-produced volume which shows him in an unfamiliar and revealing light.

Paul Bennett

Sports Results (1949)

From the February 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

1948 was a year that will remain long in the memories of English sports fans. The Olympic Games were held here, an Australian cricket team visited and toured the country and the usual football, cricket, horse racing, dog racing, speedway and other sporting features had their place. The relative merits of prominent footballers and first-class cricketers have been hotly discussed. The abilities of various race horses and jockeys have been the subject of much argument. The Olympic contestants from all over the world have been cheered and applauded. Evenings have been devoted to the weekly ritual of completing the football pool coupons.

Late in the year a controversy arose over the business of the transfer of football players from one club to another. Football clubs will pay thousands of pounds to other clubs to obtain the transfer of a top-line player. The players become tied to the clubs that buy them. If they leave the club with which they are registered, they are barred from earning a living as professional footballers by playing for any other club.

Capitalism has converted to its own ends the many institutions thrown up by society in the course of its development and the sporting institutions have certainly not escaped. Sports and games, once the care-free expression of the joy of living, have become, for most of us, an entertainment to relieve the monotony of living.

At one time, man's sport was centred in the struggle to wrest from nature the means of life. Exceptional prowess in the hunt, etc., was the pinnacle of achievement. But now, except for those whose livelihood is derived from it, sport is practically divorced from the business of producing life's necessities. In a few rare instances, men cling to the old forms of enjoyment connected with the tussle with nature, instance fishing. In the main, sports have taken on a new aspect with each change in the social structure. The games and pastimes of the medieval village differ greatly from the more vigorous pursuits of barbarians before them, and the pay-at-the-gate type of game that we get today.

For the majority of workers nowadays, life is a continual round of drudgery and toil and monotony. They have no control over their labour—no interest in their products. There is no "joy of workmanship" for them. Home comfort  for many is more of an ideal than a fact. They have but few opportunities and little inclination to leave the towns and cities to enjoy the countryside. Too tired after their toil to engage in active recreation, the majority of workers seek a little respite in the entertainments offered them.

This condition of affairs offers a fruitful field for investment to those with wealth to spare. The institution of sport is seized upon and corrupted in the interest of capital. It becomes an industry. We see the amateur displaced by the professional and gate receipts become the motive for organising games. Even the remaining amateurs must play to the gallery to ensure patronage—or just get squeezed out. The players are subject to exploitation and intensification just as are other workers. Players who are at the top of their class are a money-making attraction and the clubs that employ them bind them in a form of slavery.

In a drab and unromantic world people seek thrills and excitement. These are provided by profit seekers whose interest is not in "sport for sport's sake," but in balance sheets and dividends.

Here is an instance of an institution, drawing its vitality from a deep social need, being converted to an instrument for producing profit. That it is used as a means for retarding the spread of revolutionary ideas, we are well aware. Although it may not be a conscious intention to do so, yet the organised professional sports of today serve the same purpose as the gladiatorial contests of the days of the declining Roman Empire. Whilst the exploited populace is applauding the contestants, in either greaves or shin-guards battling with either trident or tennis racquet, they are giving no thought to their exploitation or the means to end it. In this way sport serves a dual purpose. It produces profit for a few and it keeps the minds of the workers filled with thoughts of league matches and cup ties, winners for the 2.30, featherweights and heavyweights, Oxford and Cambridge, greyhounds and hares, holes, goals, tries, l.b.w.'s and all the other jargon and paraphernalia of present-day sport. Not forgetting totalisators and permutations.

Socialism, by ending exploitation, will end drudgery; by abolishing poverty it will abolish sordidness. Men and women will find life more interesting, they will find that it can be an adventure in itself. They will not be driven to seek artificial excitement. Friendly rivalry will take the place of cut-throat competition, on the sports ground as elsewhere. Sport can then be the means of allowing men to exhibit their physical strength, their fleetness of foot, their keenness of eye, their powers of endurance and their agility. It can satisfy man's desire to play. That was its original function. Capitalism has degraded it. Socialism can amend it. Socialism can make life entertaining so that men can use sports as a means of recreation, so that they will not be so tired and bored that they need to make of it a form of "pass-time."

W. Waters 

Sting in the Tail: Force and Revolution (1990)

The Sting in the Tail Column from the April 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Force and Revolution

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the defeat of capitalism " . . . can be achieved only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions".

Generations of left-wingers have claimed this is proof that Marx and Engels advocated armed insurrection, smashing state power, etc.

Of course they did no such thing. Instead they urged workers "to win the battle of democracy" in order to control state power and thus secure the socialist revolution.

Left-wingers have ignored the fact that "force" doesn't only mean violence but has economic and political meanings too.

For example, workers are "forced" by economic need to work for wages: More to the point, almost all of Eastern Europe's dictatorships were ousted by political force and without any violence being used. This "force" was the determination of the people to get rid of a system they detested and is in line with the "forcible overthrow" envisaged by Marx and Engels.

Economics of Health

How splendid is the claim of Kenneth Clarke, Health Secretary, that under his White Paper no patients will be refused the medicine they need.

This is, of course, a downright lie. There is a drug called erythropoetin that can transform the life of those suffering kidney failure. A thousand patients are being denied the drug because it is so expensive. It costs between £3,000 and £5,000 per patient per year.

Of the 1,500 who would benefit from it, only 500 are receiving it. The doctors have to refuse the treatment to the other 1,000 sufferers, because it is too expensive for the NHS.

Commenting on this, Dr. Stephen Waldeck, consultant renal physician at Hope Hospital, Salford said:

It is extremely frustrating for doctors and nurses, having seen how much better that little ampoule can make the patients to have to refuse it.

It is also frustrating, doctor, to see workers suffering unnecessarily while bare-faced liars like Clarke get away with their empty political boasts.

Love's Young Dream

It is not often that any worker will find anything of interest in Harper's and Queen magazine. It is a snobby magazine aimed at the parasites who own this country, but have been woefully short changed in the brains department.

But there was an interesting little item in a recent issue about the 20 richest women in Europe. It comes as no surprise to learn that Queen Elizabeth tops the list, with a personal fortune of £5,300 million. She was way ahead of her nearest rival Queen Beatrix of Netherlands, who had a mere £3,800 million.

But this wealth accumulation is not the exclusive domain of royals. It was heartening to see that a former member of the working class had managed to reach number 10 in the Rich Bitch Charts.

She is Janni Spies-Kjaer who has a personal fortune of £330 million. Not bad for a former lift-operator!

How did she manage this transformation? It seems that at 16 years of age she caught the eye of her 60 year old employer. Married him and a year later he died, leaving her his Scandinavian travel empire. Later she consoled herself by marrying a multi-millionaire.

Now £330 million is a tidy sum. Why, it could buy 66,000 treatments of erythropoetin!

The Nutty Professor

The new Tory "Libertarians" claim that they influence the government by "thinking the unthinkable: and setting out to deliberately shock.

Roger Scruton, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, has set out to shock us.

We must recuperate yet another Victorian value: that of child labour. Many a 14 year old, set to work as a builder's apprentice, an electrician's mate or a stable hand, will learn far more than he could ever learn at school, while acquiring independence, responsibility and self-respect. If the pay were sufficiently low - and children are willing to work for quite paltry sums -  there would be no lack of employers ready to offer it.

The Guardian 13 February.

So you see, child labour would really benefit the children: just look at all the things they would gain! Of course the "paltry sums" they might earn are purely incidental as are the extra profits employers would get.

Scruton's views that many children would "learn far more" if they left school at 14 is his unconscious verdict on the standard of working class education, and has he never wondered how the children of our masters manage to acquire "independence, responsibility and self-respect" without the advantage of child labour?

Anyone who thinks Scruton's obnoxious views are mere fantasy should remember that some previous libertarian fantasies are now law. Child labour is only one example of the kind of society they want and work for.

Oh No, Not That!

Can you imagine Kenny Dalglish complaining that fans are talking football or Bros being unhappy because youngster discuss pop music?

Of course not, but here's a politician who doesn't want people talking about politics. Tory MP John Stokes told a meeting of Tory MPs

People never talk about politics in the pubs. But now they are starting to. I regard this as a sinister sign.

Glasgow Herald 9 February.

It's easy to see why Stokes doesn't welcome this trend. Tory policies such as the Poll tax, high interest rates, etc., are highly unpopular and Stokes thinks that if politics is being discussed then so will those unpopular policies.

But maybe something much worse has dawned on Stokes: like the dread thought that workers who talk about politics might even start thinking for themselves.

Every would-be leader from "right wing" Tory to "vanguard" Leninist would find that very sinister indeed.

Letter to Tebbit

The Scorpion's Nest

1st April

Dear Norm,

We read how upset you were at at the BBC for describing those Russian hardliners who opposed Gorbie as "conservatives". You added:

Indeed, to my astonishment I find from the BBC that Stalin and Brezhnev were "conservatives" while poor ill-informed me, well, I had thought they were communists.

The Independent 22 February.

We know how you feel, Norm: haven't we in the Socialist Party fumed when the Labour Party is miscalled "socialist" or some dictatorship is dubbed "Marxist"? We even read, in your favourite rag, The Sun, about Nicaragua's awful "Marxist coffee".

But Norm, you've got a nerve to complain about others misusing words. You do it all the time! You're doing it when you say Stalin and Brezhnev were communists: what communist principle did they ever adhere to?

And at the last general election you were even describing the Liberal-SDP Alliance as "socialist", so you really shouldn't whinge when you get a taste of your own medicine. 

Tell Me Lies (2004)

Book Review from the February 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Miller ed: Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq. Pluto Press £12.99

This volume contains 32 contributions from a wide variety of writers, which naturally means few arguments are developed at length and there is some overlap. A number of the pieces have appeared before, such as John Pilger's articles in the New Statesman.

It is probably not a surprise to learn that the physical attack on Iraq was preceded, accompanied and followed by a massive propaganda war. There were the notorious claims about Iraq's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), claims which the mainstream media signally failed to expose as falsehoods. The view that Iraq constituted a threat to the rest of the world, largely by dint of having WMDs, was built up from at least 1997, despite the lack of real evidence for it. Even the CIA was pressured into producing reports that gave more support to the case for war.

Once the invasion had started, the propaganda machine went into overdrive, though under the more acceptable labels of “public diplomacy”' or “information support”. Both state and private media played their part; the BBC's Andrew Marr, for instance, reported that Baghdad had been captured “without a bloodbath”, despite the loss of thousands of civilian lives. The invasion force went to great lengths to ensure that only their perspective on the fighting was given proper airtime. Many reporters were stationed at the US Central Command in Qatar, where they could do little but listen to, and pass on, the official line as delivered in press conferences at which hostile or even sceptical questions were firmly discouraged.

A major development in this war was the use of “embedded” reporters, who travelled with invading forces, supposedly sharing the same dangers and so identifying with the soldiers they were accompanying. This inevitably meant that they toed the official line, often presenting a sanitised view of war, in which Iraqi casualties were minimised and all emphasis was put on the prospects for a successful (from the US-UK standpoint) outcome. In contrast were the so-called “unilateral” journalists, who were more independent, in some cases reporting from Baghdad while it was under attack. The US stressed the protection that they could offer to the “embeds”, while the unilaterals could enjoy no such advantages. In fact, two embedded American media workers were killed during the war, as were at least fifteen other journalists. In some cases, media centres and hotels housing reporters were bombed by US forces - probably intentionally, given that their positions and status were too well-known for all these incidents to be accidents.

Of course, there are other forms of government and ruling class influence on the media than naked physical threat. Many media bosses are themselves extremely wealthy capitalists (think of Rupert Murdoch), so their companies naturally present a pro-corporate power position. In the US, owners of radio stations supported the war as a thank you to the government for its deregulation of the radio industry, from which they'd benefited. The US media adopted a jingoistic attitude during the war, but the UK media were not quite that bad (and it is only fair to record that Channel 4 News was the most critical in its reporting).

The Iraq invasion was a media war in that many of the prominent public images of it were mere media stunts. Remembering the toppling of Saddam's statue? Well, it was American troops who pulled the statue down, and a few handpicked Iraqis were depicted rejoicing. In other cases, the reporting was noticeable for what was not said. Much attention was given to Iraqis looting museums and hospitals after the fall of Baghdad, but there was hardly any reference to the fact that US troops made sure that the Oil Ministry building, with its important records of oil exploration and so on, was made secure.

One good thing which emerges from the book is the way that ordinary people are becoming less and less prepared to swallow the lies emanating from governments and their propaganda machines.

Paul Bennett

Recent Times (2015)

Book Review from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Charlie Chaplin', by Peter Ackroyd. Vintage £7.99.

Charlie Chaplin was born in a South London slum in 1889. His childhood was extremely impoverished, including spells in a workhouse, and his first show-business job was as a clog dancer at the age of nine. He became an actor and stage performer, joined Fred Karno’s company and travelled to the US, where he made his first film in 1914. He survived the birth of talkies and became a director and independent film-maker. Already by 1915, according to Ackroyd, he was the most famous man in the world.

Chaplin was best known for his screen persona as the Tramp, the ‘little fellow’ who became a kind of universal symbol of failure and hopelessness. Some of his films were overtly political, such as The Great Dictator (1940), where he played Adenoid Hynkel. This applied in particular to Modern Times (1936), about factory life and the repetitive and dehumanising nature of the production line.

In the First World War, he decided to stay in the US rather than return to the UK and risk being conscripted; people sent him envelopes with white feathers in, and some British cinemas stopped showing his films. During the Second World War, he made remarks supporting the ‘Soviet Union’ as a wartime ally, and also expressed some admiration for Stalin. Together with the implied message of Modern Times, this led in the late 1940s to trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Some thought it suspicious that he had lived in the US for thirty years without becoming a US citizen, and in 1952, as he and his family sailed to Britain, his permit to re-enter the US was withdrawn (though he was later allowed to visit). For some discussion of his political views, see www.cartoonresearch.com/gerstein/chaplin/commie.html.

Ackroyd describes Chaplin as ‘a libertarian with tendencies towards anarchism’. But this is hardly compatible with his authoritarian approach to directing, his support for President Roosevelt, and his chauvinistic attitude to women. He also accepted a knighthood and was very concerned to protect his US-based property and investments. Though he was hardly consistent, he is perhaps best seen as someone who, looking back at his impoverished childhood, identified with the poor and downtrodden, but had no ideas about restructuring or even reforming society. Claims about him being a ‘Communist’ say more about the hysteria prevalent in some circles in the US than about Chaplin himself.  

Paul Bennett

Tony Benn: a political con-man (1981)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even if capitalism was administered by politicians who were all selfless and honest men and women, it would make little or no difference. The evils of poverty, unemployment, war—the list is endless—are an integral part of capitalism and will not be removed until the system itself is removed. Which itself can only happen when the working class decides to do its own thinking instead of hiring out its minds to leaders. Good leaders or bad leaders—it doesn't matter.

There is, unfortunately, no sign yet that the working class is ready to stop putting its faith in leaders and it remains an endless source of wonder that they can go on, generation after generation trusting shepherds who lead them from one morass to another. How is it possible that workers could even expect people like Wilson or Callaghan to solve their problems for them? And having realised after the "winter of discontent" that the Labour government was doing them no good at all, how could they possibly think that Margaret Thatcher would be able to do other than what she has done? There now seems to be a possibility that the next miracle worker the electorate will appoint to run British capitalism will be A. Wedgwood Benn. He cut the Wedgwood part from his name to lend a spurious working-class aroma to his stock-in-trade, while carefully retaining the capitalist wealth that the name implies. It might be instructive, therefore, to look at the slogans used by this men to lever himself to the top of the Labour Party—slogans which will presumably form the so-called left-wing programme on which the workers will in due course be asked to vote.

In a report in the Guardian (2/2/81), we are told that Benn advocates five priorities for the next Labour government. It is important first to remark that one "priority" is bound to be missing: socialism. And yet, as he calls himself a socialist, one would suppose this should be the sole priority. What else should a socialist want to introduce other than socialism? What is the point of being a socialist otherwise? If you think that socialism is the answer to the problems of society, then surely the establishment of such a system in the place of capitalism must be the object of obtaining power. If you don't think that, then you are clearly a fraud of the most impudent kind. Nobody will be surprised to learn that Benn's five points make no reference whatever to socialism. And the sad thing is that this slight omission will not even be noticed by the working class in general or even by the leftists Militant faction in the Labour Party who are lending such vociferous support to Benn and denying the right to call themselves socialists to such as Shirley Williams and David Owen (well they're right about that last bit, at least).

First of the five priorities is "the restoration of full employment". Merely to state this shows the utter contempt this would-be leader has for the working class. He takes it for granted that they are too stupid to see that the very inclusion of the word "restore" is itself a piece of chicanery. How can you restore something that never existed in the first place? Benn knows full well that the Labour government, of which he was a prominent member under both Wilson and Callaghan, not only presided over a large unemployment problem (which Thatcher inherited). He knows that under that government, unemployment actually doubled from the three-quarters of a million when the Heath Tories were removed from office to one and a half million when Callaghan was kicked out. The nerve of people like Benn and Foot to lead huge demonstrations denouncing unemployment can only mean that they assume the workers have no memory.

Next we have something called "expansion of public services". Whatever that might mean, it is clearly shown up as fraudulent by the cuts in social services which were a chief cause of discontent in that famous last winter of the Labour government. Thirdly, Benn regards it as important for the working class to support the idea of "withdrawal from the EEC". In fact the question of British capitalism being in, or out of, the EEC is of no consequence whatever to the working class.

So now we get to Priority Number Four. Benn wants unilateral nuclear disarmament. If one thing above all betrays the duplicity of the man (and of Foot and the rest of them) it is this, The Labour government of Attlee the Great was, after all, the one that made the decision to build their very own H Bomb. Then, when they were removed from office, all these lefties, Benn included, became supporters of CND and were to be heard screaming "Ban the Bomb!" They should have screamed "Ban the Bomb Which We Made" but perhaps that's too long for a slogan. However, in due course the pendulum swung and Labour, including Benn, was back in power. So they could ban the bomb, scrap Polaris, kick out the American bases and anything else that was needful to carry out their high-principled policy.

As everyone knows, they did nothing of the sort. The Labour government carried on where the Tories left off, voting vast sums on improving their H Bomb at a time when they said it was necessary to make cuts in hospital beds, school meals and the like—all the very things in fact which they now blame the Tories for. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to say that Benn resigned from the Labour Party to show his contempt for this disgraceful dereliction of principle? And pigs might fly. Once again, he kept mum for the whole time his party was enjoying the sweets of office. But almost the very moment they were kicked out, he and his fellow tricksters were at it again. Ban the Bomb!

Last, and one hopes least, Benn wants to "strengthen democracy at all levels in society". It is not worth wasting much of the valuable space of this journal on worrying about what this vague claptrap can possibly mean. In a society based on two classes, the minority owning almost everything and the majority owning almost nothing, there is a clear limit to the amount of democracy that is possible. But if Benn now seeks power "for more democracy" (whether t means anything or nothing), surely he should face the obvious question: As you were in power for many years until quite recently, why did you not introduce this improved democracy? Why did you not resign if your governmental colleagues stopped you? Why did we never hear so much as a whisper about it during the whole period and yet the moment you are out of office you suddenly discover what has been missing?

Enough is enough. If the working class would behave like thinking human beings, instead of like sheep, then bogus shepherds like Benn would no longer be able to fleece them.

L. E. Weidberg

Hodge-podge (1984)

Book Review from the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Democratic Economy by Geoff Hodgson. Penguin 1984. £3.50.

It is not unusual to find that non-socialists writing on political and economic questions have interesting criticisms to make of other defenders of capitalism, but are far less impressive when setting forth their own ideas. This is the case with Hodgson.

His book begins by discussing the views of the "New Right", by which is meant Hayek, Friedman and their followers in the Thatcher government. Their attitude is that freedom is the absence of coercion and that a free market economy minimises coercion by providing freedom of choice. It is not difficult to point to absurdities in this; poverty and starvation are coercive, so workers have no freedom of choice about entering employment. The state is not the only instrument of authority and coercion: the capitalist enterprise is another. Moreover, some degree of state intervention in the economy is a necessary feature of capitalism; laissez-faire capitalism in Britain was in fact the product of deliberate state action. The goal of the New Right — a system completely regulated by the market and private enterprise — is unrealisable (and, socialists add, equally undesirable).

On the basis of this conclusion, Hodgson proposes what he called the impurity principle, which states that different economic structures must necessarily co-exist in a single society (though one structure may be dominant). Pure market capitalism with no state intervention is thus impossible. Eastern European countries show central planning co-existing with some market forces. It follows from this that "some form of structural economic pluralism" is inevitable: it needs to be decided whether markets or planning will be dominant.

And here we reach the limits of Hodgson's vision. Though he mentions in passing that socialists have often advocated the abolition of money, he has no conception of anything as revolutionary as abolition of the wages system. He wants a society based on worker participation, democracy and decentralisation, where markets still exist but are subservient to planning. This is not socialism with some elements of capitalist structure — it is capitalism period! It is not possible for socialism (a classless society based on common ownership and free access) to co-exist with capitalism (a system based on class monopoly and commodity production).

At bottom, Hodgson simply fails to understand what constitutes capitalism. He criticises Tony Benn for identifying markets with capitalism, but for the wrong reasons: he believes that markets can exist in socialism, not that capitalism can exist without a free market. His dismissal of the view that Russia is state capitalist is utterly confused, and leads him to conclude:

The theory thus transforms Marxism into a millenarian hope in an impossible scenario of simultaneous world revolution. In the meantime, 'capitalism' is everywhere.

In spite of himself, Hodgson has seen the implications of the socialist case. But he rejects it with the ignorant voice of reformism. Still, what should one expect from an advisor to Neil Kinnock?

Paul Bennett

Obituary: W. T. Hopley (1968)

Hopley at the SPGB's 1905 Conference.

Obituary from the May 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to record the death at the age of 87 of Wilfred T. Hopley, one of the two oldest members of the Party. His funeral was at Tunbridge Wells Crematorium on March 12th. Hopley joined the Party just after it was formed in 1904. He was one of the best humourist writers in the Party and was a regular contributor to the Socialist Standard for many years. In fact his last contribution appeared in 1954 in the bi-centenary issue of the Standard. He wrote over the initials "W.T.H."

He helped to form the original Paddington Branch and represented it for years as a delegate to Conference and Delegate Meetings. Later he moved to Watford Branch and performed the same services for that Branch until the outbreak of the 1914-18 War. In 1925, when Alex Anderson attended his last Conference, Hopley was Chairman. Anderson was dying, and knew it, and he went on addressing the delegates for a long time in a voice like a loud whisper: one or two members urged Hopley to ask Anderson to finish, but he said it was Anderson's last chance to speak to members and he was not going to stop him. Anderson died a few weeks after the Conference.

Some time after the last war Hopley and his wife moved to a little place in Kent, not far from Tonbridge, to be near a son who was ill in hospital. Unfortunately his son died and his wife died a few years later, leaving Hopley to live alone in his house for the last nine or ten years. The other son and family lived up in the Midlands but Hopley did not want to leave the Tonbridge area.

To the very end Hopley was as lively, humorous and interested in Party progress as ever.

The Party has lost one of its staunch and solid old timbers, and some of us have lost a cheerful, optimistic and grand old comrade and friend. To his son and family we send our sincere sympathy.

Gilmac. 

Cooking the Books: The Right to Work All Hours (2005)

The Cooking the Books Column from the July 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1993 the European Commission proposed that the maximum time that employers could legally make their employees work should be limited, on average and including overtime, to 48 hours a week.

A quick calculation will show that, for a six-day week, this is the Eight Hour Day, a long-time trade union demand. In Capital (chapter 10 on “The Working Day”) Marx quotes a declaration from a General Congress of Labor that met in Baltimore in August 1866 that “The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labour of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all States of the American Union”. In fact, May Day was instituted in 1889 precisely to demonstrate for this in all countries.

The Council of Ministers of the Member States of the European Union (the body that makes European laws) did not accept this proposal. While still retaining 48 hours as the maximum that employers could legally require their workers to work, they amended the draft Working Time Directive to allow countries to provide for individual workers to voluntarily waive their legal right not to work more than this. This loophole, inserted at the insistence of the UK  minister, came to be known as the “UK opt-out”. Which the then Tory government immediately took advantage of.

Since the bargaining strength of workers and employers are by no means equal this made the Directive virtually a dead letter in Britain, with employers making “voluntary” agreement to work longer a condition for being employed or promoted. As Paul Routledge explained in his column in the Daily Mirror (13 May):

“Forty per cent of UK firms exploit the opt-out – by ‘asking’ workers to sign away their rights. Many bosses require staff to accept employment contracts containing an opt-out clause, even though this is illegal. No clause, no job”.

When the Directive came up for review in May this year, the European Parliament (which is not a real parliament, more a consultative committee) voted to end the “UK opt-out”. Immediately a huge hue and cry was raised by employers’ organisations in Britain. “Freedom of choice” was at issue, said the Director General of the CBI, echoing what employers had said in the 1840s when a timid bill to limit the working day to ten hours had been introduced. It would undermine “competitiveness”, said the Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, expressing employers’ dislike of restrictions on how long they can get their workers to work, since any limitation could mean they might have to take on more workers, so increasing their labour costs and undermining their competitive position vis-à-vis capitalist enterprises in other countries – such as China, Brazil and India where no such restrictions apply.

And what did the newly-elected Labour government have to say on this? Yes, yes, it would undermine competitiveness, we’ll fight to ensure that a maximum 48-hour week is not introduced into Britain, grovelled Industry Secretary Alan Johnston and Employment Minister Gerry Sutcliffe (both of whom had climbed the greasy pole via the trade union movement).

True to their word, they did and won. The Council of Ministers retained the opt-out. Proof if any more were needed (which it isn’t) that Labour is not even a “Labour” party.

Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker (2015)

Peter Watkins

From the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

To mark the 80^th birthday of film-maker Peter Watkins, we examine his unfairly neglected work.

Peter Watkins, the film auteur, has been subject to massive marginalisation of his work. His entire oeuvre has seemingly met with extreme disapproval by the state, the power structures in capitalism and its ideological support structure, the mass media. Watkins can be a difficult film artist but he is essential cinema, the pioneer of the faux docudrama where he dissects historical events, the present day, or the near future. He described himself as a libertarian socialist and campaigns against false, stale and authoritarian film-making.

In the mid-1970s, Watkins’ experience of film-making and his studies of mainstream cinema and television led him to develop his theory of the ‘Monoform’, the predominant style used by the ‘Mass Audio Visual Media’ (MAVM) industry. A film or programme produced in the Monoform would be edited with a rapid succession of different images which don’t allow the viewer long enough to digest and consider what they have seen. This style manipulates the viewer into interpreting the film according to what the film-makers determine.

This theory influenced how Watkins would make his films. For example, The Journey (1987) did attempt in its use of time, space and alternative structures to counter the Monoform. His later preference for lengthy films gave the viewer more time and information to consider the subject matter, although he recognised that non-monoform movies don’t have to be as long asThe Journey’s14.5 hours! His use of non-professional actors and improvised scenes (even before he developed the theory of the Monoform) were intended to give a voice to people outside the media industry.

His theory of the Monoform includes a discourse about the ‘Universal Clock’ which refers to the synchronisation and the global movement of the televisions in the world, calibrated anywhere, at any time, their programming constructed without meaning, context or feeling but fitting within time constraints determined by commercials.

The Monoform treats audiences as receivers, consumers, passive spectators when faced with news, television and film. People are trained to accept the mass media in a non-critical light as if the media is neutral  and informative. The Monoform precludes any critical analysis of technique, structure, or effect, and is based on pre-formed moulds, from which there is no real freedom. The public are viewed as inherently stupid so that it needs authoritarian, simplistic, rapidly-moving language forms in order to absorb consumer ideas from TV.

To counter the Monoform, Watkins advocates an organic relationship between the film-maker and the audience; using non-professionals furthers his cause of involving the public in a democratic media. Watkins has laid out new possibilities for meaningful audience interaction with media, not just for viewers and those involved in production, but on a personal level. He endeavours to remove the comfortable avoidance of reality inherent in conventional programming on television by challenging the mainstream media’s handle on the way we view the world through television and film. Watkins has wrought more truth from the faux docudrama genre than the documentaries of the so-called vérité school.

Watkins himself pioneered the docudrama genre of dramatising events in the style of newsreel footage, right from the early years of his career. In the mid 1950s, he was part of the Playcraft amateur theatre group in Kent. He acquired an 8mm camera and directed the group in short films set in the first and second world wars, and during the 1956 Hungarian uprising. By the early 1960s, Watkins was working as an assistant producer at the BBC. He had already noticed that ‘much of the commercial cinema in the 1950s and early 1960s, and television in general, felt extremely stilted and conventional, holding the public locked into set and authoritarian agendas’, and he wanted ‘to offer a way of countering the effects of soap-opera historical reconstructions and TV news broadcasts’ (pwatkins.mnsi.net/part2_home.htm). So, when he had the opportunity to produce his own film for the BBC, he built on his newsreel style, and Culloden (1964) was the result.

The film showed the 1746 battle between forces loyal to the Stuart and Hanover royal dynasties, and its aftermath, as if a TV camera crew had been there to record it. In less than an hour, over 2,000 soldiers were killed, and the victorious Hanoverian Duke of Cumberland’s troops then went on to hunt down any remaining members of opposing clans. One of Watkins’ aims was to draw parallels between the resulting destruction of the clan system and the American army’s impact on civilians during the then-current Vietnam War.

Many of the cast were non-professional actors, including descendents of those who fought at Culloden. This wasn’t just an artistic decision in order to elicit more naturalistic performances, but also a political statement. Watkins wanted his films to provide a voice for anyone, rather than the biased, unrepresentative media industry. The film received enthusiastically supportive reviews, especially for its pioneering techniques.

After Culloden, the BBC commissioned Watkins again, and he produced the 1965 harrowing, bleak, nuclear war docudrama The War Game, 47 minutes in length. It concerned a nuclear attack on Britain focusing on the North Kent area, and featured instant flash blindness, a firestorm, radiation sickness, widespread psychological damage and suicide. We see the Army burn corpses, the rationing of resources, police shooting looters during food riots, civil disturbance becomes a capital offence, and people are executed by firing squad. The cast was almost entirely made up of non-actors, and Watkins filmed in the style of a news magazine programme.

The BBC violated their own Charter when in September 1965 they screened the film to senior members of the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Post Office, the Military Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary to Harold Wilson’s Cabinet. As a result, the BBC suppressed transmission before the screening date in October 1965, stating ‘the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting, it will, however, be shown to invited audiences.’ A Parliamentary question in December 1965 ‘asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department what representations he made to the BBC concerning the Civil Defence film called The War Game; and why he exerted pressure to prevent its showing to the public’. But the Labour government denied any outside pressure on the BBC. There had also been pressure from Equity, the British actors’ union, who were angry that non-professional actors had been used.

The War Game was released to cinema in 1966, and picked up the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and a BAFTA. Hypocritically, the BBC picked up the awards although the BBC had also said the film was banned because it was an artistic failure! Today both The War Game and Culloden have been available for some years on DVD but it is difficult to obtain these films for theatrical screenings which is related to restrictions imposed by Equity. The BBC eventually broadcast The War Game twenty years later in July 1985 during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

The film essentially stated that civil defence policies did not prepare the public for a nuclear attack. Watkins said later that ‘I was interested in breaking the illusion of media-produced ‘reality’. My question was ‘Where is ‘reality’?’’ Watkins disassembled the fourth wall to uproot the MAVM complacency, and characters deliver direct Brechtian statements to camera. Patrick Murphy, a senior lecturer in Film and Television at York St John University, quotes Watkins: ‘The War Game and Culloden are signposts to a direction that TV could have taken, but refused. Television could have been a plurality of forms and processes.’ Watkins’ disillusionment with the way television programming was heading meant that he left the BBC and turned instead to film production.

His reputation as a talented new voice meant he could attract the backing of major studios such as Universal Pictures. This led to Privilege (1967), a docudrama about Steven Shorter, a manufactured pop idol of the near future. Shorter’s career is dictated by his management company, which is working with the government to distract his millions of fans from society’s problems. His stage act uses violence to provide ‘the public with a necessary release of all the nervous tension caused by the state of the world’. Shorter’s popularity with the masses means that he can be used to manipulate them. So when the state wants to promote religious and national unity, Shorter is rebranded as repentant and faithful. The singer Paul Jones from Manfred Mann plays Shorter, giving a tense, awkward performance which reflects how the character is trapped and unable to express himself.

Privilege was dismissed by contemporary reviewers as ‘paranoid, hysterical and unconvincing’ (Privilege DVD booklet), and was shown by few cinemas. Consequently, it has been largely forgotten, whereas it should be recognised as a lively and perceptive critique of the mass media’s power, echoing Herbert Marcuse’s views about consumerism as a form of social control. The directions that Watkins’ career would take next reflect his growing awareness of how the media industry stifles intelligent debate. The concluding part of our look at his work will follow in the next issue.

Mike Foster & Steve Clayton

One Man's Meat . . . (1982)

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

"They use everything about the hog except the squeal", joked the guide. He was showing the wonders of the Chicago stockyards and packing plants to a group of Lithuanian immigrants at the start of this century. In The Jungle Upton Sinclair gives a graphic description of what that joke meant for those who worked in the appalling conditions of the packing plants, and also of what went into the cans: 

. . . and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old man's task to clean these out, and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!

The Jungle was published in 1906. Since that time there have been considerable improvements in the standards of public health and hygiene, and the exploitation of the working class appears less blatant. But it is still the same social system.

Government draft regulations for new minimum standards in the manufacture of meat products will come into force next year. Manufacturers will have discretion over the contents and labelling of a wider range of products. Consumer groups are concerned that the labelling on meat products should accurately represent the contents, and would prefer to give prior approval. They are hoping to influence the Ministry of Agriculture to improve its proposals before the final version of the new regulations is published. The proposals were in general welcomed only by the meat manufacturing industry. Among those expressing hostility were farmers worried that in future fewer pigs might be needed for the present output of pork products.

Advancing technology means that there is not much of an animal which cannot be used within a loose definition of "meat". "Crushed pigs' head are already used in some pork sausage manufacture, with only the teeth removed" (Guardian 13/4/82). A "meat product" is defined as any food consisting of "at least 10 per cent meat". A 3oz meat pie would have to contain at least 5/8 oz of meat but up to half of that "meat: could be fat or gristle.

What is the reason for new regulations? If the concern was how to remove the obscenity of starvation and malnutrition from the world, we would expect every method of producing and processing food to be examined. Should it then prove that ways to produce sufficient food would need to include grinding up all skin, bone and gristle from animals' carcasses and using a minimal amount in "meat" products—there would be nothing more to be said!

However the aim is not feeding hungry people.

The object of the Government, of course, is to enable meat products to be manufactured at prices that most people can easily afford. This is also true of the meat product makers, although they clearly also want to maximise their profits. (Guardian 13/4/82.) 

Government interest is easily understood since the price of food is a major factor in pay claims (and in their ability to reduce unemployment benefit). Meat product makers would be unusual members of the capitalist class if they did not wish to maximise their profits.

Contrary to popular belief prices cannot be set at the whim of manufacturers. If it were so they would not need to worry about production costs. Concern for the contents and accurate labelling of meat products should be seen in the context of a social system where the motive for producing food, and every commodity, is sale and profit; where the choice of what anyone eats is qualified by what they can afford to pay. Food produced cheaply enough for "most people" to easily afford means that a privileged few have a different choice.

Pat Deutz

Workers against The Gulag (1981)

Book Review from the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers Against The Gulag, edited by Olga Semyonova and Viktor Haynes. (Pluto Press £1.95)

"I am a Russian worker, aged 46. I have worked in production for 30 years, 22 on electrical work, repairs. The archives of the KGB hold three folders of documents confirming that I am a skilled electrician, conscientious in my work, practically don't drink, and don't smoke.

"I will list some of the reasons which led me in 1959 to take the risk of illegally crossing the border, and in 1964 and 1966 to ask for permission to emigrate.

(1) The low level of pay  . . . I have spent the best years of my life slaving for a crust.

(2) The lack of free Trade Unions.

(3) The cruel, humiliating treatment of men in Labour Camps. I spent many days in freezing solitary confinement in Camp No. * of the Omsk, UMZ.

(4) The continual ever-growing tendency of the KGB to use "psychiatry" to strengthen its punitive powers."

On the 21 December 1976, V. A. Ivanov appeared in Revolution Square in Moscow with a placard: "To the Soviet Authorities. I demand permission to emigrate. I have gone through Hell in your Camps and Gas-Chambers. What else is left?" Ten minutes later Ivanov was seized, spent 24 hours in the police station, and was then sent home, out of Moscow. In November he addressed a letter to George Meaney, President of the American AFL/CIO: "I am a Russian worker, a highly qualified electrician with thirty years record  . . . I ask you to help me leave Russia and thereby escape further persecution."

This book is one of the most damning indictments to come from Russia so far, consisting of a series of documents smuggled out and published, for the first time, in Britain. These documents tell the facts behind the glossy government propaganda tracts. Ninety per cent of the Russian working-class are on piece-work rates, based on impossible so-called "norms". The minimum official poverty line is 50 Roubles a week; 10,000 families in Leningrad alone fall below this line. Every Soviet citizen has to carry an "internal passport" (just like under the Czar), which is also a residential permit. In addition, every worker has to carry his Labour Book, giving his work record, and without which he cannot get employment. Food is dear, in winter often unobtainable, especially butter, milk and eggs. The average Russian citizen gets less than half as much meat as West European workers. Serious widespread strikes have broken out as in Novcherkass, and been brutally suppressed. These workers in their protests actually betray the same naiveté as their grandfathers did in 1905 when they appealed to the Czar (the Little Father); asking "Comrade Brezhnev to intervene on their behalf, and the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party to prevent the local Communist officials from persecuting them is as futile.

In their appeals they declare their support of the Russian system and say they want to "make it work". The most moving, harrowing parts of the book are the accounts of the brutal persecution and ill-treatment of workers by the criminal thugs of the KGB and the Russian CP. For daring to protest against corruption (more rife in Russia than in New York), thieving of state property, swindling workers of their pay, rigging elections to the official state "unions", workers have been dismissed, had their furniture and children thrown out on the street, in the depths of Russian winter, been beaten up in police stations, and sent to "Psychiatric Hospitals" and Labour Camps.

All of which shows how terrified the authorities really are. In spite of everything, with incredible courage, Vladimir Klebanov and his friends have formed a free Trade Union, demanded recognition, and appealed to the west for help, which the KGB with all its powers has failed to suppress. The first Russian Free Trade Union has been driven underground, but still exists. This book confirms our view of the anti-working class politics in Russia.

Horatio

The new Russian ruling class (1981)

Book Review from the February 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

La Nomenklatura by Michael Voslensky (Belfond, Paris)

This book, written in German by a dissident who left Russia in 1972 and here translated into French, will also no doubt sooner or later appear in English but meanwhile we can already mention some of the information it gives on the privileges of the Russian ruling class.

Russia is a state capitalist country where the means of production belong to the state which in turn is dictatorially controlled by the single political party allowed to exist. The means of production are thus effectively monopolised by the top layers of the party, who constitute the owning, exploiting class. They are in fact a capitalist class, even though their ownership is collective rather than individual (as was for instance that of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages). Similarly, the proceeds of their exploitation of the Russian working class are shared out as bloated "salaries" and various institutionalised privileges and benefits in kind rather than as dividends.

Although Voslensky does not use the term "state capitalism" he shows that Russia is a class society in which the workers and peasants are exploited by a ruling, owning class as the "nomenklatura", a social group who occupy the posts which the Party, at various levels has the sole right to fill. It is a clearly defined group—a special document proves membership—and Voslensky estimates their number at 750,000 (with their families, 3 million) or 1.5 per cent of the population, a tiny minority like the capitalist class in the West.

The official average monthly wage in Russia is 167 roubles. The basic pay of a head of sector at the Central Committee of the Party is 450 roubles, but this does not take into account that he is paid a 13th month, receives a cure bonus and tickets called kremliovka which entitle him to obtain good quality food cheaply. According to Voslensky, these extra perks bring his monthly income up to 750 roubles.

Then there are the various privileges in kind. A member of the nomenklatura lives in a luxury flat and has at his disposal a chauffeur-driven car, a dacha in the country and rest and holiday homes in the mountains and at the seaside. He also has access to special shops and restaurants where only the best is on sale, at cheap prices. Every station and airport has a special waiting room reserved for members of the nomenklatura only. Since the death of Stalin, membership of the group is virtually for life; even if you make some mistake you are not expelled from its ranks, but only transferred to a less important post—and so you still keep the privileges. Similarly, and even official Russian sociological studies show this, the nomenklatura is tending to become hereditary: new members increasingly choose fathers who are also nomenklaturists. Voslensky says that the nomenklatura could be said to live in a separate country which he calls "Nomenklaturia":

Here are to be found special housing constructed by special firms, special country houses and special holiday centres, special cure homes, polyclinics and hospitals; special products sold in special shops; special cafeterias and canteens; special hairdressing salons and special car centres; special petrol pumps and special number plates; a special information service with wide ramifications; kindergartens, schools and boarding schools of special educational establishments (giving degrees), exclusive clubs where films are shown in exclusivity; special waiting rooms in stations and airports. And even a reserved cemetery. (pp. 249-250).

And these privileged exploiters hypocritically proclaim that classes have been abolished in Russia and that social equality reigns there! But the Russian people are not completely taken in, as shown by the following widely-circulating Russian joke which Voslensky quotes—Question: what is the difference between capitalism and communism? Answer: capitalism is based on the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the opposite.

Adam Buick

A reconstruction (1980)

Book Review from the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French village, 1294-1324, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Penguin Books.

It is the turn of the 14th century; a small French village high in the mountains continues a tradition of life that has been rolling on for as long as anyone knows. There is a closely knit community of priests, minor nobility and peasantry, the latter free from the worst restrictions of feudal servility. Most peasants live as farmers, the poorer members being either shepherds (the men) or servants (the women). They are connected to, yet also cut off from, the mainstream of French social life.

The priesthood is more concerned with its own sexual appetites than any pretence at religion. Social values, which clearly predate capitalism, include freer sexual relations and a lack of the sexual prejudices which beset 20th century society. To take one obvious example, an unmarried mother is in no way discriminated against, either in terms of marriage prospects or generally. There is a lack of commitment to time keeping (other than by the seasons); little regard for money (very few money transactions took place); different social classes mix easily (the lady of the village sleeping with priest and peasant). But there is also a new and potentially subversive religion, Catharsism, the Albigensian heresy that threatens to undermine the Catholic Church by accepting a deity but rejecting the established priesthood.

Into this easy going, almost timeless, community descends Bishop Fournier, a fanatical Catholic who rounds up the Cathars in a series of inquisitions between 1318 and 1325. His enthusiasm for burning and imprisoning the Cathars knows no bounds. But the inquisitions are also meticulous and carefully document, incredibly lengthy statements from all the inhabitants of the village. These statements, painfully transcribed into Latin, have survived, and allow Ladurie to recreate the life of the community in minute detail.

It is a remarkable record and Ladurie's patient reconstruction allows one to see into the very minds of the people of Montaillou. It is one of the most detailed pictures of the rhythms of pre-capitalist life of the non-privileged classes to have been published.

There are, however, problems with Ladurie's work; no historian is neutral and Montaillou does suffer from contradictions. Ladurie seems to make no allowances for the potential distortion (conscious or otherwise) in the depositions of the rounded up villagers. He tends to be repetitive; the same story about the same love affair will appear in different contexts on several occasions. But perhaps this was almost deliberate; life was repetitive and the minutiae of the "sophisticated" peasant world of Montaillou needs time to appreciate. This book's length may be part of its own structure. Anyone who wants to find evidence of the stupidity of the arguments about "greedy human nature" or the inevitability of conflict could do worse than get on the time machine and pay a visit to Montaillou.

Ronnie Warrington