Having a rotten Christmas (1983)

A Short Story from the December 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I suppose", said Tomlinson, waving his hand-rolled Old Holborn as if it were a large, expensive cigar, "you'll be spending it at home with the family?" I looked at him with a wary surprise; for three years in that office I had been working under, or perhaps I should say had been terrified by, him — by the huge temper which sparkled behind his pebble glasses, by the rage which he regularly turned on me when he knew he had made a mistake. if I could find the courage, I would hand in my notice. Now, on this Christmas Eve, I was unnerved by his unaccustomed affability, with its hint that he saw me as a human being who might after all live in a home with a family.

Without warning he lunged to grip my shoulder, bared orange teeth and coaxed across his face, now very close to mine, an expression I had not seen there before. This was it, I thought — the physical attack I had feared for so long, and with wing-like gyrations of my elbow I tried to dislodge his hand. But his grip was strong (he had once been an Olympic gymnast) and for some seconds we writhed wordlessly at his desk until, as he panted "Merry Christmas", it dawned on me that he was smiling.

Tomlinson was shipping manager to a small firm which had begun its life in an office and warehouse in the City of London, importing and selling chemicals. There was, to put it mildly, a resistance to change there; the management was entrenched in a traditional formality which, among other things, ensured that you had to work there for years before you could earn the prefix "Mister" to your name. Nobody, of course, ever used their first name and if one of the secretaries got married the rest of the staff simply continued to call her by her maiden name.

The post-war property boom had blasted the firm out of the high rents of the City into a modern, bleak building in a west-suburban industrial estate. Quite a few of the employees lived in the East End and beyond; before the move they had had a simple journey to work but now each day they had to travel from one end of the Central Line to the other, reading their Daily Express and telling each other jokes using their surnames/ Whatever the reason for such loyalty, it could not have been that the firm were paying high wages. I know that I was paid well below the going rate and, after one fearfully sneaked look at his pay packet, I knew that Tomlinson, for all his airs, was treated no better. Twice a year we got a bonus which was handed out, after weeks of coy reminders from Tomlinson, as if the firm was swamping us in generosity.

It was in this mood that Tomlinson approached me that day. We had just received the Christmas bonus and I suppose he expected my usual enmity would have been disarmed by gratitude. It was, he may have reasoned, the season of good will (although there was never any celebration in that firm); time to repair some of the damage he had done during the rest of the year, perhaps to catch me off guard with an admission that the firm was a relaxed, friendly, caring bunch and that Tomlinson was an impulsively warm and festive personality.

In my gloomier, more penetrative moments I could see that what might be called right was on their side. Far beyond the passages and courts of the City, beyond the gimcrack suburbs, the popular christian festival of Christmas is offered to us just as Tomlinson was offering his hand to me. In the midst of a war, with thousands dying each day in unimaginable fear and pain, Christmas is the time for monarchs and statesmen to place special emphasis on their obscenities about peace and human dignity. A social system in which an abundantly rich minority live off a grindingly poor majority is justified, when Christmas comes, in soothing words about the good times which will come when we have had a change of heart. As millions die each year in famine, Christmas feeds us with its special brand of hypocrisy. Its festivity is a time to try to escape an inexorable, horrible reality, for workers to disguise their impoverished homes in tinsel and coloured paper and to anaesthetise their tensions at the prospect of the exploitation process waiting to swallow them again, when the holiday is over and the decorations are a dusty heap in a corner.

Christmas exists on the delusion that capitalism need be as it is — indeed, at times that it is not as it is. But this society is not a matter of human defects. Poverty exists, not because the working class, who suffer from it, are morally deficient and their masters morally perfect. War lays waste to life, not through human aggression or acquisitiveness. Society is blighted by repression, not because its people ignore moral instruction.

It cannot be said too often, or too emphatically, that the effects of capitalism are unavoidable as long as the system endures. Capitalism inexorably produces war, poverty and human degradation and these problems will not be abolished by seeking a change in hearts but through a revolutionary upheaval. Anything — like the Christmas interlude — which attempts to persuade us otherwise is an episode in hypocrisy and delusion.

All of this was apparent, as it always was with me, as I faced Tomlinson that Christmas Eve. I would like to be able to say that I shook off his hand and told him what I thought of him, of the company he adored, of the country he gave his loyalty to, of the social system he regarded as the ultimate in human rationality. But I wasn't up to it so I muttered and shuffled my feet. reached out for the bill of lading file and immersed myself thankfully in what Tomlinson called work.

And yes, I did spend it at home with my family, where all good wage slaves go at Christmas. But there was no escape there; for the family is not, as the queen so often tells us, a haven of warm security. It may not be too obvious, around the Christmas fireside, but the family has a role in capitalism — to socialise us from childhood into an acceptance of capitalism's privilege-based morality. There was no escape there nor anywhere; the Tories were not long back in power and Suez lay in the not-too-distant future. It was still possible before reality set in, for the media bandits to talk about a new Elizabethan age. I gloomily contemplated capitalism's future and the immediate fact that after Boxing Day everyone would stop being talkative and replete and go back to the deprived and furtive personalities of wage-slaves.

I had a rotten Christmas.

Ivan

‘Surplus Theory’ versus Marxian Theory (2013)

From the April 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The work of Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick contains some insights for socialists but it is not Marxian economics and is not socialist.

The late twentieth-century saw the demise of many governments that viewed themselves as heirs of the ideas of Karl Marx. The failure of these regimes was seen by their opponents as the triumph of capitalism and the death of socialism. With the rise of neoliberal economics in advanced industrial countries the future of the left did indeed seem bleak. The legacy of Karl Marx and Marxian socialism, however, was far from dead. As the current global recession shook the confidence of neoliberal prescriptions Marx’s economic ideas received renewed attention. We examine here the theories of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff in relation to class, surplus value, their definition of communism and how to achieve it. Richard Wolff in particular has gained much attention in light of the recession through his video When Capitalism Hits the Fan.

Reformist road to nowhere

The Socialist Party rejects the minority seizure of power or governing with a programme of reforms with the aim of achieving socialism at some point in the future. We argue that pursuing an objective of seizing power in the name of the working class or of a programme of reforms that aim at removing the worst excesses of capitalism do not move society any further towards socialism. Replacing the immediate objective of socialism with more immediate aims in effect removes the socialist objective altogether. Others, most others in fact, who have called themselves socialist or communist in the last century and today have rejected this approach. They have argued for the necessity of the seizure of state power by minority parties or, more often, have seen in the reform programmes of labour parties the hope of gradual socialist transformation. The experience of the twentieth century saw the failure of these approaches to transform society on socialist lines. What ensued was the collapse of confidence in the possibility of socialism and indeed in the belief that there was any alternative to capitalism.

If it was assumed that various governments had been or were in fact variants of socialism or communism then it is quite understandable that confidence in that political outlook would either diminish or that a reworking of assumptions would occur, given that the populations of these ‘socialist’ countries appeared to prefer capitalism. Marxism or ‘socialism’ could either be discarded or the understanding of them reassessed. Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff are in the latter category and have reworked Marxian economics into ‘surplus theory’, which attempts to reinterpret Marxian economics in the light of the failure of so-called ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ governments to arrive at their declared communist objective.

To their credit they do not define the former USSR, China, Cuba, etc. as socialist but as state-capitalist. Likewise they acknowledge that the various attempts to regulate or reform capitalism in the name of socialism resulted in merely more regulated capitalism rather than something different to capitalism. In fact, Wolff and Resnick describe quite nicely the swings, often in response to economic crises, between relatively less or relatively more regulated capitalism in the last century or so. They reject the idea of socialism as it is commonly misunderstood – as state ownership and planned production as against capitalist private ownership and production for the market. At the root of their argument is the understanding that private or state capitalism merely changes the exploiter and does not remove the exploitation. However, their understanding of the root of the exploitation of the working class is at odds with the arguments developed by most Marxian socialists who regard the former USSR and other such regimes as state capitalist.

Russian state capitalism

For us in the Socialist Party capitalism remained intact in the USSR because buying and selling, commodities, value, prices and profit continued. The employers, ceased to be private individuals owning capital and became instead the state, which owned and controlled the large scale means of production and received the surplus value produced. In place of a narrow elite of private owners of the means of production emerged a narrow social elite who controlled the state. The fundamentally exploitative relationship between capital and labour remained intact with the continued existence of money, wages, commodities, exchange, prices and the growth of a bureaucratic and brutal state. We argue that the disappearance of all of these facets of capitalist society would in fact be necessary before a socialist society could be argued to exist.

For Resnick and Wolff on the other hand capitalism remained intact because the mere legal transfer of private to state property and the shift of power from private capitalists to the state did not produce change at the enterprise level. The workers, the producers of surplus value, they argue, must also become the appropriators of surplus value. Their definition of communism is a society where those who produce the surplus in a given enterprise are the same people who own it and control its distribution. Their argument is the result of the application of their ‘surplus theory’, which condenses the three volumes of Capital into saying that Marx was essentially analysing past and present societies according to who appropriates and distributes the surplus produced in a given society. In this way their ‘surplus theory’ can be applied to areas like the family, where it is argued that men have historically extracted surplus labour from women in the home.

Conflict over surplus

Whilst Resnick and Wolff promote their analysis as Marxian, it is in fact a simplified departure from classical Marxian ideas that would have Marx turning in his grave. Marx and Engels and many subsequent socialists considered socialism to be a society which transcends wage-labour and money. ‘Surplus theory’, by contrast, sees no problem with the continuance of money, wages, commodities, exchange, prices and the state. From its perspective, as long as the productive workers obtain the surplus-value of their work and control its distribution then society is communist.

There is a thorny issue for ‘surplus theory’ to deal with in the relationship between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ workers. This is a distinction between those workers in capitalist societies who produce surplus value (e.g. factory workers) and those workers who do not (civil servants, sales staff, security guards, etc.). Of course the one cannot exist without the other and in socialism, according to our definition, there would no longer be such a distinction as there would be no surplus value (although there would be a surplus of goods, of use-values). However, in a socialist society as defined by Resnick and Wolff there would be a tension between those who produced the surplus value and those that drew from it without contributing to it. They get around this by suggesting job-rotation and other practicable but pointless solutions.

The whole concept of ‘surplus theory’ is simplistic and misleading. Wolff and Resnick describe a process within capitalism where capitalists appropriate surplus value and then redistribute portions of it in order to reproduce the process. These payments are termed ‘subsumed class payments’ and include such things as taxes, wages to ‘unproductive’ employees, rent, interest, advertising, etc. In practice capitalists do not immediately appropriate surplus value but rather the products of the labour of their employees which they hope to sell on the market as commodities at a price that will provide them with a profit (the realisation of surplus value as money). It is not possible to distinguish the appropriation of surplus from the distribution of it as ‘subsumed class payments’ since the process is simultaneous and mostly determined behind the backs of those involved as market transactions (although boards do deliberate on how to distribute accumulated surplus value as cash reserves). Capitalism is an anarchic system of social production in which the capitalist class as a whole appropriates surplus value from the working class as a whole and cannot be understood adequately at the level of the individual enterprise.

What is class?

The use of ‘surplus theory’ can be confusing because it is written in terms familiar to Marxian socialists but with a quite different meaning. When they discuss class, for example, they define it by relationship to surplus value and reject definitions based on power, property or consciousness. For them, your place in capitalism is defined by whether you produce surplus value, derive your wages from surplus value (both working class according to our definition) or whether you appropriate the surplus value and control its distribution (the capitalist class). All processes which do not relate to the direct production of ‘surplus value’ are classified as ‘non-class processes’, such as education, culture and even politics. Their philosophical concept of over-determination (seehttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/overdetermination-and-marxian-theory-socialist-view-work-richard-wolff-and-st ) comes into play again because class is also argued to be no more important than non-class aspects of society – it is argued that that would be reductionism. By this reasoning if you change the class relationship, if you change the ownership and control of surplus value, other changes (at this point unknowable) will follow as class relates dialectically to all other areas of life.

This is a deliberate attempt to try to keep ‘surplus theory’ clear of issues of ownership or power. Socialism has failed to date, Resnick and Wolff argue, because socialism has been defined according to who owns the means of production and/or who controls them. This has led to various governments being called socialist because some of the means of production have passed into state ownership and, if enough of the means of production have been transferred, a large measure of social and political power is likewise conferred. This leads to their abstruse and obfuscating ‘surplus theory’ in which ‘communism’ according to their definition can exist in an economy with state ownership or private ownership and with state planning or markets or a blend of all of these features.

However, capitalism is a system of social production in which private property and the state developed to enable and maintain the expropriation of surplus value via wage-labour. Class (in the classical Marxian sense of the relation of the individual to the means of production) is, of course, not the only or necessarily the most important relation in a given identity or event – it does not determine our lives in any mechanical way. It does, though, suffuse our social experience and shapes and limits our individual and social possibilities. The position of the Socialist Party is at odds with Resnick and Wolff‘s ‘surplus theory.’ Socialism, for us, entails a working-class consciousness of the basis of our exploitation and the necessity of political action to gain control of the state as part of a revolutionary process in which common ownership and democratic control of the means of production would replace capitalism, the private or state ownership of the means of production. Our understanding of class involves awareness of the importance not just of the appropriation of surplus value but its mutual dependence on property relations and the state as well as, crucially, the developed political consciousness of the capitalist class and the currently limited political consciousness of the working class.

Worker co-operatives

So, after all their work developing the theories of over-determination and ‘surplus theory’ what are the practical solutions offered up by Wolff and Resnick. How are the working class to advance towards a world in which they appropriate and distribute their own surplus? Wolff in particular promotes a strategy to achieve social change around the concept of Workers Self Directed Enterprises (WSDEs). These are, despite Wolff’s efforts to argue that they are something new, essentially worker’s co-operatives. These, it is argued, combined with activism to promote democracy and gain political support could be the basis for achieving social transformation. Here we are on familiar and not new ground. Wolff’s argument is similar to that of Eduard Bernstein who argued over a century ago that worker’s co-operatives were transforming capitalism from within, obviating the need for social revolution. Rosa Luxemburg countered then, as we do now, that workers forming a co-operative “are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur – a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.” To achieve meaningful change through WSDEs would require massive social and political struggle with the end being a form of capitalism in which workers collectively exploit themselves.

Colin Skelly

                                                                                                                                        

"An Epitaph for George Dillon" — A Study in Failure (1958)

A Theatre Review from the June 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Look Back in Anger," "The Entertainer" and now "An Epitaph for George Dillon": John Osborne's trilogy of failure. Jimmy Porter is a failure, Archie Rice is a failure, and George Dillon is a failure. This cannot be without significance, the question is—why? The remarkable success if these plays is largely due to a strong sense of identification that many people have with them. They unconsciously or otherwise see something of themselves in the problem children John Osborne has set before them on his stage.

Each of these three plays represents in one way or another the frustrations and disillusionment of youth in post-war Capitalism their sense of personal failure on the one side and the failure if Britain to remain a front-rank Power on the other, expressed in a soured romanticism the famous "anger," which paradoxically is aimed at those very elements they most desire. Romanticism is essentially the reaction of people to a society which fails to provide them with a satisfactory function. The inability of Capitalism to deal with this basic need thus creates a strong romantic craving for the nebulous "lost cause," for the ideal beyond the drab reality which, unlike in its formative years, the chromium-plated Capitalism of the mid-twentieth century is unable to satisfy. Society has no need of them. Consequently they contract out of the problems of Society, rejected, resentful and rebellious, seeking something, somewhere, that will claim them as its own. Cheated of their purpose and their identity, they seek instead a mythical past, looking backward in anger and also nostalgia, to an age which they imagine had a place in the sun for them as well as the country they pretend in their jilted patriotism to despise.

"An Epitaph of George Dillon," which John Osborne wrote in collaboration with Anthony Creighton, now running at the Comedy Theatre, presents us with the tragedy of such a failure. The artist in Capitalism—a tune without an instrument, unbidden and unwanted, a flower that has somehow strayed amongst the more practical vegetation—unlike his fellow workers in industry and commerce who at least have a point of contact, a specific function, however unsatisfactory and creatively barren.

George Dillon is an actor and playwright, guiltily ashamed of his social impotence. (The alienation of the artist from Society and also the stultifying of the artist in each one of us, making work more often than not a penance, is one of the most vicious aspects of Capitalism.) His failure to be a complete human being induces in him contemptuousness of his class through his inability to communicate with them on his own terms. Dillon's contempt and cynicism towards the working class family, on whom he lives is sickening. (Sickening also is the way some members of the audience find this funny.) The narrowness and meanness of their existence symbolises to Dillon his own predicament as an artist and their attitude to him, that of Society to all artists; betimes hostile, patronising, or merely uncomprehending. To the dire necessity of earning a living Dillon eventually succumbs: to suffer a fate worse in reality than complete negation as an artist. Our Society, with its hollow values—as the play shows—which makes even its own vapid morality bow before snobbery and cheap personal success, turns Dillon, the rebellious profligate outsider and erstwhile idealist, into a soggy hack-writer of "prolefeed." Now capitulated to Capitalism's suffocating conformity, it has a place for him at least—but not in the sun.

Ian Jones

Jack and the Beanstalk (1952)

From the March 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

At this time of the year the pantomime season is drawing to a close and these Xmas plays are being taken off.

One of the plays regularly performed is "Jack and the Beanstalk." The story is of Teutonic origin and was written during feudal times. It tells of a peasant woman who is forced by poverty to send her son Jack to market to sell their cow. He exchanges it for a bag of beans. On his return home the woman throws the beans out of the window. They grow to a tremendous height during the night and Jack climbs to the top, to find himself in the realm of a giant. By subterfuge he steals the giant's money bags and when this money is spent and gone he goes back and steals the giant's magic hen. The second acquisition has the advantage that the possessor is able to live in permanent luxury as the hen lays golden eggs. The giant's harp warns its master, but Jack succeeds in making his getaway with the hen. The hen's supply of golden eggs enables Jack and his family to live happily ever after.

The audience not only enjoy the usual pleasures associated with attending a play, but, with this pantomime, as with some others, the additional pleasure of merging their own individual identities with some of characters in the play. To merge their identity with Jack and his mother is a very pleasant experience for many workers.

It makes a pleasing even if fantastic dream to leave their world of anxiety, toll, strife, working-class houses and working-class food through the ownership of a hen that lays golden eggs producing such wealth that the fortunate owner can satisfy all his wants. Quite an impossibility to so many workers' minds, much too good to be even though about—except in a pantomime.

Back at the process of making a living next day all thoughts of the pantomime are forgotten. There is no time for such dreams—the workers is far too busy producing wealth for his employer. And what wealth!! The golden eggs of Jack's hen appear quite insignificant against the profits the workers produce for those who own capital.

Just Take a Look at This:—

The profits of companies, public and private, in 1950, according to the Treasury White Paper amounted to £1,692 millions after deducting depreciation. The profits of 3,787 companies, which reported in 1951, as totalled by the Financial Times came to £1,873 millions. This total is an increase of 30 per cent. over the Financial Times 1950 figure of £1,431 millions. After depreciation the figures were £1,636 millions and £1,225 millions respectively.

Aspirations that now seem to many workers to be just wishful thinking can become reality just as soon as they realise that it is the ownership of the land, factories, transport systems, and the means of life generally by society that will enable these dreams to be realised by them. Then there will be no need to waste labour on armaments, advertisements, passports and the host of officials and clerks necessary for the present system of wealth production.

This will come about when the workers understand the exploitation basis of this system of society.

Socialist propaganda will help them. The task is urgent—will you join with us and help to make those dreams come true!

Frank Offord 

From Political Economy to Vulgar Economics (2015)

From the December 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The history of economic research came up as an independent science in the seventeenth century. However, that didn’t happen all of a sudden. Long ago since ancient times, the process of rudimentary conceptualization and formation of political economic ideas had begun cropping up. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Hindus and other peoples were already acquainted with such economic categories as commodity, exchange, money, price, loan interest, commercial profit, and others. There are very interesting ideas and data in ancient Egyptian papyri; the code of Hammurabi, the ruler of Babylonia; the Vedas of Ancient India; Homer’s Odyssey and other works of the ancient Greek poet; the writings of Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle and other philosophers of Greek antiquity, and so on. However, what the ancients knew about economic categories was just embryonic.

The history of economic thought begins with the works of Xenophon, Plato and especially Aristotle, who made the first step towards a theoretical understanding of the economy of the ancient Greek society (which was at the stage of demise of the primitive-communal system and the rise of slavery), and articulated some remarkable ideas on value, commodity exchange, and the earliest forms of capital: trading (merchant’s) and usury capital.

Capitalist structures first took shape not in production, but in trade and monetary operations in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Eventually this evolutionary process of the upcoming capital came to be known as Mercantilism that expressed the interests of merchant’s capital in England, Italy and France. Its principal spokesmen were William Stafford (and Thomas Mun in England, Antonio Serra in Italy and Antoine de Montchrestien in France).

The term 'Political Economy' was first coined by the French mercantilist Antoine de Montchrestien in his Treatise of Political Economy (1615), which contained recommendations on how to run the state economy and multiply the country’s wealth. The term was derived from three Greek words: 'politikos' – state, social; 'òikos'- household or its management; and 'nomos' – rule of law, and so meant 'the laws of state management'.

Later on, in the eighteenth century, bourgeois political economy was developed by the Physiocrats: Francois Quesnay, Turgot, and others. François Quesnay was a French economist of the Physiocratic school. He is known for publishing Tableau économique (Economic Table) in 1758, which provided the foundations of the ideas of the Physiocrats. Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne, commonly known as Turgot, was a French statesman (and economist in his own right) heavily influenced by Quesnay.

In contrast to the mercantilists, they switched the emphasis in economic research from the sphere of circulation to the sphere of production.

Bourgeois political economy in that period [from the 17th century to the 1830s] was advanced by William Petty (1623 – 1687) in England and Pierre Boisguillebert (1646 – 1714) in France. They were the pioneers in formulating the labour theory of value. They were in effect the founders of classical political economy, which reached its peak in the works of the Scottish economist Adam Smith in the eighteenth century and the English economist David Ricardo in the early nineteenth century.

Karl Marx observed in 1859 in the section 'Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities' in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: 'The decisive outcome of the research carried on for over a century and a half by classical political economy, beginning with William Petty in Britain and Boisguillebert in France, and ending with Ricardo in Britain and Sismondi in France, is an analysis of the aspects of the commodity into two forms of labour – use-value is reduced to concrete labour or purposive productive activity, exchange-value to labour-time or homogeneous social labour.' In Capital (1867) he defined political economy: '… by political economy I understand the economy which since the time of W. Petty has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society'.

Marx made a distinction between such men as Petty, Smith and Ricardo and their successors. He wrote of the former that they devoted their efforts 'to the study of the real interrelations of bourgeois production', while the latter were 'content to elucidate the semblance of the interrelations' and to act in effect as apologists for the capitalist class. He called them 'vulgar economists'.

Engels had already warned, and shown great foresight, in 1843 when he wrote in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: 'The nearer to our time the economists whom we have to judge, the more severe must our judgment become. For while Smith and Malthus found only scattered fragments, the modern economists had the whole system complete before them: the consequences had all been drawn; the contradictions came clearly enough to light, yet they did not come to examine the premises and still accepted the responsibility for the whole system. The nearer the economists come to the present time, the further they depart from honesty'.

Binay Sarkar

Ensnared by ideological beliefs (1995)

Theatre Review from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Easter by August Strindberg

Playwrights, like ordinary mortals, are creatures of their time. Whether unconsciously or as a matter of intention, most playwrights reveal in their story-lines and their dramatic pre-occupations, their characters and their dialogue, a view of the society of which they are a part.

August Strinberg's Easter (RSC, Barbican) is full of symbolism and illusion. It describes events in the life of Elis Heyst, a manic-depressive Norwegian schoolteacher in three fateful days between Maundy Thursday and the Saturday before Easter Sunday. It is filled with references to Christian suffering and the possibilities if redemption; to the coming of spring after a Scandinavian winter; to guilt associated with a father's imprisonment for embezzlement; and, finally—so it seems—to forgiveness and charity. It is marvellously presented by a gifted cast in the crucible-like atmosphere of The Pit, to the echoing sounds of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion and against a slide-show of paintings from The Last Supper and the Crucifixion. The atmosphere of religiosity is tangible. 

Critics in the national press have responded to the moving last act as well they might. The ideas of forgiveness and charity might have been appropriated by Strindberg and given expression in the world of late nineteenth-century capitalism and Christian belief, but their benevolent, life-enhancing notions have a universal, timeless relevance. Indeed socialists see them as part of the common currency of life in a world based on co-operation rather than competition, happiness rather than angst.

What is especially interesting in both the play and also the reactions of the audience (and the critics) to it, is the way in which forgiveness and charity have been stolen and given expression within the values of capitalist society. Several times an apparently merciful redeemer makes clear to the unfortunate Elis that "it all comes back": that he (Elis) is to be forgiven because long ago his father—and languishing in jail—behaved charitably to the redeemer. This makes forgiveness not so much a gesture of magnanimity as a commodity to be exchanged on an "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch my back" basis.

This marketing of forgiveness and charity escaped the notice of the critics in the national newspapers. Clearly it isn't only playwrights who are ensnared by the ideological beliefs of the society of which they are a part. Most of the audience and the critics are victims of the same kind of prejudices.

Michael Gill

Blue Pencilled People (1995)

Theatre Review from the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Editing Process by Meredith Oakes, The Royal Court Theatre.

Meredith Oakes's play The Editing Process is apparently about the take-over of a small magazine by a predatory capitalist entrepreneur. Enter the new owner's efficiency expert, together with the corporate image consultant, and activities are rationalised, savings (sic) realised, and talk of redundancies is in the air.

Michael Billington in the Guardian complains that the play refuses "to expand into a metaphor for the crisis currently affecting the publishing business". And Billington is right. There is no acknowledgment of the larger world in which the characters operate.

Oakes is good at showing the importance of work: revealing the impact of work on personality; pointing to its centrality in life, as the basis of most social relations. But, according to Oakes, behaviour has no economic and social reference points. Displays of power and dependency at work are seen as matters of individual choice and not as concomitants of the social relations of work. Indeed in defence of her position Oakes writes in a letter to the Guardian that "whatever system prevails, a power is sought by a few people. The quality of society depends on the moral choices those people make, not the political labels they wear".

Socialists see this as just plain wrong. Power is not a universal to be forever the basis of struggle and conflict. Power is a feature of an economically-divided society, and its generalised appearance is rooted in economic divisions. Oakes sees power and morality as independent variables: socialists recognise the primary impact of economic divisions in determining the character of ideas in what Marx called "the superstructure of society".

Within its limitations The Editing Process is a revealing, often very funny, play which us presented with wit and panache. But it is fundamentally flawed. Its characters and their actions are economically and socially adrift. Their behaviours are rooted in personal whims and idiosyncrasies that lack for economic and social underpinning. Like statues without legs Oakes's characters have separated from the economic foundations which might have more adequately accounted for their actions. The result is a series of undimensional snapshots of a world which properly demands a multi-dimensional focus.

Michael Gill

Not so friendly (1979)

From the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

A group of socialists recently attended a meeting of the Friends of the Earth at Sunderland YMCA. It had been advertised as an open public meeting, all ideas welcome. There was a crowd of about fifty, mostly students, and we sat at the back of the room to listen to what the speakers had to say.

There were three speakers, two from the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM). One talked of alleviating unemployment by creating 'Worker Controls' in which workers would commonly own their industries, and capital investment (which would also be commonly owned) would be used in the interests of the workers. The 'Worker Controls' would also be used to teach workers how to run their own affairs (how nice). The other ICOM speaker said that one of their members was at present investigating ways to solve 'over-population' and food shortages.

When it came to question time, one if us asked the speaker to explain the cause of unemployment "since you must know the cause before you can attempt to solve the problem". The ICOM speaker replied that there were various causes of unemployment, then relapsed into a tone such as to be inaudible to anyone. The member answered his own question: "Capitalism is the cause of unemployment, and your energies should be directed at removing the cause. men and women are thrown onto the dole because they are of no further use to their employers. Perhaps the market is 'glutted', but there must be a reserve army of labour ready for use when the market demands." Amazingly enough, the ICOM speaker replied that there was plenty of demand, but forgot to add that needs do not constitute market demand.

Another member said:"You say that workers will learn how to run their own affairs in these 'Worker Controls', but workers control everything now. The working class run capitalism from top to bottom. You won't find a capitalist soiling his hands with work." No reply. Another socialist rose and said that 'overpopulation' is a myth and the ICOM speaker stands accused of helping to spread dangerous myths. If half the starving people were removed tomorrow, the other half would still starve. It would not make an iota of difference. The accused, and red-faced, speaker stormed out of the room, not to be seen again that night. At that moment a member of the audience (or perhaps another member of ICOM) stood up and said, "I've had enough of this" and, "Perhaps our friends would like to leave".  (I wonder if they are that friendly with whales!)

They then proceeded to discuss 'Worker Controls', perhaps hoping that they had silenced us, but they hoped in vain. for another of our group said, "Obviously production in 'Worker Controls' would have to meet market demand, so in a situation where one group of people needed food but had no money (which is not market demand) and another group wanted arms and had the money (which does constitute market demand), the workers would have to produce arms." "I cannot see a workers' co-op producing arms", said the ICOM speaker. "Then I am afraid the only alternative would be the sack", said the member. We were then invited to leave. Why? Because the speaker decided to close the meeting after a very brief question time. We did not get the chance to put our case at this meeting, but we will continue to attend meetings that are 'open' to us.

Vince Maratty (North East Branch)

About Books (1953)

 Book Reviews from the August 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russian novelists have a knack of cramming their stories with such a large number of characters that the majority of their non-Russian leaders get lost in the crowd. Adding to the confusion is the similarity of male and female Christian names and the addition of a suffix to the surname to denote the female. Again, it appears that the name by which a person is addressed depends on the relationship with the person who is addressing him. A stranger or a remote acquaintance will use the surname, a friend or close acquaintance will use the first Christian name whilst relatives and very close friends will address a person by his or her second Christian name. This use of different names to denote the same person becomes mystifying to most English readers.

Although Sholokov's books are constructed similarly, when we read them we do not experience the same confusion that attends the reading of other Russian authors. He so presents his characters that we are able to distinguish one from the others right from the word "Go."

Sholokov's two earliest books, "And Quiet Flows the Don" and "The Don Flows Home to the Sea" are now world famous, and justly so. The first of these books was originally published in Russia in 1929 and the second in 1940. A recent reprint in English has been published by Putnam and Co., Ltd., and the two volumes are available at 12s. 6d. each.

The story, which is continuous through the two books, is enthralling. It presents us with a history of the Don Cossack peasant farmers from the early years of the present century up to the early nineteen-twenties and takes us through the latter part of the Czarist regime, the 1914-1918 war, the Bolshevik seizure of power and the counter-revolutionary war in the Cossack regions.

The Cossack farmers had little interest in the theories and aspirations of either side in the counter-revolutionary war. They desired little more than to be left alone to till their land and enjoy the fruits of their work. When they took up arms it was with the intent of driving out one bunch of oppressors or the other, which accounts for the fact that some of them not infrequently changed sides. It also accounts for one theme in Sholokov's story where intimate friends and even relatives fight one another from opposite ranks.

The great lesson to be learned from this story of the Don Cossacks is that revolutionary social changes cannot be brought about merely by the passing of laws or the issuing of decrees. The Bolshevik idea, that a political party with the support of a small minority of workers should seize political power and then start to ram revolutionary changes down the throats of a vast majority of peasants, is pathetically false. They found that, in order to impose the mildest of their measures for collectivisation, they had to resort to armed force and precipitate a civil war. The Cossacks, with the big landowners, enrolled under the banners of the White Russian Generals. Many of them fought in insurgent bands attached to neither side.

The peasant farmer makes his own home, builds his own farmhouses, breeds his own cattle and grows his own crops. Everything around him is individually, or family produced. The idea that the fruit of his individual effort should be socially appropriated is foreign to him. His highest political aspiration is to increase his individual farm holding, not to surrender all he has to a collective farm community of which he is an unwilling member. Even when the Bolsheviks had militarily subdued the Don Cossack region they were not able to enforce their instructions. They passed from compromise to compromise until their original proposals were lost to sight.

The fratricidal war the Cossacks fought was grim and brutal and Sholokov's story is in keeping with the time about which he writes. If he has a bias in favour of either party in that war he hides it well. His story is thrilling, exciting and tragic. It's great.

Mikhail Sholokov has written a third book entitled, "Virgin Soil Upturned" (same publishers, same price). In this he takes up the story of the collectivisation of the Cossack farms from the year 1930. The story is good but does not compare with the earlier two works. One could almost imagine it was written by a different author.

By a combination of propaganda and compulsion the Bolshevik Government was still trying to build its collective farms. The opposition from the wealthy farmers was fierce; from the poor ones it was sullen. The overall results were most discouraging to the men who were sent to the Cossack region to carry out the Communists' instructions.

Although the story in this book is not continued on from the other two, and although it is not such a splendid tale, it is worth reading in order to follow up the history of the Cossack farmers to a more recent date.

W. Waters

The Last Word: Why Santa should get stuffed (1997)

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

The Last Word Column from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is much to be said for abolishing Christmas. It is a festival of fake sincerity; the most dishonest season of the year. It is a time for buying what can't be afforded and selling what would not sensibly be wanted. It is a brief period of employment for obese drunks who are forced to fit into tight red uniforms and pretend to be jolly. It is a time for families to come together and realise how little they have in common but genes. It is the moment for the Arch-Parasite of Buckingham Palace to descend from her secluded palace and address the scum whose bent bodies support her and her class. It is busy season for the casualty wards, where wage slaves off the leash have bought escape through alcohol and mutilated themselves and others in metal wreckages, while the lonely attempt suicide and are dragged in sighing to be saved for another year. It is the period reserved for extra-special TV stupidity: the régime of the faked smile, the contrived sentiment, public condescension towards crippled children, and Noel Edmonds. It is the cold season for the noses of the poor to be pressed up against windows which display goods they may not buy. On the mass-produced greetings cards there is snow; in the shop doorways they shiver and hope they will not freeze.

The religious believe that it has become too commercialised. They want to rejoice in fantasies about a messiah born of a virgin. The traders are generally indifferent to the origin of the seasonal madness; their god announces his presence each time a cash till rings. Nobody knows quite what it's all for. Vicars run jumble sales and declare that it doesn't matter if the flock believes in Jesus. Merchants flog commodities with tacky images of babies born in a manger; Dylan's "flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark." All is confusion and falsified joy. The perfect festival for a system built on sales and insincerity.

It probably has something to do with the end of the year and a faint hope that the new one will be better. Perhaps Christmas is the illusory prelude to a new dawn: the lazy man's route to revolution. After Christmas come the resolutions of the New Year: ritualised hopes by the self-deluded who dream of self-control.

Worse even than Christmas are those New Year parties where strangers hug each other and pretend that the haze of booze and fabrication of community will last forever. The unkissed make a grab for whatever they can get, forcing some victim into physical proximity in the name of festivity. The next morning's stench of stale whisky is already in the air; the blushes of office co-workers who will have to share a desk after an unwanted snog are being planned; the delirium of the depressed makes its dreary way as the calendar changes and Ding Dong . . . it's 1998 and nothing's changed.

So, away with all this bogus goodwill and let us say what we mean. Tell the boss to stick his Christmas dinner where the sun don't shine, because you'd rather have the money. Tell the clerical men in dresses to bugger off and put their own house in order before they have the audacity to preach to us about how to live. Tell the charity merchants to seek their own crumbs, because we want the cake which we baked and nothing less. Tell Santa to get a life and stop trying to seduce innocent children with the lure of commodities. And tell those dull, offensive, dreary carol singers that if they so much as come within a foot of your door with their chants about little Jesus meek and mild they'll be having their lukewarm stuffing in an overcrowded corridor down at the local hospital.

Despite our best efforts, Capitalism's Merry Men will do their worst. Once again the TV News will carry pictures of the homeless being given a charitable mince pie by decent people who will be forced after Christmas to throw them back on to the cold, winter streets. Once again the Vatican Godfather will ascend his balcony and rub salt into the wounds of millions who will be told that their misery is god's will. Once agin those who refuse to celebrate religious and commercial folly will be called kill-joys. Even though all that socialists want to see is a society decent and co-operative and sociable enough for there to be no need to put aside one week or one day for happiness to prevail.

Steve Coleman

Past, Present, and Future (1908)

From the May 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Andrew Carnegie! Pierpont Morgan! Names not without meaning to the man in the street, but, to the Socialist, symbolic of something of far deeper significance than their mention calls up in the mind of the uninitiated.

Designative of types of two distinct orders of capitalist dominators, representative of two definite eras of industrial history, they bear inconvertible witness to the truth of our scientific conclusion anent the evolutionary nature of capitalism. They are to be cherished as invaluable aids to the understanding of one of the most important lessons the workers have to learn; as raised letters to the blind, ocular demonstration to those who cannot hear.

As far as may ever be properly said  of human kind, the men they nominate are makers of a page of history incomparably more pregnant of consequences to the world than any which chronicles the activities of royal hero or military genius—ancient lights or modern. They mark an epoch.

Their story will bear repeating.

It is common knowledge that at the end of the last century Andrew carnegie was head of the largest steel rail factory in the world, an establishment with an output so vast that to state it is to court suspicion of extravagance.

Here the famous Scot had dominion over which his rule was complete; his word was law, his whim destiny, life and death his prerogative—as was shown when he had his workmen shot down by bargeloads of armed detectives.

Came Pierpont Morgan with new conception. Andrew's method of business was based on competition—the undercutting of rivals. The very essence of Morgan's system was the elimination of competition by amalgamating the powerful concerns of an industry, crushing the smaller, and then,—why then Competition had reached the end of the strife-strewn path that history had foreordained she should traverse, and is discovered taking her ease at least, sitting in peace "under her olive," suckling a sturdy son—Monopoly.

Andrew was asked to abdicate, and, like himself, refused. He would see Morgan hanged and Wall Street sink into the bowels of the earth before he would surrender his factory.

Did Andrew speak without due reflection? It would seem so, for, just as, when he declared the disgrace of dying rich, he underestimated the difficulty of becoming poor, hurling defiance at Wall Street, he depreciated the tremendous power opposed to him.

He quickly found that Morgan had control of the railways, and was therefore in a position of dominance; for without his consent not a rail could be freighted out of the vast Pittsburg steel works. He quickly found also that the new conception did not wait upon the pleasure of the master of Pittsburg; for if he would not submit to be bought out, then Wall Street would amalgamate the remnants of the industry against him and fight him out.

Here was a situation in which all Pinkerton's army could afford Andrew no assistance. Those who threatened him were no longer working men, the natural defence against whom was the levelled rifle. No weapon existed to batter the forces of the financial monarchs, so Carnegie was a beaten man. he retired from the contest—made way for the "Billion Dollar Trust."

Now great change came o'er the land. Pittsburg became a province in the empire of the Steel Trust; the seat of government was shifted to Wall Street; the sceptre had passed from the great ironmaster, acquainted with every corner of his factory, proficient in the technics of his art, supervisor of the operations of producing his commodities, into the hands of the great financier, who knew not what steel was. The position that Andrew had filled with majesty was now the place of a hireling - a mere foreman whose only princely semblance was his salary. Great powers of direction had been given to an employee, but control had passed for ever from the overseer of the productive forces, and had become vested in outsiders, whose utility or necessity the most subtle imagination fails to conceive.

Nor did the change end here. The strife of competition gave place to the peace of monopoly. In the field of steel production there was one master instead of many; in the field of steel distribution there was one seller instead of many. So peace reigned in the steel industry as it does at times in Russia under the soothing influence of the Czar's Cossacks.

All this marks an epoch in capitalism's evolution.

Not the first, be it understood, for the merchant prince was a ruler in his generation, even as the manufacturer has been in the days now slipping into history, and the financier is to be in the days which are to come.

Type of the dying past—Andrew Carnegie; type of the youthful present—Pierpont Morgan; where shall we seek a type of the yet unfulfilled future?

For it may not be doubted that the reign of this present capitalist dominator is transient, even as the others have been. That which has beginning must of necessity have end. Capitalism has not always existed, nor will. It has been revolutionary in its time, has risen against and dethroned its immediate predecessor—Feudalism: what os to dethrone it in its turn? Long since the manufacturer seized the baton of the merchant prince and pushed him from power, only to be himself thrown down in the fulness of time by the financial upstart—who is there left under the sin to unseat this last?

The prophetic finger of Science points to him who even now stands in revolutionary opposition to the regalism of the financial Molloch and his phase of capitalism. For scientific inquiry has furnished abundant evidence that through all history power has moved in the direction of economy, of adjustment to the needs of the social organism, of ultimate advantage to humanity. The manufacturer has played his useful part in production, as did the merchant prince before him in distribution, but what necessary place, in either production or distribution is filled by the financier? The final vestige of useful function has been relegated to an employee, who, however munificent his remuneration, remains a hireling.

Irony of fate—the only use the last of the capitalist rulers can have is to prepare the way for his successor. For long capitalism has been engaged in the lugubrious occupation of digging a grave: it has at length discovered that this grave is its own. For has not Pierpont Morgan himself announced that the function of his kind is to organise production in such form that it may be taken over by the community?

Capitalism is itself to be the educator of the revolution which is to shatter it to pieces. Its latest development, by separating entirely from the productive processes the owners and controllers of the means of production, is making very clear to the worker, what he could never believe before, that he alone is necessary to the creation of material wealth. Control of production, he begins to see, has passed to an order of men who can be removed without any industrial disturbance, and the growing knowledge of this fact pronounces the doom, not only of the phase of financial monarchy in capitalism, but of the capitalist system itself.

Wherefore the prophetic finger aforesaid, which must be pointing somewhere, could indicate none other than the worker as the successor of the modern capitalist. The needs of the social organism demand his rise to power, for it is impossible for that organism to continue to flourish while the vast bulk of its component cells are ill-nourished and stinted. Logic also demands that the worker become paramount, for it is the very antithesis of logic to produce goods for profit instead of for use, to have the producers hungry and unemployed because they have produced too much and glutted the market. Finally, history demands the supremacy of the worker; for why else has it provided this last of the long concatenation of changes which, starting by depriving him of the means of life as necessary condition of their perfection to such as would afford him fuller subsistence and higher existence, end by offering him once again those means of life—radiant with their added wonders of fertility, and large with the promise of still greater wonders yet to be added unto them—if he will only stretch out his hand and take them?

The transition is so easy—merely the substitution of the old property condition for that which so long has played the usurper. Private property in the means of life must go. It has dug its own grave, it remains but for the workers to push it in and cover it up decently.

Then, with common ownership of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth the sound, sure and kindly basis of all human affairs let come what will.

A. E. Jacomb

Seasonal Goodwill, Dodgy Deals and Unreliable Witnesses (2015)

The Halo Halo! Column from the December 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jingle bells, jingle bloody bells. Yes, it’s that time of year again. A month of enforced jollity is about to be inflicted on us. And to make matters worse, The Apprentice is back on the box, that weekly display of arrogant, immature toadies stabbing each other in the back in an attempt to impress Alan Sugar and his sidekicks with their dodgy business deals.

An hour of that every week could certainly affect your mental health. You find yourself thinking; If only Marx had been a better businessman. Instead of hiding away in the British Museum reading room every day he’d have invested in a Father Christmas outfit and a false beard and got himself down to Oxford Street with a suitcase full of plastic, happy nodding worker gnomes. At £5.99 each (batteries extra) they’d have sold like hot cakes and we’d have had socialism years ago.

Fortunately, the Apprentices will have all been fired by Christmas, but as for Christmas itself, the only known ways to ensure a festive free December are to apply for a place on the Mars colonization programme or to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And the Mars mission is probably more oversubscribed than the vacancies (144,000) in the Jehovah’s Witnesses heaven.

So unless you want to spend the rest of your days reading The Watchtower, (mandatory for ‘witnesses’ to prevent them ‘falling into darkness’) you’ll just have to put up with it. Whatever you do, don’t invite them round to share your turkey. They are mad. Honestly, you’d have more fun with a paper hat, a balloon and a cracker, surrounded by screaming kids and broken toys, while attempting to plough through volume three of Capital with the Queen’s speech on the telly in the background.

What’s really irritating about them though, apart from their numerous attempts to forecast the end of the world, so far unsuccessfully, are their sanctimonious, infantile publications, The Watchtower and Awake.

Take the September issue of Awake for example. ‘A Balanced View of Money’ it promised us on the front cover. Exactly what’s needed we thought, and excitedly looked forward to reading their views on the accumulation of capital and, definitely, something on the production of absolute and of relative surplus value. But guess what? All we could find was the warning that ‘the love of money is a root to all sorts of injurious things’, and a heartbreaking account of how Daniel and his friend Thomas fell out after the car Thomas bought from Daniel broke down, and he demanded his money back.

Not what we were hoping for, but at least we learned one thing. Never buy a second-hand car from a Jehovah’s Witness.

NW

Obituary: Don Poirier (2002)

Obituary from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are saddened to have to report the death from cancer of comrade Don Poirier of the Socialist Party of Canada at the comparatively early age of 63. Don became a socialist while still serving as an enlisted man in the Royal Canadian Navy (which shows that those who argue that members of the armed forces are immune to socialist ideas are wrong). On leaving he joined the SPC in Vancouver and soon became active as an outdoor speaker and organiser. In the mid-sixties he was a paid organiser for the SPC and the World Socialist Party of the US, touring North America in a van with socialist slogans such as “Production for Use not Profit” and “One World, One People” painted on its side. Most of his working life was spent in logging camps where he was also active as an organiser for the International Woodworkers of America. In between, he managed or owned a succession of bookshops, the last in Duncan on Vancouver Island. Don was a sturdy fighter for the cause of socialism and will be missed.

Are You a Wage Slave? (2012)

From the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most people object to being told that they are a wage-slave but why?

The notion of wage slavery, taken reasonably, is actually rather difficult to refute. The idea that we are in an entirely different social position to chattel slaves is based upon the assumption of our freedom. But this sense of freedom is an illusion which rests upon the contradiction between law and reality. The law grants us personal liberties, and we therefore have the right to make our own decisions: where to live; who to work for; or whether to work at all. But underlying this veil of freedom are the real, material, physical facts, and they run as such: you can only live where you can afford to live; you can only work for someone who will willingly employ you; and while you are under no legal obligation to work for anyone at all, you will find it a struggle to live while not doing so. The welfare state will be your (miserable) safety net, but only as long as you abide by the contract agreeing to actively seek employment.

Whether we choose the wages system or not, we are in reality bound to it, and within this system we enter into contracts with employers whereby the value we create for them is more than the value we receive in wages, and thus they make a profit through our exploitation. We are not by law bound to a single individual, but, in fact, to the capitalist class as a whole. With the acknowledgment of these simple truths, the illusive veil of freedom is dissolved, and laid bare is the reality in which we are still in chains.

Such a strong feeling of personal aversion to claims of wage slavery no doubt stems from a sense of pride. But this objection to the mere notion of wage-slavery only acts to perpetuate the reality of the condition: people’s misplaced sense of pride paradoxically serves to maintain their humiliating position. Imagine, of those chattel slaves who fought for political emancipation, if they had instead simply denied the existence of slavery. But it’s difficult to express the common sense behind, and the political importance of, the term ‘wage-slavery’ when somebody has already decided that what you’re saying is offensive.

The term ‘socialism’ has been immersed in so much bullshit that it is often necessary to revert to the basics when discussing it. Failure to properly define terms often results in being associated with an entirely different political stance, and one which is, conveniently, much easier to attack.

We do not see ourselves, as many of the Left do, as being distinct and detached from the rest of the working class (that is, all of those who work for a wage or salary), but as being part of the working class movement as a whole. In fact, we firmly hold that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself, which means that workers do not need, and must not have, leaders in the revolution. We, like Marx, have always stood in staunch opposition to anyone that says otherwise (Lenin and his Bolshevik Party of “professional revolutionaries,” for example). In this sense, the explanation of the socialist case to other workers is a sign not of our condescending superiority but of our political equality.

Something else frequently encountered is some people’s instant feeling of outrage at someone espousing the socialist case while living in what they judge to be a more comfortable position than their own. But this acts to make their own feelings of hardship an obstacle to, rather than a catalyst for change.

This is misplaced, because it rests on the misunderstanding that socialists are people who simply whinge about capitalism and the rough hand it deals to us. What we are actually trying to express, however, is the position of workers in relation to capitalists, whatever their wage might be. The point is to show exactly what capitalism is – i.e. the exploitation of wage-labour, production for profit, a market system – in order to illustrate how it can, and why it must, be changed.

We often meet the protest, “Well what do you do to improve things?’, as though alack of effort to improve or reform capitalism somehow makes the argument less valid. But we have never claimed to be concerned with the improvement of capitalism; while acknowledging the necessity of the defensive actions of trade unionism within capitalism, the Socialist Party case is in fact openly anti-reformist. This is because no amount of adjustment to capitalism can completely eradicate the problems which are inherent within it.

We do not simply advocate a more equal, fair form of capitalism which is a little bit kinder to workers, but the abolition of capitalism altogether: that is, the abolition of private property and of the wages system, and the establishment of a society based upon the doctrine of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. Given the required nature of the revolution, i.e. carried out by the majority, all we can really do at present towards achieving this is to try to persuade other workers of its necessity. The time will come for more practical efforts towards socialism, but while the majority of workers still support capitalism we are, alas, not yet there.

But why is it that we socialists constantly have to justify ourselves? Those who are so quick to erect barriers against the spread of socialist thought should consider the question: what is it that you are defending, and in whose interest?  Capitalism is an inefficient social system which causes a catastrophic level of death and destruction on a daily basis. It is a system in which many are forced to live in poverty or die through starvation in a world of unprecedented abundance; a world capable of providing life’s necessities for all of its inhabitants. Capitalism is a miserable social order in which those who own but do not produce live parasitically off the labour of those who produce but do not own. But its continuation ultimately depends upon the continuation of workers’ consent. We have withdrawn ours and we urge you to do the same: until then, the onus for justification lies with you.

CBH

The Vitalising Principle of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (1955)

From the March 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain was organised in 1904 in order to achieve the emancipation of the working class. That was the reason for its founding.

The people who formed our party were working men and working women. They had learnt that there was only one way by which the workers could gain their emancipation. That way was by establishing Socialism, and that there were no short cuts to this objective. Bitter experience had taught them that the fatuous policies of "progressives," the blissful dreams of humanitarians, the patronising philosophysing of "intellectuals," and the prolonged agony of reformism, were all alike delusions and snares. Their experiences and studies in an earlier organisation had taught them three things: The Socialism could only be established by a working class that understood what it involved and wanted it; that before Socialism could be established the working class must take the powers of government out of the hands of the possessing class; and, finally, that the Socialist Party must follow an unswerving course based upon an understanding of the class struggle and its implications.

When the founder members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain realised that the party to which they formerly belonged, the Social Democratic Federation, was leading the workers into a morass, they then decided to form a new party with the aim of emancipating the workers by establishing Socialism, and cleaving to this as their sole object. Hence they set down their object and formulated a set of principles which summarised the existing social system, its implications and the course that must be followed.

Since 1904 the other parties have come and gone, chimerical hopes have been raised, but the basic position has not changed, nor are there any indications that it is ever likely to change before the accomplishment of the Party's objective. Hence the only course the workers can follow in order to achieve their emancipation from the capitalist system of exploitation is to work for the establishment of Socialism and to ignore all the alluring and much trodden byways which only lead to frustration and despair. No amount of word spinning, verbal juggling, or hairsplitting, can get around this position or surmount the obstacles that stand in the workers' path to emancipation. To no longer be solely concerned with the emancipation of the working class would be to abandon the outlook that brought our party into existence, inspired those who have continued to press forward its outlook and policy, and what has kept the Party on a sound Socialist course through 50 years of tribulation and opposition.

The fact that the emancipation of the working class by the establishment of Socialism will have beneficial effects on groups of people, whether they be workers or not, who suffer other forms of discriminations is entirely incidental and has no bearing on our intentions or procedure, though it helps to support our case.

The class cleavage between workers and capitalists is universal; it cuts across all national, colour and religious distinctions. It overrides and swamps all other distinctions in the final analysis and the final reckoning. When the class distinction between the working class and the capitalist class has been abolished by the establishment of Socialism all other distinctions that set people at variance today will go with it.

Finally, our exclusive aim is the emancipation of the working class by the establishment of Socialism, and we welcome to our ranks all who are prepared to help us in this work.

Gilmac.