Enoch Powell & War (1976)

From the January 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Enoch Powell is no friend of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. His divisive views on race are enough to make any self-respecting Socialist shudder. Yet amongst politicians he is undoubtedly one of the more coherent defenders and theorists of the present social set-up. His opposition to government spending, for example, does not extend to the police or prison services. He is in no doubt that crime is an unavoidable part of competitive society and maintains that economies in this field can only hamper the smooth running of that system. On inflation, too, he is uncompromising. He fully understands that inflation is caused by governments having an excess of paper currency printed, an explanation given (although Enoch may not realise it) by all Socialists since Marx.

In a recent edition of the BBC’s Any Questions Mr. Powell “came clean” once again, this time on the subject of war. He expressed the view that, with nations obliged to defend their interests against possible attack by outsiders, all grandiose, well-meaning schemes to disarm or to abolish war were pie-in- the-sky; the best governments could do was to stave off for as long as possible the wars that were bound to break out sooner or later. This is a bold, objective description of conditions in the world today and we must congratulate Mr. Powell for his frankness and lucidity. What he might have added, however, is that a nation’s interests are rarely susceptible to objective interpretation. The recent tension in the Spanish Sahara is a case in point. It arose from three different nations each claiming to defend its legitimate interests. In reality the three groups are after the mineral wealth which possession of this territory would give  them. And here is the rub, for it is competition for the earth’s resources that causes confrontation and armed conflict. Do we infer from this that people are greedy or anxious to grab from others? If so, it is not natural but depends on circumstances and is not what happens in the case of wars. In modern wars leaders use the insecurity, ignorance and frustrations inseparable from competitive society to persuade the led to fight and slaughter their fellow human beings in the “national interest”, which in reality is the interest of the ruling class.

Enoch Powell is simply acknowledging what we have said: in a commercial, nation-divided world, war is inevitable. If the politicians are unable to avert wars, it is quite simply because they are committed to looking after a system that breeds them.

What is our alternative? We suggest a truly united, wholly democratic world with no nations, no money and with the satisfaction of human needs as its first priority. Impossible? We don’t think so. All that is in fact needed to bring it into being is peaceful political action by a convinced majority of ordinary people.

Howard Moss

Letter: Marx and Dictatorship. (1932)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent (London, E.C.1) asks the following question:—

I notice that you class yourselves as "Marxists." How can you explain the following to be in accordance with S.P.G.B. principles. It is taken from Marx's criticism of the Gotha Programme.

The question, therefore, now arises, what transformation will the State-system experience in a communist society? . . .  Between capitalist society and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding with this there will be a period of political transition, during which the State can be nothing other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. (Italics mine.)

Can you explain what Marx meant by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat? Does not the above quotation show that the S.P.G.B. is at variance with Marx and Engels?

Reply.

One of the questions put by our correspondent was answered by Engels himself in his introduction to the German edition of “The Civil War in France.” The introduction was written in London in 1891, on the 20th anniversary of the Commune. Translated into English, it was published in 1920 by the New York Labour News Company in a pamphlet called “The Paris Commune."

Engels’ introduction, after surveying the events of the Commune and the lessons to be drawn from it, concludes with the following words:—

The German philistine has lately been thrown once again into wholesome paroxisms by the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Well, gentle sirs, would you like to know how this dictatorship looks? Then look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Commune was an instance of majority control based upon democratic elections. There was no suppression of the newspapers or the propaganda of the minority, and no denial of their right to vote. The Communards, having once obtained control of the State, set about democratising the machinery of legislation and administration. For example, they filled all positions of administration, justice, etc., through election by universal suffrage, the elected being at all times subject to recall by. their constituents. They also paid for all services at the workmen’s rate of pay.

This contrasts in a marked way with the Dictatorship in Russia—a dictatorship not of the proletariat, but of the leaders of the Communist Party.

In Russia the electoral system is not based upon universal suffrage and democratic elections. Many persons, for political reasons, are deprived of the right to vote. In proportion to population, the Town Soviets send to the District Soviets five times as many delegates as are allowed to the Village Soviets. The elections are not direct (as in Great Britain and most countries), but are indirect. That is to say, the All-Union Congress of Soviets is not elected by the electors at first hand, but is elected from Regional Congresses, which in turn are elected from District Soviets, which are elected by the Village and Town Soviets. The power of recall, owing to the devious route it has to follow, is impracticable.

Opposition propaganda and newspapers and opposition candidates for election are suppressed. The persons who are disfranchised are subjected to severe economic disabilities. It is made difficult for them to obtain food and lodging, and various rights are denied to them. (Recently there has been some alleviation of their condition.) 

It was for years the rule that Communist Party members did not receive more than a fairly low maximum rate of pay, in this copying the Commune to some extent. It is reported now, however, that this rule has been relaxed since the middle of 1931, when the Russian Government announced a large-scale extension of the policy of inequality of pay among factory workers. It has also to be remembered that Communist Party members have been, and still are, privileged in being able to buy goods at specially low prices.

The Russian Government has for years practised inequality in the payment of those workers and officials who have not been members of the Communist Party and who, therefore, have not been affected by the rule referred to above.

The S.P.G.B.'s view on the transition period after the workers have obtained control of the machinery of Government is in line with that of Marx and Engels, and is opposed to the miscalled “dictatorship of the proletariat" in Russia.

Ed. Comm.

Alcoholics numerous (1966)

From the February 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Attention has been focussed recently on the “problem drinkers”. Somebody has been counting their cost. In the December issue of Business, the Management Journal, it is claimed that the annual cost of alcoholism to British industry is £61 millions in absenteeism alone. It is claimed that of the total working population, two to three per cent are “problem drinkers”. The same percentage is given also for America.

It is a typical piece of commercial cynicism to measure and describe a problem in money terms. Officially, the most disturbing aspect of widespread alcoholism is not the tragedy of people who require opiates to fortify their existence, but the loss of £61 million. Indeed, it is this loss that qualifies alcoholism as a problem.

Of course, employers will never rest in their attempts to find the ideal labour force. Workers are besieged by exhortations to be conscientious, sober, hard working, honest and thrifty. In short, workers are asked to practice all the so- called virtues of moral and political conformity which assure their maximum exploitation as wage slaves. The curse of capitalism—for the capitalists—has always been that the units of labour power comprising the working class are also human beings. Regrettably they are not merely machines with brains; they are emotionally volatile, physically vulnerable; they give under pressure.

Addiction to alcohol is found at all levels of industry and commerce. The executive, the manager, the clerk, the shop floor operative. The kind of drink varies with the income bracket, from wines and spirits, beer, cheap wines, down to the cheapest of all, methylated spirits. The meths drinker has reached the stage of total degeneracy, a derelict hulk, rather than a vital human being.

The meths drinkers are the most pathetic of all, lost in a twilight world of doped unreality. With personalities destroyed and contact with fellow human beings broken down, they are interrogated in decrepit cellars by naive social workers. Why were they sleeping rough? Had they no accommodation at all? Had they any money? Had they jobs? In their cases, the National Assistance Board is interested, again counting the cost of subsidising the unemployable.

It is typical that blame for alcoholism should be put on the individual. The very phrase “problem drinker” emphasises not the plight of the sufferer but his nuisance value. For the heavy drinker, alcohol becomes the buffer between his sober self and an intolerable reality. Alcohol in fact becomes a substitute for living. For the man who needs alcohol to see the day through, his drinks are the terms on which he is prepared to adjust himself to an existence that he despises. Though he may not be aware of it, alcohol is the repudiation of a life to which he sees no alternative. Unfortunately the disease easily generates its own momentum, sometimes ending in a complete personal capitulation to the meths bottle.

Nevertheless to the conventional moralist, the individual is completely in the wrong. In those who are worried about the money cost of alcoholism, there is no criticism of society. It is the individual who must conform; if he does not or cannot, then at best he is lazy or weak, lacking in the necessary will to make the adjustment.

Alcohol is only one of the substitutes that men grasp in their flight from reality. There are others. Suicide and mental illness are equally results of the emotional stress that capitalist society imposes on humanity. The existence of all these problems is part of man’s unconscious protest against a society that not only denies his needs but actively destroys him.

The term “social workers” is an exquisite euphemism for individuals who are attempting to minimise the cost of capitalism’s worst effects. Even so, their work is useful in documenting the incidence of such problems as alcoholism. To put these facts in perspective it is necessary to clear away such concepts as "problem drinkers”, “social misfits”, etc. This phraseology by itself places the onus of responsibility on the individual. It fails to relate the incidence of alcoholism to the social pressures bearing on the individual. It implicitly encourages the view of the individual as a failure rather than a possible victim. In fact, by endorsing the status quo, this view of the problem guarantees its continuance. The use of phrases like “social failures” partly contributes to the problem. Surely it is this background of successes and failures, the empty competitive values of propertied society from which people seek a refuge in drink.

In the short term, the incidence of alcoholism will probably increase. Capitalism cannot avoid a continuing ferment of discontent, albeit generally expressed in negative ways, through hate, violence, cynicism and even despair. Paradoxically, this may form a background for building up useful knowledge about where man’s true interests lie.

Pieter Lawrence

Democracy (1992)

From the April 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of us were not taken in by talk of "defending democracy" when the Great and the Good went to war with Iraq over the invasion of Kuwait. We had the strongest suspicion that it had more to do with the supply and control of oil, especially as “our” side declared common cause with such great democracies as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Then it emerged that, far from being a democracy, Kuwait's political system was one of the most autocratic, elitist dictatorships with no democratic pretensions whatsoever. Kuwait's rulers—in comfortable exile—promised that, when restored to power, they would introduce democratic reforms; granting civil and political rights not only to the incomers who keep the whole system going, but also to their own women.

The first anniversary of the “liberation" has passed and. as one Palestinian worker put it: “The intolerance towards non-Kuwaitis has become worse than it was before” (Independent on Sunday, 23 February). In the elections which are due in October only “First Class” men (those descended from men who were resident in 1920) will be allowed to take part. The promise that all citizens of the emirate, including women, would be given the vote will be ignored. A demonstration by women trying to register was given no support.

On this first anniversary too, the horrendous damage done to the civilian infrastructure in Iraq as well as the much greater number of civilian casualties—vehemently denied at the time—are being admitted. During the war we saw repeatedly on TV the “smart” bombs which made it impossible to cause indiscriminate damage; now it is admitted that only one in ten was smart and the other nine were as subject to human error as any other weapon. Still with us, too, are the civil unrest fomented in the north of Iraq in attempts to topple Hussein and Saddam's vengeance which is meted out to Kurdish and Shi’ite minorities.

The lesson which must be learnt is that the dogfight for markets and economic advantage under capitalism will always be cloaked with grand phrases such as the “Fight for Democracy". Wars are never for the sake of democracy but are all about shares on the world market and profitability.

Eva Goodman

From America: Ethics and conflicts (1978)

A Letter from America from the January 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ethics: the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group. More and more is this word ethics becoming a commonplace in America. Switch on your TV or radio and you frequently catch discussions by politicians, business people, or youngsters aspiring toward a business or a political career on that subject. How much of a percentage of profit is within the bounds of ethics? How far may a political office-holder go in private business operations without being guilty of conflict of interest? And so on.

In passing, it is noteworthy that such concerns do surface among a population which—according to some members of the scientific community and most defenders of a competitive as opposed to a cooperative society— are naturally greedy and inherently inclined to get the better of one another. Interesting indeed that a system that legally enshrines the warning: caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) seems unable to suppress outraged reaction to certain consequences of that philosophy. Particularly now, in what has been called the post-Watergate era, are politicians who make up the several branches of the Federal Government fair game for investigative reporters and watchdog organizations. (Prime target today seems to be Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, quite possibly the second most powerful person in the US political scheme and, ironically, one of the first to “put the finger” on then President Nixon and to bring him down in disgrace. He has been a suspected link in the favor-buying activities in Washington of the South Korean CIA and he is currently being exposed in a personal “conflict of interest” operation; in brief, using his high office as a means of feathering his nest in a private business deal.)

The population, most of it working-class, is expected to be concerned about such matters. “It is our money they are squandering and appropriating . ." we are told by the petitioners for Congressional codes of ethics. And the reaction, generally, to the efforts of the crusaders for honest government falls into an expected pattern: (1) Agreement, “let’s put a stop to it!” or (2) a shrug of the shoulders and an attitude, expressed or silent, “what difference does it make? They’re all thieves!” All too infrequently is the petitioner confronted with the real world by a socialist who “tells it like it is”.

Whose Money?

The fact is that it is not our money and it is not the sort of crusade that those who must work for a living should interest themselves in. But it makes more sense to understand why this is so rather than to merely shrug it off as normal thievery. For with understanding can come desire to do something intelligent about ending the social arrangement that really does create our problems. It is not the illegal or shady operations, the conflicts of interest, by business people or politicians that bring us our miseries. The loot involved here is not working-class money but part of the surplus-value that has been legally expropriated from us in the honest operation of the capitalist system. “But see here!” they complain. “All that throwing around of Government money means that we have to pay more for everything.” Just like the effect on prices of shoplifting, according to popular propaganda. Any sort of thievery or extortion or conflict of interest forces prices upward, they argue.

But this is nonsense, as reflection should show. Prices are not determined, arbitrarily, by purveyors of merchandise. In the long run, they reflect the socially-necessary labor-time in the commodities and they are certainly affected by the state of the world market and by supply and demand. Merchandizers know that competition prevents them from marking prices up, at will. But there is another side to this question.

Can one imagine the effect on prices were illegal activity of all sorts to end? “Crime stocks” would plummet, bankrupting those companies involved in producing the variety of equipment used in combatting crime; unemployment would soar to all-time record highs; the sharp increase in Government moneys needed to augment social agencies would bring ruinous levels of inflation. Viewed from that angle (“conflict of interest”) violators, ordinary swindlers, and thieves of all sorts are performing a useful function in stabilizing prices to some extent, at least. So bourgeois economics would say . . .

So the question that should bother working people is: does it really matter to those whose lot it is to produce and surrender their surplus-value that a percentage of the loot is hi-jacked from the original expropriators? We think not. And as far as ethics is concerned, the very concept arises when the moral principles desired are not operable. Would you welcome a world in which mankind lives and works in harmony, where the interests of each are the interests of all, where conflict of interest is impossible? Such a world is possible but not before we get rid of world capitalism.

Harmo, WSP, Boston.

Stalinism, Russia and the Jews (1957)

From the June 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

In August 1939 the Soviet-Nazi pact of non-aggression and co-operation between Russia and Germany was signed. From this date the position of the Jews in the Soviet Union became most difficult. The Soviet government did not allow the Russian Yiddish Press to mention Nazi atrocities against Jews in Europe; and, more important, when the Germans did make their attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, millions of Jews had not been warned or evacuated from the areas of Western Russia and Eastern Poland, annexed by Russia. Of the situation at the beginning of the war between Germany and Russia, David J. Dallin, the well-known Menshevik writer and commentator, wrote in his book, The New Soviet Empire:—

“The fury of the German occupation was directed primarily against the Jews and against members of the Communist Party. But the Soviet radio and press chose to say nothing of this. They sought to create the impression that die Germans were out to exterminate everyone alike. And so, while Berlin was maintaining a strict silence about its gas ovens, its concentration camps, and S.S. atrocities against Jewish women and children, the Moscow government also kept quiet. The motives may have differed, but the result was the same. Neither the Russian nor the Jewish population of Russia knew what the German war held in store for them" (p. 115).

At the beginning of the war 60,000 Jews were massacred in Riga; 12,000 in Minsk; 10,000 in Pinsk; 7,000 in Kerch; 6,000 in Vitebsk, and so on. But by 1942 the Soviet government began to show a great deal of interest in the Jews. It encouraged their nationalistic and religious feelings. It formed the “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee." But in areas overrun by the German armies anti-Jewish feeling, encouraged to a large extent by the Germans, began to show itself. Dallin, in his book, The Real Soviet Russia, says that under the German occupation, especially in the beginning, dozens of Russian pro-Nazi newspapers were started, in which they welcomed,"on behalf of the intelligentsia"and “ on behalf of the Russian people," the liberation from Bolshevism and “Jewish rule." (p. 209). And directly after the war Mr. M. Philips Price, M.P., who visited the Soviet Union, kept on hearing in Kiev, in the Ukraine, that “these Jews are here again." (Russia, Red or White, p. 68). The Jewish population was—and still is—large in Kiev. Before the 1917 Revolution the Jews in Kiev, as elsewhere in the Ukraine and Western Russia, were mainly engaged in small trades, general dealing and petty business. Today most of their businesses and shops are nationalised and the Jews are found in large numbers as civil servants, clerks in state enterprises, etc. They were to a large extent the backbone of the Stalinist bureaucracy before the last war.

After the War

Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda had had a profound effect on sections of the Soviet people, and this strengthened Jewish nationalism, Zionism, and the desire for a national homeland. Later Jewish feeling in Russia was further stirred by the actual creation of the State of Israel. And the Soviet government feared that the establishment of the State of Israel would encourage Zionism or "Jewish bourgeois nationalism," as they called it, even more in the Soviet Union itself.

From the end of 1947 the fight against "bourgeois nationalism" was on. It was conducted by the Stalinists with much violence, particularly in the Ukraine. "The first admission about the emergence  of Zionist tendencies in the post-war period," writes Walter Kolarz," was made in September 1947, during the plenary session the Union of Soviet Writers of the Ukraine, where 'the existence of nationalist Zionist views in the work number of Jewish writers’ was unmasked." (Russia and Her Colonies, p. 168). Later on, in 1949, the Yiddish almanac, Der Shtern, was banned for “ideological mistakes." The Jewish publishing house, Der Emes, the Jewish newspaper, Aynikeit, and the Jewish theatre were all closed down in 1949; and the Jewish anti-Fascist committee was disbanded.

Stalinist persecution of the Jews continued for some time. In 1953 many Soviet Jews were disturbed by the so-called “Jewish doctors plot." Communists in Russia, Britain and elsewhere denied that there was an anti-Semitic campaign in Russia. But since Stalin's death they have changed their minds. They are now admitting much of the truth.

Communist Party Report

In October 1956 a delegation from the British Communist Party visited the Soviet Union. They have summarised their findings in the official Communist journal, World News (12/1/57).

The report states that prior to Stalin's death rumours began to spread that all was not well, and that well-known Jewish writers and “intellectuals" in the Soviet Union had disappeared. After the Khrushchev revelations at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union specific charges were made in Folkszjtyme, a Polish Jewish workers' paper, “that could not be ignored, for these charges were consistent with the kind of accusations which Khrushchev had levelled against Stalin, Beria and the security police.” The report continues:—

“The charges specifically named a number of Jewish writers, artists and intellectuals as having been tortured and physically destroyed, particularly during the period 1948-52, and this included the whole Jewish anti-Fascist Committee which had done yeoman service in helping to mobilise Jewish support of the Soviet Union during the darkest days of the war."

The delegation found many difficulties in their search for information, but they found a certain amount of negative information at the Lenin State Library, where there was a Yiddish and a Hebrew section containing 15,000 and 70,000 items respectively. But: “It turned out that there is nothing in Yiddish later than 1948, when publication of Yiddish papers and journals must therefore have ceased."

The Soviet Encyclopedia, which in its 1932 edition devoted 160 columns to the Jews, had in its 1952 edition only four columns.

“The biographies of many eminent Jews had been removed. Marx was no longer referred to as a Jew  . . .  For example, Heimland, a Yiddish journal, was in the library up to the volumes of 1948 and no later. The collected works of Halkin and Vergelis, Yiddish poets still alive, were there up to 1948."

But, as the delegation reports, that year seemed to be marked out as a significant date.

The Black Years

It was through personal conversations by one of the delegation, H. Levy, that the delegation found out that the years 1948-52 were known by Soviet Jews as “The Black Years"—a period during which many Jews disappeared; when many more were dismissed from their jobs; when Jewish writers and poets and artists were arrested and charged with treason; when Jews were executed and murdered, and Yiddish disappeared from the street and the market place.

   “Conversations with the relatives of cultural workers who had been liquidated seemed to suggest that the procedure was invariable. Those arrested and charged in secret were prominent political or cultural workers. Shortly after his arrest the immediate relatives of the arrested man would be deported to some distant place and there set to work often at low wages. Finally, the husband would be shot, perhaps after torture, to try to force him to confess or incriminate others . . .  and this procedure was carried out by the security police under the direct authority of Beria, with the agreement of Stalin himself, who had apparently become convinced of Beria's genuineness in seeking out the class enemy . . .
   It is unnecessary to give chapter and verse as proof of these crimes. They are known, admitted and accepted as fact in the Soviet Union today, and no attempt is made to deny them. Since the Twentieth Congress many facts stand out as evidence of a changed attitude and therefore as indirect evidence of the terror that proceeded it." 

Life for the majority of people in the world today is not a particularly happy one—it is a life of general insecurity, of wars and of want. But, because of historical and social circumstances, life for many of the world’s Jews has possibly been more insecure, more unhappy. They have been the victims of periods of persecution and unspeakable atrocities; of mass murder in concentration camps and gas chambers, and of periodic pogroms. For the Jews of Russia, before and after the 1917 Revolution, the picture has been much the same: periods of relative tranquillity followed by pogroms, persecution and the like. For our part we would point out, however, that the solution of the “Jewish question” does not lie in a “Jewish Home”; a State of Israel or a Soviet Birobidzhan; or even mere assimilation into the non-Jewish working-class.

The problems that confront the Jews of Russia— and elsewhere—and other religious and social minorities, can only disappear when the vast mass of people have become socialist in outlook—in a truly Socialist world: not the sham Socialism, or Communism of Russia, and elsewhere we see today. 

Peter E. Newell

About Books (1953)

From the July 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Plato, Aristotle and others of their day spoke about Greece and the Greeks, they did not include the slaves; when historians of the 18th and 19th centuries wrote about Americans, they gave no heed to the negro slaves. Likewise today, when there is so much blather about the Elizabethan age, our super-patriots and political quacks refer only to the upper crust of the late 16th century society, not to the Toms, Dicks and Harrys who had to strive to earn a meagre living by the sweat of their brows. Not only are the humble workers not mentioned, they are not even considered. A picture of prosperity and regal pageantry is painted against a background of period architecture and costume, with farthingales, ruffs and fancy pants much in evidence. To have painted against a background of masses of hungry, oppressed serfs and workers would have spoiled the colourful effect, and destroyed the object of the painting.

We Socialists are inoculated against this “Elizabethan fever,” but living daily in the very heart of the epidemic it is hard to avoid becoming slightly infected. So we find ourselves pulling books from the bookshelves and reading about the age of Elizabeth I. Some most illuminating reading we can assure you.

We passed over the history books that deal with such world-shattering events as the gallantry of Sir Walter Raleigh in spreading his cloak over a mud puddle for his queen; the cool, casual courage of Sir Francis Drake, finishing his game of bowls whilst the Spanish Armada was in sight, and the heart-flutterings and hand-holdings of Good Queen Bess and her noble lovers. We selected books that told of the domestic tragedy of a certain Joan Wynstone who, on February 6th, 1575, was whipped and branded as a vagabond, on July 26th was saved from being hanged by being set to service to her husband, and on October 3rd, having run away from the husband, was caught and hanged. We browsed into books that gave records of the rates of wages paid and the cost of living during the years of the reign of Elizabeth I. And we read how many a noble lord, whose descendants were privileged to be inside Westminster Abbey on June 2nd this year, laid the foundations of the family fortunes by indulging in practices that would have brought a blush of shame to the cheek of an 18th century highwayman, and by investing in schemes that to this day give off a strong smell of working class blood and sweat.

For the benefit of anyone who may wish to follow our example and try to get a true picture of the conditions of life for the vast majority of people during the reign of Elizabeth I, we will list a few books.

First there is a book that is completely lacking in sensational writing but crammed from cover to cover with facts and figures of rates of pay for workers in various trades in different parts of the country at different times of the year, together with details of the cost of necessary commodities, fluctuations in price with their causes, and comparative figures with other periods. It will not be possible to buy this book now-a-days but it can be obtained from public libraries. It is entitled, "Six Centuries of Work and Wages” by Professor James E. Thorold Rogers, M.P. The book was originally published by Swan Sonncnschcin and Co., Ltd., but there have been many editions. It has, as its subtitle, “ The History of English Labour,” and that is just what it is.

In another book by Thorold Rogers there appears an interesting statement.

"... from 1260 to 1540 poverty was a distant risk in England.”—(“The Industrial and Commercial History of England,” page 10.)

This very concise statement throws the poverty of Elizabethan days into bold relief in contrast with the nearly three centuries to which Mr. Rogers refers.

Another book that tells a very gruesome story of working class suffering is “An Economic History of England, 1066 to 1874,” by Charlotte M. Waters, published by Oxford University Press. The author deals, interestingly and with numerous illustrations, with the causes of working class poverty during the latter fifty years of the 16th century; the break up of the feudal system, tenants turned from their land by landlords who enclosed large tracts for sheep farms, bands of feudal soldiers dismissed from their service, manufacture replacing handicraft, etc. A very, very useful book indeed.

If one would thoroughly understand that period of change that culminated with the English revolution during the 17th century and was at its highest tempo during the reign of Elizabeth I, one should read “Thomas More and his Utopia” by Karl Kautsky published by A. & C. Black, Ltd. Sir Thomas More died in 1535, two years after Elizabeth I was born and twenty-three before she succeeded to the throne. He cannot be classified as an Elizabethan, but Karl Kautsky, in writing of him and his work, devotes a large portion of his book to sketching a background of the social conditions of the 15th and 16th centuries in order that his readers may see the life of More in its proper perspective. So, we get a splendid history of the times and conditions under which the poor of the Elizabethan age lived.

To keep the list as short as possible we will mention only one more work, a well known one; “Capital” by Karl Marx. In Volume I of this great work, part VIII, Chapter XXV111, entitled, “Bloody Legislation against the expropriated from the end of 15th Century. Forcing down Wages by Acts of Parliament,” Marx tells of the cruelty of the oppressive working class legislation of the period and gives us chapter and verse of a number of the acts that were passed and enforced.

Other books dealing with this period of English history can be traced through the bibliographies in the ones we have mentioned should anyone wish to study the period in greater detail. There are also constitutional histories, political histories and social histories of recent publication dates that will help to build up a complete picture of the age.

When one realises that the Elizabethan period was a time of acute class struggle between the rising capitalist class and the decaying feudal groups one is better able to appreciate the works of men like William Shakespeare 1564-1616, and Miguel dc Cervantes, 1547- 1616. Both of these men, although they probably did not understand the social events that were taking place around them, at least saw those events and wrote about them. In novels, poems and plays they joined in the popular ridicule of the expiring feudal aristocracy. Shakespeare lampoons them with his Sir John Falstaff and Cervantes does likewise with his Don Quixote.

There are numerous works of Shakespeare to be had now-a-days and there is a cheap issue of Don Quixote published by Penguin Books at 8s. 6d.

Equipped with the knowledge contained in these books we can better understand what our masters desire when they prate about the second Elizabethan age being as glorious as the first. They are not interested in our living conditions. They are looking with shining eyes to the prospect of expanding trade and commerce, to enterprises that produce such astounding profits as did the Levant Company and the East India Company, to support and encouragement by the state, and to a docile and disciplined working class. That is what they mean when they talk of the Glory of Britain, that is what all the flummery and speech making of the coronation period indicate.

W. Waters

Between the Lines: Choose your prison (1989)

The Between the Lines Column from the March 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Choose your prison

Libertarians who support capitalism tie themselves into knots. The Late Show With Clive James (BBC2. Friday 10 February had a debate between two psychiatrists, Anthony Clare and Robert Szasz. The latter, who wrote the compelling book, The Myth of Mental Illness, contends that psychiatrists diagnose bogus diseases when they say that people's minds are ill. Clare offered an eloquent defence of psychiatry, although it did not convince the present writer. Szasz is a strange combination: a man dedicated to the eradication of the state's right to drug and incarcerate people in the name of making them better, while at the same time a passionate defender of the so-called free market. What this means is that Szasz s answer to workers who feel depressed or are victims of other mental problems is that they should go and buy counselling. It must follow that those unable to buy the talking therapy which will relieve their anguish must be left to suffer. In the course of the discussion Clare put it to Szasz that "mentally ill" people need to be placed in care for their own safety. It is almost certainly true that some people do require protection against what they might do to themselves or others. And what remedy did libertarian Szasz offer? The state should build more prisons in which to lock up such people.

Individualism?

We live in a society of individualism, or so we are told by the minority who can afford the luxury of escaping from the crowd Channel Four's three-part series, The Big Company, gave the lie to that capitalist myth. The series showed just how modern companies encourage their workforces to feel part of the business. IBM workers were trained to repeat the company motto: ‘World Peace Through World Trade ". Huxley's Brave New World, with its mindless, logic-twisting slogans, came readily to mind. At another big company called Herman Miller the workers making furniture are made to feel that every company product is a matter of pride to them. One poor fellow, busily making leather chairs for executives to swing about on, boasted proudly that after ten years employees are given a leather chair to take home. A company called Amway. which goes in for a kind of pyramid selling just the right side of the law. holds conventions at which employees scream like devotees of new religions as they are informed that Mr. and Mrs. Shnortel of Wyoming have won a gold star for selling more rubbish than the rest of them. Three gold stars and you go for a sail on the company yacht. We were shown the chairman of Apple addressing a convention of his cheering wage slaves. He informs them that Apple is going to challenge IBM for a share of the world computer market. Hooray! IBM have had it their way for too long. Cheers; hooray! A film is shown depicting IBM as a backward, anachronistic company, whereas Apple employee are all sun-tanned Californian go-getters. The sun-tanned go-getters rise in ecstasy. A public relations man from IBM says that his team is really the best and then shows a film demonstrating that his company's employees are the most faithful in the world. What is the difference between working in the Russian Empire as a cog in the state capitalist wheel, carrying out other peoples Five Year Plans, and working for an equally bureaucratic and monolithic giant American business corporation in which you, the worker, are just one more profit-gathering ant? To be sure, ants are told they're free. But then again, there is a horrible tendency for free ants to be trodden on.

Sun TV

On Wogan (BBC1. Friday 18 February) the man being interviewed was Rupert Murdoch. Here is a list of questions which Tel Boy did not ask: How do you feel about the printers sacked by you who were beaten up by the police (now facing criminal charges) when they were picketing at Wapping? How worried are you by the fact that the soft porn displayed in your newspapers makes many women feel frightened to go out at night, for fear of assault by rapists who expect all women to be consumable? How do you feel about the tradition of outright political lying which your newspapers go in for? How do you justify the capitalist idea of the self-made man when you inherited a multi-million dollar publishing company at the age of just twenty-two? Instead, Murdoch was given an easy ride and a free plug for his new venture, Sky TV. Murdoch said that he was proud of The Sun and hoped that Sky would be as good. Say no more.

Steve Coleman

What socialism means (1982)

From the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a world rotten to the core with human suffering it is easy to forget the richness and beauty of the natural environment. The artificiality of a society over which the mass of humanity has virtually no control obscures the foundations upon which social existence is built.

Urban industrial life, under a system which puts profits before needs, deforms the relationship between nature and human beings. Alienated from ownership or control of our material base — the world in which we live — living often seems to run contrary to nature; our lives appear as a struggle against material forces, as though there were a conspiracy of the universe against the overwhelmed individual. You want to eat, to live in a decent home, to be fully mobile, to enjoy the pleasures of the world — but the world refuses to let you. “It's a crazy world", people often say. But it is not the natural environment which is crazy. Natural forces do not condemn the hungry to starvation or the homeless to permanent insecurity. Nature can potentially satisfy most of our material wants.

Is it, then, the people of the world who are bad? Badness and goodness are human concepts which- reflect moral perceptions: we are no more inherently bad than we are inherently good. The evils of capitalism are not a consequence of the will of bad people. The old shiver and die in the winter cold, too poor to pay for heat; their suffering is no more the consequence of “badness” than "goodness”. There is nothing in the human make-up which makes us behave as we do.

Nature is not greed, aggression, selfishness, laziness and competition. We have a capacity to act in such ways, just as every baby has a capacity not to. Nature is sunlight, rain, birth, death, earthquakes, eating and excreting. When we pour cold water down our mouths on a hot day or sense the coldness of ice or rolling in the grass, we then exhibit human nature. When soldiers shoot with guns they are behaving, but not naturally. Human nature comprises those characteristics by which the human species is defined and constrained. Human behaviour is social; it is limited only by the forces of matter and the workings of the human brain.

The earliest human society, which lasted for tens of thousands of years, was communistic in its organisation. Primitive humans were at one with nature, in that they respected the natural environment, utilising it for their own natural objectives. Modern humans have learnt to control nature in ways that our ancestors would have thought unnatural. We virtually dominate the universe, but our system of society denies us the power to utilise nature for our own ends. We are capable, for example, of doing the necessary productive work to feed, clothe and shelter every human being on the face of the earth, but the capitalist system denies us the chance to use the productive forces to their fullest capacity. We live in fear of our knowledge, for instead of using it to produce all that we want there is the imminent threat of science being employed for the purpose of social destruction.

Perhaps we should turn to the simple life, unbothered by scientific knowledge and control — could that be the path to unity with nature? To stamp out centuries of human evolution — to hope pathetically for a dose of collective amnesia so that we may forget the recipes for bombs and the indignities of poverty — is no answer. It is impossible to fight against history and win even the presently complacent conservatives wilt discover that lesson one day.

Cynical resignation to the reality of the present is no answer either. To sacrifice potential social happiness for the sake of a non-existent omnipotent "Nature" is a waste of our short lives. Why conform to a system which tramples on your human potential when there is not a scrap of evidence to show that it must go on existing and plenty to show that it will not?

To live with the belief that your condition is predetermined is unhistorical and a colossal waste. Consider the Athenian slave or the feudal serf, refusing to envisage life beyond their respective chains of servitude. Think of the factory workers of the late eighteenth century who accepted the bosses’ stick as a "fact of life” or the South African black worker for whom it is “natural” not to enter places where white people go. Now the slave and the serf have made way for the wage slave. The label of oppression has changed, as has the process of exploitation, but a class of propertyless. socially inferior beings remains. The non-possession of the earth is still the lot of the majority; the parasitic power of the ruling class differs in form only.

Trapped in a time-lock of social evolution, the majority of workers think that nothing except capitalism has ever existed, and even if it has, nothing else will ever come. Nature is seen to determine the system and to challenge these false dogmas is to be accused of being at best a crank and at worst a wrecker.

In a sense, socialists are cranks and wreckers. Our refusal to accept the beliefs which keep the system standing makes us cranks in the eyes of those who define sanity. To those who wish to conserve class monopoly, exploitation, poverty and war, we revolutionaries are wreckers; and without doubt we do want to destroy such a society. Those who possess but do not produce will use any method they can to defend their privilege. Once the myth of god sufficed: “God says you must obey us, so you had better or you will face everlasting damnation". The modern capitalist line is that to envisage a world without wage labour and capital is to entertain visions of the “unnatural”. We are told time and time again that we have "forgotten human nature".

Think of the arguments against socialism. "It can't work”; “What about the greedy, lazy, war-like, unco-operative person"; “you’re forgetting that society is made up of human beings"; “freedom is impossible because of human nature". Socialists have heard these responses almost as many times as we have been told to "go back to Russia". Thousands of times the same old cliched objections to socialism are trotted out, all of them based on the myth of human nature. But repetition of an argument — or its widespread popularity — does not prove its validity. For many years it was often repeated and widely believed that the earth was flat. The denial of the possibility of socialism on the grounds that the new system would conflict with human nature is not made by coincidence: such a belief is historical and political, it arises out of particular social relationships and it exists to serve a specific class interest.

Human nature is an ideological concept designed to shield those who benefit from the status quo against change. The first response of someone who sees something happening which he or she fears is to say that "it can't happen"; likewise, an historically redundant class can only meet the political challenge of socialism by assuming that "it can't happen”. The capitalists, and their defenders, will give as proof the fact that socialism has never "happened" before. And that which has not existed cannot exist. Such a method of analysis conflicts directly with the most fundamental principle of history and science: that all things change, and all reality is preceded by the conception of that reality, in one form or another, in the human brain.

To maintain their mythical contentions, the Human Nature Brigade must abandon history and science. Had they been told a century and a half ago that society would include an intricate network of motorised road transport, all regulated by a generally self-administered highway code, the believers in human nature would have claimed that "it can't happen. Drivers won't stop at traffic lights. Pedestrians will walk in front of fast cars. There will be multiple pile-ups in every street every other day. Road co-operation is an impossible dream". But, by and large, the transition from the horse and cart to motor transport has worked — and would work even better if the stress and inefficiency of capitalism was taken away. Co-operation does happen now in certain social contexts; people "feel good" when they are able to behave co-operatively. In a socialist society conscious human co-operation will be a natural form of social behaviour — killing, plundering, exploiting and oppressing will seem as unnatural to a socialist community as the idea of having a society without those features seems to most people today.

The need for a socialist society, based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution, is an urgent one. Our daily experiences of life under capitalism tell us that this competitive, jungle society does not and cannot work in the material interest of the majority of the population, who produce the wealth but do not possess it. Socialism becomes a meaningful idea to workers when it is realised that instead of trying to survive in conflict with everyone else, as if this were the only possible way, the answer is to survive by co-operating with the rest of humanity.

Steve Coleman

From No Platform to Safe Spaces (2016)

From the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

We refute two arguments for not allowing the free expression of ideas

Last year the militant atheist and ex-Muslim Maryam Namazie was initially banned by the officials of the student union at Warwick University from giving a talk to the atheist, secularist and humanist society there on “Apostasy, Blasphemy and Free Expression in the Age of ISIS”. The justification offered was that the views to be expressed would be offensive to some students, namely, those who still adhered to the Muslim religion. After protests, the student union officials backed down and she was allowed to speak.

Similarly, a petition was launched, which attracted 2500 signatures, calling for the veteran feminist Germaine Greer to be prevented from speaking at Cardiff University. This was because she had expressed the view that men who changed their sex to a woman weren’t really women, a view considered offensive to the LGBT community. This case was worse than Namazie’s as Greer was not going to speak on this but was to be banned merely because of an opinion she had expressed on another matter. In the end she too was allowed to speak.

No Platform

This argument for not allowing particular views to be expressed (or particular people to speak on any subject) differs from that invoked by the likes of the SWP for not allowing racists and fascists such as the National Front and the BNP to speak. ‘No Platform for Fascists’ was justified on the grounds that the views themselves were dangerous and so should not be allowed to be heard in case people came to accept them.

This was an elitist position in that it assumes that some people – the leftwing ‘no-platformers’ – could hear and read fascist views without being affected by them while others – the rest of us – were liable to be infected if they heard them. This was the same argument put forward by those who wanted to ban Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover as obscene and actually expressed at the trial in 1960: that educated men could read it without being corrupted but not their wife or servants.

That censorship is undemocratic and elitist as it involves a minority deciding what the majority can hear or read is the main case against it in general and why we in the Socialist Party never supported, and in fact actively opposed, the ‘No Platform’ policy,  practising what we preached and debating against the National Front and other racists (despite the no-platformers trying to break up the meetings).We took, and still take, the view that people are quite capable of deciding for themselves what to think, and so the way to deal with racists and fascists is not to prevent them expressing their views but to allow them a platform and then publicly confront and refute their arguments . We are pleased to note that this approach is now more widely accepted.

That the majority class of wage and salary workers and their dependants are capable of understanding what is in their class interest is central to the whole case that socialism can only be established if and when a majority have come to want it and to understand what it is and what it involves. To claim that people need protecting from certain views lest they be led astray is saying that the working class is not capable of coming to a socialist understanding on its own but needs to be led. Which of course is precisely what the SWP and other Leninists think.

Identity Politics

What about the argument from offence for censorship? It starts from the plausible position that people who are subject to prejudice and discrimination should have a ‘safe space’ where they can be free from this. This does tend to happen anyway as such people meet together in their own clubs, cafes or pubs. But the student union officials want to extend this to a whole university campus and to this end to ban the expression there of views considered offensive to particular such groups.

This change of argument reflects a wider change away from class politics to ‘identity politics’, a change welcomed by the authorities who prefer divide and rule to class unity (though some of them are beginning to have second thoughts as it also undermines the national unity they want). Minority groups are urged to identify themselves politically as such and to campaign to get gains and concessions only for themselves. Previously both revolutionaries and reformists had talked in terms of getting benefit for the whole wage and salary working class, irrespective of their ethnic origin, gender, language, religion, sexual orientation or whatever.

This class approach has now been abandoned (though not by us) and reformists and do-good liberals have turned to protecting ‘identity’ groups that are subject to prejudice and discrimination, seeing the setting up of ‘safe spaces’ from which the expression of views offensive to them are banned as one way to do this.

But the question remains: which is the best way to deal with people who hold racist or other prejudiced views? Is it to ban them from expressing them? Or is it to confront them in open debate and refute their views and expose them as dangerous? We see no reason to change our position of favouring the second approach.

Religion and Politics

In one respect the ‘safe spaces’ argument for censorship is proving more insidious than ‘no platform’. It has led to bans being sought on the expression not just of admittedly obnoxious views but also of views that don’t fall into this category but which, on the contrary, are helpful and necessary, namely, the criticism of religion. Ironically it has also led to the SWP being banned because of a rape scandal a few years ago, but we are magnanimous and defend them being allowed to express their views.

Nor is it clear why the ‘safe-spacers’ want to exclude Islam from such criticism when the expression of its views on women and gays could be considered offensive to such groups. In any event, suppressing a view does not change the mind of those holding it, which surely is the point as in the end changing minds is the only way to overcome prejudice and discrimination.

No doubt religious people – and not just practising Muslims – find criticism of their religion offensive but to ban the expression of such criticism because of this is to re-introduce the old blasphemy laws and extend them to all religions. Quite apart from us being against censoring views in general, this is something socialists cannot accept. Religion is a social issue, even a social problem, that needs to be discussed and debated and, like other mistaken ‘solutions’ to humanity’s situation, confronted and refuted. We cannot accept any policy which leads to the expression of anti-religious views being banned.

Fortunately, the attempts by student union officials to suppress free expression in universities have met resistance which has forced them to back down, but this has not stopped them from keeping on trying. This is why they must be opposed and exposed just as much as the Leninist ‘no-platformers’.

Adam Buick

From America: "Making it" v World Socialism (1977)

A Letter from America from the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the entertainment business, good lines that catch the attention of the viewer are not easy to come by and many a Show Biz personality—whatever the field —must sweat blood to hold interest. Happily, though, there is one tried-and-true exception to this rule and any number of movie, radio and TV stars have used it to good advantage. It is the reminiscing by a successful one of his and his family’s earlier bout with poverty. If there is one tale that never goes stale with most audiences it is the saga of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, as the saying goes, or making it against the world on one’s merit. Having been the butt of capitalist propaganda from nursery school times, it is little wonder that the average worker continues to get a vicarious thrill from the rags-to- riches story.

Not that we would challenge the argument that it is still possible to work one’s way up the “ladder.” It is being done and we are more apt to hear of it now because of the growth of the media, particularly TV. But unlike news broadcasting, which features disasters, plain-and-simple entertainment does not generally deal with those who fall off the “ladder” or get stuck on the bottom rungs. It is the exceptional success that gets the play. For the entire philosophy and rationale of modern capitalism rests on the possibility of rising from rags to riches or, at the very least, the opportunity to combat and overcome economic adversity.

True, there is widespread admiration, even veneration—in America as in the “old countries"—for those who have inherited their wealth and status and who have never been compelled to do a day’s “honest” work in their entire lives. We have our “royalty,” too — the Rockefellers, Fords, Du Ponts, Kennedys, etc., almost any of whom have been or could be represented in the elective bodies of the land. But this is somewhat of an aberration in the general scheme of American capitalism. Lurking behind all of the professional representation of “black and city poor” in the USA by organizations—such as National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League is the philosophy of an individual’s right to “make it” if he has “what it takes” and is not being deliberately shut out by those in political control.

Item: The writer, James Baldwin, appearing recently on an educational Network broadcast, defended the looters in the recent NY City blackout, most of whom were black (as were their small-business victims). The looters had been conditioned, he contended, by the advertizing of a “consumer oriented” society to acquire status items so, when the opportunity presented itself, they took advantage of it. The problem, according to Baldwin, is that black workers are being deliberately deprived of the opportunity to live a good life by being denied good jobs with “decent” wages. The fault does not lie with the organization of society on the basis of wage-labor and capital, it would seem, but with those who are in a position to shut out blacks, especially, from opportunities to “make it.” An interesting aspect of that affair was the fact that those who committed arson as well as theft, did their victims a favour—at least those who were covered by fire insurance. On the other hand, and also of academic interest, was the response of horror from the authorities at the magnitude of the crime of looting. Hundreds of the culprits were incarcerated in cells with no facilities, and with no communication with lawyers or family permitted, during a record heat-wave while awaiting for days for arraignment. “Let the punishment fit the crime!” One example of “Human Rights” in the USA.

Now, Socialists maintain a “hands off” stance in regard to activity such as helping the city poor to “make it.” It is not that we object, in any way, to individual workers beating this jungle system. We all must live until we die and certainly it is easier to live under capitalism when one enjoys comparative affluence. Nor are we concerned, as an organization, with the manner in which one “makes it”—whether through inheritance or by one’s wits, legally or otherwise. Our goal is to spread a different gospel. It no longer makes sense to maintain a society wherein individuals have the need to acquire economic or political power in any degree whatsoever. Capitalist mass production techniques have long since made possible a world in which every man, woman and child can be secure by having the right to access to the goods and services that provide security. Modern capitalism must concern itself more and more with damning this potential by slamming production floodgates to accommodate a market. It is possible, given a sane system of society, to change the meaning of “making it.” When brain power no longer must be wasted on “beating the system” the frontier of the future will be unlimited.

Harmo, WSP, Boston.

Elephants' graveyard (1983)

From the June 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Between 1970 and 1982, according to the magazine Onyx (Vol. 16, p. 225), the number of African elephants declined sharply. Reliable counts in a large number of different regions showed a fall of between 80 and 95 per cent. The conclusion from this is that unless action is taken — for example to prevent the poaching of elephants — this attractive animal will soon be extinct. The African elephant’s plight is not, of course, unique; many forms of wild life are under threat and there are numerous organisations which campaign on behalf of the various endangered species.

There are similarities between the situation of the modern elephant and that of the pleistocene megafauna which were prominent in most parts of the world about two million years ago. Their disappearance came about largely as a result of their conflict with human beings, who were fairly efficient hunters. Consequently the megafauna became extinct in Eurasia over 10,000 years ago; in Australasia this happened within the last thousand years and in North America within the last 500 years (P. S. Martin, Prehistoric Overkill, Yale, 1967). The reason for this is fairly simply; the very size of the large mammals, which had once been an advantage for their self-defence, became a liability when hunting had advanced sufficiently to make size of no value against a well armed hunter. Furthermore, the vast amounts of food which an elephant needs to keep going (in Frankfurt Zoo elephants are fed nearly 185lb. of fodder each day) put the megafauna in competition with human beings for what were then scarce resources. The effects of hunting large mammals is accentuated by the fact that they take a comparatively long time to reproduce themselves.

The decline of the megafauna's modern counterpart, the African elephant, coincided with the rise of capitalism. It was competition among the rising capitalist nations for the raw materials and the markets of the continent which first brought the unfortunate elephant into contact with “civilisation” — which in the elephant’s case meant a group of well armed hunters. The first example of this was in South Africa, where hunters could make vast profits (between 1500 and 2000 per cent) on the sale of ivory to the Dutch East India Company. By the 1830s the huntsmen — mainly Boers — had virtually wiped out all the Cape Colony elephants and then they moved north with devastating effect, massacring great hordes of elephants. Had enforceable Game Laws not been passed in the 1890s, the African elephant would probably have become extinct by the first world war.

It was the system of production for profit which both nearly wiped out the African elephant and saved it. Tusks were produced — that is, elephants were shot — for the profits from the ivory but the elephant was relieved from the murderous pressure when it became useful not just as a source of ivory. In the Belgian Congo the elephant was domesticated and used in agriculture and forestry. The opening of the many game parks allowed elephants to become a tourist attraction; the liquidation of the elephant no longer made good economic sense. There were other ways of making a profit from the animal, than shooting it.

This process, in which capitalism has driven a species into near-extinction and then preserved it, has not been confined to the elephant. The white rhinoceros was nearly hunted out of existence for its horn (which was believed to be marketable as an aphrodisiac) but again has been saved through its popularity with the paying tourists. The ostrich was almost obliterated because of a demand for its skin but has been saved by the fact that it is more profitable to turn out ostrich products in ostrich farms. Consequently wild ostriches have no further attraction for the hunter and are largely left alone by them. There are many similar examples.

But this stay of extinction may only be temporary, conditional on the species remaining valuable when it is alive. And this has been the fate of the African elephant, which is now again under threat and whose numbers have declined sharply. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is the ivory trade; ivory is still in demand as a valuable commodity. One dealer estimates that it is usually worth over £40 a kilogramme. The exact number of elephants slaughtered for their ivory is uncertain; Dr. Douglas Hamilton has said that between 100,000 and 400,000 were killed for their ivory in 1976, an estimate disputed by Ian Parker who believes that fewer than 55,000 elephants in fact died for their tusks (Onyx. Vol 16, pp 235-8). Of these deaths Parker estimates that only 20 per cent were killed “legally” (by government-licensed hunters or in management culling programmes). The remainder were illegally poached and exported to their market quite openly as, according to Parker, export licenses for poached ivory are quite easy to obtain by bribery and other means. Illegal ivory is of course quite indistinguishable from that which is allowed to be shot. The world’s major ivory importers are Hong Kong, India and Japan, where the ivory is carved, polished and sold, bringing in huge profits to the hunters, dealers and the sellers of the finished products.

The second major reason for the recent decline of the African elephants is their size. Because of the need for large amounts of food, the creatures are constantly on the move. Each family group will range over a set area to feed itself and the size of these ranges varies between 25 and 1,200 square miles (I. Hamilton, Among the Elephants, 1975, pp 231-3 ). But these ranges have been put under great pressure through agricultural development; consequently the elephants have been virtually confined to the National Parks and any outside these boundaries are liable to be shot as a danger to the crops.

The shooting of elephants to protect crops must not be seen, however, as a conflict between the elephants and human beings for scarce resources; it is the result of a clash between the elephants’ need for food and the interests of the crop growers. The crops are not produced to satisfy human needs but to realise a profit for the people who have invested in their growth. It was the demands of the crop owners which led to more effective boundaries of the National Parks (which are themselves drawn in an attempt to maximise profitability) and the drastic reduction in the elephant ranges. This reduction has meant that there is insufficient spare land for the elephant population which, according to Ian Parker, is a more important factor in the recent decline of the elephant than the ivory trade (Onyx, Vol 16, p 238).

So the numbers of the African elephant have declined rapidly because a live elephant is generally regarded as less valuable than a dead one. In face of this over-riding consideration in a capitalist society, the various wildlife protection societies are impotent. The African elephant can only survive, in a social system in which a minority of people own the means of life, if that minority believe that its survival is in their interests. In the 3rd century BC, Ptolemy II tried to prevent elephant hunting tribes from pursuing their prey because their killings were detrimental to his military strategy, which involved the use of elephants. Since then, there have been several attempts by the ruling class to boost the elephant population, the latest of which is the National Parks.

Should we bother about the fate of any one species of wildlife? How vital is the demise of a million or so elephants compared to that of the 30 million people who die each year of starvation or the threat of an all-destructive nuclear war which will make the human race an extremely rare species? Well the decline of the African elephant illustrates important points about the nature of capitalism and of socialism.

The first of these is the essential callousness of a social system in which production is for profit. In this all things, including the elephant, exist through a calculation which puts a price on their life and on their death — an equation which currently operates against the elephant and so hastens its demise, in much the same way as human beings may be written off or maintained on very low levels of “benefit” when they are no longer productive.

Secondly, what of future society? Will socialism allow free development of all forms of wildlife, whatever the consequences for the human race? Would it encourage the locust and the tsetse fly to thrive? When the means of production are communally owned there will be a totally different mode of wealth production, with different motives; commodities will be replaced by free access to use values. Free of the distortions of property society, the people of socialism will be able to assess comprehensively the totality, and the true balance, of the relationship between wildlife and the human race. If there should be a situation — a natural disaster, perhaps — which forces one into competition with the other for scarce resources then socialist society may well take the decision, democratically, that there is no alternative to an humane cull. It may even decide to obliterate some species.

That would be a regrettable, but unavoidable, step to take but it would be taken in the interests of humanity, unlike the motivation under capitalism for the slaughter which clubs the seal pup bloodily on the ice, which has the elephant die in slow agony from gunshot wounds and all in the name of profit.

John Critichfield

Grass Roots (1968)

Book Review from the September 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Constituency Labour Parties in Britain by Edward G. Janosik (Pall Mall Press, 45s.)

Edward Janosik has produced here a study of the organisational and political nature of constituency Labour Parties. The blurb on the dust jacket claims that the book contains “a body of reliable data from which sound generalisations could be made". Unfortunately, the author, an American who spent a year in Britain, has little or no experience of his subject and his data has been acquired by interviewing what he calls  “key leaders" of thirty six CLPs.

Before joining the Socialist Party of Great Britain 1 was a CLP secretary—a “key leader”—for some years and my own impressions of the Labour Patty are very different from those gained second hand by Janosik. He must realty be naive if he thinks that the party machine (Transport House) isn't all that powerful in the selection of parliamentary candidates. True, there is a procedure laid down which appears to give the “grass roots" a great deal of independence in the matter, but the machine, through its local paid officials, can and often does see that the dice is loaded in favour of nominees acceptable to it by turning a blind eye to blatant irregularities in the delegations to selection conferences.

Also, Janosik's claim that there is little evidence of organised factionalism in the CLP's is. to anyone who has ever been active in the Labour Party, sheer nonsense. Before such events as the election of office-bearers, the choosing and instruction of delegates to national and local conferences, the selection of parliamentary and municipal candidates, each faction will normally meet in conclave to decide a course of action against the others.

Janosik does admit that his studies were carried out at a time when a general election was pending. Such an event is always a great unifier as CLP's are basically an electoral machine whose function is to secure the return of candidates representing a very broad viewpoint of how British capitalism should be run. Not that the "unity" ever lasts very long. After the votes have been counted the various factions, left and right, will cheer their heads off together if Labour wins but it is only a short while before the back-stabbing begins again. If Labour loses then, of course, it commences right away.

The book does reveal, in passing, some of the skeletons in the Labour cupboard. For instance, the fact that candidates are sometimes chosen with an eye to the religious prejudices of the electorate. Also dealt with is the degrading "pulling out” of the Labour vote on election day. This consists of the party activists plaguing everyone suspected of Labour sympathies to come out and vote. Fleets of cars are provided for this spectacle and no wonder, for if the average Labour voter were left to vote of his or her own accord then there would be a lot less Labour MPs in Parliament.

The myth that the CLP’s are bastions of militancy against the reactionary leadership also takes a knock. Actually, the vast majority of Labour Party are simply apolitical and are only concerned with humdrum fund-raising and social activities.

Janosik's book cannot fail to impress whoever is obsessed with discovering the facts relating to the average age and occupational, religious, educational background of CLP leaders and there are abundant tables dealing with all this and more. Doubtless, the Robert McKenzie, Abrams and Rose crowd will be fascinated, but really, the author has failed to get under the skin of his subject and to see it for the corrupt, undemocratic and anti-socialist organisation that it is.

Perhaps we shouldn't blame him too much for that After all, thousands who have spent a lifetime in its ranks still haven’t seen through it either

Vic Vanni