These Foolish Things . . . : Big Bucks (1997)

The Scavenger column from the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Big bucks

The world’s top 500 companies, it seems, employ 0.05 percent of the world’s population but control a quarter of the world’s economic output. The combined assets of the 50 biggest companies is now 60 percent of the world’s $20 trillion of productive capital. In eight sectors, including cars, aerospace, electronics, steel, armaments and media, the top five corporations now control 50 percent of the global market. Increasingly the question is: who governs them? And for whom? . . . Ten corporations now control nearly every aspect of the world’s food chain. Four control 90 percent of the world’s exports of corn, wheat, tobacco, tea, pineapple, jute and forest products. (Guardian. 20 June.)


Labour is Right

Even as they elect their new leader, the Tories are in a quandary. They are faced with a government which seems determined to outdo them in all of the things they did best. If new Labour stands for free markets, sound money, prudent finances, a tough stance on criminals, higher school standards, and unravelling the welfare mess, why should anyone need the Tories? They have the difficult task of persuading the electorate that they will do even better, and will have the competence to fulfil that promise. Politics in Britain used to be a clash of ideologies: now it has become a competition in virtue. Dr Madsen Pirie, President of Adam Smith Institute. (Scotland on Sunday, 15 June.)


In proportion

It would take one Haitian worker producing Disney dolls and clothes 166 years to earn as much as Disney President Michael Eisner makes in one day. And Eisner isn’t even one of the seven richest men in the world . . . (Independent on Sunday, 22 June.)


Work is dangerous

Statistics show the work-place is the fastest growing location for violent crime. According to the Loss Prevention Council, between 1981 and 1991 assaults at work doubled to 350,000 a year . . . according to British Retail Consortium figures, retailers reported that more than 9,000 staff were subjected to physical violence, 47,000 to threats of violence and 120,000 to verbal abuse between 1995 and 1996. (Observer, 22 June.)


Market cares

Small charities have been warned to merge or risk going under in the face of fierce competition for declining funds. The Disabilities Trust said the market place for charities was already overcrowded with 188,000 bodies chasing the same money. In a report, it claims public donations are set to fall by 13 percent by 1999, blaming the National Lottery for siphoning off funds. (Evening Mail, 18 July.)


Conspiracy theory

Jonathan Aitken’s world is truly crumbling around him. After his resignation from the Privy Council, the former Tory cabinet minister, ruined by his collapsed libel case against the Guardian, will have to cede another honour—one that his friends say he values as much as being a Right Hon or PC. For the past few years Mr Aitken has been chairman of Le Cercle, right-wing think-tank set up at the height of the Cold War for senior politicians, diplomats and intelligence agents which is one of the most influential, secretive, and, it goes without saying, exclusive political clubs in the West. Now he is about to be relieved of this role . . . [Alan Clark] describes it as “a right-wing think-tank funded by the CIA, which churns Cold War concepts around". (Independent on Sunday, 29 June.)

The Scavenger

A Vivid Imagined Nation (1997)

TV Review from the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is always fascinating to attend an event later portrayed on television if only to make the obvious "compare and contrast" analysis afterwards. So it was on Sunday 10 August with BBC2's The National Eisteddfod of Wales, which comprised commentary, clips and observations of an event I had attended in the cause of wage slave duty on three occasions the previous week.

Given the strong links between the Welsh establishment and the media it was unlikely to be a highly critical piece—more so with BBC political correspondent Huw Edwards doing the commentary, a man whose father was a Bard. Focusing on the traditional portrayal of Wales as the land of harmonies and the harp, of poetry and prose, it successfully documented an event in many ways well worth attending, even by non-Welsh speakers. The impression given was that of a generally convivial atmosphere in the north Wales hills, sunshine beating down and fine music of most varieties all around. With much of this being true it might seem churlish to complain.

And yet in other respects it does well to cast a more cynical eye at events than the BBC is in the habit of doing. For instance, it is not necessarily a good idea to go to the Eisteddfod if you are poor. Entrance fees notwithstanding, food and drink prices on the site—dominated seemingly by a cartel of some sorts—were extortionate to a degree rarely found outside of Central London in peak season. And with the Eisteddfod site itself still being alcohol-free, a trip to the pubs in Bala which had also formed a cartel just for the week, was not an entirely sensible alternative.

You can of course go to Alton Towers or London Zoo and complain about the prices after they have got you in their ring-fenced compound, but in virtually all other respects the Eisteddfod has a clear edge. To illustrate this, it was a pity that the BBC didn't have its cameras at the ready for the hardly untypical scene when a Jordanian academic, who had spent over a decade learning fluent English, conversed with a Welsh boy while showing him how to use the internet. Whenever he spoke to the child, the boy's mother shouted at her son in Welsh not to answer him . . . and the naive among you thought language was all about effective communication. So did the pop band Gorky's Zygotic Munci, who were banned from playing their traditionally bilingual set in the Rock Tent because the language-fascists thought their occasional English singing would have corrupted the young and innocent. (Bands singing sexist or totally vacuous shit was fine so long as they did it all in Welsh.)

Narrow-minded nationalists
The prevalence of this type of stultifying, narrow-minded behaviour is a tragedy for a land which otherwise has so much to offer. But then again. Wales has been blighted by nationalism and bigotry for as long as anyone can remember. And the ultimate irony is that while all nations are imagined communities, few illustrate this better than the Land of My Fathers.

Wales and the type of traditions currently celebrated at the Eisteddfod are largely a product of the rise of a Welsh non-conformist commerce-based class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was a class initially desperate to throw off English domination and in some instances, at least, keen to pursue the same course eventually adopted by the southern Irish. The legacy of this mindset still persists today and pervades most Welsh culture and institutions.Wales has a fascinating culture and Welsh is a fine language but both have been devalued by the actions of capitalism's class of predators who would have been quite content to let Welsh culture in whatever its forms die if it had not served their interests to cynically mould it and debase it.

None of this is really a matter of dispute even among bourgeois historians, with Kenneth O. Morgan once famously stating that it was this economically-inspired cultural process, with the refoundation of the long-dead Eisteddfod, which led to the “rebirth of a nation", though admittedly the phrase "rebirth” was overstepping the mark a bit. In Wales: The Imagined Nation edited by Tony Curtis, another argues that the rise of the Welsh trading and capitalist class helped create "what was really a new national identity at a time when Wales was drawn inexorably into the maelstrom of British social, political and industrial life, and when many of the peculiarities of Welsh nationhood had either disappeared or become moribund".

The Welsh capitalist class—today more fully developed than hitherto and perhaps even more entwined in the workings of the state machine than its English counterpart—still trades on the nationalist myth and distortion it was largely responsible for in the first place, binding its wage slaves to a totally fake commonality of interests encouraged by a suspicion of outsiders.

The Labour Party, much in evidence at Bala '97 all the way from the Secretary of State downwards, panders to it all like they pander to their paymasters whoever they may be, from the City one day to the Farmers' Union of Wales and the "Taffia" the next. Meanwhile, the culture of the dispossessed class reflects the competing claims of the propertied, a global class forever encouraging the parochial touch for its subordinates, not out of a cultural celebration so much as an extension of the principles of divide and rule and each against all. To this end, in the grim terraced mining valleys, metropolitan Cardiff and the massive sink council housing estates of Wrexham and Newport the working class go about their daily business listening to Oasis, eating at McDonald's and occasionally taking night-classes in beginners’ Welsh. A cynical thought perhaps, but with more than a grain of truth attached to it and one unlikely to be given expression on the BBC.

Dave Perrin

Authoritarian (1997)

Pamphlet Review from the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where There’s Brass There’s Muck: Ecology and Anarchism. Anarchist Communist Federation pamphlet.

An interesting short survey of anarchist thinking on ecology. It reveals that Murray Bookchin, founder of the Social Ecology movement, has become even more reformist in adopting "Confederal Municipalism":". . .  a belief in taking state power at a local level and using that power to transform society from the bottom up."

The ACF itself advocates using Direct Action to bring about a classless society in harmony with the environment. The anti-roads movement, they say, "has a fine record of sabotage". They admit that their road to social transformation will lead to violence, as indeed it must. It is also a dead end. Apart from the people involved, they have no way of establishing that they represent the majority view, nor is there any way of democratically assessing their argument. This is the paradox of anarchism: the method for bringing about the society they want is inherently authoritarian.

Lew Higgins

Greasy Pole: Paying For It (1997)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

How much would you pay to listen to a speech by John Major? Ten thousand pounds? A hundred? One? Fifty pence? Or would you rather pay not to have to listen to the spoken wisdom of our recently deposed Prime Minister? We ask these questions in response to the news that Major plans to spend some time, now that he is reduced to being a plain backbencher, lecturing in America and that he will be paid £32,000 for every one of his speeches.

Startling as this might be (because even the most ardent of Major's admirers could hardly describe him as £32,000-worth of charisma and gripping oratory) the fact is that he is not the highest-paid of the celebrities travelling the world on these jaunts, the irrelevance of which is matched by their lucrativeness. At the top of this particular pile—this will come as no surprise—is Margaret Thatcher, who gets £45,000 every time she holds forth on the world and its problems and how she almost solved the lot of them single- handedly.

At this point anyone who has the habit of asking naively penetrating questions will wonder why we suddenly have to pay to listen to Major and Thatcher when only a short time ago we endured their speeches for free. It was, after all, bad enough to hear Thatcher raving on about all those evil foreigners whose only ambition was to destroy the British Way Of Life without being charged for it. Listening to Major's oratorical blundering was never an uplifting experience but to be charged for it would have made it worse.

Burdens
In any case what can these people say that is worth listening to? They could trot out the same weary nonsense— the delusions, the evasions, the empty platitudes—which was their daily diet when they were in power. Thatcher could tell us. again, how she had made this country “great” as a property- owning democracy—where tens of thousands struggled with a lifetime’s burden of a mortgage or, when the burden became too much to bear, were ejected from the homes which they regarded as a symbol of their security. She would tell us about the rampant jingoism she stimulated during the Falklands war, while hundreds of workers on both sides died. She would tell us about her government’s assault on the trade unions and how they ruthlessly cut back the meagre state benefits on which the poorest people tried to get by.

John Major could tell us, in that voice which so many of us have been trying to wipe out of our memory, about the repeated blunders, the knee-jerk reaction to capitalism’s crises and the dedicated sleaze which characterised his governments. He could remind us how, while surrounded by all this disarray, he persisted in assuring us that he had the situation under control, that we were all living at a high standard and things could only get better. He might also explain why, if his premiership had been such a huge success, he so rapidly deprived us of the chance of keeping him as prime-minister-in-waiting after the May election. For anyone paying to hear these speeches there will be no guarantee of their money back if they are not completely satisfied.

Poverty
And how could anyone be satisfied? After almost two decades of Conservative rule the condition of the people of this country is such that the Labour Party are able to launch something described as an onslaught on the more extreme edges of poverty. Peter Mandelson who is Minister for Something or Other, hit the headlines in August with the announcement that a special cabinet unit would be set up to deal with the "scourge of social exclusion" which those in deeper poverty experience. Of course nobody should have got too excited by Mandelson’s words (how many times have we heard similar promises before?) and in any case the attack would have to wait until "circumstances and the reordering of public expenditure make this possible" (how many times have we heard that before?). Nor should we bother, right now, with the typical fragility of this typical Labour promise. The point, for the present, is that poverty still exists and shows no sign of going away or even of becoming a less onerous burden to its victims.

A recent report by the National Heart Forum—an alliance of 35 health and voluntary organisations working to prevent heart disease—stated that this is becoming a disease of poverty. In the 1970s its incidence was spread across society; now it is concentrating where people are poorer. The Institute of Fiscal Studies—not a body we would expect to call the masses to the barricades—has described capitalist society where, with income expressed in terms of body height, a handful of people reach almost twice as high as Nelson’s Column while nearly 60 percent of the population measure at or below 5ft 9in. A study by a geographer at Bristol University emphasises what this means in terms of health. Briefly, people who live in places like Glasgow, Oldham, Blackburn and Newcastle-on-Tyne have a much higher chance of dying younger than those who live in areas where poverty and the struggle to survive are not so acute.

Being silly
If politicians—retired or still, active— speak about these issues they always do so as if they are regrettable accidents— blips on capitalism’s ever-upward march towards universal prosperity. They assure us that they have the remedy to hand—an official enquiry perhaps or a special task-force of experts or, as Mandelson now tells us, a cabinet unit. Then, perhaps, a little tinkering about with rates of benefit or other footling adjustments.

Are we really expected to pay to hear such discredited drivel? It would be more worth it. if has-beens like Thatcher and Major would own up to their inability to control or change this social system and advise us to pay no heed to their words. They could tell us to take control of society ourselves and change it in our own interest. Or is this just being silly?

Ivan

50 Years Ago: The Crisis - The Planners' Swansong (1997)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism we know and have long endured. Socialism we could have and will have when a majority understands the need for it. But is there a half-way house, something that has ceased to be Capitalism but is not Socialism? Socialists know that there can be no such thing, but many people both in the Labour Party and outside thought that it was possible and desirable. Not that the Labour supporters of planned capitalism called it that. Indeed they said precisely the opposite—“there is no half-way house between a society based on private ownership in the means of production, with the profit of the few as the measure of success, and a society where public ownership of those means deliberately planned for attaining the maximum of general well-being.” (“For Socialism and Peace,” Labour Party). Yet that is just what the Labour Party has been trying to do and in the experiment it received the support of many who knew quite well what they were seeking was to keep capitalism but rid it of its chaotic features and subject it to planning and controls.

(From front page article, Socialist Standard, September 1947)

The Irish scene changes (1997)

From the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we write, in August, Harold Wilson’s affirmation that a week is a long time in politics is particularly apposite to the political situation in Northern Ireland. The previous month most people here were anxiously scanning the daily news bulletins for some sign that would lend hope that the province’s Armageddon might not be at hand.

Everywhere the awful word "Drumcree” was spoken: cautiously, in anger and in whispers.The holy men of the Orange Order had to placate their god by marching down the "Catholic” Gervaghy Road and through other areas where their opponents would be put under police curfew so that they should not be offended when the Orangemen reminded them, with salutary intent, that they had beaten them in other places in the past.

Gervaghy Road was particularly sensitive for it was here two years ago that a flushed David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had skipped a victory jig with the arch bigot Paisley when the police had forcefully cleared a path for the Orangemen. Now the word was out: there would be no Orange feet on the Gervagghy Road. But the echo said: stop us at your peril!

Mo Mowlam, the new Labour Secretary of State was the mainstay of the popular hope of deliverance. What she lacked in ability and aplomb was compensated for by tremendous energy as she visited Residents’ Groups, Orange Lodges, politicians, clergymen and the dogs in the street with the old, failed argument that we should all be reasonable.The Catholic nationalists were especially impressed, however; British Secretaries of State didn’t usually call around for tea and a chat and the anger of the Unionists at this newly-forged friendship seemed to clinch the Catholic belief that Mo would protect them.

In the event, Mowlam, in what the Catholics not unreasonably construed as an act of gross treachery, supported the Chief Constable of the RUC in sending in hundreds of armed police, expensively equipped for dealing with the violence which they initiated. With a viciousness equalling their violence of the previous year, they cleared the road for the Orangemen to go in triumph for the worship of their god. Ironically, the Catholic god had to do with a makeshift mass on the street because Mo and the RUC refused them permission to go to their church.

While sensible people with motor cars or the price of a boat or plane ticket were making their way across the Irish border or across the Channel, the fiery battalions of stone and petrol-bomb throwers were already retaliating. Within a few days the cost, in monetary terms, of the legacy of lunacy that motivated both the Orangemen and those opposing them was around £20 million which was within an ass’s whisper of the cost of the same religious outing in '95 and ’96.

Twenty million deducted from the shrunken educational budget or the grossly under-funded NHS was an obvious matter for concern. Last year the offensively arrogant Sir Patrick Mayhew decided that additional “security" costs should be defrayed from the health and educational budgets—on the apparent assumption that youthful petrol-bombers would stop and think about the effect of their actions on their education. The real fear, however, was what the aftermath of Drumcree would lead to.

Would the IRA up the ante? Would the loyalist paramilitaries officially return to the killing game? The newspapers said people were hoarding essential supplies: the empty streets told the general fear.

Sudden change
Suddenly the Orange Order announced that its members would avoid those areas where its marches carried the greatest threat to the peace and a week later the IRA announced a cease-fire. It would have been comforting to think that both these organisations, neither of which is renowned for putting peace and the concern for human life before the historical fictions on which each bases its absurd posturings, had suddenly moved into the twentieth century; unfortunately, their subsequent "explanations” undermined any such optimism.

Unlike the Tories, the response of the Blair government to the IRA cease-fire has been swift and positive. The last government squandered the opportunity created by the earlier cease-fire because Major’s slim majority in the House of Commons left him hostage to the power of the Unionist parties at Westminster—and the Unionists opposed the idea of all-inclusive peace negotiations. Now the Unionists have lost their veto in the Commons and the British and Irish governments have made it clear that, if the IRA cease-fire holds, not only can Sinn Fein join the peace talks when they resume in September, but that, if those talks fail to come up with an agreed settlement before May of next year, the two governments will put their own joint settlement proposals to the people of Northern Ireland in a referendum.

Problems
It appears like a no-win situation for the Unionists parties. Paisley, echoed by his understudy, Robinson, had already announced the intention of the so-called Democratic Unionist Party to pull out of the talks as has, also, the insignificant UK Unionist Party. The powerful Orange Order has asked the main Ulster Unionist Party to withdraw, too, but David Trimble, perhaps with a greater understanding of grassroots opinion, has indicated that the Ulster Unionists are likely to participate— though, as a public relations exercise they will probably insist that their public exchanges with Sinn Fein take the form of "proximity” talks.

The problem for the Unionists is the intention of both the British and the Irish governments to ensure that, one way or the other, there are peace proposals to put before the people of Northern Ireland in a referendum next year. With certainty it can be said that those proposals will not involve any constitutional, change in the status of Northern Ireland though it is likely that new cross-border bodies with considerable power will be included together with internal legislation to protect the rights of the nationalist minority under some form of "partnership” local assembly. Trimble can hardly be unaware that however numerous the opponents of such proposals may be, the majority of people want to seen an end to conflict and this is especially true of the loyalist fringe parties whose armed wings previously represented a serious threat to any solution opposed by the Unionist parties.

On the other hand, Trimble may be comforted by the fact that Adams and his political playmates in Sinn Fein must be equally aware of the desire among their supporters for a lasting resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict. Even more comfort might be derived from the realisation that Sinn Fein, in consenting to enter open-ended talks with the Unionist parties, the SDLP, the Alliance Party and the five smaller parties (all of whom accept as a negotiating principle that Northern Ireland should remain with the UK as long as a majority within the province wish so to remain) is compromising its traditional stand which has always been that only a majority on the island of Ireland can determine the constitutional fate of Northern Ireland.

Another grave problem for Sinn Fein and one that is likely to undermine the raison d’etre of the IRA’s justification of their historic right to use physical force is the intention of the Irish government to put any settlement agreed between the parties in Northern Ireland, or of the two governments, to the people of the Republic of Ireland in a referendum to be held the same day as the proposals are put in a referendum to the people of Northern Ireland. By indulging in a bit of political aerobatics Sinn Fein and the IRA were able to claim that the last all-Ireland election, in 1918 (before the British-imposed partition of the country) endorsed the right of Sinn Fein to employ the armed force of the IRA to wage war to establish an all-Ireland Republic.

This peculiar justification theory is important to the IRA/Sinn Fein for despite the fact that the opposition of the Catholic Church to their activities has bred a strong streak of anti-clericalism within the Republican movement, they do accept that there is a "moral" distinction between killing as the heirs of the “legitimate government” of the people and what they would see, and condemn, as mere political murder. The prospect of the removal of this eighty-year excuse must surely create a telling dilemma for ardent Catholics like Adams, McGuinness and many of their cohorts.

But, then, if the peace holds. Unionist, Nationalist and Republican politicians in Northern Ireland, whether or not they engage in the impending peace talks will be faced with dilemmas. Of course the consequences are relevant in that the killing may be ended or may start again but the issues behind the conflict are completely and utterly irrelevant to the real interests of the working class.

Richard Montague

50 Years Ago: The Growing Unemployment (1972)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present and future outlook of the working class is extremely gloomy—as gloomy as the murky London fog outside the writer’s window this Sunday afternoon. Prices are still in cloudland, whilst wages are falling rapidly. Unemployment engulfs a vast mass of the working class, whilst the movement for increased production (which in effect means both a lowering of wages and a lowering in the number of wage receivers) promises to further increase the workless army.

Looking at the matter casually, today it would appear that the main objective of the capitalist is increased production. A closer examination of the matter will easily dispose of this false idea.

What are the elements required to produce wealth today? Raw materials, machinery and labour-power of various degrees of skill. Is there any shortage of raw material? The earth is teeming with raw material, and the untapped resources are as relatively unlimited as the development of human ingenuity. Is there a shortage of machinery? There are numerous first-class manufactures of all classes of machinery working short-time for want of orders to execute. Is there a shortage of labour-power? The hundreds of thousands of unemployed of all degrees of skill searching anxiously, and so often, unavailingly for work can provide a complete answer to this question. Finally, the slowing down of production owing to overstocked markets is the overwhelming contradiction to the claims of the increased productionists.

The mere increase of production is not the objective of the capitalist; his main objective is the lowering of the cost of production.

The capitalist in competing for markets endeavours to undersell competitors by reducing the labour-time spent upon articles to a minimum (reducing the value of an article) and at the same time to obtain the maximum of surplus value by increasing the difference between what the worker receives and what he produces—increasing the amount of wealth a worker can produce and reducing the amount he receives, in other words, increasing the exploitation of the worker.

(From an unsigned article, “Hope Springs Infernal in the Workers Breast,” in the Socialist Standard February 1922.)

Joseph Chamberlain on the Functions of the Capitalist State. (1924)

From the April 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

   “From the moment that we accepted and entered upon the duties of office our most important duty, our most absorbing care, has-been not the party legislation, which occupies probably the largest part of our public discussion, but the development and the maintenance of that vast agriculture, manufacture, and commercial enterprise upon which the welfare and even the existence of our great population depends. .  .  .  .  All the great offices of state are occupied with commercial affairs. The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office are chiefly engaged in finding new markets and —in defending old ones. The War Office and the Admiralty are mostly occupied in preparations for the defence of those markets and for the protection of our commerce. The Boards of Agriculture and of Trade are entirely concerned with those two great branches of industry. Even the Education Department bases its claim to the public money upon the necessity of keeping our people well to the front in the commercial competition which they have to sustain; and the Home Office finds the largest scope for its activity in the protection of life and health and in the promotion of the comfort, of the vast army of manual labourers who are engaged in those industries. Therefore it is not too much to say that commerce is the greatest of all political interests and that that Government deserves most the popular approval which does most to increase our trade and to settle it on a firm foundation.”

(From a speech to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, 1896. Quoted by L. S. Woolf in Empire and Commerce in Africa, p. 7.)

Why Capitalism is Decadent (1997)

From the February 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists refuse to be taken in by the assertions that capitalism is not only the most viable economic system possible but that it also represents continuous progress. After all, the evidence to the contrary is everywhere — inner-city nightmarish conditions, beggars in the streets, homelessness, increasing violence and drug abuse. . . .  and, of course, to deal with this 'progress', more police officers!

For most of the politicians, economists and historians this century, “the future” has been equated with progress. Even those who have never expressed a belief in the miraculous have invariably claimed that there has never been any reason to think that the future will bring anything other than development and advancement in the overall condition of the human species. While many have recognised that capitalism is not perfect, and have thus spent time trying to perfect it, they have never seriously countenanced an alternative to it because none seemed necessary or relevant. So long as capitalism is defended and emerges victorious, they have argued, humankind will prosper; thus to defend capitalism is to support progress. One historian—Francis Fukuyama—was so confident of the invincibility of capitalism as a progressive social system that a few years ago he pronounced that history had ended with the triumph of the world market and the rise of bourgeois liberal democracy, claiming that minor difficulties notwithstanding, human progress was assured.

While such an attitude has been the prevailing establishment view it has not always been held quite so enthusiastically by the rest of the population. It is, after all, the working class majority in society who have most direct contact with—and experience of—the system's inadequacies, being a subject class with little or no economic power. Today, the ruling class view of progress has less resonance among the working class the world over than perhaps ever before. Recent opinion polls in ‘advanced’ states like Britain have suggested that 60 per cent and more of the population now believe that the kind of world today’s children will inherit will be worse than their own generation inherited, apparently the highest number to take this view since records began. It is a view replicated in a great many industrialised countries let alone in the less developed ones and in the ‘Third World', where meaningful progress for the majority has long been a sick joke indeed.

Is progress still possible?
For our part as we watch the twentieth century draw to a close, socialists do not argue that progress is assured or that, contrariwise, we are all doomed. Socialists contend that lasting progress is possible for humankind—but only under certain conditions. These conditions do not appertain at the moment and most people are right to recognise this and right to question the traditional ruling class viewpoint they have been fed. They are right because we are no longer living in a society that is progressive in any real sense, but one that is reactionary or decadent.

In using the term ‘decadent' to describe modern society some explanation is necessary. Standard dictionary references to this term elicit the following definitions: “a state of decay”, “lacking in physical and moral vigour”, and “decline—especially in sexual morality”. To those most familiar with the word it probably conjures up visions of a society resembling something out of the Borgias or the hit musical set in 1920's Weimar Germany, Cabaret. In popular usage decadence, sexual licentiousness and moral decline are synonymous. For our purposes the wider definition of decadence being taken to refer to something in a state of decay, and existing without vigour, is the most useful.

For instance, over many decades—in fact about 100 years—socialists have argued that the type of society we live in today is decadent. Indeed, it is because we think that capitalism is decadent that we are politically organised to help bring about its overthrow. But that does not necessarily mean we contend that capitalism is drowning in an ocean of sexual immorality. Instead, we say capitalism is decadent because as a way of organising human affairs it is now outdated or obsolete.

To understand this it is necessary to briefly examine the socialist view of historical development, derived in the main from the pioneering work of the early socialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For without an understanding of the socialist view of social change it is impossible to fully comprehend why we say that capitalism is a decadent social system.

The key to history
During the last century Marx and Engels developed what is usually termed their Materialist Conception of History, an analytical tool which has since been used by socialists to explain historical events and social changes. 'The basis of Marx and Engels’ contention—derived from an investigation of past social changes and the forces that motivated them—was that society is not basically a static entity, changing only superficially, but is periodically subject to dynamic change and development. These changes are characterised chiefly by alterations in the way in which humans organise themselves to get what they need to live—food, clothing, housing, entertainment and so on.

The chattel slave society of Ancient Rome and the feudal society of the Middle Ages were organised on a very different basis to modern capitalist society, for example. Whereas once the dominant form of social organisation was for slaves to be physically owned and compelled to work for the benefit of their masters—often in appalling conditions—the inefficiency of this arrangement led at a later stage in human history to the development of feudalism, where feudal serfs worked part of the week for their own upkeep and livelihood and the rest for the feudal lord. Today we have capitalist society where there is still a class division between two main classes, the difference being that now the majority subject class ‘freely' sells its ability to work on a market in return for wages and salaries in order to live. Like in the other private property systems of Ancient society or feudalism, this subject class is still exploited by a dominant and unproductive class—in this case, the capitalists. However, the nature of social organisation has clearly changed.

Utilising Marx’s analysis, socialists contend that the motive force for such changes in society are the material forces of production. These chiefly consist of the instruments of production themselves (tools, machines, etc.) and the productive skills and knowledge at society’s disposal. In the last analysis, it is technological change which periodically revolutionises the productive skills and tools of society as humankind attempts to increase its power over production. But it is important to stress that this theory is not mere technological determinism—while technological change does tend to ultimately lead to major social change, it does not do so automatically, since humans make history. Any wider social change made necessary by technological development will only come about when struggled for by a group of humans—usually a new social class with a unique relationship to the means of living. Indeed, it is precisely the social grouping which comes to play the key organising role for the new productive methods as these methods are transformed by technological development, that will tend to emerge as the new dominant class in society. This grouping will not achieve dominance automatically and will have to struggle for this position by becoming conscious of its own interests and by then capturing political power from the old dominant class.

We argue that it is this scenario which broadly explains historical change through various social epochs. It explains, for instance, the demise of feudalism and the rise of the capitalist class and capitalist relations of production, and similarly it can be used to chart the decline of capitalism and the rise of the forces in society that have a class interest in its abolition and in the establishment of socialism.

Inventing history

The conditions which gave rise from the seventeenth century or so onwards to the capitalist mode of production—based on wage labour, market exchange and capital accumulation—have now clearly changed in an important way. This is because the role of the dominant class in society—the capitalists—has significantly altered. When the capitalist class emerged as the ruling class in society it was because they originally played a key technical role in the rise of the market economy as it superseded feudalism. Most people arc taught at school the stories of inventors and entrepreneurs such as Arkwright, Watt and others who played such a notable part in the development of the Industrial Revolution. In fact the view of the capitalist class as being the key innovators and inventors in society still persists to a degree, and was used by Margaret Thatcher among others as a form of modern-day justification for the free market It is, however, a view which is no longer to any significant extent supported by reality. Today, very few indeed of the richest men and women in the world have invented or introduced anything to hasten productive development. For every capitalist like Bill Gates of Microsoft there are many times more like the Duke of Westminster, George Soros or the Sultan of Brunei, who only work—if at all—at overseeing their finances.

This was a phenomenon noted in a work which was in many ways a fine application of the Materialist Conception of History, where Friedrich Engels argued in his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that the transformation of industry and the means of distribution into large joint-stock companies, trusts and state property demonstrated the increasing irrelevance of the capitalist class regarding the management and development of society’s productive forces. He argued from the perspective of the late nineteenth century that as capitalism takes hold:

   "All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the stock exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. ”

In other words, as capitalism takes root, the more isolated and independent nature of human activity in feudalism is replaced by a huge network of socially interconnected production, initially spurred on by a class of entrepreneurs, but then sustained by the mass of the population who come to operate capitalist society from top to bottom, even performing the tasks that the capitalists once did themselves. The capitalist class achieve an economically privileged position in society, and do not have to work or directly involve themselves in the productive process any longer. Hence the key organisational role in society clearly passes from the class of capitalists to the wage and salary earning working class who create all the wealth, including the large part of it appropriated by the capitalists for their own purposes.

As capitalism develops in this way its fundamental contradiction becomes ever more apparent—a socially operated and highly interconnected means of living based on the collective effort of the majority on the one hand, private ownership of this means of living by a tiny parasitic minority on the other. Socialists argue that this fundamental contradiction of capitalism, from which much else follows, can only be solved by the replacement of the capitalist class’s private monopoly of the means of production and distribution by collective ownership by society as a whole—socialism.

(To be continued)

Dave Perrin

Exhibition Review: Robots (2018)

Exhibition Review from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some of the earliest objects that could be considered as robots were constructed by the catholic church from around 1500. They were clockwork machines that, for instance, showed Jesus on the cross shedding drops of wooden blood. Most people had no idea how they worked and regarded them as being based on magic. Thus the machines demonstrated the power and authority of the church.

So begins an exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, on until the middle of April, which covers robots from the early days to the present and even the future. In medieval times anatomists described the human body as a complex machine, while clockwork models were used to show the movements of heavenly bodies. Later, automatons were built that performed actions such as dancing, and these enjoyed a golden age in the eighteenth century.

But it was in the last century that robots began to come into their own, with electric batteries used rather than clockwork. There is a section on cinematic representation of robots, including a replica of Maria from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, which is described as ‘the first blockbuster robot’. Industrial robots began to be used in factories from the 1960s, to carry out specific repetitive tasks, and for safety reasons they could not work with people.

There has been much technical progress in recent years, some of it exemplified in the displays. For instance, one company makes 3D-printed bionic hands that can be used not just by robots but also by people with amputations. Kaspar (developed at the University of Hertfordshire) can help children on the autism spectrum, for instance to read facial expressions and to feel less intimidated. Other examples included in the display are Baxter and YuMi, both of which can work alongside people. All this raises the problem of robots displacing human workers: a recent report (Guardian, 29 January) argues that up to a quarter of jobs in the northern UK could be replaced by robots by 2030, with Mansfield being the worst hit.

A question posed at the end of the exhibition we can lead to the reader to ponder: should robots be gender-neutral? 

Paul Bennett

Obituary: Bill Williams (1997)

Obituary from the February 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bill joined the old Palmers Green branch in 1953, having moved to London from north Wales. From an early age he had been interested in science and technology, building his own reflecting telescope and even importing magazines on rocket technology from the USA during the Second World War!

He had been plagued by ill-health for most of his life, due to TB and aggravated by smoking, starting the habit years before it had been universally recognised as potentially dangerous. Although this limited his physical activity, as a car-owner he was able to act as "wheels" for branch members to carry out activities in the 50s and 60s.

His main profession was as a draughtsman in the Civil Service and he was active as a member in their union, DATA. It was at this time that, because of his gaunt appearance, he was known as "The Thin Man".

He was keenly interested in the UFO phenomenon and related subjects, but managed to keep his feet firmly on the ground as far as his materialist understanding of the world was concerned. During the 50s and 60s he took an active part in the theoretical investigation of crisis theory in political economy and in studying the emergence of civilisations in the ancient Near East. As far as he was able Bill was an active member of the branch, and his knowledge of scientific and technological developments was of much value in branch discussions and meetings.

When eventually his health prevented him from working, he was able to escape from wage slavery, in so far as not being beholden to an employer. This situation left him with a modest income. Even by the limitations imposed by capitalism Bill could not have been said to have lived his life to the full, choosing an abstemious existence rather than living for the day. He lived the last 20 years of his life with only one lung and had to be extremely careful about not infecting his remaining one. He was, however, able to attend the branch up to a few weeks before his death.

Julian Vein

Letters: Many tragic aspects of SLP history (1997)

Letters to the Editors from the February 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many tragic aspects of SLP history

Dear Editors,

In reviewing the TV series 1914-18, DAP asserts that the Socialist Labour Party "wavered before coming out against the conflict” (Socialist Standard, December). I presume by Socialist Labour Party DAP means those in the SDF who broke away in 1903 in opposition to Hyndman’s reformism, chauvinism and authoritarianism rather than the American organisation headed by DeLeon. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can find no evidence to support DAP's allegation. Indeed, the SLP's paper The Socialist for September 1914 stated that the SLP was neither pro-British nor pro-German and that its enemy was the capitalists. As the slaughter progressed, a number of SLPers found themselves behind bars for opposing the war, while the police destroyed the SLP's printing press.

There were many tragic aspects to the SLP's history but its position on WWI was not one of them. What was tragic in my view was the failure of those who broke away from the SDF in 1903 to unite with those who broke away in 1904 for much the same reasons. True enough there were differences—the SLP emphasised the industrial struggle while the SPGB emphasised the political. But there were a host of similarities— opposition to reformism, the need for a democratic organisation, making and educating Socialists.

Tragic too was the hypnotic effect of Bolshevism on many SLPers which resulted in their joining the Communist Party where they quickly came under the iron rule of those who slavishly implemented the line laid down by Moscow. However, SLPers did make some important contributions to Marxist theory in particular the work of William Paul and Len Cotton on the state.

The Socialist Party is right to criticise any other organisation calling itself Socialist but if it does so on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations it risks falling into the trap of using the type of methods its opponents, particularly Leninists, use against it.

Terry Liddle 

London SE9

Reply:
The review did not make "unsubstantiated allegations" about the SLP. It stated that the SLP "wavered" before fully coming out against the war, which meant that the only political organisation to "unequivocally" oppose the war was the Socialist Party. This is not a loose or unsubstantiated allegation—it is a matter of historical record, noted with dismay by us at the time and chronicled by historians since.

The Socialist in the early months of the war contained a number of contradictory statements which reflected the different political positions held by members of the SLP, both pro- and anti-war. One section of the SLP membership looked favourably on the idea of a war of “national defence" against German militarism. This was the view expressed both by leading SLPer Arthur MacManus and by the then editor of The Socialist, Johnny Muir. The resultant doubts about the SLP's exact position on the war were expressed by Muir himself in the December 1914 issue of the paper where he wrote about the two factions in his party:

   "I have not been able to find out what support each side has, and consequently I cannot say definitely what the official attitude of the Party is."

We may add that both before the conflict and during it the SLP worked with pro-capitalist organisations for temporary purposes e g. in anti-militarism campaigns. Eventually the SLP allied itself with elements in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and British Socialist Party (BSP) who opposed the war but nevertheless supported state-run capitalism.

This was a disastrous policy which played no small part in encouraging the "hypnotic" politics of Bolshevism Terry Liddle refers to. The other factor in this was the leadership-orientated, anti-democratic nature of the SLP, a characteristic of course shared by the SLP’s American partner body of the same name as well as by the Russian Bolsheviks themselves. Indeed, the very idea that the SLP—like the SPGB—recognised "the need for democratic organisation" is at variance with any serious knowledge of that organisation. The SLP was a highly authoritarian body like its US counterpart and Terry Liddle would do well to read the rule books of either if he doubts this. Because of factors like these it was no surprise to us that the SLP was split asunder in 1920 when a large portion of its membership left to found the Communist Party of Great Britain along with members of organisations like the ILP, BSP and others that the SLP had been courting for years.

Editors.

What about the electorate?

Dear Editors,

While in agreement with R. Montague's article in the November issue of the Socialist Standard in which he criticises the role of the media in contemporary society, he fails to mention the recipient of media propaganda, i.e., the electorate. and the influence which it in turn has upon society.

Take, for example, the current demise of socialism within the Labour Party. Some people would argue that it is all the fault of the leadership; but the Labour Party can only be the kind of party that public opinion will allow it to be; and public opinion is, for the most part, determined by the media. The Labour Party knows full that if it started to espouse socialism between now and the next election. it would have no chance of being elected, because the media has succeeded in turning socialism into a dirty word and/ or an anachronism.

Furthermore, there seems to be a lack of awareness amongst the electorate that when they watch television news what they are in fact watching is not merely news but propaganda, propaganda being the discriminating use of information, which is then presented in such a way as to make it seem acceptable or unacceptable. depending upon the mode of presentation. Propaganda is, of course, something that is not confined merely to communist or Islamic countries, but is universal, and is most prevalent among those societies which have the largest number of television channels, radio stations and newspapers (the bourgeoisie has a total monopoly of the broadcasting media, the most powerful of the media institutions, and a virtual monopoly of the press).

I would suggest that the Socialist Standard continues to spend more time attacking the power of the media (as does R. Montague’s article) and less time in criticising politicians in general. since there is little doubt that those famous faces we see on our television screens at news-time, plus of course all those faceless backroom people. those television producers. editors and directors who prepare news programmes, have far more influence on the minds of the electorate than do their elected representatives in Parliament.

E. Shepherd

Manchester

Mass debating with barmy Bernie (1997)

The TV Review column from the February 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Usually there is much competition for the dubious privilege of which programme has plumbed the lowest depths of inanity and humbug in the period before this column goes to press. Last month there was no contest. Not even Richard and Judy or Ricki Lake came close to matching the televisual disgrace which masqueraded as informed debate under the title of The Monarchy: The Nation Decides (ITV, 7 January).

Billed as the biggest exercise in democracy ever seen on British television, this programme told us all we need to know about the nature of democracy that exists in capitalist society. Virtually every aspect of it, from the so-called "debate” format, to the paucity of the views expressed by the invited panellists through to the uncontrolled (and allegedly rigged) telephone poll, went to demonstrate that democracy in capitalism is largely sham democracy.

Nothing more than a soundbite was allowed, most of the debate was taken up with whether the Royal family are "value for money" (whatever that means) and as Roy Greenslade explained in the following day's Guardian, the audience of 3,000 had been whipped up into a near hysterical frenzy before the show so that by when the 'debate' actually started it resembled little more than a bear garden.

Large sections of the audience, invited from several cities around Britain, simply shouted, heckled and cat-called on a mass basis for the entire duration of the programme. This meant that the little debate that would have been possible was rendered useless—and clearly by the design of Carlton TV who commissioned and ran the whole thing.

In a sense it was understandable that the audience—or a least a sizeable enough part of it—should have behaved in such a way. It was probably the best chance they had of stemming the tide of verbal diarrhoea emanating from the panellists. Nonetheless, some seeped through and the stench was truly repellent

Particularly odious, as a representative of the monarchists, was author Frederick Forsyth. Though coherent in an entirely tangential manner, Forsyth’s bad-tempered performance was sufficient to bring a whole host of rather unkind epithets to even the most considerate reviewer’s mind—like 'arrogant', ‘bumptious’ and ’surly’, these being the least descriptive but at the same time those least likely to result in a libel action. Forsyth’s main defence of the royals was that they are an economic bonus for Britain. To echo this point, he shouted at his hecklers “Your jobs are at stake!," claiming that any expenditure on the Royal Family is easily outweighed (he even had some figures) by the tourist revenue they create every year. It was possible to imagine the millions of rich tea-towel makers and commemorative mug engravers across the length and breadth of the country nodding sagely in approval. The suggestion that the multinationals and big-time capitalists were the real beneficiaries of all this (if there are any at all) was not considered. The programme producers had neither the time nor inclination to let anyone string more than two sentences together and a coherent reply to this nonsense, if any had been forthcoming, would have been near impossible.

Arise, Sir Bernie

One panellist smartly retorted that Forsyth would be better off sticking to writing Fiction, something he evidently knows a bit about, but what poor old Bernie Grant is good for is anybody's guess. A knighthood perhaps, or an early peerage. Never a stranger to controversy, one might have anticipated that Grant’s presence on the panel was guaranteed to set the cat amongst the pigeons. But, no. Bernie knows which side his bread is buttered on and launched into a sycophantic eulogy of the Queen that would have put Dame Vera Lynn to shame. Elizabeth was a marvellous head of the Commonwealth, he claimed, and did an awful lot to help all the poor black people in Africa.

It was obviously beyond Bernie’s comprehension that the Queen and her like, and the system they uphold, is the reason for their poverty and misery in the first place. But never mind, she's so gracious and has such a lovely warm smile as she walks among the malnourished. Well, she can continue to smile very big smiles indeed with suckers like Bernie Grant to do her bidding for her.

Most of those who plucked up the courage to oppose the monarchy, including those who rang in, did so with the proviso that they wanted a nice, respectable Head of State—a leader to look up to. Bizarrely enough, Princess Anne was the most popular choice followed by monied clown and failed balloonist Richard Branson. As such, the legions of republicans proved themselves little better than the raving monarchists. But then again, why should we expect them to be any different? These are, after all, people who vote for the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens and are therefore fully tuned in to what can be expected in an inherently hierarchical, class-ridden and exploitative system like capitalism.

Even if Carlton had provided for a proper debate format, it would have been to no great effect. For does anyone still expect serious arguments for social equality from such people and their elected representatives? Frankly, it is no more likely to come from them than it is from the Duke of Edinburgh. and if this dreadful programme had even one little thing to commend it, it must have been the obviousness of that. 

Dave Perrin

Sophisticated critical perspectives (1997)

Theatre Review from the February 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Art by Yasmina Reza (Wyndham's Theatre)

Art is an odd play. Some critics see it as a populist attack on modern art; others believe it to be about friendship. It runs for barely 90 minutes and it is packing them in—queues every night for returned tickets. When I called for tickets the clerk at the booking office told me—with a mixture of pride and of resignation born of hard work—”It's the hottest ticket in town."

The plot is simply stated. Serge buys an abstract painting for about £20,000. His friend, Marc, is uncomprehending. To Marc the canvas is but a white rectangle—although he does admit that he can see some whitish diagonals and some pinkish dots. But what can Serge see in it? Marc is baffled. He thought he knew Serge, and now this. He feels undermined—betrayed perhaps. In the event pushed by Serge into saying that he likes it. he explodes and calls it “shit". Yvan. a mutual friend, accommodating by nature, is brought in to mediate. But far from successfully resolving the conflict, he is unwillingly drawn into the drama. Three friends soon become three men at odds with one another.

At the end the audience was agog. I've rarely heard so much animated conversation at the end of a play; so many different opinions wafting on the air. Retiring for a pizza we talked for longer than the play had run. What did it all mean? All four of us had seen it differently, and had different points of view. As we chatted I found it easy to understand why the critics and the audience had been so divided. What had been presented was capable of many interpretations, so that the opinions of individual members of the audience probably revealed more about them and their particular knowledge and prejudices than about what they had seen and heard.

I was reminded of similar discussions about politics. Talk to folk about politics and most people will retain some variant of the conventional opinions offered in the Sun, Mail or Telegraph. etc. Only a few people, and conspicuously members of the Socialist Party, are able to see beyond the obvious to deeper levels of reality. Thus socialists see politics in terms of historical materialism and class conflict based on ownership of the means of production and exchange. And here, in reacting to what they had seen on stage, people were bringing a similar range of insights to bear; ranging from the kind of crude populist antagonism found in the popular press to sophisticated critical perspectives and insights.

I guess there must have been a lot of quasi-Sun readers in the audience. The biggest cheer of the evening greeted Yvan’s admission that, yes, he too thought the picture was “shit". But Yvan was clearly lying. His was a response born out of pain and a desire to hurt Serge. Not that many in the audience seemed to care, even if they understood. They laughed uproariously at Serge's plight. I confess to feeling very uncomfortable when people sitting close to me find the pain of characters on stage a matter for amusement. We smile smugly at the thought that it was our primitive ancestors who cheered at public executions, but you don't have to sit long in theatres and cinemas to realise how much capitalism has brutalised people's sensitivities. On such occasions I am reminded of Orwell’s description of the progress (sic) of capitalism: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.’’

Early in the play Serge observes to Marc “You have to understand the rules (of modern art) before you can make an informed comment." Socialists know this to be "true" of the world of economics and politics. You have to go beyond the immediate, the self-evident, if you are going to get any kind of purchase on how society works. What people need if they are to understand their everyday lives is a set of analytical tools— based on historical materialism, the labour theory of value, and the class struggle. A similar set of tools seems necessary if we are to understand art. The ideological apparatus of capitalism—including the so-called education system, newspapers, public service (ho, ho) broadcasting, and the other media—is intent on not providing such explanatory frameworks. The reaction of many in the audience to Art is one measure of its success.

Michael Gill

50 Years Ago: Labour Government, Strikes and Arbitration (1997)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The road haulage strike, which lasted for some ten days in the early part of January, brought out clearly the false position of the Labour Government and the impracticability of its policy.

Having undertaken the running of the capitalist system, the Labour Government is finding that it has got to do it in the only way it can be done. Capitalism will only work if the Capitalists can see the prospect of making a profit, so, in disregard of years of vaguely anti-capitalist propaganda, the Labour Government has had to come out in support of the "profit motive". Having claimed it would raise wages, it urges the unions not to make wage claims, lest profits should all be swallowed up. It declared for shorter hours, but now says the time is inopportune. It condemned the use of troops in strikes, and has twice used them since it came to power. It declared that under Labour Government strikes were unnecessary because “impartial arbitration" would give all the worker wanted, but has repeatedly seen the workers defying unsatisfactory arbitration awards.

(From editorial. Socialist Standard, February 1947)