Fairy tales (1991)

Book Review from the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Does God Exist? and What is the Bible?. By Carl Lofmark (Rationalist Press Association)

Commendably clear and straightforward, these two small books are a thorough demolition job on the whole idea of god and the bible as a store of wisdom. For some, this kind of criticism is beyond the pale. But Lofmark brings out the absurdities and dangers of religious belief. For socialists these books provide valuable ammunition in the struggle against the ideology of religion which is still the “opium of the people".

Like many other humanists. Lofmark accepts the dogma that overpopulation “causes poverty and war and now threatens our world with ecological disaster". This is somewhat ironic as it was an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, who became famous for proposing the idea that population growth tended to exceed the increase in food supply. The result, he claimed, was a periodic check in population growth by famine, disease and war. This remains a popular apology for capitalism. Yet how is it that in every country a privileged minority manage to escape the curse of poverty?

There exists the means for producing enough to satisfy the needs of the world’s population. Is it then more rational to lay the blame at the feet of the poor masses who cannot afford enough food, or with the system of production? Similarly with the environment and war. Is it more reasonable to say that the cause of these problems is to be found in population size or in a competitive world economic system bent on reducing costs and maximising profits?

Lew Higgins

Racism debunked (1991)

Book Review from the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Mismeasure of Man. By Stephen Jay Gould. Pelican.

If intellectual dishonesty was a crime most of the 19th century racist scientists would he put on trial today. What they did was to concentrate on oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, and women—and come up with evidence claiming to show that they were biologically inferior and so deserving of their inferior status. In this they confirmed existing prejudices and allowed those who held them to believe that these had a scientific basis. It was the worst intellectual crime of the century.

This sordid history has been documented by Stephen Jay Gould in this excellent book where he shows that all the leading 19th century biologists followed the conventional view that blacks were inferior to whites. The lead was given in the 18th century by Linnaeus himself, the man who laid the basis for the classification of all living things which is still used today, and by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Linnaeus distinguished between a homo sapiens afer (the African black) "ruled by caprice"and a homo sapiens europaeus "ruled by customs". Hume wrote: "I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men . . . to be naturally inferior to whites".

Cuvier, one of the pioneers of both geology and palaeontology as well as of comparative anatomy, considered Africans to be “the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere great enough to arrive at regular government”. Even Darwin took it for granted that Negroes and Australians (aborigines) were biologically inferior to “Caucasians (whites).

Both sides in the pre-Darwin debate amongst Creationists about the origin of different human races— monogenism (which held that all humans were descended from a single Adam) and polygenism (which held that the different human races were descended from different Adams)—argued, on different grounds, that blacks were inferior to whites. The monogenists said that races were the product of a degeneration from the perfect humans of the Garden of Eden, the blacks having degenerated more than the whites. The polygenists such as the leading American naturalist of his day Louis Agassiz said that blacks were a separate, inferior biological species to whites who were not entitled to share in the “Equality of Man".

Scientific evidence to back up these prejudices was provided by craniometry which was the leading numerical biological science of the 19th century. Those who practised it believed that, by measuring skulls, they could establish intelligence. Their findings invariably claimed to show that blacks (and women) were inferior.

Gould shows that this continued into the 20th century when craniometry was replaced by psychological testing as a way of supposedly measuring intelligence. Both were based on the fallacy that intelligence was some measurable thing located in the brain which allowed people to be graded into a single series. Like craniometry, IQ testing came to the conclusion that the poor, blacks and women were inferior because of their biologically-determined mental inferiority.

Gould re-examined the data of some of these scientists and found their evidence to be invalid. Sometimes it was simply faked, but in most cases it had been unconsciously biased by acceptance of the prejudices of the time. His conclusion is a devastating rejection of the claims of all forms of biological determinism:

   The classical arguments of biological determinism fail because the features they invoke to make distinctions among groups are usually the products of cultural evolution. Detcrminists did seek evidence in anatomical traits built by biological, not cultural, evolution. But, in so doing, they tried to use anatomy for making inferences about capacities and behaviors that they linked to anatomy and we regard as engendered by culture . . . We now believe that different attitudes and styles of thought among human groups are usually the non-genetic products of cultural evolution. In short, the biological basis of human uniqueness leads us to reject biological determinism. Our large brain is the biological foundation of intelligence: intelligence is the ground of culture: and cultural transmission builds a new mode of evolution more effective than Darwinian processes in its limited realm—the “inheritance" and modification of learned behaviour.

 Racism, as a variety of biological determinism, has no basis in biology or any other physical science. It also denies. as we point out in our pamphlet on Racism, the real division of capitalist society— class division—and the urgent need for workers everywhere to cooperate to end capitalism. Racism is an issue which the working class must deal with as an obstacle to their progress to a sane, free, humane social system.

Michael Ghebre

Saving time—for what? (1992)

Illustration by Peter Rigg.

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Saving time" is an expression we hear all around us in our daily lives; in our jobs, driving to work rather than waiting for public transport, writing out shopping lists during the coffee break, running to the shops, popping in here and there on the way, not forgetting driving the children to school and, if you’re lucky, carrying your mobile telephone. All this saves time—but for what?

Travelling recently on a coach journey that used to take at least eight hours and made three stops for refreshments, we had waitress service instead. Once the coach has left London the waitress sets to work, collecting orders for refreshments and snacks from 46 passengers all in one sweep to save time. Can you imagine all the activity going on in the mini-kitchen about three feet square? When your drink arrives you have to perform a balancing act to drink it, for by now the coach is tearing along the motorway doing at least seventy mph. So, once the drinks are down, a look around for—you’ve guessed it—the toilets! Now, most passengers need to make at least one visit during such a journey; with all the drinks flowing freely it would take a super-man-woman to miss this one out. So to the "loo" aboard this "luxury" coach, well that is what it says on the ticket, and this begins a real adventure. Is it free, is it available, will it still be available when I get there? Once at the door a sigh of relief, but on opening the door, one is confronted with a space so small you almost have to reverse to get in. The toilet paper rolls around on the floor beside the hand towels, and the wash hand bowl is about as big as a yoghurt carton. And all this luxury for the convenience of 46 passengers and crew! The all-important time-saving here is the stopping periods previously made to "water" the passengers

Speeding past

What is also interesting while travelling on this "luxury” coach and gazing out of the windows is the hustle and bustle going on outside. Lorries and cars speed past, carrying in many instances the same goods from and to all parts of the country. And company sales representatives duplicating each other, in the competitive struggle for sales. What a crazy system; they’re trying to save time, dodging behind each other to save fuel, often transporting goods that need not be moved in the first place . . . meanwhile on the coach a change of drivers takes place without the coach stopping.

Who benefits from all this saving time? The workers or the employer? If the workers save enough time, they will be found more work to do. More profits will be enjoyed by the employers, whilst many workers will be so tired they will mostly just fall asleep until their next shift. Squeezing a bit more out of the worker’s day and increasing output greatly benefits the profit-seekers, and the pressure by the employer to seek increased productivity is never-ending.

How many of these drivers who regularly ply their way through the blue haze of exhaust, brake and tyre pollution will die from illnesses related to their employment? Lung cancer, respiratory failure and stress are all bound up with the combination of lack of exercise, volume of traffic, bad weather, missed meals, threat of breakdown, etc. Quite a reward for being "King of the Road"!

How much longer are we workers going to put up with this? Can you picture a world without these pressures? Can you imagine a society in which we can enjoy our children, enjoy travelling in comfort and stop worrying about saving time? A society with time to enjoy this beautiful world before it is destroyed by this time-saving lunacy.

Shelf-life

Food additives, preservatives and flavour enhancers are all used to promote sales growth, savings on ingredients and to give a longer shelf-life which mean that the products can be transported further, and therefore a larger potential market is available to the manufacturer.

Along with carcinogenic colourants and preservatives and organic foods polluted by acid rain, there is also another problem we all face: the deliberate irradiation of food, itself a side-effect of nuclear development. The adulteration is never-ending, and all because profit is the driving force. Come on fellow-workers, enough is enough. Let us replace this system which gives rise to such anti-social but seemingly "acceptable" behaviour.

We can establish a socialist society which will end all of this drive to adulterate, this drive to pressure us to save time, so that a few make more profit. With the means of living owned and democratically controlled by the whole of the community, it will be a classless society in which exploitation and oppression of man by man, woman by woman, man by woman and woman by man will be abolished.

The coach journey ended . . .  it was an experience to be learnt from . . . and to be thankful it was over, safely.

S. Buchanan

50 Years Ago: The Rise and Fall of Mussolini (1993)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

One myth about Mussolini, still held by many who denounce him, is that he was the creator of modern Italy, the inspired and dynamic leader who moulded events to his will and took power by a brilliant and forcible “march on Rome" in October 1922. Mr. Bernard Shaw is an outstanding believer in the "great man" myth. If it were true that the great man could so mould events to his will, why the undignified and craven exit from power? Mussolini’s path to power was not through any bold and godlike masterstroke, but through the connivance and desire of those who had control of the political machine in Italy in 1922. Is it not related how General Badoglio offered at the time to "scatter this Blackshirt rabble with a whiff of grapeshot", only to be ordered by the King of Italy to let the rabble take office? 

[From article in Socialist Standard, August 1943.]

Sting in the Tail: Time to think (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time to think

At the last count there were 171,434 registered charities in this country. Most of these charities are engaged in trying to alleviate the plight of the poor.

One of these charities recently sent out a leaflet appealing for funds. It is called Actionaid. Like all of the other charities, it is a futile organisation. It believes World Hunger can can be solved by workers sending a pittance to save a child in "the developing world".

The facts it quotes are heartbreaking. "Tomorrow 40,000 children will die in the developing world." There is a photograph of a beautiful little kid called Sanu and the chilling information that "every two seconds a child like Sanu dies in the developing world."

What a heartless brutal system. All of these children dying of malnutrition and poverty-related diseases could lead useful worthwhile lives if we got rid of capitalism and brought about socialism.

Think about it. It will take you about 80 seconds to read this article. In the same time another 40 children will have died needlessly.

Come and join us

The Bishop of Birmingham, Mark Tranter, complains that market reforms have made the NHS a "system in distress":

   "The patient is reduced to the status of a unit of consumption and exchange. That, in the Christian view, must be wrong" (Independent, 4 July).

Has he not noticed that capitalism reduces just about everything we need to this same status? And does he think it equally wrong that food, clothing and shelter should be subject to the market? After all, they are as essential to our wellbeing as is health care.

To be consistent the Bish should be coming out against the market in its entirety and not just its application to one of the necessities of life.

Loadsamoney (1)

"Art for Art’s sake", was a cry of the aesthete in the last century. It wasn’t true then, but it is even less valid in the crass, commercial world of today.

Commenting on the career of the film actor Jack Nicholson, the Observer (10 July) recalled the words of the head of Columbia Studios in Hollywood on learning of the financial success of the film Easy Rider:

 "I don’t know what the fuck it’s about, but it’s going to make us a fuck of a lot of money."

Films, like novels and other "artistic" creations are mere commodities in the mad market system that is capitalism. Like everything else they are produced for profit, not for their own sake.

Loadsamoney (2)

While workers of Railtrack engage in a bitter struggle for a few pounds a week, it is worth nothing the values put on human efforts by the market place.

Reporting on the financial bonanza of one speculator in the Anglia TV takeover, the Observer (10 July) gave an indication of the loot enjoyed by the owning class:

   "The shares were bought by Lord Archer’s friend shortly before the £292 million takeover bid from MAI last January. The deal netted a profit of £80,000 when the shares were sold a few days after the bid was announced on 18 January. The buyer did not even need to pay for the shares - just collected the profit."

Toiling on their rest days, working overtime and taking home about £200 a week to keep a family, signalworkers may reflect that a system that allows some parasite, with influential friends, to pocket £80,000 with just one phone call makes a mockery of the capitalist apologists’ claim that this system rewards hard work.

The sad warriors

When it suits them the Labour Party like to project the image of being the Party of Peace. At election times they con voters into the belief that they are less militaristic than their Tory counterparts.

The recent threat of closure of the Rosyth Naval Dockyards revealed them in a different light. They spoke patriotically about the Tories threatening the defence of Britain. The threat of less battleships filled them with nationalistic dread.

How vigorously they have pursued this cynical vote-catching stance (there were thousands of jobs - and votes - at stake) can be seen by the letter in the Guardian (19 July) written by Dr David Clark MP, Shadow Defence Secretary.

Replying to the accusation that he had been absent from the House of Commons when defence cuts were announced, he defended himself on the grounds he was attending his daughter’s graduation ceremony and stated:

   "After all my daughter’s graduation ceremony cannot be repeated - but sadly, there will be many more commons statements on defence cuts."

Horror of horrors - there may be more defence cuts by those wicked Tories, hence the sabre-rattling lickspittle’s use of the term "sadly"!

Different class

The TV programme recalling the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914 was an interesting account of the eve of World War One, but even better was Diary of a Debutante, shown the same evening, in which an upper-crust young woman described her social whirl during that same June.

And what a whirl! Ascot, Henley, the Royal Horse Show, lunch with daddy at the Cavalry Club, afternoon teas by the river and grand balls in the evenings.

There were problems, though. She constantly fretted about what to wear, and on one occasion simply couldn’t find a new dress to match her hat, but whatever the problems, money certainly wasn’t one of them.

Such was the life of some people during June 1914. The Socialist Standard that month reported how some other were faring. Old-age pensioners received five shillings (25p) a week and a 72-year-old Pimlico woman cut her throat. Her husband told the coroner that their joint weekly income was twelve shillings (60p).

The Future: Socialism or Barbarism (2018)

From the August 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Back in the glory days of the Blair administration, a soft-left journal like the New Statesman would have confined itself to articles on the Kremlinology of Whitehall: who was a Blairite? Who a Brownie? Perhaps the odd John Pilger article would crop up to deplore some aspects of foreign policy. Discussion of capitalism, much less socialism, would have been a rarity. Fast forward to today, and we have the political editor of that organ, George Eaton, discussing what the consequences of the end of capitalism might be 

Now, the Socialist Party has always been clear that capitalism won't end itself, and that only its conscious replacement by politically organised workers will achieve that. Something, though, is clearly in the air when post-capitalist ideas start to gain air-time. Part of that is the clear sense that technological change is transforming the way we work now.

Eaton notes the slew of books on the matter: Paul Mason's technology-driven book Post-Capitalism has been reviewed in the Socialist Standard, and it does indeed put technology front and centre of social change. Eaton also references a forthcoming book with the intriguing title Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (which we will no doubt be devouring as soon as it is out). Eaton, though, explores the possibility, despite the shiny stuff on offer, that the future might well be a choice between socialism or barbarism.

He cites Four Futures by Peter Frase, which outlines the possible effects of technological progress: ‘Communism’ (equality and abundance), ‘Rentism’ (hierarchy and abundance), ‘Socialism’ (equality and scarcity), ‘Exterminism’ (hierarchy and scarcity). All premised on the question of response and resolution to environmental catastrophe. We'll leave the small matter of our standing objection to the misuse of the word socialism hanging, and work within Frase's framework for now.

The futurist and science fiction author Charles Stross set out, in a blog post in 2017, how the exterminist option contains its own horrific and plausible logic:

   'Consider Bangladesh, and the Bay of Bengal fisheries collapse, not to mention the giant anoxic dead zone spreading in the Bay of Bengal (which means those fisheries won't be coming back for a very long time). There are nearly 170 million people there, mostly living on alluvial flood plains feeding into the gradually rising ocean. If the sea level rises by just one meter, 10% of the land area will be flooded; most of the country is less than 12m above sea level. It's a primarily agricultural economy (it's one of the main rice and wheat producing nations), heavily dependent on fisheries for protein to supplement the diet of its citizens' 

As he notes, one horrific option is to just contain the population of Bangladesh, and let catastrophe run in a Malthusian genocide that could be passed off as natural disaster. This is a repeatable option for an elite that can jet to their private fortress islands and escape. No need to adjust to climate change, the deaths of others will reduce the environmental impact of humanity.

This can only be made possible by technology creating a relative surplus population of people whose labour is no longer required for market production.

In the light of this, Eaton is entirely correct, technological change alone will not deliver us from capitalism; and he channels Marx in observing that 'Men and women will continue to make their own history – if not in circumstances of their choosing.' The human response to technological change is, though, at the heart of political battles for the foreseeable years to come, and if we are to make our history, it has to be in the conscious effort to choose what might be called 'fully automated luxury socialism.' The choice we will all face is how to use the time won by labour-saving technology. Not that we need a fully automated society to build a society where 'poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom' but we do need to take control of the gains and benefits of labour saving technology.

Pik Smeet

Obituary: Edgar Hardcastle (1995)

Obituary from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Edgar Hardcastle—or Hardy as he was simply known in the Party—died in June at the age of 95.

Hardy gave a great input into the Party, particularly to the Socialist Standard, serving on the editorial committee for over thirty years and contributing articles from the early 1920s onwards. He was also a member of the Executive Committee for decades and a Party lecturer and representative in debates as well as serving on the new pamphlets committee.

The son of a founder member, he went to prison as a socialist conscientious objector in the First World War, formally joining the Party in 1922. After studying at the London School of Economics under Professor Edwin Cannan he worked all his life as a researcher in the trade union movement, first for the Agriculture Workers Union, then for a short while for the international trade union movement in Brussels, then till his retirement for the Post Office workers' union where he was chief adviser to a succession of UPW General Secretaries.

Hardy had the reputation of being a "theoretician' of Marxian economics but in fact he was something different and rarer in the socialist movement: a person who combined a wide knowledge of Marxian economics with a knowledge of the contemporary empirical evidence.

His main interest was monetary economics. From the 1930s on, as his articles testify, he did battle against Keynes on behalf of Marx and also, more curiously it might be thought, on behalf of his old professor, Cannan. Edwin Cannan, a largely forgotten bourgeois economist of the first part of this century (he died in 1935), could be described as the last of the Classical Political Economists and, as such, shared with Marx certain economic views. In particular that inflation was a purely monetary phenomenon caused by an excessive issue of an inconvertible paper currency and that banks were merely financial intermediaries without any power to "create credit". Both of these positions were denied by Keynes whose views became part of the economic orthodoxy. At one time there was talk of reprinting Hardy's 'Marx v Keynes' articles in book form but nothing ever came of it.

Hardy's empirical bent enabled the Party to refute, with the necessary statistical evidence. theories which have sometimes been attributed to Marx such as under-consumptionism, the increasing pauperisation of the working class, the collapse of capitalism (Hardy was the author of the famous 1932 Socialist Party pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse) and— more controversially within the Party—the increasing severity of crises.

It was a pitiful business that towards the end of his life, Hardy found himself a member of a branch which was expelled by a poll of all the membership (the only way anyone can be excluded from the SPGB) for deliberately and repeatedly refusing to apply a democratically-arrived-at Conference decision. This was a sad end to a lifetime's contribution to the development of the socialist movement.

A Norwegian sense of humour? (1996)

Book Review from the August 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, Phoenix, £6.99.

This is a highly readable and innovative book. It tells the story of a young girl’s encounter with the study of philosophy. In telling the story more attention is paid to the simple explication of philosophical ideas than to any great literary flourishes. (Indeed, as a novel it is quite pedestrian.) As an introduction to what various philosophers from antiquity to the present had to say the book can not much be faulted for simplicity and the way that it stimulates further thought. The present writer found the early chapters on the Greek philosophers especially enlightening, often clarifying concepts which had always before been a little misty.

Of interest to readers of the Socialist Standard will be the fifteen-page chapter which tries to explain Marx’s basic ideas. Does it succeed as an introduction? Essentially, yes. In the most simple of terms, from which many contemporary Marxist writers could learn a thing or two. Marx’s three key concepts—the class struggle; historical materialism; and exploitation—are outlined. It is pointed out that Marx's ideas were rooted in humans as producers and the theory of alienation, being rooted in the separation between the producer and what is produced, is made clear. It is also emphasised that Marx would not have supported many of the things that have been carried out in his name, although this does not stop the writer from representing Marx as an advocate of “the dictatorship of the proletariat" as a first, transitional stage of socialism.

Quite ludicrously, Gaarder suggests that while Marx's analysis of capitalism is basically valid, it is inapplicable to contemporary Norway were most of the problems of nineteenth-century capitalism have been eradicated. He suggests that this miracle has been performed by social-democratic reformers (inspired by Marx) who sought to change capitalism gradually. Can this be an example of the well-known Norwegian sense of humour infiltrating the text? Or might we conclude that, though a basically good teacher of philosophy, we must say of Gaarder. in the words of Marx, that "the educators must also be educated"?

Steve Coleman

Cooking the Books: Bitcon (2018)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Bitcoin “will never replace money”’ ran the headline of a news item in the Times (18 June) about a report by the Bank for International Settlements:

  ‘Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can never replace conventional money because they lack centralised backing and are riddled with problems, not least that they can simply stop working and have their value totally wiped out . . . In contrast to traditional money, cryptocurrencies become more cumbersome and unstable the more they are used.’

As the BIS is the international of state central banks, which issue conventional money, it is tempting to think ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ They would, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they haven’t got a point.

 Bitcoin was a free marketeer project, a scheme to create a currency that had nothing to do with the state, in accordance with the view that the state was a hindrance to the proper functioning of a genuine market economy. From a technological point of view, its creators succeeded – they did devise a way of making an electronic payment without using state fiat money.

 However, although dubbed a ‘cryptocurrency,’ bitcoin has never really functioned on any large scale as a means of payment. It has served two other purposes – speculation and a means of making transactions without states knowing.

People have bought bitcoins, speculating on its price rising; which is why some have suggested that bitcoin is more a ‘crypto-asset’, something to hold to keep or enhance what you paid for it like paintings or gold. Since bitcoins are intrinsically worthless the price is just a bubble that would burst if there was no other reason for holding them.

 It so happens that there is another such reason. Very few of those who use bitcoins are anti-state idealists. The vast majority are shady capitalists such as drugs barons, arms dealers, tax dodgers, sanctions busters, money launderers and others who don’t want the state to know about their financial dealings. It is their demand that determines the bitcoin price, so enabling it to be a subject of speculation. As one critic has put it, the bitcoin price is an index of money laundering. This is shown by the fact that, following state authorities taking measures to try to stop bitcoins being used for these purposes, the price of one bitcoin slumped from nearly $20,000 just before last Christmas to nearer $5000 today.

 Although a technologically elegant solution to what the free market computer geeks wanted, it is a waste of time and energy. New bitcoins are created by using computers to solve a complicated mathematical problem. This requires a huge amount of computer time and so of electricity, all pure waste from a rational point of view. Further, each time a bitcoin is used this is recorded, so the string of computer code representing it gets longer and longer. It’s as if every transaction using a particular paper note or metal coin had to be recorded. The BIS calls this ‘cumbersome’. Crazy is more like it.

 Having said this, the computer technology which is used to do this – blockchains – does have other uses. Since it is almost impossible to tamper with it could be used, for instance, to confirm the origin of meat so that horse meat can no longer be passed off as beef.

 So the BIS is right. Bitcoins will never replace state fiat money. State fiat money isn’t that stable itself of course but nowhere near as unstable as bitcoins. No doubt it will last till the time when capitalism is replaced by socialism and all forms of money become redundant.

Editorial: Ruling class split (2018)

Editorial from the August 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

By calling a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union in June 2016, David Cameron was counting on a victory for the Remain side to contain the Eurosceptics in the Tory Party and see off the challenge from UKIP. Far from overcoming the divisions within the Tory Party, the resulting victory for the Leave side has blown them wide apart.

David Cameron immediately cut his losses and ran, leaving his successor, Theresa May, to pick up the pieces. She attempted to gain the upper hand in her Party by calling a General Election a year later, but unfortunately for her, she lost her majority and is now more vulnerable to the Tory Party's warring factions.

The referendum result has had repercussions for Scotland and Northern Ireland, the two regions where most voters opted for Remain. The SNP government has used it as ammunition to press for a second Scottish Independence referendum. Leaving the EU could jeopardise the Northern Ireland Good Friday agreement, as this was predicated on there being a common customs area between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Initially, partly to poach votes from UKIP and increase support in Brexit areas, Theresa May pursued a so-called hard Brexit, where the UK would leave both the customs union and the single market. However, facing up to the reality that most British businesses need to stay close to the EU and to avoid a hard border in Ireland, on the 6th July, the Government at Chequers produced plans which amounted to a "softer" Brexit. There would be a harmonisation with EU rules in trading with goods (but not with services). However, this was too much for some and there were howls of treachery and several ministers have resigned, including David Davis and Boris Johnson. Tory Brexiteers have threatened to mount a leadership challenge. May backed down and accepted amendments from a hardline Tory Brexit group to water down her Customs bill. This sparked a rebellion among furious Tory Remain MPs. May seems to be caught in a pincer movement between the Remain and Brexit factions of her Party and her authority is ebbing away. Some have argued that a Second Referendum on Brexit is needed to resolve this impasse. Others say that another General Election is required.

We are treated to the unusual spectacle of the Tory Party being unable to serve the interests of the majority of the British capitalist class, who favour staying in the Custom Union. Ironically, it is Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party that appears to better represent the interests of British capitalism on this issue.

This political crisis is really a matter for the capitalist class only, but the working class has been dragged into it. At the 2016 referendum, we argued that workers had no interest in supporting either the Leave or Remain campaigns, as either way they will still have to deal with the problems of capitalism, such as job insecurity, low wages and unemployment, and urged them to write ‘World Socialism’ over their ballot papers. Should there be a second referendum, we will again be advising workers to do the same.

"The Fourth Estate" (1921)

From the July 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

The value of the Press to the capitalist class as a bulwark is nowhere more evident, I should think, than in the Sunday newspapers. It is obvious that the average member of the working class finds that the seventh day of the week is the only day on which he can peruse the paper from front to back. On other days he has little leisure in the mornings save for a glance at the headlines and to-day’s nap on the sporting page as he sits in the 'wage slave' car.

But on Sundays it is different. He may lie abed and read to his heart's content— and incidentally to his brain’s confusion— all that the talent of Fleet Street and Withy Grove has to offer him. There is very little doubt, too, that this factor is counted for in the production of Sunday papers and is responsible for the matter they contain.

To a certain type of mind (the product of a rotten system, be it understood) the disgusting sordidness of the police court and the divorce court make appeal, and you will consequently find papers which make a feature of reports of the proceedings therein. But those with which we are most concerned are those which inculcate political notions favourable to the capitalist in the minds of the workers.

The impregnation of the unsuspicious brain of the worker is not done openly; it is disguised in clever journalese, catchy colloquialisms that he can understand and repeat to his mates on Monday morning, sensational headlines, and other things that go to make the stuff easily assimilated. .

A case in point is that of the “Sunday Chronicle” (29.5.21.)—a Hulton publication—a paper that affects a hearty, democratic, John’s-as-good-as-his-master air and serves out cheap clap-trap in large doses. The first article is one by that bitter enemy of the working class, Robert Blatchford. He is nothing if not topical, and he loves to shed a tear over the miseries of some sufferer or other. This time it is toil-worn horses.

Apparently, apart from the old gee-gees, there is nothing we need worry about this week. “God’s in his heaven,” the Kaiser’s at Doorn, and “all’s right with the world.” And with the implied hope that something will turn up next week R.B. makes our flesh creep for a couple of columns (with matter mostly culled from “Daily News” reports, by the way) and leaves us with the information that his stuff is “copyrighted in America and Canada.”

But we may spare a word about Blatchford, although he has been exposed and denounced in these columns more often, perhaps, than his importance deserves. One would guarantee that if he were to write a true article about the sufferings of old, toil-worn human animals thrown on the industrial scrap-heap because capitalism has no further use for them, and to tell the readers of the "Sunday Chronicle” that it is because one small section (the section that pays him for writing) of society owns the machinery of wealth production and distribution and can and does treat the remainder of society (the working class) worse than horses— if he were to do this, I repeat, then one could guarantee that R.B. would get the. sack, not only from the “Sunday Chronicle,” but from any other capitalist periodical.

But, as you must be aware, Bob has discovered long since that writing for the Capitalist Press pays so he is not likely to blow the gaff on them. 

On the same page we get a very usual type of journalese, the short, snappy type. It is remarkable, you workers, your masters don’t believe you have the intelligence to handle long paragraphs, so they jerk them to you in small doses! Jane Doe has been working in a mill (she didn’t wear the pretty frock she is posing in at the top, I think!) She thinks it is a jolly fine idea. And so do the mythical mill girls she quotes. They can go to sleep in the work time if they wish—and often do, mark you! And as one remarks over a dish of Irish stew and a jug of tea in the card room, “We’re not in a prison and we get plenty of fun.”

There’s a lot more like this I could quote did I “feel so dispoged,” but it will suffice if I just tell Jane Doe (although I hate to have to speak like this to a lady) she’s a liar. Still, to give credit where possible, I will admit that she has the excuse that she does it for her living.

The facts are nearly all contrary to Jane’s statements. I need only ask anyone who lives or works in a cotton mill environment whether I am right when I say in contradiction to Jane Doe that mill life is unhealthy; its victims are not, as a general rule, healthy, plump, and so on. Their teeth are not good (I think she says “splendid”); in fact they are far, far from it. The mills they work in are like prisons, and even worse. They do not sleep in their work time if they choose. And last, their homes are as a general role, not the little heavens of comfort and restfulness Jane Doe would have us believe.

If the verbose lady doubts this point the present writer will himself conduct her down dozens of streets in industrial Lancashire where .the “mill lasses” and their husbands prefer to sit outside on the pavement rather than endure the discomfort and foulness of their living rooms. And I can further assure her that if she is not squeamish she can be shown worse sights, and can hear worse sounds, than she dare ask her masters to publish or than her refined mind could contemplate without revulsion. But Janey is like Bobby, I suspect! Master pays better than truth!

On page 2 is an article in dialect written in praise of Jane and her boosting of the Lancashire cotton girls’ supposed idyllic existence, all written with the express purpose of counteracting the effect of propaganda that attempts to expose the vileness of the present industrial system.

It is on page 2 too that we strike a pathetic note. One who signs himself “Country Parson” is bewailing the vanishing of feudalism and the spirit that taught us— 

 “God bless the Squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations.”

He tears our heart strings with the news that the Earl is forced by the crises-of to-day to sell his hunters, to reduce his staff of retainers, and to close a wing of the ancient baronial castle. But he relents in the last paragraph and wakes us to hope again with the happy declaration that the yeomen of England are proof against the virus of Communist propaganda and the tracts and pamphlets that are pushed under his doors, generally after dusk, which they know are written by drawing room intellectuals and are paid for by foreigners! And he prophesies in a confident peroration that “the staunchness and integrity of the yeomen which won for them the title “the backbone of England” may yet assert itself again.

Now one could go on from page to page, from paper to paper, quoting the virus of capitalism that our masters seek to infect us with. Just as in the Army they innoculated us to guard against the ravages of fever, so they innoculate us with the insidious propaganda we have instanced to guard against the ravages of clear and logical reasoning. For they know the mighty intelligence of the working class that enable it to produce the wealth of the world, can only be divorced from the intelligence of class-consciousness by the constant repetition by paid hucksters of fine words and maudlin sentiments each as are drivelled by our Robert Blatchfords, our Jane Does, and our “Country Parsons".

In conclusion, it is for the working class to read between the lines and search out the truth for themselves, and to throw to the ground the pillars of hypocritical "poppycock” which form the foundations on which capitalism stands, and to build upon the place where it stood a social edifice which has for its architect Intelligence and for its purpose the common weal.

S.

Quotes (1922)

Quotes from the July 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Early issues of the Socialist Standard would be peppered with brief quotes which would serve as inspirational, informative and, most importantly, as space fillers. Here are the quotes from the July 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard:

  “The work of the individual and that of the family, the work of the factory and that of the whole society, is an organism, each part of which contributes to the whole. The contribution of each organ cannot be mechanically weighed or measured. The Socialist is quite aware that the workers are organs of the work process. He has completely given up the idea of individualising and dividing up a Communistic product, and paying to each according to his deserts. Present society; with its misunderstood principle of suum cuique (each unto his own) and its grotesque justice, acts as unreasonably as the man who gives his eye an overweening care while utterly neglecting his leg. As the engineer is more careful about his smallest screws than about his big wheel, so do we desire that the product of social labour shall be divided according to the social needs, so that the strong and the weak, the swift and the clumsy, the mental and the physical labourer, in so far as they are human, shall work and enjoy in human community."

Joseph Dietzgen

“Historical Materialism"

  The term “historical materialism” describes that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of Society; in the changes in the modes of production and exchange; in the consequent division of Society into distinct classes and in the struggle of these classes against one another.

“ Socialism—Utopian and Scientific.”

Frederick Engels

  “Systematization is the essence and the general expression of the aggregate of science. The practical result of all theory is to acquaint us with the system and method of its practice and thus to enable us to act in the world with a reasonable certainty of success.

Joseph Dietzgen

Why Work? (1923)

From the July 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Tis said the Capitalists are grown miserly. They want to cut down wages still more. Some there are, of wicked intent, who would blame the Capitalist and accuse him of evil designs. But this is surely not true. Have they not pointed out to us again and again that they even employ us at a loss to themselves, so anxious are they that we should not suffer unnecessary want?

But lo! What is this I have before me? Why, the report of the impending ruin of J. Lyons & Co., Ltd.! It is contained in the following record of their business :

   “During the last six years the profits have expanded by 100 per cent., and since the war the aggregate profits have amounted to £3,881,279, while the dividends on the ordinary shares have totalled 370 per cent., allowing for the 100 per cent. share bonus distributed two years ago.”—(“Daily News,” June 7th, 1923.)

You thriftless worker! If you had only saved a paltry £1,000 out of your enormous wages, and invested it in Lyons’ shares six years ago, you need not have lost a bead of sweat working, and yet you would have drawn £3,700 out of the company and still have your £1,000 invested in Lyons’ shares. Marvellous! isn’t it? And you are the dupe who produces the marvel.

Gilmac

The Capitalist Housing Bill. (1924)

From the July 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Wheatley, the Labour Minister of Health, speaking on his housing Bill in the House of Commons, said :—

   "Labour does not propose to interfere with private enterprise in the building of houses. Labour does not propose to interfere with private enterprise in the manufacturing of building material. Labour only touches private enterprise here at one point, and that is in the investment of private capital in the ownership of these rented houses. But what does Labour do in return for that interference? It says to the man with small capital: "Instead of putting your private capital into a risky investment, lend it to the local authorities at 4½ per cent. Without your having any trouble at all you will get a safe return for your money, with all the security behind it of a municipal investment.” The Labour party’s programme on housing is not a Socialist programme at all.”—(Parliamentary Debates, March 26th, p. 1470.)

They don’t "interfere with private enterprise” except at one point, he says. The point where they interfere is when they borrow money from bankers, etc., promising them a safe return ! Such is the "Red” from the Clyde.

Adolph Kohn

The Economics of Paying (1925)

From the July 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is irritating to the majority of workers to be told that the enormous expenditure incurred in running the capitalist system in its various departments is a matter of no concern to them. Schooled by the masters and their decoys in false economics, they fall easy victims to the delusion that they "Pay for everything." Dimly conscious of the fact that it is the working class who alone engage in the various functions necessary to the production and distribution of wealth (including management and supervision), they allow a hazy class sentiment to warp their economic reasoning; producing everything by no means involves paying for everything. An instance of how the press plays upon the workers' lack of knowledge in order to hide the facts is contained an the following :—

   The man in work is becoming more and more restless at the constant strain upon his resources, having to carry not only his own burden of maintenance, but the burden of a million or more out-of-works as well (Democrat, 25/4/26).

Well might the worker ask why this concern, if the burdens are his and not those of the capitalist class? Beneath this superficial observation lies the true explanation. The workers are a slave class; they are as much slaves as their progenitors, the chattel and the serf, but in place of previous methods the worker receives his subsistence to-day through a money payment, he is a wage slave. To the chattel his whole labour appeared to be given gratis, to the wage worker his whole effort appears to be paid for. Behind this payment lurks the secret of modern methods of exploitation: ever since the dawn of slavery human energy has sustained a set of unproductive idlers out of the wealth produced beyond that required for the sustenance of the producers. As with the slave of ancient society so with the modern wage slaves, the wealth they produce is the property of the masters. Its proportionate increase is enormous owing to the increased powers of mankind over nature’s materials. This surplus over and above the value of the workers' wages is called by the Socialist “surplus value." Out of this surplus, whether its form be rent, interest, or profit, its owners have to meet the expenses of their profit-making system, i.e., wars, pauperism, crime, etc. Fellow-workers, heed not your masters' canting cry about “burdens," they are his, and in order to economise as far as possible he would have you think them yours. Whatever the total of the prices of the necessaries required to sustain your wealth-producing capacity must be given to you as a wage. Failing this, you will be driven to take measures to maintain your standard of living, or your labour power will deteriorate to your employers' disadvantage.

Why fritter your time away on matters that leave you bottom dog. Recognise the real and ultimate contest must be between masters and slaves. In numbers you are overwhelming, armed with the knowledge of your usefulness as a class, no power can withstand you.

Mac.