Fascism as history (2019)

Book Review from the May 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Marxists in the Face of Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism from the inter-war period’. Edited by David Beetham (Haymarket Books. 2019. 380 pages)

In his introduction to this reprint of a book that first came out in 1984, the editor points out that fascism is not a contemporary threat as historical conditions are not the same as they were between the last century’s two world wars. The word ‘fascist’, however, is still frequently bandied about today and not just by ‘anti-fascists’ as it has come to be used to describe any authoritarian individual or action. It was even misused at the time, as Togliatti, a leader of the Italian Communist Party pointed out in 1928 in one of his articles reprinted here: ‘It has become customary to use it to designate every form of reaction. (…) [W]henever the so-called democratic freedoms sanctified by bourgeois constitutions are attacked or violated, one hears the cry: “Fascism is here, fascism has arrived.”’

The book is a collection of articles from the period by mainstream Communists, dissident Communists, and Social Democrats. The original fascists were the followers of Mussolini who came to power in Italy in 1922 but the word was soon used to describe any reactionary, openly anti-working-class movement anywhere. The official Comintern line was that fascism was a mass mobilisation of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ to further the interests of ‘finance capital’ that arose because of the failure of other countries to emulate the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia in 1917. After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 it was seen as a particular threat to Russia whose foreign policy interests the Comintern was committed to defending.

Despite what Togliatti said, the Comintern did describe, as can be seen from their writings here, any policy of attacking working class living standards as ‘fascist.’ It was on this basis that, for a period, they denounced the Social Democrats as ‘social fascists’ because, when in government on their own or in coalition, they felt they had no choice but to support such a policy. As Otto Bauer, the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats quoted in the introduction, said in its defence: ’if you won’t create a socialist society, then you must do nothing to disturb the mechanism of the capitalist order, under pain of economic catastrophe.’

It was not until 1933 that fascists (though that is not what the Nazis called themselves) came to power in Germany. The myth has grown up that this could have been prevented if only the Social Democrats and Communists had united to oppose it. This did not happen as the Communists had only just stopped calling the Social Democrats ‘social fascists’, while the Social Democrats pursued the policy of ‘tolerating’ as the lesser evil any government as long as it didn’t include the Nazis. This policy failed as the non-Nazi right-wing parties did eventually allow Hitler to come to power constitutionally.

In Austria the Social Democrats did pursue, as Bauer pointed out, the different policy of refusing to ‘tolerate’ any government that didn’t include them. But they too were crushed, though by a different reactionary group to the Nazis. It was left to Kautsky to make the point that, as the Social Democrats and Communists together still represented only a minority of the population, there was not much they could have done to stop a government in control of political power and enjoying majority acquiescence.

It has to be said that the Social Democrats represented here, Bauer and Kautsky in particular, came up with a better analysis than the Communists. In fact it is surprising how ‘Marxist’ they were compared to the Leninists. Apart from Togliatti, the official Communists (who like the fascists also stood for a totalitarian, one-party dictatorship) didn’t have much interesting to say, while the dissident Communists Trotsky and Thalheimer only confused things by irrelevantly describing ‘fascism’ as a form of ‘Bonapartism’ (after Napoleon’s nephew who ruled France as dictator between 1852 and 1870).

Bauer, in the last article he wrote before his death in 1938, saw what was coming and why:

  With the new division of power brought about by the treaties of 1919 British and French imperialism achieved their war aims, and since then they have successfully defended the position of power won by conquest in the war. The imperialism of Great Britain and France is the imperialism of the satisfied, of the satiated. For this reason it is conservative and peaceful. In Germany and Italy, in contrast, there developed an aggressive, warlike imperialism, which seeks to revise the global distribution of economic and political power.

This is one reason why fascism was a product of a specific period of twentieth-century history which is highly unlikely to be repeated, however much some may still cry ‘fascist’.

Adam Buick

The Magic of the Mad-House (1992)

Illustration by Peter Rigg.

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Thatcher years it was "the magic of the market” which served as the Tory mantra. Buy your own home—start your own business—purchase shares—the market rules, OK. But for millions who listened to the bogus magicians it was not to be OK. It was to be less like magic and more like a trick. Homes repossessed: businesses bankrupt; shares having to be sold to pay the debts. The magic of the market was transformed into the misery of uncontrollable, vicious economic forces which are eating away human lives and ridiculing past aspirations.

The lie about the market was not hard to see—if you were not blinded by the prophets of profit. The market was mythologised, turned into a cosy image of friendly producers happily exchanging their wares in the town square. The propaganda of the Eighties tried to make buying sound like some sort of passport to security. They spoke of a "property-owning democracy” and wage slaves were fooled into buying their wafer-thin slice of it. So-called yuppies took huge mortgages, now costing them more than the petty packages of luxury living areas which they had imagined meant success. Unemployed workers were encouraged to borrow in order to set up businesses, the debts of which now mean that for many of them suicide and the receipt of their life insurance pay-outs is the most rational economic option.

In 1992 few speak of the magic of the market. There are the rightwing nutters from the Adam Smith asylum and the Libertarian Alliance—“we demand a free market in drug pushing and a privatised police force”—but these days they have one foot in the Tory research departments and the other in a psychiatrists waiting room.

These days—the days of hopeless disillusion—a new deity has arrived on the scene: The Markets. Switch on the radio and the newsreader will foretell its next divine act. “The Markets are feeling uncertain this morning—The Markets want a cut in interest rates—The Markets are not very pleased with the result of the French referendum—The Markets want more cuts in welfare spending”. It is like a return to Greek drama where huge, invisible entities govern destiny. The day after Major devalued the pound, or, to use the current newspeak, Major allowed the pound to free fall on the Markets, a man on the BBC said that he was uncertain about the future of the British economy, but "it's all in the lap of the gods now—or rather the Markets” (verbatim quote).

So now we have it: who needs Archbishops and Popes when we have thirty year-old stock market analysts with degrees in economic gobbledegook to tell us our fortunes? The same night as the above comment the BBC TV newsreader declared, in exactly these words, that "Industry would like an interest rate cut of at least another one per cent”. Who is Industry? Is it a man. a beast, a gang, a private club? Who are the Markets when they’re at home?

Of one thing we can be sure: the Markets are not the boys and girls in white shirts and braces who run round the Stock Exchange screaming like they’re on drugs. And Industry is not the men and women who are actually involved in industrial production. The workings of capitalism are not about them. These are the makers and counters of profits.

The truth is that nobody controls the Markets. Nobody can. It is beyond the control even of the few who benefit from production for profit. But those for whose advantage all of this market madness is going on are not the wealth-producing majority. The function of the capitalist market is to sell commodities in order to provide rent, interest and profit for the small minority who monopolise the productive resources of society. It is in their interest that the majority must suffer.

Whingeing marketeers
The spectacle of Tory ministers whingeing in parliament about profit-seeking speculators disrupting the economy is truly funny. Capitalism is all about the freedom to seek profits at anybody’s expense. What do the Tories want the capitalists to do? Lose the chance of making a fast buck so that the government will look good? Just as absurd is the Labour Party's claim that given power they could tame the market. Why then have they never left office since 1924 without unemployment being higher than when they were elected? A Smith-Brown government would be just as much at the mercy of the market requirement to produce profits as all earlier ones.

Any government which finds itself in power when capitalism is going through one of its endemic crises, with the need to destroy productive forces in order to restore profits, will have no option but to ride the storm. What is particularly just about the cries of seasickness from the present victims of an exceptionally rough storm is that they were the people whose whole appeal rested upon the endless prosperity and stability which they claimed market forces generate. For many workers “market forces” are a code word for misery. The best response to the sadistic whims of the Market-gods is to send packing the market-loving messiahs and abolish the market by bringing the resources of society into common ownership and democratic control.

A marketless society is the only sane alternative to the mad-house which they call The Economy. Tinkering with it will be of no practical use; it would be like buying a new suit for Frankenstein’s monster and hoping that newly-clothed a monster he will no longer be. The urgent task before us is to unite to take society away from those whose sole intent is to sacrifice needs for profits. Then, once society is in the hands of all of us, we can begin having free and equal access to the available wealth of this abundant planet.

Steve Coleman

Against the market (1992)

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism will uproot every vestige of the market economy. As socialists, we do not accept the need for some “invisible hand” beyond the control of human beings, to govern human affairs and give them coherence.

We deny emphatically that a complex modern society that can leave its footprints on the face of the moon as surely as it can detect the sex of an unborn baby, is only possible because individuals submit themselves to the discipline of the marketplace. We reject the ahistorical belief that human history, which only recently gave rise to one class that prostitutes itself to another for a wage or salary, has come to an end in the experience of contemporary capitalism.

In this battle of ideas what is being contested is what it means to be a human being.

Poverty and plenty
Capitalism is a system riven by contradiction. At the most basic level there is, in Marxist terminology, a contradiction between its “forces of production”, the technological potential that capitalism has built up. and its “relations of production” that work to limit or constrain the manifestation of this potential. Economic scarcity is artificially maintained for the sake of perpetuating an outdated social system.

To perpetuate a system which has “objectively” outlived its use it is imperative that it be subjectively entrenched. For it cannot continue without the acquiescence of the majority upon whom the burden of its shortcomings fall. It thus needs to account for these in ways that deflect criticism from itself.

Take poverty for example. As in the Victorian era, so today there is a tendency to see this as something which is, unwittingly or otherwise, self-inflicted. This personalisation of blame is the mirror image of the myth of the “self-made man"; in each case the explanation for an individual’s fate is held to lie within the individual concerned. By the same token, society congratulates the millionaire on his millions and washes its hands of the pauper’s poverty. The interconnection between them is lost, broken and mystified in this fragmented and individualistic world-view.

That the roots of poverty are fundamentally structural cannot be doubted. Consider the facts. Why, for example, does homelessness exist when, in Britain alone, literally hundreds of thousands of homes stand empty and large numbers of building workers cannot find work? Why is food allowed to be dumped and farmers paid not to produce when there are millions of people grossly underfed?

Clearly, something gets in the way of satisfying human needs that could be so easily met. That something is the overriding priority of the profit motive. The market economy does satisfy some human needs but only incidentally and on condition that they are backed up by purchasing power. Yet the very means whereby working people express their purchasing power—their wages and salaries—constitute costs that have constantly to be curtailed to ensure profitability in a competitive market.

Empty houses and unploughed fields represent only the visible tip of an iceberg of structural waste. Arguably, of much greater significance are those activities which, though integral to the operation of a capitalist economy, do not meaningfully contribute to the satisfaction of human needs.

Such activities, directly or indirectly, account for roughly half the total workforce in the formal sector today and absorb huge quantities of resources. They embrace a vast range of occupations—from ticket collectors to tax consultants, from pay clerks to pension-fund managers. They vividly illustrate the potential of production that is trapped under capitalism, a potential that can only truly be glimpsed from a perspective that is fundamentally anti-capitalist.

In a socialist society such activities would cease to have any purpose; they would simply stop. The labour and resources tied up in them will be redirected into socially useful production. With productive effort much more effectively targeted, far more could be produced to satisfy human needs even without a commensurate increase in total effort.

This growing burden of structural waste is the most potent manifestation of what is capitalism's major contradiction. But what is the practical significance of this contradiction for the process of changing society?

We should not put a too mechanistic construction on this process. For a growing contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production to translate into an intensification of class struggle would seem to imply something else must happen. Otherwise there is no reason to suppose that the contradiction could not grow indefinitely without having any discernible effect on social attitudes.

One possibility is that working people would need to undergo a marked deterioration in their living standards in order to adopt a more militant class conscious outlook. However, there is again no reason to suppose that the development of capitalism and the exacerbation of its inner contradiction will bring about absolute impoverishment. In fact. Marx foresaw the possibility of the development of capitalism being accompanied by an absolute rise in the living standards of the working class (albeit a relative fall by comparison with the wealth of the capitalists). Moreover, far from absolute impoverishment being a necessary precondition of class militancy, the opposite was more likely to be the case: his analysis of the “lumpenproletariat” in 19th century France suggests that it was precisely this most downtrodden and impoverished section of the working class which was most easily co-opted into the most reactionary of causes.

By and large the living standards of the working class have risen significantly since Marx's day. While we should not judge progress by the yardstick of what our grandparents lacked but, rather, according to what we are capable of realising today, it is clear that the absolute impoverishment of the working class in the developed world (and over the long term) has not happened. And barring some unforeseen ecological collapse of our life-support systems, precipitated by capitalism's rapacious short-sighted appetite for economic-growth, it is unlikely to happen.

We should not overstate the extent of this material success. We would do well to remind ourselves that even in the most developed parts of the developed world there are still millions of people in a chronic condition of wretched hunger. In the United States, some 9 percent of the population— 12 million children and 8 million adults— do not receive a sufficient nutrient intake for growth and good health (Scientific American, February 1987). Nevertheless 9 percent of the population do not constitute a majority and. indeed, according to most nutritionists a much larger percentage of the American population are overfed.

Turning to the underdeveloped world, however, we find a very different situation. Since the war, the income-gap between them and the developed world has steadily widened as has the distribution of wealth within many of these countries. In some of them—notably in sub-Saharan Africa—living standards have fallen as a consequence of the encroachment of market forces on the subsistence economy.

It is sometimes argued that the success of capitalism—and by implication, the continuing justification for it—may be judged by the fact that it is able to support a larger, and still growing, population than ever before. This, of course, glosses over the fact that a significant proportion of the food produced—in parts of Africa, up to 80 percent—does not enter the market economy at all. Without the safety net of the subsistence economy, famine on a catastrophic level would surely ensue. More to the point, is the fact that we have the technological knowledge and resources today to make hunger everywhere a scourge of the past; it is because it has failed to utilise this potential that capitalism stands indicted.

Paradoxically, the more capitalism erodes the absolute foundations of material poverty, the more “spiritually” impoverished and alienated do our lives become. Like the mythical snake doomed constantly to devour its own tail, we can never find satisfaction or peace. Urged on by the advertisers’ hype to consume without limit, we pursue what must forever elude us.

“We are”, observed Erich Fromm, “a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent—people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save” (To Have or to Be?, 1976). In the face of this organised meaninglessness of the marketplace we retreat into a protective shell. Rather than engage with the world we seek to escape it. As Robert Cooperstein perceptively points out. it is not that “commodities do not provide the illusion of real satisfaction so much as they satisfy the real need for illusion" (The Crisis of the Gross National Spectacle).

Life, in short, has become a kind of spectator sport. We move through it, each in his or her own little fragile bubble of existence, buffeted by forces too diffuse to comprehend and too powerful to overcome.

Yet, in the end, human beings cannot be reduced to so many electrons along an electric current. We are not mere units to be pushed around by a world market and pressed into hired labour at the whim of capital. We need to validate our own identity as social and human beings by meaningfully participating in the life of others. We need to express ourselves in ways that contribute to the common good, to be valued and wanted for what we can give to society in return for the benefits of being a member of it.

Capitalism is a system of wage slavery notwithstanding the spurious freedom of the wage contract. It cannot be otherwise where the means of production are monopolised by a small minority. It imposes upon us conditions that conflict with our deepest needs.

This theme is one that socialists need to address as the old images of cloth-capped poverty fade from the social landscape.The realisation that human beings do not live by bread alone compels us to expand our definition of basic needs to embrace also our emotional needs as an integral part of human existence.

Mary Midgley argues brilliantly in her stinging attack on the existentialists for whom “hell is other people":

  The notion that we “have a nature", far from threatening the concept of freedom, is absolutely essential to it. If we were genuinely plastic and indeterminate at birth, there could be no reason why society should not stamp us into any shape that might suit it.

Even Marx

  though he officially dropped the notion of human nature and often attacked the term, relied on the idea as much as anybody else for his crucial notion of dehumanisation. (Beast and Man).

To attempt to incorporate a “moral dimension" into the cut-throat world of capitalist competition—as exemplified by such organisations as the Institute of Business Ethics—must remain a futile gesture. Capitalism cannot be humanised. The segregation of morals and money is as entrenched today as when the limited company was first legislated for, relieving investors of any liability beyond the sum they invested.

If human values are to prevail over money values this will surely come about in spite of capitalism and not because of it It will come about as a result of a growing and resolute movement working in opposition to capitalism. And it will find its ultimate expression in a new type of society that will not place morality on a public pedestal as an impractical yardstick by which to judge its transgressors but will integrate it into every aspect of social life. Society will come to be a seamless whole, an experience which our "primitive*’ forebears once lived through and a prospect which our modern technology, at last unfettered, will greatly enrich.

Robin Cox

Europe's new war plane (1992)

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every worker who isn't a total abstainer from the news media will have heard about the European Fighter Aircraft (EFA) by now. Do "we" need it? Can "we" afford it? Why do "the Germans" want to pull out? Should the rest go it alone? These are some of the questions being bandied about as the defence ministers of the partner countries pose for the cameras on their way in and out of meetings. Well, what about EFA?

The Gulf War should have killed off the notion that the demise of the Soviet Union has ended the prospect of war. even world war between rival power blocs. The last such rivalry was exceptional in the way it ended, although the minor clashes it spawned killed enough workers. The USA, temporarily the only superpower in the business as only a bloc of countries acting in unison can now challenge it, cannot at present be threatened by missiles capable of hitting New York, as might have been the case prior to 1989. Thus when Jane's Defence Weekly (21 March) quotes the RAF as having identified a need for a “stealthy long-range penetrator” (this is a type of bomber!), for use against "threats" further from home than was envisaged in Cold War days, the author accepts this without bothering to identify who these new enemies may be.

In fact, while no new power bloc structure has yet emerged to replace the Cold War antagonism, it is not difficult to envisage some possibilities. One would be a revived Russia, perhaps not with the support of the former eastern European satellites, but maybe in league with Middle East states and India, challenging what was basically the Western side in the Cold War. In Russia some capitalists are complaining that the Yeltsin administration has "sold out to the USA", and may be after revenge for what was after all a humiliating defeat by their American rivals. Whatever happens here it is clear, however, that continuing punitive actions are envisaged against recalcitrant Third World states like Iraq. This thinking appears to be important to the design of EFA and the role envisaged for it.

Arms exports
Russia is in the equation already in another role, as an arms exporter. Previous arms drives have created a large stockpile of weapons, and conversion of factories to other purposes is not the simple cheap operation some imagine. Such a sales drive would put Russia into direct competition with the EFA consortium. Future markets in India and Saudi Arabia have been mooted for EFA, following the successes there with earlier BAe aircraft such as Canberra, Lightning and Tornado. An existing arms stockpile is also a factor in current German thinking, as they took over a sizeable force of MiGs as a result of reunification. Germany is remaining as a partner in the development phase of EFA, and will therefore continue to benefit from the considerable technological development which a new military aircraft involves. Spain, whose continued part in the production phase is also in doubt, has a less advanced aircraft industry and is even keener to see out the development period.

Many of these arguments are being put forward in the "Campaign to save EFA", currently spearheaded by the MSF trade union, even though they are merely capitalist concerns. We can understand the concern that the workers involved feel at the implications of these events on their employment prospects and their life in general.

Socialists can in general support efforts by workers to stave off threatened sackings, which are by no means always doomed to failure. In fact such action should, when required, be part of the more general effort to defend, and improve where possible, pay and working conditions. The thing about this particular campaign which forces us into a critical position is its begging-bowl attitude, and the class compromise involved in taking on board purely capitalist arguments. This weakness is reinforced by a willingness to cooperate in the unending efficiency drives, “team talks”, business plans and other paraphernalia typical of developed hi-tech capitalist firms striving to keep their place in face of the current slump. In anything other than the very immediate short term, this is no more than feeding the mouth that bites you, and this socialists are totally unable to support.

The latest MSF journal (No.3, 1992) contains the almost obligatory article entitled "Save EFA" on its front page. Much of its argument consists of telling the British and German capitalist class how they should run their own affairs. The German counter-proposal for a smaller, lighter aircraft is dismissed out of hand because of its short operational range, as if that should concern workers. One alternative, that of "buying off the shelf’ which in practice means buying American, the point made is that the only aircraft which would be superior to EFA is the F22, which will not be in service until the year 2000. Again, this is a question which capitalist governments need to consider, but not workers.

Job losses
We can acknowledge that the main concern of MSF is with the job prospects of its members, but it is the way they go about protecting them that is so open to criticism. The whole concept of “saving jobs” by persuading the capitalists to "buy British” rather than a foreign alternative is fatally flawed. The jobs “saved" here represent jobs lost elsewhere with no real chance of a significant overall gain. This can only be achieved if the capitalists can be forced to employ more workers on a project than are required on strict capitalist criteria. This might lead to the Daily Express talking about three men doing two men’s work, but so what? The workers retained will benefit and that is basically the only reason why unions exist at all. What is more, it can be achieved, admittedly only in the more favourable cases, in the same way as pay increases can be negotiated in the face of capitalist opposition. The fact that, despite the present severe slump, the earnings of most of those workers who have remained in work are outpacing inflation shows that the unions are not as helpless as many seem to think. It is true that this is inevitably patchy, that it cannot directly help those out of work or living in the Third World, and is accompanied by the negative features such as labour intensification and more unsocial hours.

Any attempt to protect jobs by trying to influence directly the way employers conduct their business, so that they sell more of their particular products, leads to compromising situations which can only benefit the capitalists in the end. Employers prefer us to waste our time devising alternative strategies for them rather than have us further our own interests. The 'Save EFA” campaign is actually much worse than making this or that thing with British rather than “foreign" labour. The campaign is one for the building of military aircraft which can be designed for no other purposes than those which will inevitably kill and maim fellow workers abroad and sometimes at home also. Even if going ahead with EFA did mean more jobs, and even if having an extra design, with its concomitant development phases, might mean a few extra people at work for a time, this military aspect is one which socialists cannot and will not support however much we may sympathize with anxieties of the workers involved.

E. C. Edge

New World Order Comes to Iraq (1992)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Cold war ended, the USA found itself deprived of its anti-Communist card and could no longer use the “Soviet threat” as the pretext by which to intervene in defence of its interests in international affairs from Vietnam to Grenada.

The 1990 Gulf Crisis came just in time to arm President Bush with the excuse he needed to re-assert US international leadership at a time when its right to lead was being challenged, and when it was a third-place economic power behind Germany and Japan.

A US-led Gulf War would have many incentives for an economically-struggling superpower. As the Middle East was a major oil-producing region, it was important for the US to be seen as the champion of “liberty and democracy” here—at the end of the day there would be lucrative pay-offs, and it did not matter that both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had abysmal human rights records. Iraq could also be used as something of a showroom for every type of hi-tech weaponry available. Thus it was little wonder that US firms secured Middle East arms sales worth $18 billion months after the shooting war ended, not to mention a further $9 billion contract to supply Saudi Arabia with 72 F-15s in early September this year.

Two years after the “Mother of all Atrocities”, the Allies are back in the Gulf, like the proverbial villains returning to the scene of the crime.

Mandate to kick ass

This time the pretext is that Iraq has breached UN Security Council resolutions 687 and 688, in which Iraq conceded to allow UN inspectors, charged with rooting out and destroying its weapons of mass destruction, access to key ministries, and to halt the repression of its civilians.

The US, in reality, never needed the breach of any resolution to intimidate any country. The US has UN cover to kick ass wherever it pleases. This was made clear by the UN Ambassador Thomas Pickering who pointed out to the Security Council in 1990 how Article 51 allows the US “to use armed force . . . to defend our interests”. In this case to prevent Panama from using its territory as a base for smuggling narcotics into the USA.

That a breach of UN resolution 687 is the reason the US is back in the Gulf is something of an irony. After all, it was the US who gave Saddam the money to buy the weapons at his disposal during their years of diplomatic courtship, and few would doubt that the US intelligence network knew where the money went.

Bush’s love-hate relationship with Saddam stretches back some ten years, for it was then that Bush, as a big voice on the National Security Council, argued that Saddam wasn’t all that bad, that Iraq should be encouraged as a block to the Islamic fundamentalists of Iran.

By 1984 Bush’s relationship with Saddam had developed and Iraq and the US were enjoying healthy diplomatic relations and intelligence sharing – even at late as 1990 the CIA was tipping off Saddam about a Ba’athist assassination plot. In 1984, Bush also talked the Export-Import Bank into pressing on with a dodgy loan worth $484 million to Iraq.

A further $5 billion Community Credit Corporation programme was underway in 1987, the same year Bush met the Iraqi Ambassador for talks about the easing of licences for hi-tech exports sought by Iraq, and the same year Iraq attacked the USS Stark killing 37 US servicemen.

In 1988, ignoring evidence from US officials that Iraq was subverting US credit programmes to purchase arms, and opposing congressional sanctions brought about by Saddam’s murder of 2,000 Kurds at Halabja, Bush pushed through further loans.

When FBI agents raided the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in 1989, evidence was found of a $4 billion link to Saddam’s arms network. Bush’s own administration went on to prove Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Bush, however, insisted that healthy diplomatic relations came first. As late as 1990, Lawrence Eagleburger and James Baker had pulled off a further $1 billion deal with Iraq through other government agencies, and days before the allied invasion, April Glespie, the US Ambassador to Iraq was telling Saddam how the US had no interest in his “border disputes”. What followed is etched in history forever.

Democrat Charles Schumer was right when he commented that Saddam was “President Bush’s Frankenstein . . . a run- of-the-mill dictator the President fed with US dollars”. (Guardian, 22 May).

Iraq’s breach of resolution 688 – the repression of Southern Shi’ites – is hardly something Bush should be losing sleep over. Wasn’t it the US which backed Saddam in his war against the Shi’ites of Iran – the same Shi’ites who saw the USA as the “Great Satan”?

As David Hirst pointed out: “During the Iran/Iraq war, the US backed Saddam as an instrument to contain Khomeinism and the dire threat it seemed to pose the oil-rich monarchies of the Gulf.” (Guardian, 28 August)

Strategic interests

Following the Gulf War came the “Great Betrayal”. Bush urged the Kurds in the north and the Shi’ites in the south to rise against Saddam. Thinking they had US backing they did just that, only to hear Bush point out that he would not mobilize ground troops in their defence; neither would he commit US aircraft to repel Iraqi sorties against them. Bush’s reason? He feared that Iran would capitalize on the Shi’ite backlash and spread the fundamentalist revolution to southern Iraq. Thus the US pulled back, fearing a strengthened Iran, now Iraq was disabled, would mean a greater threat to US strategic interests in the region. 

Of course, Saddam is just as big a hypocrite as Bush. In his war against Iran, Saddam heaped praise on the Marsh Arabs—Shi’ites who fought alongside Iraqi troops. Now Saddam sees them as “inferior and un-Iraqi, monkey-faced people”.

In reality, the second round of the Gulf crisis was a blatant piece of Bush electioneering – the latest instalment being the recently – announced sale of 72 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. A deal that will secure 20,000 defence jobs and up Bush’s election chances in the key Mid-West state of Missouri.

Bush claimed that the jets were a reward for Saudi support during the Gulf War, believing the deal will not disturb the strategic balance in the region – if there ever was one – at the same time contradicting his own stated policy of scaling down arms proliferation in the Middle East.

Bush’s sidekicks, Baker and General Brent Scowcroft, welcomed with open arms a high level delegation of Iraqi opponents of Saddam at a meeting in late July. For the mixed team of Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’ites provided the Bush administration with just the pretext it needed to have another go at Saddam. A deal was quickly arranged whereby an air umbrella would be enforced north of the 36th Parallel bisecting Kurdistan, with a similar exclusion zone below the 32nd Parallel between Baghdad and Basra.

On 13 August Bush and Scowcroft hatched a further plan, whereby UN inspectors would attempt to gain access to key Iraqi ministries. The innocent UN inspectors, supposedly highly trained and acting on their own initiative, in fact depended heavily on US intelligence.

Three days later, Patrick Tyler of the New York Times, broke a story concerning the UN inspectorate’s demand for access to the Ministry of Military Industries.

One official told how the whole cat-and-mouse game “relates less to the importance of any documents that might be found in the targeted buildings than the conviction that the steps will provoke a confrontation that will serve as a pretext for military action and to help the President get re-elected”.

By mid-August the US was well prepared to bomb any ministry failing to open its doors, or to knock out of the sky any Iraqi plane that did not belong there – the US had 120 planes on stand-by in Saudi Arabia with more offshore. They had also brought along, for the sheer hell of it, the GBU-28, a bomb capable of penetrating 90 feet of soil and concrete.

The US, in recent years, has acquired something of a name for itself when it comes to bringing along more tools than are needed for the job. In 1991, the coalition had 2,000 combat aircraft in the Gulf, outnumbering Saddam’s 3-1. Allied ground forces in 1991 numbered 700,000–troops from 32 nations. Saddam, as was only recently revealed (but you can bet Bush knew all along), had 183,000 troops.

The Vietnam Syndrome had left deep psychological scars on the Pentagon. Bush wanted to hit Iraq hard and fast, ignoring arguments that sanctions should be left to work. Now, sanctions are indeed working. At present inflation of the Iraqi dinar stands at 4,000 percent. The war has left starvation and disease in its wake, with little prospect of international help. Hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans will carry the mental scars of the war for years to come. So who the hell needs another war? Iraq needs one like it needs the plague.

The present crisis is also wrapped up in that complex term “The New World Order”, about which much has been written in recent years. Back in January 1991, Noam Chomsky (Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics Massachusetts Institute of Technology) had this to say:

  The NWO is real enough . . . its basic features were coming into force 20 years ago with the emergence of a tri-polar world as economic power diffused within US domains. The US remains the world’s leading military power, but its economic security has declined. . . . With the collapse of Soviet tyranny, the US is more free than before to use force . . . In the NWO, the Third World domains must still be controlled by force (Guardian, 10 January 1991).

The Bush administration is well aware of this. In March this year, the US Defence Department drafted a policy to:

  ensure that no rival . . . is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union . . . the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive position to protect their legitimate interests (Guardian, 9 September).

Peregrine Worsthorne was certainly thinking along the lines of US capitalists in the wake of the Cold War when he wrote that the task is to “to help build and sustain a world order stable enough to allow the advanced economies of the world to function without constant interruption and threat from the Third World”. (Sunday Telegraph, 16 September 1990).

Is it not a further irony that the US needs just this kind of “interruption and threat” to re-assert itself, exploiting its monopoly in the security market to reap economic rewards. Were the US to slash its defence budget by 25 percent in the next five years, as recently pondered by the Pentagon, it would face the prospect of pulling out of many of its bases in Europe and the Far-East. This would, as Francis Fukuyama pointed out “in turn stimulate real pressure for regional rearmament” (Guardian, 9 September).

But who would those nations wishing to re-arm buy weapons from? You guessed it and the US would always have the pretext to invade any up-and-coming tyrant who had a few too many weapons.

We should expect wars to be still on the capitalist menu in coming years.

John Bissett

Keynes — in the land of the sinking sun (1992)

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

For more than a decade, Japan has been portrayed as a non-stop growing economy based on new concepts of social harmony that somehow made it different from the other major industrial powers which were characterized by strikes and general social unrest as well as by inferior production records. The Japanese workers employed by the big multinationals such as Nissan, Sony and Honda were looked after in terms of regular employment, access to company hospitals and modern housing. Workers and managers wore the same company-style clothes, ate in the same canteens and worked in teams on the production line where the responsibility was shared by the team, with a resultant increase in production.

The Japanese economy has tripled in size since 1967. To many observers Japan has been, in economic terms, “the Land of the Rising Sun”. The Labour Party have been impressed to the extent that they suggested in their 1991 Policy Review document that the management of the Japanese economy indicated how a country can work its way out of recession:

  In Japan they train their way out of recession . . . Wc want to create a new training culture across British industry, one which recognises the relationship between training, innovation and profit.

With this rapid growth in the Japanese economy and the resulting surplus of funds available to Japanese banks huge loans were made abroad for the purchase of assets which were perceived to be cheap. By June 1990 Japanese banks had 12.4 percent of American assets or $408 billion-worth (Economist, 18 January 1992). The scale of this lending abroad is exemplified by the State of California. In the inflationary 1980s nearly every new office block in downtown Los Angeles was financed by the Japanese. The Japanese banks own the fifth, sixth and seventh largest banks in California.

Today, however, Japan faces an accelerating banking crisis as asset values inevitably decline as the world economy, including Japan, enters the deflationary phase of a world depression.This has resulted in a credit crunch and the consequent downgrading of the credit rating of Japanese banks and institutions. Because the accounting methods of Japanese banks fail to report loan defaults for periods as long as a year after the borrower has stopped paying, and because the Finance Ministry in Tokyo will not compel the banks to report them, the American regulatory authorities are rigorously examining the accounts with the result that the banks have to make higher loss provisions. These problems can be duplicated in Europe, Australia and throughout the industrial world.

The property boom in Japan involved levels of borrowing exceeding that of the UK and the USA. Mortgages of 99 years are not uncommon and housing is bought as an investment as well as a place to live with a view to passing it on to future generations. Availability of land is an important factor since Japan is a mountainous country, 68 percent of which is uninhabitable. Although in land area it is roughly the size of Italy the population—twice that of Italy— is confined to an area about the size of Austria.

This inevitably affects land prices and the banks have accumulated property loans on both domestic and commercial property. A one-bedroom flat in Tokyo could cost $500,000 before the market began to fall. Furthermore, large sections of the Japanese population have used the property they were buying as collateral for further bank loans to invest in the Japanese stock market. Along with the banks and institutions buying shares, this pushed the Nikkei Dow index to astronomic levels.

The Japanese economy is now moving into recession following on the banking crisis and credit crunch. Property prices are on the slide, business bankruptcies are increasing. The major Japanese banks have been put on credit watch by the major debt rating agencies. The worsening economic conditions are reflected as elsewhere in social disorder, as instanced by riots in Osaka:

  Trouble flared on Thursday after labourers tried to storm a municipal centre in protest against a decision to cut benefits to many of the local jobless, who do not qualify for full unemployment pay . . . About 2500 riot police dispersed hundreds of protesters early yesterday after cars and bicycles were set ablaze . . . Japan's unemployment rate is only 2.2 percent but that disguises the fact that many companies arc saddled with surplus staff, whose jobs may be in danger.

(Daily Telegraph, 3 October).

In a recent quarterly report the Bank of Japan acknowledged the worsening state of the economy:

  The outlook for profits, sales and investment were all down . . . The survey was reinforced by Nippon Steels forecast of a 74.6 percent drop in pre-tax profits for the half year ending this month . . . Job losses have so far been relatively few but with consumer demand waning, output falling, inventories growing and profits plunging many economists say it is only a matter of time before the manufacturing sector contracts with big job losses. (Financial Times, 13 September).

Some workers deemed to be no longer useful to their companies are being paid to stay at home but this is unlikely to continue indefinitely.

As in other countries the ruling politicians have been making proposals in order to convince the public “that something is being done to put things right”. And it is Keynesian methods that have been proposed as the solution: injecting large sums of money into the economy in order to upgrade the infrastructure. Undoubtedly the infrastructure badly needs improving. The bulk of the Japanese population do not enjoy the facilities of those who work for the big corporations. Sixty percent still live in backward agrarian conditions in dwellings whose toilets are not connected to outside main sewers. Japans roads are not adequate for the traffic which has increased five times in the last 25 years (Wall Street Journal, 28 September). Traffic holdups 50 miles long are not infrequent. But this is not the reason for the proposed Keynesian spending spree on which the government has embarked.

These plans have already run into difficulties about how the government should finance them:

  Mr Hat, Japanese Finance Minister, giving a lecture in Tokyo ruled out a return to special borrowing to finance the emergency spending package announced in August. He also rejected demands from retailers and industrial leaders for an income tax cut in 1993 to boost flagging consumption . . . His comments signal an intensification of the political struggle over how the government should finance higher public spending, which is virtually the only domestic source of economic growth at the moment. (Financial Times. 30 September, our emphasis).

In other words, the economy is moving into deep depression with zero growth in the private sector. So how can the Keynesian-inspired government bail-out plan revive the Japanese economy? Attempts to avert slumps by increased public spending have never yet been effective in a contracting economy. It failed to revive the American economy in the depression of the 1930s in spite of schemes such as the Boulder Dam under the New Deal. There are many similarities between the 1929 crash in the USA and the crash that is beginning now in Japan where the Nikkei Dow has lost over 60 percent of its value. The instability of the Japanese banking sector bears some comparison with the state of the American prior to Roosevelt closing them.

The socialist analysis, using the scientific Marxist economic approach, shows that this proposed solution (or any like it that are propounded by the Labour Party) is doomed to failure. The world depression that today engulfs all countries in varying stages, and the human tragedies that go with it of which the Osaka incident is but one example, are inherent contradictions of the capitalist system whether market-orientated or state “controlled” and cannot be solved by tinkering about with government finances.

But Japan may prove to be different in one sense, namely that the depression may reach depths not seen in previous ones as the huge mountain of debt is liquidated. The world depression is causing contraction in the Japanese economy and is exposing the phoney myth of permanent Japanese social tranquillity between workers and employers. The economic sun is no longer rising in the East. It is sinking and taking Keynesian theory with it.

Terry Lawlor

Letter: Yugoslavia (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Yugoslavia

Dear Editors,

I am writing to query what seem to me certain anomalies in the article on the bloodshed in Yugoslavia (September Socialist Standard). The writer states that uneven economic development amongst the constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia is the primary factor behind the conflict. Specifically, it is said that the capitalists of Slovenia and Croatia were reluctant to see their profits “exported” to fund development in the poorer republics. Hence the pro-independence policies of their respective governments.

The above is undoubtedly true but it still leaves the position of the workers in these two republics unexplained. According to the article, free elections were held in Croatia and Slovenia in 1990 in which parties promoting secession from Yugoslavia were victorious. This must mean that the majority of workers voted for these policies. The reason they voted so would appear to be that they could expect vastly improved earnings as workers in a capitalist Slovenia or Croatia rather than a capitalist Yugoslavia; a figure of possibly up to six times as much is mentioned in the article. This again is a straightforward result of the uneven development. Further they obviously felt little ethnic kinship for their fellow workers in the rump state of Yugoslavia.

Thus the writer’s comment that workers have been injected with nationalism by unscrupulous capitalists would seem simplistic. It would appear that both capitalists and workers in the breakaway republics had a material interest in going it alone. Hence the governments, being elected, acted accordingly to carry out the aspirations of both sections of society.

Yugoslavia is but one historical instance where the economic demands of capitalism and nationalism have combined, resulting in human tragedy. To prevent its repetition, by being able to explain to workers its causes, it is necessary to understand these phenomena fully. Perhaps questions such as the nature of the state; the role of government and what forces in a "democratic” capitalist society it represents; and the influence of nationalism and ethnic culture in forming workers’ political views and modifying their experience of the class struggle could be explored in future issues of the Socialist Standard.

Kevin Cronin

Belfast

Reply:
No doubt the workers in Slovenia and Croatia who voted for pro-independence parties perceived this to be in their economic interest, but this does not mean that independence will in fact make any substantial difference to their economic situation.

The article did not say that their wages could go up by as much as six times. It merely recorded that the average wages in Slovenia were reputedly six times as much as in Kosovo, the most backward part of former Yugoslavia. This was due to economic rather than political considerations, for instance a higher degree of industrialization and a higher level of education, training and culture amongst the working class, “a straightforward result of the uneven development” as you put it. It follows from this that independence—a change in the political superstructure—will make no difference to wage levels.
Independence will, however, mean an immense gain for the capitalists of Slovenia and Croatia in that a proportion of their profits will no longer be syphoned off to Belgrade (to pay much more for the upkeep of the Yugoslav army than for projects in backward Kosovo and Macedonia, as it happens). If the Slovenian and Croatian capitalists were to share these retained profits with their workers in the form of higher wages, then a case might be made for saying that workers as well as capitalists had a common material interest in independence. However; this would be to assume a generosity on their part never yet displayed by capitalists anywhere. Perhaps the workers who voted for independence believed that this would happen. If so, they will be sorely disappointed—Editors.

Sting in the Tail: What's Up Doc? (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

What's Up Doc?

In the Observer Magazine (27 Sept.) under the headline Poverty Makes You Sick, a doctor John Collie wrote:

  There is one piece of health advice which is more effective than all the others. One guaranteed way to live longer, grow taller, avoid chronic illness, have healthier children, increase your quality of life and minimise your risk of premature death. The secret is: be rich — because all the major health indicators are directly related to income. People living in poverty are not simply 'less comfortable' than everyone else — they have shorter lives, sicker children and babies which are more likely to die in infancy.

So there you have it, fellow workers; stop whingeing, just get rich.


Dying For A Job

Here is some heartening news for those workers who are still managing to hold on to a job.

  Losing your job increases your chances of dying, according to new evidence. Data from the British Regional Heart Study, which has spent 10 years studying people from 253 British towns, shows that unemployment kills.
  "We have found that men we were screening who were unemployed at any time over a five-year period were more than one-and-a-half times as likely to die in the next five years as men in continuous employment" said Dr Joan Morris, lecturer in medical statistics at St Thomas's Hospital, London.

The Observer (27 September)

For those of us still with a job it is not all sunshine however.

  Stress at work is an important reason why people take time off sick, according to Dr Paul Oldershaw, head of health sciences at the Health and Safety Executive. "A 1990 Labour Force Survey suggests a national picture of around 110,000 people who regard themselves as victims of stress and depression caused by work, and 200,000 who regard themselves as having a problem made worse by their work."

Got the picture then? Out of work and facing hellish poverty problems you are more likely to snuff it; in work and you are driven nutty by the stress of it all. Aint it time we got shot of this crazy society?


Dead-End Path

The capture of Abimael Guzman, the leader of the Maoist Sendero Luminosa guerillas by Peru's security forces hit the headlines recently.

Sendero Luminosa (Shining Path) aim to do in Peru what Mao did in China — to sweep away the ruling class by armed force, and they have for years waged a ruthless and bloody war against the police, military, judiciary, politicians of both left and right and even villagers who do not toe the Maoist line.

So the old Maoist illusions live on in Peru. Sendero Luminoso imagine that the poverty of the peasants and workers can be ended by toppling Peru's rulers, but should they win power they will find, as Mao’s successors in China have found, that capitalism is a worldwide system and they must become part of it even against their own wishes.


Mixed-Up Mike

Film star Michael Caine's comments on political and social matters are a strange mixture of sense and nonsense.

A dyed-in-the-wool Tory, Caine is forever on about his working class roots but could still complain in a TV interview about council tenants having cars and, even worse, lockups to put them in when he couldn't find a parking place where he lived in Mayfair for his Rolls Royce!

That’s only some of the nonsense but he can make sense too. For example, he recognises that the Labour Party isn't socialist and just look at this comment on religion:

  I'm born of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother. I was educated in a Jewish school and I'm married to a Moslem. None of these religions has made a mark on me because I see the cant and hypocrisy In them. Each one teaches prejudice.

Dally Express (23 September)

The Dirty Work

Anyone who wants to know who will do the dirty work in socialism such as farming, should have seen a recent TV programme on the government’s "Set Aside” policy. This amounts to farmers being given money to set aside some of their land, that is grow nothing on it because of glutted food markets.

We have dealt many times in this journal with the madness of a social system where this can happen while millions starve, but there were for us some very encouraging views expressed by some of the farmers on Set Aside. They "hated” it: they didn’t want the money but wanted to use the land usefully and saw their role as being primarily one of growing things. Above all they wanted to stay on the land because they loved the life.

In socialism farming, like any other job, will be done by people who wish to do it and there looks like being no shortage of those.


A Useless Unity

Following their humiliation at the general election the Scottish National Party met in sombre mood at their conference in Perth last month.

Like any other reformist party the SNP is a loose coalition with the various strands of opinion all pulling in different directions.

There were "social democrats" ranged against pure-and-simple nationalists, supporters of the multiparty "Scotland United" movement versus go-it-alone hardliners, nationalises clashing with "regulators" CNDers opposed by "defence realists", and so on.

There were, however, two things on which unity was total; the complete acceptance of capitalism and a blind belief, despite all the evidence, in their ability to tame It.

50 Years Ago: The Ugly Reality of Indian Nationalism (1992)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received a request to give our support to a joint manifesto in favour of the Indian Nationalist movement, and the following resolution has been sent in reply to it:—

  We are not willing to give our support to a joint manifesto in conjunction with other political parties endorsing the Indian Nationalist movement. As Socialists we are opposed to the exploitation of the toilers either by foreign or native exploiters. As that exploitation can be ended only by the achievement of Socialism. through international working-class action, we are opposed to the Indian Nationalist movement which has capitalist aims and is not deserving of working-class support. We are also not prepared to associate with non-Socialist political parties.

(...)
The fact that we are opposed to the Indian Nationalist movement does not mean that we acquiesce in the brutal suppression of which the Indians have been victims. We are opposed to the capitalist system wherever it raises its ugly head, but we know that the solution to the workers’ subjective position under it is the same everywhere.

The only road to salvation for the Indian worker is the road to socialism, and he must travel along that road in brotherly harmony with the members of his class throughout the world.

[From a statement signed “Executive Committee, S.P.G.B”, Socialist Standard, November 1942.]

Capitalism in China — Whose Side Are We On? (1970)

From the July 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The article ‘The Red Capitalist Class’ which appeared in the November 1969 Socialist Standard has brought some correspondence from Frank Collins of Wellington, New Zealand — the vice President of the Wellington-Taranaki Footwear Operatives’ Union and a member of the pro-Chinese New Zealand Communist Party. Mr. Collins was a member of a New Zealand Communist Party delegation which recently spent five weeks touring China and we publish some of his observations below:

   I found this article very hard to see, though most interesting. But whose side is it on? — it must be one or the other. 

    I had the experience recently of a five weeks tour through socialist China. I saw nothing of the ‘old China’ like I once saw as a young seaman. Culturally much had changed — there are no beggars, no prostitutes . . . and no one trying to take you down. Rather I can state that living standards, housing and general conditions throughout the People’s Republic of China are on the rise. There is plenty of food, everyone is well dressed and shod by modern Chinese standards. There was no unemployment. I never saw an armed soldier or a policeman, only People’s Liberation Army men who are like the workers. 

    When in Shanghai I was told that the few 'capitalist roaders’ who had held power until 1967 boasted that the Cultural Revolution would fail in this city. There was no evidence that it had. It was the same in Peking and Canton, Changsha and Wuhan. 

   In six factories I visited I found that all were run by the workers themselves — by elected revolutionary committees of 12, 13, as many as 30, according to the importance or size of the industry. 

   I was impressed again and again by the relaxed methods in working by the workers — there was no hurry or bustle, no bonus or piece-work schemes in operation (which are the curse of the worker in the capitalist mode of production). As a result production had increased. Meeting with the revolutionary committees was something to remember! They answered questions freely, modestly and free from arrogance. 

   The worker in the factory receives medical attention for himself and family free of charge. The factory administration cannot sack a worker, whatever the circumstances. Should a worker in a factory wish to leave, he or she would have to apply to do so. Political education in Mao Tse-tung teaching is carried out in the factory’s time. 

   At the hostels where I stayed, this education is carried out by the staff — who, by the way, would be insulted if offered a tip. 

    With respect to China’s socialism, workers whom I spoke to were all of the one mind: that a socialist China was not possible unless Socialism was world wide.

What Mr. Collins says about the ‘new’ China is interesting — but proves nothing. It is common knowledge that China has changed a great deal since Chiang Kai-shek’s days but it should be obvious that one doesn’t decide that a society is socialist simply because there are no longer any prostitutes walking in the streets of Shanghai or because living conditions have improved.

Mr. Collins says that of six factories he visited they were all run “by the workers themselves—by elected revolutionary committees”. So what? If factories anywhere (in New Zealand, say, or in Britain) fell into the hands of workers’ committees tomorrow what would happen? Since workers at the moment all over the world are committed to capitalism, because they have not yet grasped any alternative method of organising society, these factories under ‘workers’ control’ would continue to produce commodities for sale. It would simply be a question of the workers driving themselves, holding their own whips, managing their own exploitation. The factories in China will be run on socialist lines only when the goods they turn out are no longer for selling on the internal and world markets and when the people working in them have no need for wages.

Mr. Collins also adds that all the workers he talked to understood “that a socialist China was not possible unless socialism was world wide.” We are glad to hear it — but this merely demonstrates that workers in China are in conflict with Mao Tse-tung's views. For example, Mao was writing in 1945 that Russia was a socialist country (that is, going along with the Stalinist myth of the possibility of ‘socialism in one country’):

   Russian history has created the Russian system. There they have eliminated the social system of exploitation of man by man and have realised the newest type of democracy, namely the socialist political. economic, and cultural system. ('On Coalition Government’. Mao’s report to the Seventh Party Congress in 1945).

Then there is the question of ‘whose side are we on?’ Mr. Collins’ attitude to the so-called Cultural Revolution seems to amount to whole-hearted acceptance of the official Peking version —that this upheaval represented a united front of workers, peasants and Maoists struggling against the proverbial ‘handful’ of ‘capitalist roaders’. The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not agree with this. The ‘Cultural Revolution’ was comprised of two distinct elements. Firstly there was the power struggle between rival factions in the old leadership — Mao Tse-tung acting as the figurehead of one tendency and Liu Shao-chi playing the same role in the other, though doubtless the infighting was infinitely more complicated (and opportunist) than this simple collision of two groups suggests. This gave rise to a situation throughout China where for a time there was no unified political power and as inevitably happens under these circumstances, groups of workers and peasants used the opportunity to push ahead with their own demands. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is not aware of any workers’ organisation operating during the Cultural Revolution which was putting forward a completely coherent socialist analysis of China and the world, but there were plenty of examples of workers going much further in their criticism of Chinese state capitalism and in their proposals on democracy than any section of the ruling class was prepared to go. An outstanding case was the policy advocated by the Sheng-wu-lien movement.

The Ninth Party Congress marked something like the consolidation of Maoist control in China — with the leadership in the hands of Mao himself. Lin Piao, the amazingly durable Chou En-lai and the new men in the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Ch’en Po-ta (formerly Mao’s personal secretary) and K’ang Sheng (head of the secret police). Now that rival elements in the ruling class had been defeated it was time to smash organised working class opposition to Mao’s state capitalist regime. The traditional bogy of ‘left deviation’ (i.e. workers showing some political initiative) was resurrected and the slogans and declarations of the Cultural Revolution period were dropped, evidently because some working men and women were taking them seriously.

“Trust the masses, rely on them and respect their initiative’’, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party had written in their Decision Concerning the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution in August 1966. “Some units are controlled by those who have wormed their way into the Party and are taking the capitalist road. Such persons in authority are extremely afraid of being exposed by the masses and therefore seek every possible pretext to suppress the mass movement.” But when Chou -En-lai came in for criticism, wall posters immediately went up in Peking warning “the adversaries of Chou’’ against “any manifestation of opposition”.

“Party leadership should be good at discovering the Left and developing and strengthening the ranks of the Left; it should firmly rely on the revolutionary Left” had been the Maoist line during the Cultural Revolution, but now the official agitation is against “left extremism”— against the demand of some activists of the Cultural Revolution period who called for the ousting of the entire former leadership. Most spectacular of all has been the volte-face on the question of force. During the Cultural Revolution the official policy was that in order to “correctly handle contradictions among the people”, “any method of forcing a minority holding different views to submit is impermissible. The minority should be protected, because sometimes the truth is with the minority. Even if the minority is wrong, they should still be allowed to argue their case and reserve their views.” This is in evident contrast to the widely reported accounts of recent mass public executions. According to Tass, for example, nineteen youths were executed at a stadium in Peking on 27 January 1970 — because they were members of a left-wing opposition movement.

China is a capitalist country and, as always under capitalism, shows all the signs of a bitter class struggle in progress. Faced with a choice between the workers and the Maoist representatives of the ruling class, socialists have no hesitation in deciding whose side they are on.

Party News: About Ourselves (1970)

From the July 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is the Socialist Party of Great Britain?

An independent political party which stands opposed to all others in this country, including the Labour and Communist parties. Our only links are with similar socialist parties in some other parts of the world.

What is your aim?

The replacement of the existing capitalist system of society by a new and different system we call Socialism.

What is capitalism?

A system based on the ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth (land, industry, railways, offices and the like) by a section only of society who thus form a privileged class. The others, who in return for a wage or salary produce wealth for sale with a view to profit, make up the producing or working class. In Britain less than five per cent of the population belong to the owning or capitalist class. Most people — those who work in offices as well as those who work in the factories — are in the working class.

What is Socialism?

A democratic world community without frontiers based on the ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth by society as a whole. Socialism will abolish classes and free all mankind from exploitation and oppression. The basis of Socialism is this ownership of all the means of production by the whole community; control over their use will rest in the hands of the community through democratic institutions. Wealth will be produced not for sale or profit, but solely to satisfy human needs. This means the end of buying and selling and all the other financial and commercial institutions like money, prices, wages and banks. People will co-operate to produce an abundance of wealth from which they can take freely according to their needs.

Will everything belong to the State?

No. The State does not represent the whole community; it serves the interests only of those who own the means of production. State ownership or nationalisation is one of the ways in which this class controls industry. When the State takes over industries (like the railways and coalmines in Britain) it does so in their interests. State ownership leaves unchanged the class basis of society, .the profit motive and the wages system, all of which Socialism will abolish. Nationalisation is just State capitalism.

What system exists in Russia?

Russian society is part of world capitalist society. It shows all the essential features of capitalism: a class who control the means of production .through their control of political power; another class forced to work for wages; production of goods for sale with a view to profit and the accumulation of capital out of profits. The same goes for countries like China, Cuba and Yugoslavia. They like Russia have State capitalism.

Do you want something like the kibbutzim in Israel?

Socialism can only be a world community without frontiers. It cannot be established in one country let alone on one farm. The kibbutzim do show that human beings can live without money and can work without wages, but their small scale means that what they can offer is very restricted so that young people are tending to leave them. In practice they have paved the way for the development of capitalism in Israel and some have themselves become capitalist institutions employing outside wage labour and producing for the market with a view to profit.

How do you advocate Socialism should be established?

By the class of wage and salary earners, once a majority of them want and understand Socialism, taking democratic political action to change the basis of society from the class to the common ownership of the means of production and distribution.

Why must there be a majority in favour of the change to Socialism before it can be made?

Socialism, by its very nature as a system involving voluntary co-operation, could only be kept going by those who really wanted it and knew what it involved. Any attempt to establish Socialism without a majority first being in favour is bound to fail.

Do you repudiate undemocratic minority action to achieve Socialism?

Most definitely. No leaders, however sincere or able, can lead a non-socialist working class to Socialism. Leaders who take power while a majority do not understand Socialism have no choice but to develop and administer capitalism, as has been shown in Russia and by the various Labour governments in Britain. When a majority do want and understand Socialism they have no need of leaders, but only to organise themselves democratically.

Why do you advocate political action to achieve Socialism?

It is their control of the machinery of government that now allows the capitalist class to protect their privileged position as the owners of the means of production. In Britain it is parliament that makes the laws granting them property rights and it is the police and the Courts, and if need be the army, that enforce these laws. The socialist majority must win political power in order to remove the protection the government machine now gives to class ownership and to carry through the establishment of the common ownership of the means of production.

How do you advocate the Socialist majority should win political power?

By using their votes to elect Socialist delegates to Parliament and the local councils. A Socialist victory in a democratically-run election would demonstrate to all that a majority were in favour of the change to Socialism.

Why are you opposed to all other political parties?

All of them accept the capitalist system and believe that current social problems can be solved within its framework.

Why do you think that reforms of the capitalist system are not the solution?

These problems are caused by the class ownership of the means of production which all reforms leave unchanged. The policy of trying to deal with social problems one by one by reforms of capitalism is futile as this is to deal with effects and not the cause. We call this policy “reformism” and are opposed to it.

But surely you are not against all reforms?

We are not opposed to reforms which may bring temporary relief to some workers, but we do not regard it as the task of a socialist party to propose reforms of capitalism. Were we to do this we could easily soon become just another reformist party. To avoid this danger we advocate Socialism only.

Why have all the other parties failed?

Basically because capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work in the interests of the class of wage and salary earners. It is a class system that can only work for those who own the means of production. Any party, be it Labour or Conservative, which takes power under capitalism is forced to run that system in the only way it can be and so is inevitably brought into conflict with the mass of people who work for a wage or salary. This has been proved time and again.

So it is not because the politicians are not determined enough or are incompetent or dishonest that they fail?

No. No matter how determined or able or sincere the members of a government may be they still could not make capitalism work for the good of all. The politicians fail because they have to accept the class system which causes the problems they are always promising to solve.

Everything has its price (1970)

From the July 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

One fact which is made very clear by the operation of things like the welfare state, social aid agencies, criminal records, is that a capitalist state simply cannot function without some means of identifying people. There are of course simple ways of doing this— the policeman asks you your name and address—and there are more complex and refined methods, like matching fingerprints.

Another method, which has only recently come onto the scene, is by referring to speech patterns. This works on the theory that each person speaks to an individual style, has a personal vocabulary and uses some words and phrases persistently while others hardly at all. (Professional footballers on television seem quite unable to utter more than a couple of words without interjecting “y’know” but perhaps that is a social, rather than an individual, fashion.)

Now there is no reason to confine this method to the identification of people. If we apply it to society, it has its uses in telling us something about a social system. One word, for example, which is in constant use under capitalism is “market”. We hear about the Common Market, market economics, market research and so on. What does that tell us about capitalism ?

A market originally meant a gathering of people for the purpose of buying and selling goods. Time has rather modified this; a market need not now be a place where people gather but it is still, in some shape or form, a place where goods are sold. So one fact from capitalism’s constant use of the word is that it is a system of buying and selling where the dominating motive for production is profitable sale. It follows from this that everything must have a price and that there are laws and principles and procedures which operate to arrive at that price.

This may seem like labouring the obvious, were it not that there are unpleasant implications to the pricing of everything and that lots of people who think that capitalism and its market economy are examples of eternal sanity often find themselves protesting at the way the economy has to work. For example there is the case of Stewkley Church.

This is a church in Buckinghamshire with enough ancient material in it to justify the description 12th. century; in fact it is said to be among the finest Norman village churches in England. The mediaeval craftsmen who built the place, who knew nothing of modern technology or market research, were unwise enough to put it down in a place which may be needed for the third London Airport. If the airport is built at nearby Cublington, Stewkley Church will be destroyed.

The location of the airport is at present being considered by the Roskill Commission and one of their jobs is to put a price on each of the four possible sites. This price will be made up of the costs of such as new communication systems, the loss of agricultural land, the destruction of buildings. So it came about that, about six months ago, a firm of business consultants made what is called a cost-benefit analysis of Stewkley Church. The euphemism is itself enough to illuminate the function of the consultants. They costed the church at £51,000.

This figure, however represents only the fire insurance value and some local people don’t think this covers the situation. The chairman of Buckingham County Council has said that the three Norman arches in the church are worth, as works of art, about £1 million each. The secretary of the church preservation committee thinks it is impossible to put a value on the place; he probably agrees with the chairman of the group who are resisting the airport, who says “It is like trying to put a value on a summer’s day.”

In fact, capitalism does put a value on a summer’s day. And on a work of art. On a church. A social system which works by profit, whose wheels are lubricated by money, must put a price on everything. It bruises many sensitivities in the process, but capitalism can work in only one way. That is why vandalism is part of its history. Stewkley Church would not be the first bit of history to be trampled under in the march for profit.

Then there is the case of the judge’s life. A couple of months ago, a High Court action began, in which an American rubber company sued three other firms for alleged infringement of a patent on a production process. One judge heard the case for 30 days and then died before he could give judgement, which of course was not only inconvenient but also very costly.

The original hearing cost about £60,000 and the repeat, before another judge, was expected to come to about another £50,000. So all four of the companies united to take out a joint insurance policy on the life of the judge, for the estimated cost of the retrial.

One can imagine the judge—and judges are not notoriously slow to react to any slur on their dignity—fuming at the thought of a bunch of accountants coldly assessing the price of his life, even if it was rather higher than the price they put on the lives of most of their employees. But of course it was not the value of his life which was being insured—only the price it had in relation to the use the rubber companies were hoping to make of it. Or perhaps that only makes it more of an insult.

Yet insult or not, this is all perfectly natural under capitalism. Since the judge would hear the trial, and assess the rival cases, in terms of the system’s profit motive and the protection of property rights, he cannot logically complain (not that he probably wanted to) if some of the essential degradation of the system rubs off onto him.

The judge does not stand alone in this; the valuation of human life is commonplace. One impetus which has been given to this is in the building of new roads, which may make transport cheaper—and so bring more profit to the industries using them — and save some lives, but which also costs a lot of money. How to decide, then, between building a motorway or leaving the old road to carry on ?

One factor which counts in the decision is the price put one each human life which a new road may save—what is it worth? A recent (31 March) article in The Guardian said that the Ministry of Transport has fixed a value at £8,800; they are thinking about raising this figure to £9,800 because after all wages have gone up and there is the higher cost of training and replacing workers to be considered.

There are pressures for other ministries to join in this inhuman, unavoidable piece of calculation and for the whole thing to be tidied up in that thing beloved of the profit-conscious accountant—a standard code of costing. Professor Alan Williams of York University has done some calculations on this and has come up with the notion that ". . . every year of life is of the same intrinsic value to the community" although he hints at what he means by “community" when he adds “This sum will then be added to the economic benefits of providing various facilities" and that "certain weightings" could be applied to increase the price of people of "greater value to the community.” The same Guardian article says that a senior civil servant has actually suggested a figure to suit the "typical" man in England and Wales—£30,000, based on his potential earnings. The usefulness of all this research is that, if an agreed figure can be put on the worth of a human life to capitalism, the accountants and the cost benefit analysists and the planners would know where they stand when they are considering the economics of things like preventive medical services, new transport systems, industrial safety measures. In other words, the capitalist class would know, before they invested in a new road or a hospital, whether they were putting their money into saving lives which would bring them a return on their investment.

This may make the blood run cold yet it is all very necessary, and sensible, once we accept that capitalism must continue. Capitalism exists by profit; its wealth is made to be sold; under it everything must have its price and, as human beings provide an essential part of the productive process, they too must be costed and valued like nuts and bolts and raw material.

Too bad for anyone who comes out on the wrong side of the balance sheet and whose wellbeing, comfort or even whose life, may be written off as uneconomic. Too bad if something which might be worth keeping stands in the way of profitable progress. If capitalism is to be assessed and identified by its characteristics—by its market economy—then it is an inhuman, degrading system whose concern for human life and dignity is ever diminishing. There are plenty of other reasons for getting rid of capitalism, but that on its own is enough.

Ivan