Week-End School (1936)

Party News from the August 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

A week-end school is being held at "Woodlands" Camp, near Sevenoaks, Kent, on Saturday and Sunday, August 29th and 30th. There are facilities for swimming, sunbathing, outdoor games, discussion, and there will be lectures on Saturday evening and Sunday. Sleeping accommodation is provided in clean, dry, warm huts.

The charge is 7/6 per person, covering accommodation and all meals, from Saturday tea to Sunday tea. For those who bring their own tents the charge is 6/-.

Those who wish to come only on the Sunday may do so.

Nearest station, Otford (two miles from camp). Fare, 4/3 week-end return from Holborn Viaduct or Victoria.

All who wish to attend for the week-end or for Sunday should without delay inform the Central Organiser, "Summer School," at Head Office, 42, Great Dover Street, S.E.l.

Letter: Socialists and War (1936)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Reader’s Queries Answered

To the Editor, Socialist Standard.

Dear Sir,

Although I have read many Socialist Standards, I am still not at all clear regarding your view of war and armaments. Every sane person must be opposed to war. But as to arming. Speaking from where we stand, British Soil, do you advocate complete disarmament and therefore open for any other power to control this land; or while countries all over the world are piling up arms— for defence of course—do you favour some measure of arming by Britain, and if so, to what extent? In a nutshell, I do not care whether it is called arming for defence or offence, do you advocate Britain disarming as things are now on the Continent, or not? Hoping you can help.

Yours truly, 

E. C.

Liverpool

Reply:

Our correspondent's letter, in its first paragraph, contains the statement “every sane person must be opposed to war." This contains only enough of the truth to be very misleading. If we clear up the error in it we shall have gone far to explain the Socialist attitude towards war. The statement, “Every sane person must be opposed to war," contains as much truth as the statement, “Every sane person must be opposed to slums, undernourishment, and excessive work under conditions dangerous to health." Every sane person is opposed to war-horrors and to exploitation as regards himself; but when it comes to protecting the interest of one class by imposing these things on other people then both statements are transparently false. If the capitalist class have to choose between giving up their wealth and privilege and freeing the working class from poverty, inhuman exploitation and degrading conditions of life, the capitalist class, as a whole, plump solidly for retaining the misery of the working class. Threatened by a challenge to their position, they will without hesitation set in motion all the machinery of law and force, prisons, policemen’s batons, concentration camps, bullet, bayonet and aerial bomb against the men and women of their own nation. They will calmly starve a million miners and their families into submission as in 1926. There is almost nothing they will not do.

Transfer that from the home to the battlefield—to the arena of international conflict. Threatened by the greed of rival exploiters in foreign countries the capitalist class will drown the world in four years of blood and slaughter. They will destroy human lives by the million, rather than give up their property, their right to exploit the workers, to the capitalists of a rival power.

In short, as far as the capitalists are concerned, they have something to lose which is of the utmost value. They will go to the utmost limit to keep what they have.

What of the workers? They have almost nothing to lose, except their lives and their health, and these they lose in war: not in the outcome of war, but in war itself, whatever the outcome. The working class have no interest at stake which warrants their supporting war. Whatever strength they have to influence the issue of war and peace should be thrown against war, no matter what the circumstances of the particular conflict may be. The question put by war-makers, “Are you in favour of peace at any price?" has no meaning to a worker who understands his class position. The price of losing a war or of surrendering without waging war is not paid by the working class, but by the capitalist class. What difference does it make to the working class whether the British or the German or the American ruling class own the colonial lands and dominate the world’s trade and shipping? Will they be poor, or suffer from unemployment? Indeed they will, for they do already everywhere.

The workers then should throw their weight against war. What does this mean in practice? As the working class have not yet placed themselves in control of the machinery of government, but continue at each election to place the capitalists in control, the latter are in a position to decide when, where and why the armed forces shall be set in motion, and also the amount and nature of the armed forces. The question the capitalists have to consider when deciding whether or not to wage war over any particular international conflict is the probable consequences to themselves. These include the military probabilities, personal danger (from air-raids, etc.), and also the effect war will have on the workers. If the working class, or any large body of them, are hostile to the war the capitalists have to consider how to overcome that hostility and what will be the result if they should fail to do so. To the extent that the workers in any country are alive to their interests and opposed to war the capitalists will be inclined to make some concession to the enemy Government, rather than face war. A majority of workers will, however, never be in favour of peace against capitalist wishes while they (the workers) are prepared to support capitalist government, because they will always be ready to accept capitalist reasons for waging a particular war.

The answer to the specific questions put by our correspondent are therefore as follows: —

The S.P.G.B., having no control over the formation or use of the armed forces now controlled by the capitalist class, cannot affect and has no concern with the purely capitalist question whether the British capitalists should have more armaments to protect their property against the British workers and the foreign capitalist powers.

The S.P.G.B., in line with working-class interests, is not concerned with the outcome of any war between capitalist groups over the right to appropriate the proceeds of the exploitation of the working class.

The S.P.G.B. knows that war means death, maiming and disease to the working class and, knowing that wars between capitalist groups do not involve any working-class interest does not support such wars in any circumstances whatever.

The S.P.G.B. has one object—Socialism—and to attain that object knows that the organised working class must gain control of the machinery of government, including the armed forces. When such control has been achieved the working class will know how to use the armed forces for so long as it may be necessary to defend Socialism against an insurrectionary minority or an undefeated foreign group of capitalists.

Editorial Committee

Marx: the Man and his Work - Part 1 (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx died on the 14th of March 1883. The work he did lives on. An enormous amount has been written about him as an individual and about his materialist philosophy; less has been written about his work on economics. His theory of surplus-value is still largely ignored. Of those few who have written on this subject, many appear never to have read Marx himself. In fact most pseudo-intellectuals who write or have written about Marx, being in many cases of the type Marx so often castigated as bourgeois reformers, ignore those facets of his work — either not liking or failing to see the importance of them.

Making this small addition to the mass of material on Marx the man is done in no spirit of hero-worship but to place Marx in line with the conditions which produced him. The writer has chosen for the most part the early stages of Marx’s career in order to show a man reacting to the conditions and, as far possible in a short article, the conditions shaping the man.

A Time of Revolution
Karl Heinrich Marx was born at Trier (Trèves) in Germany on 5th May 1818. Both the date and the place of his birth are significant. Not many years before, the armies of republican France had advanced over Europe carrying with them the emotional ideas of liberal democracy, ideas about liberty, equality and fraternity.

The victory of European reaction did not destroy the influence of revolutionary ideas in the backward countries of Europe. Politically and economically, Germany was a backward country, and consisted of thirty-six semi-independent states and principalities in which a feudal aristocracy held power. The whole of Germany was dominated by the extremely reactionary states of Austria and Prussia. Growing industry and commerce had created a capitalist class, but the aristocracy had no intention of giving way to the rising capitalists and were strong supporters of the absolute forms of government then existing throughout the German state.

In these circumstances the capitalists were in revolt and were demanding the setting up of a democratic form of government over a unified Germany, which was to be completely separated from Austria. Conditions thus brought into revolt much of the youth in Germany, and it is not surprising that Marx and others of that period became revolutionaries.

Philosophical Questions
The parents of Karl Marx were able to provide for their children what was by the standards of the time a good education. Karl appears to have shown good intellectual ability at an early age. He was attending Bonn University at the age of 16, and went from there to the Berlin University. Apparently it was the intention of his parents that he should prepare for a legal career. Marx, however, like many young students, was impatient of the ordinary methods of study, and was for some time very undecided. He dabbled in poetry, and toyed with the idea of writing a work on the philosophy of law, and engaged in other forms of literary activity.

At that time the main intellectual influence on the students of Berlin was the philosophy of Hegel, which was used to criticize the existing regime. Marx became one of a band of “Young Hegelians”. He now decided upon an academic career; in 1841 he obtained his doctor’s degree from Jena University for a thesis upon the Natural Philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. This thesis was an anticipatory part of a larger work in which Marx intended to deal with the cycle of Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy as a whole. In the end Marx did not publish his thesis. Its immediate aim was no longer a matter of urgency; political and philosophic affairs of quite another kind did not permit Marx to carry out his original intention.

For a short time Marx was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a paper owned by a group of radical industrialists which operated under great difficulties due to a strict police censorship. As editor Marx was confronted with questions concerning economics and socialism. Due to the kind of academic training he had, he found great difficulty in dealing with such questions. He decided to study these subjects as soon as possible. The possibility arose when the backer of the paper, in an attempt to save it from suppression by the adoption of a milder policy, forced Marx from his position as editor.

Revolutionary Theory
It was during this period, on the 19th of June 1843, that Marx married Jenny von Westphalen who became his support and counsellor up to the end of her life. Shortly afterwards they moved to Paris, where Marx had been offered employment as editor of the Franco-German Year Book. Here it was that he contacted Engels; it was this event which led to the lifelong friendship and collaboration which has left an invaluable legacy to the Socialist movement.

In Paris, Marx was in contact with and took part in the revolutionary movements of the time. He thus became acquainted with the numerous schools of thought existing in the revolutionary movements and made a deep study of economics and social questions. At the time Marx was editing the Rheinische Zeitung he was a radical democrat: it was his studies in Paris which transformed him into a communist, as that word was then understood. With the political change occurred the philosophical one. He became a materialist.

Due to the vindictiveness of the Prussian government, Marx was forced to leave Paris and went to live in Brussels. It was while he was resident in that town, in 1847, he gave a series of lectures on economics to the German Workingmen’s Club. The purpose of these lectures was to show the economic conditions which formed the basis of the class struggle. It is in the lectures, now to be found in the pamphlet Wage-Labour and Capital, that we find the germ of the theory of surplus-value.

1847 was also the year in which Marx published his book The Poverty of Philosophy. This work was levelled at the French Utopian, Proudhon, and in this criticism Marx outlined the fundamentals of scientific Socialism.

The Communist Manifesto

The Manifesto was published as the platform of the “Communist League”, a working-men’s association at first German and later international. Due to the political conditions on the continent before 1848, it was a secret society. At a congress of the League, held in London in November 1847, Marx and Engels were asked to prepare for publication a theoretical and practical party programme, and this was published in 1848 as The Communist Manifesto. It has since been published in many languages. In an edition of 1888 Engels wrote a preface in which he gave in detail the history of the Manifesto. The following quotations are important:

  Yet when it was written we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Socialists in 1847 were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances — in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the "Educated” classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class has become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself communist.

Second:

  And our notion from the very beginning was that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself”.

Third:

  The Manifesto being our joint production, I feel bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus, belongs to Marx. That proposition is that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, forms the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the intellectual history of that epoch.

For the German edition of 1872 Engels wrote as follows:

  However much the state of things may have altered during the last 25 years, the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of section II. That passage would in many respects be very differently worded today.

Engels made it clear that although much of the Manifesto had become outdated, as shown by his 1888 preface: “But then, the Manifesto has become an historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.”

The first quotation gives an insight to the political situation in the working-class movement of 1847. Engels leaves no doubt as to why it was called the Communist Manifesto. An explanation is provided for those who have become tired and frustrated, an answer to the cynics is to be found, in the second quotation: the establishment of Socialism as the work of the working class. That class is not yet ready to accomplish its historic mission.

The third quotation is important and interesting Here we have Engels telling us that Marx had, as early as 1847, mastered and was able to apply the materialist conception of history. Engels gives us in this statement a concise definition of the materialist conception of history.

Cologne and London

1848 was a year of European revolt. There was an insurrection in Paris and Marx, expelled from Brussels, accepted an invitation from the Parisian government to return to that city. Shortly afterwards the wave of revolt spread to Germany, and Marx and Engels decided to return there.

In Cologne they commenced the paper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, of which Marx was the editor. The paper was a radical democratic journal, but in it Marx put forward his view that it was only the workers who could be relied upon in the revolution and that the industrialists who were the leaders of the movement would check it as soon as its full possibilities became clear. Marx’s view of the rôle of the leaders proved correct, and the revolt in Germany collapsed.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed and Marx himself arrested and tried for high treason. He was acquitted, but was forced to go to Paris. With the crushing of the revolt there, expulsion again threatened him and he travelled to what was to be his home for the rest of his life, London.

The early years of their life in London were extremely hard for the Marx family. A period of European reaction set in after the revolts of 1848. The Communist League broke up, and Marx had to provide for his family by poorly-paid journalistic work. During this period of extreme poverty Marx continued his social studies, making use of the reading room at the British Museum, which finally led to the publication of Capital.

Bob Ambridge

(To be concluded in the next issue)

Link to  Part 2

Whether or not the firing has ceased . . . (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again war rages in the Middle East. Once again men and women, deluded by the nationalist and religious slogans of their rulers, kill and wound each other. Once again wealth is destroyed and resources wasted. The sight of our fellow workers serving as tank fodder in this way sickens Socialists and our sympathies go to them and their families. We hope for an immediate end to this latest slaughter of our fellow workers in a cause which is not theirs, and re-affirm that only the establishment of world Socialism will abolish war for ever.

October 1973

The Significance of Sakharov (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia today appears a very different country to the confident country of Cold War confrontation. Now we see a Russia which welcomes and invites USA investment and foreign exploitation of hitherto untapped resources.

Russia is not now negotiating from a position of economic strength. The whole world now knows how catastrophically inefficient is Russian agriculture. In spite of tremendous and sustained capital investment, in spite of ruthless elimination of smallholdings and development of giant-scale mechanized agricultural units, in spite of all this Russian agriculture has not been able to deliver the goods. Frequently famine is a feature and there are few years without cause for concern.

It is against this background of inefficient agriculture and inability to exploit the vast resources of Siberia that we examine recent political developments.

Since last winter the KGB have been making a large number of arrests. Their aim was to suppress the Chronicle of Current Events by rounding up all concerned with writing and distributing this underground journal. The Chronicle, first published in 1968 (Human Rights Year), provided information on arrests and persecution of Soviet dissidents. Its publishers also ensured its republication in the West.

We now know something of these courageous people. Most were concerned only with individual rights and freedom of speech. They were mostly patriotic and generally supporters of state capitalism. But now it is not a lone struggle of novelists and poets for personal freedom from the censor. Now the civil rights movement in Russia has acquired a new and powerful impetus from scientists and engineers who have joined forces with the artistic dissidents.

Sakharov, a distinguished nuclear physicist and the father of Russia’s H-bomb, is symbolic of this new tendency. Index, in its list of people sacked from jobs, arrested or sentenced, cites in recent issues many Soviet scientists: cyberneticians, physicists, astronomers, engineers, psychologists, biologists and mathematicians.

Times have changed in Russia. While the struggle for freedom of expression is still fought by poets, novelists and artists generally, it is noteworthy that this struggle is now also being undertaken by those whose former practice it was to “carry their chains with decency”: men who designed Russia’s power stations and nuclear weaponry, for example.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin clique the demand for freedom by this indispensable section of Soviet society is likely to grow. The Russians, for all their determination, have lagged behind the West in technology ― cybernetics in particular. Scientists in Russia need to have access to Western specialist publications, they demand to attend international conferences in order to keep up with Western advances.

Rosa Luxemburg’s comment has been proved correct:

  Lenin and Trotsky have replaced the representative bodies set up by general popular elections by the Soviets as the sole true representation of the whole toiling masses. But with the suppression of political life throughout the whole country, the vitality of the Soviets themselves is bound to be gradually paralysed. Without general elections, unlimited freedom of the Press and of association, and free struggle of opinions, life in every public institution slowly dies, it becomes a fiction of life, where only bureaucracy remains the active element. That is a law nobody can avoid.
  Public life gradually goes to sleep; a few dozen party leaders with inexhaustible energy and limitless idealism direct and rule; amongst them, in fact, a dozen remarkable brains are leading, and an elite of the working class is summoned from time to time to applaud the speeches of the leaders, to vote unanimously the resolutions submitted to them, in the last resort a clique government ― a dictatorship it is true, but not the dictatorship of the proletariat: the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, i.e., a dictatorship in the bourgeois meaning of the word, in the Jacobin sense.”
(Quoted by Daniel Norman in “Marx and Soviet Reality” from Luxemburg’s pamphlet “The Russian Revolution”.)

Not only does the Russian worker bear the burden of a top-heavy bureaucracy, but also he is terrorised by the KGB, direct descendant of the dreaded Tsarist Okhrana, of which Lenin wrote in 1903: “the shameful Russian inquisition . . . will not disappear until freedom of assembly, of speech and of the press is introduced” (quoted by Daniel Norman, op. cit.). History shows him to have been right: for just a few months in 1917 Russia lived without a secret police and had freedom of speech and assembly. The Bolsheviks soon put paid to all that. The Cheka was launched on its bloody career by Lenin and Trotsky in December of that year, a mere month after the Revolution. Bolshevism begat the Cheka, the Cheka begat GPU, the GPU begat NKVD, the NKVD begat KGB ― what a vile brood !

Most of the dissidents seek reforms within the system. We do not share their viewpoint but we welcome the prospect of the Russian working class seeking conditions of political democracy. We do not however delude ourselves into regarding this as an end in itself: rather, it is the necessary means, the soil in which the seed will germinate.

With every failed grain harvest, with every new Western computer advance, the glaring shortcomings of Russian state capitalism are becoming more obvious. The ruling clique even have become aware of its inefficiency. This situation is one which may well lead to Russians coming towards the world Socialist movement. Capitalism’s grave is being marked out, in Russia as elsewhere.

For a Socialist analysis of Russia get our pamphlet Russia 1917-67. Send 8p to: The Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

Marx: the Man and his Work - Part 2 (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

Marx and the 1st International

Marx associated himself with working-class organizations although they were not Socialist in character. In his day as today, very few workers had a Socialist policy.

The International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) was founded at a meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, London, on 28th September 1864. It was not the work of one individual, and it was not “a small body with a large head”. It was neither “an insignificant shadow” nor “a terrible menace”, as it was described by various sections of the press of the period. The First International was a transitional form of the working-class struggle for better conditions, and it was as necessary as it was transitional.

In the capitalist mode of production, an embodied contradiction both produces and destroys modern states. It intensifies all national antagonisms to the utmost and at the same time it creates all nations in its own image. So long as the capitalist mode of production exists these contradictions are insoluble, and therefore the brotherhood of man about which we have heard from the apologists for capitalism has had no existence. While large-scale industry preaches freedom and peace between nations, it also has turned the world into an armed camp as never before in history. However, with the disappearance of capitalist production its contradiction will vanish also.

Early in the history of the working-class movement a tendency towards internationalism made itself felt. This is a vital condition for the very existence of the workers’ struggle for emancipation. The workers possess no magic wand in this respect any more than in any other — there is no level and easy path. The modern working class has to fight its battles under conditions created by historical development. It cannot overcome these conditions by any short cut but can triumph over them only by understanding, in the sense that to understand is to overcome.

This understanding was made more difficult owing to the circumstances of Marx’s time. The beginnings of the working-class movement coincided with, crossed and recrossed, the beginnings of a number of national states which were founded as a result of the capitalist mode of production. By drawing lessons from the struggles of the different sections of the International with their capitalist governments, Marx hoped to win various groups to his point of view and mould them into an international Socialist party. On the General Council of the International, and at its international conferences, he worked hard to realize his hopes.

Marx’s chief rôle in the First International began after it was organized. He soon became the guiding spirit of it. To him fell the task of presenting the inaugural address. It must be admitted that this address contained many compromises and concessions. Marx himself in a letter to Engels, dated 4th November 1864, in which he deals with the formation of the International, states:

  I was obliged to insert two phrases about “duty” and “right” into the Preamble to the Statutes, ditto “truth, morality and justice”, but these are placed in such a way that they can do no harm.

The address opens by recording the fact that in the years from 1848 to 1864 the poverty of the working class did not diminish, although this period had been one of unparalleled industrial development and commercial growth. It proves its point by comparing the statistics published in the official Blue Book concerning the poverty of the English working class with the official figures used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, in a Budget speech to show “the intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power” which had taken place in the same period but had been “entirely confined to the classes of property”. The address exposed this contradiction of English conditions because England was the leading country of European trade and industry, but it pointed out that similar conditions existed on a somewhat smaller scale in, making allowances for local differences, all the continental countries where large-scale industry was beginning to develop.

All over the world this “intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power” was “entirely confined to the classes of property”, with the one exception perhaps that a small section of the workers as in England were receiving somewhat higher wages, though even this improvement was cancelled out by the general increase in prices.

   Everywhere the great mass of the working class sank into ever deeper misery to the same extent as the upper class rose in the social scale. In all the countries of Europe it is now an irrefutable fact, undeniable for every unprejudiced enquirer and denied only by those who have an interest in awakening deceptive hopes in others, that neither the perfection of machinery nor the application of science to industry and agriculture, neither the resources and artifices of communication, neither the conquests of new markets nor free trade, or all these things combined can succeed in abolishing the misery of the working class, and that on the contrary, every new development of the creative power of labour is calculated on the false bases of existing conditions to intensify the social antagonisms and aggravate the social conflict. During this intoxicating period economic progress, starvation raised itself almost to the level of a social institution in the capital of the British Empire. The period is characterised in the annals of history by accelerated return, the extended compass and the deadly effects of the social pest known as industrial and commercial crises.

The address then went on to look at the defeat of the working-class movement in 1850, and came to the conclusion that this period had its compensating characteristics. Two facts were stressed, first of all the legal enactment of the ten-hour day with its effects on the English working class. The struggle for the legal limitation of the working day had been a direct intervention in the conflict between the blind forces of the law of supply and demand, which summed up capitalist-class political economy, and production regulated by social welfare as represented by the working class.

  And therefore the Ten-Hour Bill was not only a great practical success, but also a victory of a principle; for the first time the political economy of the bourgeoisie was defeated by the political economy of the working class.

After a reference to the co-operative movement of the period, and the revival of the working-class movements in England, France, Germany and Italy and their efforts to reorganize politically, the address continues:

  They possess an element of success — numbers. But numbers are weighty in the scales only when they are united in an organization and led towards a conscious aim.

Past experience had shown that to ignore the fraternity which should exist between the workers of different countries and spur them on to stand together in all the struggles for their emancipation, always resulted in a general failure of all their unrelated efforts. This consideration had moved the meeting in St. Martin’s Hall to found the International Workingmen’s Association. The address concluded with the words: “Workers of the world, unite!”

The provisional rules, for which Marx was responsible, may be summed up as follows. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. The struggle for the emancipation of the working class is not a struggle for the establishment of new class privileges, but the abolition of class rule altogether. The economic subjection of the worker to those who have appropriated the tools of labour, i.e. the source of life, results in servitude in all its forms: social misery, intellectual atrophy and political dependence. The economic emancipation of the working class is therefore the great aim for which all political movement must serve as a means.

The conference of the International held at The Hague in 1872 concluded with a public meeting at which Marx in the course of his speech said:

  One day the working class must hold political power in its hands in order to establish a new organization of labour. It must overthrow the old political system which maintains the old institutions in being, unless it wishes, like the old Christians, who despised and neglected such action, to renounce “the Kingdom of the World”.

We now know that the First International was bound to collapse, due to the conditions which gave rise to it and the conflicts which arose within it. Marx from this period concentrated on his literary work. He suffered several personal losses. In December 1881 his wife died, and this was followed by the death of his eldest daughter. Engels tells us he never recovered from these losses, and they aggravated a condition of poor health from which he suffered for some time. On the fourteenth of March 1883 he died quietly in his chair.

Bob Ambridge

So They Say: Good God, said God (1973)

The So They Say Column from the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Good God, said God

If ideas were worn like garments, most upholders of capitalism would make their speeches in the nude. As soon as the Arab-Israeli war began, both sides claimed heavenly justification and support. The Times (8th October) reported that Dr. Abdel Halim Mahmoud, the leader of Egypt’s biggest Muslim religious institution, called the conflict a holy war and said:

  The enemies of God have committed aggression on Muslim lands and desecrated our sanctuaries. It has become the duty of every Muslim to make every sacrifice to liberate Muslim territories from Zionist aggressors.

In Tel Aviv Brigadier-General Mordechai Piron, chaplain to the Israel armed forces, said “Snap”:

  Israel is fighting a sacred war against a cruel foe . . . The whole House of Israel has its eyes on you with heavy prayers and blessings for your success in repelling the enemy. The Lord will give you strength.

Perhaps God would appreciate a gift of Pelican psychiatry books, to find out what you do about schizophrenia.

Percentage from Peking

Those who believed in China’s march towards Socialism are still reeling from the news of China’s application for membership of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund: in order to be able to raise big loans abroad. In The Observer on 30th September, John Davis made the dose more bitter still by advising investors to go for Chinese government bonds. These have been in default (i.e. paying no interest) for many years, and so can — or could before 30th September — be bought cheaply. However, the IMF and the World Bank would almost certainly make a condition that the debts on the bonds be settled. Says Davis:

  The sum needed to wipe the slate clean for the Chinese is peanuts in the context of the sort of money China will want to raise in the future. In fact, it need not be more than the price of a few Concordes.

A nice “killing” for those who can afford it. Where will the money come from, and the interest on the loans China hopes to raise? From the surplus-value created by exploited workers in this “new utopia”.

A Roof over your Head

Architects and town planners from the Comecon countries recently had a conference in Bratislava about “one of the worst headaches of all East European leaderships — the problems of housing in towns” (Guardian, 26th September). The plight of workers in these countries generally is no different from that of those elsewhere. The promises are just as familiar:

  Poland, with a housing situation reckoned to be among the worst in Europe, now has a programme introduced by Mr. Gierek’s regime to provide every family with its own accommodation by 1990.

In Bulgaria, almost 50 per cent, of households share their accommodation with others.

What is interesting is that attempts to solve the problem revolve round finance as much as buildings: subsidies, schemes in which flats revert to the State at the end of the "owners’ ” lifetimes. So the housing problem in “Communist” countries is that of all the capitalist world — simply an aspect of working-class poverty.

My Dad can Fight Yours, too

A prize for the funniest item of the month should go to Norman Atkinson MP. On 26th September he wrote to The Times protesting against an apparent slight on the Labour Party’s Marxism. His letter said:

  For these reasons the Labour Party became — and still remains — a Marxist party . . .  all the leading Labour Party names you mention from Harold Wilson to Roy Jenkins accept the Labour Party’s Marxist constitution — and I assume are proud to do so. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the SDF, the ILP, GDH and Margaret Cole, the Fabians, and Arthur Henderson . . .  all would have agreed that it was their own Marxist scholarship which had the greatest influence during the early formative years of the Labour Party.

In the nineteen-fifties Morgan Phillips, the Labour Party secretary, claimed its derivation to be not from Marx but from Methodism. In fact, what almost all those Atkinson mentions have in common is their denial of the class struggle to which, as he says, “Marxist understanding is geared”. But has he “Marxist understanding”? He says "classless society is not possible without the common ownership of the means of production and exchange”. How do people exchange what they own in common? Marx would have writhed.

Achievements of Reform

Norman Atkinson’s letter also asks: “How two families can enjoy equal rights when one has an income 100 times greater than the other.” A sensible question, but the wrong one. It should be: How can one family have an income 100 times greater than another after government by the "Marxists” he names ?

On 27th September the Guardian had a review by Michael Meacher of new books on income distribution. Citing Wealth, Income and Inequality (ed. A. B. Atkinson, Penguin Education) the reviewer says:

  Historically, from 1801 when paupers and vagrants, the bottom 23 per cent of the population, had each a mere £20 per year income, while peers, the top 0.01 per cent, had annual incomes 400 times as great, the picture scarcely changed till the mid-twentieth century. Even since the Second World War, though the share of post-tax incomes held by the highest paid 1 per cent fell from 6½ per cent to 5 per cent between 1949-67, the share of the lowest-paid 30 per cent . . . also fell from 14½ per cent to 12 per cent.

It would be interesting to hear Atkinson explain how “a Marxist party” dedicated to “the founding of classless society” — and in power up to 1970 — let this happen. Certainly, how can families “enjoy equal rights” ?

Life in the Old Dog

The main problem for the Polish manager Kazimierz Gorski is whether to bring Marx into the side following his recent recovery from a leg injury.

(Guardian sports page, 10th October)

Perhaps that is what Harold Wilson and Norman Atkinson are worried over too.

Robert Barltrop

Muddled Ideas about Inflation (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chief reason why inflation is so widely misunderstood is that it is hidden in a fog of erroneous ideas put forward partly in ignorance and partly because the employers and the Government have an interest in obscuring it. A recent addition to confusion is an article “Why Money is Shrinking” by John Palmer, business editor of the Guardian, which appeared in Socialist Worker (4th August 1973), the journal of the “International Socialists.”

It dismissed the real explanation in a single paragraph which contained the following:

  But Enoch Powell says it is all the fault of the government printing too much money. This is an illusion even shared by some on the left.

No attempt was made to examine and refute the case carefully argued by Marx to show that if an inconvertible paper currency is issued in excess it will have the effect of correspondingly sending up prices. (Capital Vol. I. Allen & Unwin edition: Chapter on Money, or the Circulation of Commodities, particularly pages 108-9.) Indeed, the writer appears not to have heard of Marx and what Marx wrote on this and other questions dealt with in the article.

Marx was not alone in recognizing the direct relationship between an excess note issue and the price level, though he differed from other economists in basing his exposition on a logical application of his labour theory of value. When it was a question of explaining the price rise in, for example, the great German inflation of the nineteen-twenties, most economists had no difficulty in relating cause and effect, the cause being that the German government met its expenditure by printing notes; but faced with a situation in which an indirect method is employed, many of them cannot see the connection.

F. W. Paish in Benham’s Economics (Pitman 1967, p. 465) is one economist who sees that it is a difference of method with no real difference as to results.

  In some circumstances it [the Government] might simply print more notes and use them to pay for its expenditure. Nowadays, in a country such as Great Britain, the Government would borrow from the banks, printing more notes to enable the banks to maintain their cash reserves.

When the banks have lent to the government by buying government securities and thus have run down their cash they replenish it by calling in short-term loans, and the Bank of England in effect makes good the deficiency in the money market by printing more notes against government securities presented to it.

The article in the Socialist Worker (presented in the form of question and answer) deals with such topical matters as whether wage increases cause price increases, and whether wages should be related to the retail price index — all of it marked by contradiction and confusion. It' rejects the myth “spread by the Tories” that “inflation is caused by wages”, then lets it in again by a back door:

  But surely wages must have some effect on prices? Of course they do. Quite simply, business raises its prices when increases in costs threaten its profit margins.

(No mention of the fact that the myth of wage increases causing price increases is not a Tory monopoly but has been shared by the Labour Party, the party IS tells the workers to vote for.)

Here again the writer of the article makes no attempt to meet the case argued by Marx in Value, Price and Profit: that since the capitalist always puts his prices up to as much as the market will bear, he cannot at will put them still higher because his costs (including wages) have gone up. We are asked by John Palmer to accept a mythical capitalist who works to a kind of “ideal” or “reasonable” profit margin which he will try to maintain but not exceed—promptly contradicted elsewhere in the article where we are told that “the banks, for instance, are reporting 60, 75 and even 90 per cent increases in profit and some property sharks’ profits . . . up 300 per cent”.

We are also told that prices go up because the bosses push them up, but “no one likes that, not even the ruling class”. Are we to suppose that the bosses and the ruling class are different people?

The writer discusses whether the workers ought to go for so-called “threshold agreements” which would relate wages to the rise of the retail price index. Instead of giving the simple answer, that the workers should always try to get wages as high as circumstances permit, he gives as a reason that the retail price index underestimates the real rise of prices — implying that if it were statistically accurate the workers should accept such agreements. His reason for believing the index to be faulty is that it “includes the cost of Ted Heath’s yacht, Lord Lambton’s champagne”. If it did, this would surely be a reason for supposing that the index overstated the rise of the workers’ costs. Actually of course it doesn’t include the cost of Heath’s yacht and Lambton’s champagne. It isn’t based on “costs” at all but simply on percentage variations of prices. As the Department of Employment insists, it isn’t what is meant by a cost-of-living index at all: that is to say, it is not based on the total cost of a given standard of living.

If John Palmer does not understand the retail price index he also is not very good at arithmetic. He tells us that a 50 per cent. rise of prices is the same as a 50 per cent. fall in the purchasing power of money. On this faulty arithmetic the 100 per cent, rise of prices in the past few years would mean a 100 per cent fall in the value of money, meaning that money has no purchasing power at all. The correct figure for a 50 per cent. rise of prices is a 33⅓ per cent fall in the value of money.

Edgar Hardcastle

Not Sociology — SOCIALISM! (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nineteen sixty-seven, the year of the centenary of the publication of the first volume of Capital, was in some ways an embarrassing time. Suddenly, the derided minority who had struggled to win recognition for this work as the only effective analysis of capitalism were overwhelmed with friends of a doubtful kind. There was the Marx exhibition at the British Museum; the press treatment which, with the predictable exception of the Daily Telegraph, was reasoned and fair; there was the accolade of publication bestowed upon him by profit-conscious Penguin Books. Socialists welcomed this publicity but we were uneasy about the abrupt change of attitude. What did it all mean?

To appreciate the size of the change it is necessary to look back a little, at the ignoring of Marx, at the rejection and the deliberate distortion of his ideas and what he stood for. Greatest of these was the association of him with the Russian revolution and what came out of it. When the Cold War was at its most intense, it was almost impossible to find any assessment of Marx which read as if the writer had got past the first sentence of any of his works. Whatever exploit the Russian ruling class were involved in — their secret police, their show trials, the Berlin Wall — all were tagged with the name Marxist, implying that Marx would have approved and even supplied the theoretical justification for such crimes.

Then there was the misrepresentation of his ideas, the selective quotes which made him the discredited prophet of doom who foresaw the working class progressively dying of hunger and exposure while capitalism got on with cosseting them with cars, washing machines, televisions. Economists who daily ground out their narcoleptic commentaries on the futile gyrations of capitalism’s commercial machine busily put about the notion that Marx was a dull writer, a guaranteed cure for insomnia. There was a market for books which were a sort of compendium of this rubbish, books which purported to examine the Marx family life and which wrote him down as a demanding, irascible, petulant boor of a man. A Tory Cabinet Minister explained it all to an adoring audience by telling them that Marx suffered from boils on his bottom.

Socialists had grown wearily familiar with the need to hack away the undergrowth of this nonsense before we could begin to get over the idea that Marx’s works are essential to anyone who wants to understand society — how it came to be as it is and how it must be in the future. That is why we were uneasy at all those new friends and when we saw how acceptable he had suddenly become.

In fact, it had never been possible for Marx’s opponents to ignore him. The difficulty had been to persuade them to criticize what he wrote rather than what somebody else wrote that somebody else wrote that Lenin wrote that Marx wrote. It was rather like the party game when a phrase is whispered into an ear at one end of the line and comes out completely different at the other end. Now, it seemed, Marx’s critics had suddenly decided that as they couldn’t beat him he would have to join them. But on what terms, and what contribution were they asking from Marx?

Part of the explanation is in the post-war upheaval in education, which is responsible for more members of the working class being subjected to the hothouse treatment in universities. Students are paid to learn and to think — even about Marx. At the same time capitalism has seen the need to invest more resources into what can only be called people management. Industrial psychologists are a vital part of any intensive production unit. No company of any size can operate without its trouble-shooting personnel men. None would dream of trying to sell its goods without the help of advertizing agencies. Outside the workplace, the harsher effects of working class poverty are supposed to be deadened by the Social Work departments of local authorities.

These are all fields of operation for the sociologist, which has meant that the study of sociology has had its share of the great education boom. Sociologists might end up earning their living helping to compose ads for baked beans, but to do that they need to spend some years studying rather wider concepts of social affairs. This is where they run up against Marx, whose analyses uncovered the laws of motion of society and laid bare the workings of capitalism.

But at the same time as Marx became more acceptable there is an attempt to make him more respectable, to emasculate him, to shear off the revolutionary conclusions of his analyses and to treat him as just another contributor to the theories of sociology. Prominent among those who attempt this is T. B. Bottomore, whose book Karl Marx — Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy was first published in 1956 and came out as a Pelican in 1967. Bottomore appears to be fascinated by Marx:

  In fact Capital is, among other things, one of the earliest, and still one of the most valuable, works of social history conceived in a sociological manner, i.e. as the history of social institutions.

but elsewhere (Sociology — a Guide to Problems and Literature — 1962) it is clear that he goes along with the vulgar misinterpretation which associates Marx with the overthrow of almost any government:

  . . . in China and Cuba, the whole social structure is being refashioned under the influence of Marxist thought . . .

So it is unsurprising, that he can put Marx on a par with men more properly described as sociologists, with the more limited scope and application to capitalism’s needs which the description implies.

To expand on this point, let us look at the uses which Bottomore thinks a sociologist can put his knowledge to:

  . . . dealing successfully and humanely with the complex problems arising from revolutionary advances in technology and sustaining an elaborate network of social services.

Or perhaps they will be attracted by the current advertisements for sociology graduates to become lecturers at the Civil Service College, where they will have to teach subjects with the chilling names of Human Resources Management and Organizational Behaviour.

These are the very stuff of sociology. A politician looking for more votes may well employ them to work out a more winning — in other words a more deceptive — line for the voters. A government looking into the resiting of industry or the development of communications will use them, to plot and to manipulate the movement of working-class population. In the advertising world the sociologists work upon strange gradations of workers, into herds which they tag with letters and numbers to denote their wage level, or describe confusingly as upper middle class, lower middle class, upper-lower middle class . . . Bottomore quotes one reviewer’s opinion of sociology (which even then has to be in sociological language): “. . . slick, bureaucratized, establishment-supported, computer-supported, computer-based, and status-quo orientated.” The reviewer meant to say that sociology fits in perfectly with, and is indeed a necessary part of, the capitalist machinery of exploitation.

The same cannot be said for Marxism. The analysis of society which it supplies is not there for its own sake; neither is it there to deal with the trivia of capitalism nor to make the wheels of exploitation run more smoothly. Marx did not examine history only to discover how and why human society works and changes as it does. He did not examine capitalism only to conclude that it is here. He followed it all through to the unavoidable end and emerged as a committed and active socialist, working for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a social system based upon common ownership. What could be more explicit than this, one of countless similar passages in his works:

  The essential condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes . . . The working class in the course of its development will substitute for the old order of civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will no longer be political power, properly speaking, since political power is simply the official form of the antagonism in civil society. (The Poverty of Philosophy).

And what could more clearly label Marx as a man who saw the need for political action to end capitalism than this, the final words of the Communist Manifesto:

  Let the ruling class tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!

The works of Marx are an essential tool to a revolutionary party, to be used for the overthrow of the social system whose exploitation and ugliness Marx examined so effectively. A small part of that ugliness can be seen in the discipline of sociology — the study of human environment, reaction and movement in order to manipulate it for the benefit of the ruling class, to tighten the chains about the workers. Marx simply cannot be associated with that. We should not be deceived by our new friends; they have not been able to beat Marx but neither can they pretend that he has joined them.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Out-of-work Graduates (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like the mass of the working class the products of the higher education must come into the labour market and compete in the merciless struggle that our present social system begets.

  “During the next few months some thousands of young men from Oxford and Cambridge will be looking for work in an inhospitable world. ‘The truth is that there is less and less room in modern life for a liberal education’, said a former undergraduate (who had somehow found a job since coming down last summer) sadly to a Daily News representative yesterday. The most fortunate of these young men — that is, those who have not absolutely got to earn a living at once — will drift to the Bar, with comparatively little prospect of briefs. The less fortunate will become schoolmasters, most of them with neither aptitude nor enthusiasm for their work. And there will still be a lot left over.”

(Daily News 28.6.73)

Perhaps, and more than likely, some unlucky ones will join the ever-growing army of the workers. The capitalists themselves will see that the quantity and quality of so-called educated workers is forthcoming for the purpose of their own profit, and, like the rest of the working class, their supply exceeding the masters’ requirements, their price upon the labour market (salary or wages) consequently falls.

We, too, seek to educate the workers, not as trained machines, producing and distributing wealth for the enjoyment and leisure of others, but to understand their usefulness and importance, using that knowledge to establish society upon a basis that will allow them to enjoy the results of their usefulness in increasing physical and mental comfort.

(From an article by Mac in the Socialist Standard, November 1923)

50 Years Ago: Beeching’s Cuts (2012)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The axe man cometh.

This year’s report from the British Transport Commission indicated where the proposed cuts in rail services are likely to fall.

The Newport to Brecon line, for instance, in South Wales. Here, said Transport Minister Marples, a statistical half-man is being carried for one hundred and seven miles by a 160 ton train — about equal to a five-ton crane lifting a bottle of beer.

“It would pay us,” he said, “to give that man a car and close the line.”

That is the yardstick which the Beeching inquiry has had to use. Not: Is it useful? but: Does it pay? Some of the Commission’s undertakings can answer yes to this question. London Transport pays. British Road Services and the docks have increased their receipts.

Only the railways — and only some parts of them at that — fail utterly to conform to capitalism’s law of existence: Does it pay?

Mr. Marples is not alone in his recognition of this law. Labour Party spokesman George Strauss said, when the House of Commons were debating the Transport Commission’s report, that the railway losses gave people the impression that what he called “publicly owned” transport was a failure.

Mr. Strauss has his definition of a failure, and of a success. The report showed, he said, that the reverse was true because all the services except the railways and the inland waterways had made a profit.

Both Tories and Labour are united in the opinion that to succeed nationalised industry must make a profit. Which means they agree that basically nationalised industries are as much a part of capitalism’s economy as any private industry is.

One fact seems to have escaped notice. Removing the rail services from many parts of the country means that those areas are being left to depend upon road transport. This means that the government are virtually creating transport monopolies all over the country.

This is hardly consistent with the Conservative doctrine of what they like to call “healthy” competition. But really capitalism is impatient of all doctrine — except one.

Does it pay?

(from The News in Review”, Socialist Standard, August 1962)

Science facts and science fiction (2012)

The Halo Halo! column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Several news stories compete for our attention this month. The Higgs boson discovery, the revelation by religious scholars in Louisiana that the Loch Ness Monster is real and therefore proof that the Theory of Evolution is wrong (The Herald, Scotland, 24 June) and, of course, the BIG story: the marriage break-up of world famous Scientologist, Tom Cruise.

Which to choose? It’s a toss-up between the Higgs boson and Tom Cruise. (Unfortunately we can’t offer marriage guidance on this column, so we’ll have to stick to the Scientology aspect of the story.)

Can these phenomenal stories be explained in simply? Our thanks are due to the Guardian’s G2 ‘Shortcuts’ column for the following: “The Higgs Boson is an elementary scalar particle first posited in 1962, as a potential by-product of the mechanism by which a hypothetical, ubiquitous quantum field – the so-called Higgs field – gives mass to elementary particles. More specifically, in the standard model of particle physics, the existence of the Higgs Boson explains how spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry takes place in nature”.

Got that? Good. That should get you through even the most challenging pub discussion on the subject. Now we can move on to the advanced stuff, the minefield of theology and metaphysics that must be overcome before attempting to understand Scientology (or Tom Cruise, for that matter).

First let www.scientology.org explain why man is a spirit: “Ask someone to close their eyes and get a picture of a cat, and they will get a mental image picture of a cat. Ask them who is looking at the picture of the cat and they will respond ‘I am’. That which is looking at the cat is you, a spirit. One is a spirit, who has a mind and occupies a body. You are you in a body”.

All clear so far? Now here’s a quote attributed to sci-fi writer and founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard: “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, start a religion”. Yes, it’s all beginning to fall into place.

Having got that sorted we’re ready to consider Scientology’s theory of human origins. We’ve learnt from the born-again brigade that evolution is only a theory. But according to Scientology even the stuff about Adam and Eve and the talking serpent is a bit dubious too.

What really happened is that 75 million years ago an intergalactic ruler called Xenu herded the populations of 76 planets together, dropped them into volcanoes, and vaporised them with nuclear bombs. The souls of the victims were then forced to watch a 3D movie for 36 days which implanted all sorts of misleading data into their memories. We are descended from them.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but we only get 500 words in this column. It’s covered in great detail on the internet though.

It’s almost as bizarre as believing in a virgin birth, the raising of the dead and the turning of water into wine. You couldn’t make it up, could you? Unless you were a sci-fi writer. Who needs facts when you’ve got faith and unquestioning belief?

NW

Socialism v. Imperialism. (1923)

From the February 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is the Socialist view of the Empire? What attitude would a revolutionary administration assume towards the "subject races"? These questions are prompted by the perusal of a recently issued book by Noel Buxton and Conwil Evans, entitled “Oppressed Peoples and the League of Nations” (J. M. Dent & Sons, 6s.); and the following article is an attempt to answer them.

Imperialism, like a good many other things, charity included, begins at home. The exploitation of the workers of other lands and their political subjugation is the outcome of the system of slavery imposed upon the workers of the Imperialist countries themselves, by the capitalist ownership of the means of life. Empires to-day arise out of the necessity for our rulers to find ever new markets for the commodities produced by associated labour, and also fresh sources from which to draw increased supplies of raw material. The workers of this country forge the weapons and supply the rank and file of the forces by which the coloured races of India and Africa are induced to remain loyal to the British flag; while it is only their political support which places Imperialist parties in control of those forces.

With the development of a working class conscious of its own interest and its consequent assumption of political power, capitalist Empires will follow all other forms of exploitation to the limbo of forgotten things. In their place will arise an association of the workers of the world for the purpose of co-operating to satisfy their common needs and to establish the opportunity for the highest possible development of every human being, irrespective of race or sex.

The realisation of such a system implies, without a doubt, a lengthy process of self-education of the working class the world over. Even with the overthrow of capitalist authority in Europe and America, that process might be far from complete. But such an overthrow would enormously accelerate its pace. The emancipated workers of the West would be able to utilise all the technical and literary resources of their late masters in the task of spreading among the workers of the East the knowledge necessary to achieve the social mastery of the economic forces of the world. They would be driven to do so, not by any imaginary "humanitarian” or "philanthropic” motive, but by the same forces which had impelled them to emancipate themselves, their class interest. For the fullest satisfaction of human wants to-day the world is necessary. Therefore, Socialism cannot be otherwise than international.

The authors of the above-mentioned book are far from taking up the Socialist position. Their attitude may be gauged by statements such as the following: “The immediate application of ideals may not be possible even if a British Government inspired by good-will is placed in power. In all probability it will prove able to lay its plans for an efficient League of Nations, and for a general reform of tropical administration, but it cannot hold its hand until ‘capitalism’ has been abolished at home, much less abroad. The urgencies of the moment will occupy much of its energy” (p. 71). From the context and several other passages in the book, we are left to assume that the Labour Party is to supply the “government inspired by good-will,” while “ the urgencies of the moment ” would appear to consist chiefly of the “emancipation” of the Armenian peasants from the control of the Turks, and of the Koreans from that of the Japanese !

Details concerning the atrocities committed by these two Imperial powers occupy quite a considerable portion of the book, yet one looks in vain for any similarly frank attitude towards the methods adopted by British, American, and the late Russian administrations. Such incidents as that at Amritsar are very briefly referred to, while British policy in Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, and India generally is whitewashed on the ground of the economic backwardness of the natives’ social order.

The nationalist movements in these various countries are criticised for their alleged extravagance of demands, yet the economic explanation of these movements is left as vague as that of Imperialism. Nowhere do the authors clearly put forward the simple fact that capitalist interests dominate in the political sphere. According to them, it is the “needs of the world” which impose limitations upon the “national right of independence,” while the nation in turn is regarded as a uniform entity, though they admit that the very “conception of nationality” eludes definition (p. 11). The class division in society is ignored.

As a remedy and preventive for the “too obvious evils of Imperialism” on the one hand, and the inconvenient “extremism” of Oriental Nationalists on the other hand, the authors advance the Mandation system of the League of Nations, with such reforms as would give greater direct power to the Council of the League. What appears to be lost sight of is the fact that no capitalist power can be obliged to “accept a mandate.” It will naturally do so only when its interests dictate such a step, and the methods of its administration will conform to those interests according to the conditions obtaining in the mandated territory. A case in point is Tanganyika Territory (late German East Africa), where the system remains practically unchanged except for the fact that British, instead of German, capital reaps its advantages.

The fullest development of the League of Nations, in accordance with the authors’ ideas, could only amount to the collective (and possibly more efficient) exploitation of the coloured workers by the larger capitalist groups. Inasmuch as competition would be restricted, the political power of these groups would be strengthened as against the rising bourgeoisie of the East, with a consequent throttling, to a further extent, of the ever-expanding forces of production. From this policy the workers of Europe and America have nothing to gain and everything to lose. The elimination of-competition among their capitalist masters means increased competition among the workers themselves. Their interests demand co-operation with the object of satisfying social needs rather than the production of luxury in idleness for a few.

If the Labour Party stands for the more efficient organisation of capitalist exploitation, nationally and internationally, that is one more argument in favour of our ceaseless opposition to that body. The above book simply provides additional evidence that this is the case. It is a good illustration of the extent to which “Liberal” capitalist principles are in the ascendant in the intellectual outlook of the up-to-date “Labour Leaders.” From first to last, working class interests are away in the background, effectually obscured by the shibboleths of Gladstonian “democracy.” In the view of the authors, it is the diplomats and not the workers who are the agents of “progress" (pp. 72,73).

To the Socialist the practical problem pressing for solution is not national or racial, but economic and social, cutting across all ethnical and geographical distinctions. The class struggle over the possession of the means of production and the products of labour is to us the supreme issue.

In opposition to all this distracting talk about this, that, or the other local “question,” what better answer can be given than that contained in the manifesto issued by the Socialist Party of this country on the outbreak of the Great War, in the September issue of this paper :—

  “Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow-workers of all lands the expression of our good-will and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalist and the triumph of Socialism.”

Eric Boden

Rent and Houses. (1923)

From the February 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

House and tenement owners in Scotland are squealing because the Government, which represents property owners generally, have not taken steps to save them from the results of their own ignorance and neglect. According to the Rent Act passed by the late Government, house owners should give notice to vacate premises when increasing rent. Many of them did not do so, hence numerous summonses for return of rent illegally charged, and a withholding of rent until the debt is paid off.

The Government is on the horns of a dilemma because relief has been promised to the owners, which shall be made retrospective. To break such a promise would, of course, be beneath the dignity of the "Mother of Parliaments”; while to make the tenants pay up would constitute a precedent and look too much like class legislation.. But a virtue can be made of necessity. The Government could subsidise the owners or tell them to pocket their losses. Whichever course they take, the claim will be made that it was the tenants who were considered, because they were poor workers who could not afford to pay.

Obviously, while the Act is in force, it is up to those who own houses to observe it. If they neglect to do so, with all the advantages on their side of better acquaintance with legal forms, they should submit to the penalty without squealing.

Of course, all sorts of unpleasant results are predicted if the no-rent strike is persisted in. One is that house building will cease because no-one will build unless rents are assured.

High rents and shortage of houses are undoubtedly a real hardship for the workers. Though it is nothing new for them to be herded in jerry-built drums with little or no convenience. Hutches that let in the wind, wet, and fog, but keep out the sunlight. Back-to-back tenements and flats, damp cellars and ramshackle attics are quite commonplace as "Englishmen’s homes.” There is nothing new in the fact that families of eight or ten live in a single room and take in lodgers. Pre-war newspapers often cited such instances. Why the outcry ?

The two things, shortage of houses and high rents, generally coincide. Given the first, the second follows. The capitalists who are interested in the production of any commodity always prefer to see the supply short of the demand, because it enables them to raise prices. The commodity in the present case is the use of a house for a period of weeks or months. The house owner realises his cost of production by drawing rents while the house remains habitable. He sells, and the tenant buys house accommodation or shelter, on the same basis and according to the same laws that govern the buying and selling of other commodities. Supply and demand are responsible for fluctuations in rent, while cost of production is the main level between the two extremes. When rents fluctuate upwards, either the workers must have increased wages to enable them to pay, or they must go short of other necessaries. Removals by night are far less common when there is a real shortage of houses, and private landlords as well as local councils invariably give preference to tenants who have a regular job with well-established firms, where they can be got at if pressure to pay becomes necessary.

The two alternatives before the wage workers are, therefore, to pay the landlord and go short of other necessaries, or struggle for a higher wage. But this is as much the concern of capitalists generally as it is of the workers. If capitalists require a certain standard of efficiency in their wage-slaves, the latter must be fed and clothed up to that standard. The whole question, consequently, resolves itself into a tug-of-war between one section of the capitalist class and all the rest, the workers’ standard of living taking the strain. At the moment the housing interests have the pull.

This explains somewhat the deep concern of writers in the capitalist Press about the shortage of houses and high rents. Until rents are reduced, capitalists generally cannot enforce the wage reductions they so earnestly desire without seriously impairing the efficiency of their wage-slaves. The agitation is on a par with the Free Trade movement of Cobden and Bright. The free importation of foreign corn was immediately followed by wholesale reductions in wages, because the workers could live more cheaply.

The capitalist system never did and never can insure to the bulk of the workers decent and convenient houses in which to live without overcrowding. The "council houses" are no better and no cheaper than those of the jerry-builder. House owners to-day know quite well that overcrowding suits their pockets far better than overbuilding, hence the demand that house building shall be left to private enterprise.

What is wrong is capitalism: private or class ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution for profit. The workers do not live on profits; why, then, should they produce for profits? They should organise politically for control of the State machinery in order to establish a system of society based on production for use. Under such a system, where the people controlled production and distribution through democratic administrations set up by themselves, houses would be built when and where they were needed. The wants of the people would determine the nature and extent of all production instead of, as to-day, the profits of a ruling class.

F. Foan

Letter: Commodities and Quids. (1923)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Comrade,

Regarding your reply to Mr. Archer, you say definitely that a sovereign is not a commodity, and you give as your reason that it can only act as currency inside the country of issue. Does that mean that a product of labour has to act as currency before it becomes a commodity, and if not, where does it fall short of being a commodity? In other words, could you clearly explain to me how to distinguish a commodity from other things?

W. W.

Answer to W. W.
A commodity is an article, or service, that is produced for the purpose of exchange or sale. Under modern conditions that means produced for the purpose of realising profit through a sale.

A product of labour falls short of being a commodity when it is produced for the producer’s personal use and not for exchange or sale. Whether a product of labour reaches the position of currency or not has no bearing on this question. Of the thousands of commodities produced today, only one acts as currency.

With the changes and developments of society, the currencies in use change their forms, and, often, some of their characteristics. In the early stages a commodity in general use may act as currency, while still remaining an ordinary commodity. Later, when the exchanges have grown far more numerous and complicated, a particular commodity is set aside to act specially as currency and will receive some social stamp or mark, to guarantee its genuineness. When it has reached this position, and only then, it ceases to be a commodity, as it is no longer produced for profit, but as an official instrument set apart for currency purposes.

Jack Fitzgerald