You must like it (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Link to The Labors of Sisyphos

There is a funny story that once was kicked around against the socialist movement about a soap-box orator who had promised his audience that under socialism everybody would eat strawberries and cream. When an unfriendly heckler protested that he didn’t like strawberries and cream the socialist retorted that under socialism everybody would eat strawberries and cream and like it! There were, of course, two inferences in the answer that were and still are commonly held by those who have a smattering but not enough understanding of socialism and what it is all about. The first of these erroneous ideas is that socialists advocate a society in which everybody receives equal income; the second is that there is some sort of dictatorship that is to compel each and everybody to accept this equality.

The idea of equality in the consumption of goods and services is more than a little ridiculous when one goes into the matter. People have a difference in tastes, for example. 

Some of us like to go fishing and have a use for equipment and clothing that relate to that pastime. Does this mean that everybody will be forced to be consumers of fishing tackle and hip rubber boots for wading in streams? There are those who get pleasure from imbibing in beer. Does this signify that there must be enough beer produced to divide equally among the entire population — at least the entire adult population — and that those who dislike the taste of the brew will nevertheless be compelled to drink it and like it? There are countless examples that come to mind that expose the fallacy of this argument. In fact, socialists have never advocated such obviously ridiculous procedures.

What socialists have always argued for is a society in which each man, woman and child shall have free access to all that is produced and this is an entirely different thing. This means simply that the needs and wants of society can be satisfied if production is based upon use rather than upon sale on the market with a view to profit. The only thing that stands in the way of a society based upon production for use is widespread acceptance of or widespread apathy toward private or state ownership of the means for producing goods and services. When a majority of the population understands and accepts the idea of common ownership of all wealth-producing means and instruments and the obvious advantages to all mankind of such a system this majority will certainly take speedy steps to introduce it. When that time arrives there will be, for the first time, a real choice for the voters. No longer will one be compelled to decide which person is best suited to administer an “un-social" social system. For the first time voters will be able to register their approval or disapproval of a system based upon wage labor and capital as opposed to a brand new type of life, a classless society which will make poverty and war impossible.

As for the idea that a socialist world would require some sort of dictatorial apparatus at the top — a minimum of reflection will expose its fallacy. Political power in the hands of a minority can only exist when ownership of wealth-producing property is vested in private or state hands and when scarcity of the things people need and want is the order of the day for most people. Who would possibly want to delegate power over one's very life when right of access to wealth is available? Socialism will transform governments over people into administrations of things and the very thought of being compelled to consume goods whatever one’s likes or dislikes would be unthinkable.

The Labors of Sisyphos (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Link to In the meantime

The Ancient Greeks had a legend about a king of Corinth who answered to the name Sisyphos. This character became one of the notorious sinners of his age because he insulted Pluto, the god of Hades, and because he spread a story about a certain amour of the chief god, himself, Zeus. Sisyphos was condemned to spend eternity trying to roll a boulder up a hill. Whenever he came near the top, the boulder got away from him, rolled down the hill, and he would have to begin all over. The word, sisyphean, is now preserved in the language to denote a type of labor that is endless and fruitless.

Socialists, in observing the strategy and tactics of reformers and self-styled revolutionaries, today, are reminded of the legend of Sisyphos. Take the case of the college radicals. All over the country and throughout much of the world, the kids are seizing campus buildings, marching, striking, distributing flaming handbills, holding mass meetings, keeping things in a continual uproar. They provide grist for the press, TV, and radio and many sleepless nights, no doubt, for the college administrators. Just what else they really hope to accomplish is difficult to imagine.

They have discovered the deep involvement of the universities with the Government in the bloody business of war — especially in the Vietnam War, which they did not approve. They seem determined to force the universities to turn over a new leaf, to get down to the business of education for which they are supposedly designed. What they have not discovered is the obvious fact that universities must reflect the attitudes and purposes of the capitalist class; that the great institutions of learning are but extensions or subsidiaries of the huge industries that finance them. And they have not discovered another important fact. Recognition of the direct connection between capitalism and war, and between capitalism and mass poverty is not enough to eliminate such ills prior to the outright abolition of capitalism, itself.

But the angry and impatient students do not have time for such a philosophy. You socialists, they tell us, are talking about a world of the distant future. There is an immediate problem or two. There are people being killed in Vietnam and there are many millions, even in America, suffering every day from poverty, from high rents, from high food prices, from high streetcar fares and from high cost of living, generally. Who has time to listen to socialist utopianism? They give us a disgusted sneer or shrug of the shoulders and are off to their sisyphean labors.

Like all analogies, however, this one is not entirely fitting. Old Sisyphos couldn’t help himself, nor could anyone else inform him of a theory that could save him from his bleak future. In the mythology of Ancient Greece, all was foreordained and one’s fate could not be circumvented. It was mapped out by the gods of the Pantheon. But what is it that prevents the college radicals and radicals, generally, from ceasing their useless labor? Are they, too, condemned by some supernatural power to endless and fruitless struggle against the effects of capitalism? We doubt that many, if any of them could be influenced that way by any of the current crop of religions. One would think that kids who are clever enough to get into and through college should have the understanding that capitalism is but operating normally. That warfare, poverty, slums — and the rats, bedbugs and cockroaches that go with slums as a grim bonus — are all intrinsic to capitalism.

Why, then, do they continue to try to make capitalism operate uncapitalistically? Why do they reject the idea of organizing now to abolish capitalism, to introduce a social system wherein such evils as they decry could not exist? Were it possible to improve conditions for all rather than for a minority through reform rather than revolution It would all be understandable. Have the student radicals been brainwashed by the propaganda of the very institutions they rebel against? Do they see themselves as future leaders and saviors of society? It's high time they tried socialism and forgot their radical reformist tactics.

Link to You must like it

In the meantime (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Link to Incentive and initiative

One of the more frustrating objections that World Socialist Party members have to continually meet goes something like this: “of course you have a wonderful idea and we are also interested in working toward that goal: a socialist world. But in the meantime there is an immediate and pressing problem that has to be solved and until it is solved we don’t have the time to devote to spreading socialist information.” Such objections, of course, come from members of other groups with names that indicate an opposition to the present system — capitalism — and which are widely regarded as parties of socialism or communism. It is interesting, indeed, to note that after more than fifty years of existence as a socialist propaganda organization, the World Socialist Party still is forced to contend with the identical argument despite the number of such pressing and immediate problems that have been eliminated from the scene. Sooner or later realisation must come to masses of people that the pressing immediate problems are part of the very nature of the capitalist system of society and that for every problem that may be solved, two more will pop up to take its place. There will never be time, then, to devote to the propagation of socialism so long as one permits oneself to get involved in these so-called more immediate problems. To a socialist. only socialism can be a problem requiring immediate action.

Back in the Thirties, for example, our speakers and writers were continually being challenged with the immediate problems of unemployment on a mass scale and the threat to world peace of the Nazi government in Germany. “What are you doing about the 14 million unemployed in America!” they would scream at us. “You are nothing but a bunch of ivory-towered theoreticians! Do you expect millions of workers to starve to death or be slaughtered in war until you people bring in socialism?” And they would regard us pityingly.

Somehow, the Hungry Thirties came to an end with the opening of World War II, despite all of the efforts of the United Front and the Popular Front against War and Fascism. Before long there was very little unemployment in America but there was still a big problem. “Can't you people see that we have to get rid of Hitler before we can have time to preach socialism?” They thought we must be a bunch of lunatics.

Of course World War II finally ended. Hitler was gotten rid of. the Japanese defeated, Italian Fascism destroyed along with its figurehead Mussolini, but there was still no time for socialist propaganda — not for those so-called socialists and communists. “Are you blind?" They shrieked at us. “Don't you see that we have to put all of our efforts into helping the workers hold onto their jobs and get more money to make up for their loss of overtime? And with all of the soldiers coming home we have to demand more jobs so we won't have another depression. And look at the housing problem!"

But the housing problem didn't seem to get much better despite all of the efforts of the radicals in demanding reforms. Workers by the millions had to go on living in substandard houses and slum tenements of the worst type. And then came those other pressing problems such as the Korean War, the years of McCarthy "red-baiting," the Castro Revolution in Cuba, the fall-out shelter program, the Berlin blockade and so on and on. Until now, in the tall end of the Sixties we have the problem of how to get rid of the Vietnamese War and we see among the massed marchers who protest the American atrocities in that area the same type of radical-oriented people who, thirty years ago, agitated for American participation in the war against Franco in Spain and Hitler in Germany. They are now actively opposing — not war in itself — but this particular war. In fact, many of them are as "hawkish" as the typical “hawk," except that they support the other side. And they still have no time for socialism.

As for us, our position remains the same. We oppose all wars but we are convinced that war, like unemployment, like poverty, and like all the other ills of capitalism will not be ended until capitalism is done away with. There was a time, of course, when socialists had some valid grounds for participating in the struggle for the attainment of immediate demands. But those times have long since passed and with the rapid development of world capitalism, particularly in the last thirty years, it is even more imperative that socialists bend all of their efforts In the task of spreading socialist information Those who struggle for the attainment of so-called immediate objectives are holding back the socialist revolution and are — in that sense — reactionaries.

If this makes sense to you why not contact us and inquire further about the advantages of a society of world socialism?

Link to The Labors of Sisyphos

Incentive and initiative (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Link to Canned profits

You’ve got to have incentive, they tell us again and again. Without incentive to better oneself life would not be worth living. Capitalism, they argue, offers real incentive and opportunities for initiative whereas socialism would kill any ambition to get ahead. If we knew we had our needs taken care of who would want to work? We’d all become lazy and goof off from the job. General living conditions would deteriorate fast. Why, they go on, even in Communist countries they have discovered this truth and offer the workers all sorts of incentive plans.

Now the most surprising thing about this sort of philosophy is that it has stood up so well through the decades, despite its obvious, even glaring limitations. One could ask some embarrassing questions, such as: You say that once you knew that your needs and wants were taken care of. you would lose all incentive to work? Then why try to become wealthy? Surely if that were true then it would have to follow that your statistical chances of becoming a bum would rise in direct proportion to your acquisition of wealth. Think of the harm one would do to his own future character by becoming wealthy! And what of your children? By making it possible for them to live a life free from financial pressures and burdens you would be robbing them of their initiative, their incentive, their very birthright. They would most probably wind up as bums, even if wealthy bums.

Nonsense? Poppycock? Of course it is. It is that old argument, so beloved by the theologians, about the camel and the eye of the needle, dressed up in secular clothing. We would suggest that those who believe that yarn tell it to the capitalist class, as well as to Sweeney and to the Marines!

Actually, it is the other way around. It is capitalism that robs most of incentive and initiative. Have you ever wondered why there are so few outstanding performers in any field one can think of? Certainly there must be a large number who live in obscurity and even poverty because there can be room for but a few at the top in capitalist society. But far beyond those in numbers are the potential artists, writers, musicians, scientists who never got off the ground because they are compelled, first of all, to earn a living for self and family. Nor let us forget the potential greats whose lives have been snuffed out in capitalism’s wars.

But now let us look for a moment at that hook that is so frequently thrown at us about the so-called Communist countries discovering the value of incentive and initiative. The trouble with that argument is that it is nothing new with them. As far back as Lenin's times the Soviet Union had an incentive system known as the New Economic Policy In which private enterprise was encouraged. Later, In Stalin's times. In the build-up of heavy Industry, an incentive plan known as Stakhanovism was introduced. Workers received financial rewards and national recognition by improving their performances and output on the job. In this way the expected output could be raised and the degree of exploitation of all the workers increased. Today, in Russia and throughout the world of state-capitalist, so-called Communism, all sorts of incentive, or carrot-on-the-end-of-a-stick plans are offered the workers. Just as in the avowedly capitalist West. Under capitalism—whatever the variety—a few stand to get ahead and it is the few who are touted and whose praises are sung. The millions, however, remain in poverty never quite being able to reach that dangling carrot.

Yes, it will be different under socialism. Mass production techniques will be used to take care of the needs of the population rather than to enrich a few. When the pressures of providing the necessities of life itself are removed all restrictions on the fulfillment of one’s potentials will be gone. The world will belong to all mankind. There will be nowhere for anybody who wants to become great to go but up.

Link to In the meantime

Canned profits (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Link to The Magic Checkbook

There Is one over-riding problem in capitalist production for the capitalists, the problem of profit production. Any attention to the intrinsic nature of the particular goods one processes or manufactures must be secondary. To Illustrate: a canner of fish may be proud of the high quality of his product, might even be able to envision the cans in his warehouse as containing food. But the records in his book-keeping department show that he does not become too involved with such an Image. Here one finds machines, ledgers and working people whose lives are largely dedicated to determining if their employer's enterprise is profitable and how much of his gross must go to the various governments for taxes, how much for labor, for plant and machinery replacement. This is the real stuff of life in capitalist society. He is in business, primarily, to produce profits, not canned fish.

True enough he must maintain certain standards of purity and cleanliness and be subject to occasional government inspection. There is always the chance that food poisoning might be traced to his product forcing him to recall and eventually even destroy hundreds and perhaps thousands of cases of his potential profits. And to this extent he certainly must see, in his mind's eye, food in those cans. But even in this case it is secondary. His prime concern is that those thousands of hermetically sealed cans contain profits, for if they don't the food value, even the high or less-than-high quality, which is most often the case, counts for nothing.

Now it goes without saying that he doesn't sell his commodity by labeling It “canned profits." The purchaser is not interested in that aspect. So he has an attractive label to show that it is fish and that it is appetizing, succulent and healthful. He may even attach a separate brochure that gives a tale, born in the imagination of a writer of advertising copy, that is calculated to tempt a hesitant soul into buying the item. And it is also quite likely that he sponsors advertising in the media that is aimed at causing one’s salivary glands to work. But here, too, the prime motive is profit because our processer is not interested in stirring the palates of any but those who have the money in their budgets to buy the product. Let conditions become such that processing costs become prohibitive and the product begins to disappear from the grocery shelves. There may be plenty of fish in the sea and a multitude of people who would like to eat it but the trick of getting them together, under capitalism, is not that simple.

Now how would socialists go about correcting this problem? The answer is that there is nothing that can be done about it under capitalism. The argument one hears so frequently from reformers of all sorts is that everybody has a right to eat but there is not one shred of truth to it. Certainly everybody has a need to eat but right, under capitalism, is a different matter. Just try to take some cans of fish or anything else from the grocery shelves and leave without paying! The fact that one has the need to eat cuts no ice. Have you got the cash? If so then it follows that you have the right to eat. And this is true in every area of life, under capitalism. With food, clothing, with housing, with all the things that make up a standard of living. There is no right without money.

But just what ls wrong with this? The trouble is that the majority of the population must live from wages or salaries and the money paid for labor power can never equal more, on the average, than the cost of the items one needs to continue to work, raise families, etc. And the problem becomes apparent when we realize that to maintain averages working people are always compelled to struggle against unemployment, inflation and unusual occurrences for which they are ill prepared. The nub of the problem ls the wages system, itself. Socialists advocate abolishing it and replacing it with a new. higher and human way of life, world socialism.

Link to Incentive and initiative

The Magic Checkbook (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Link to the Foreward

Have you noticed how many more problems there are today to bother us? There has never been a time in the memory of any of us when there was quite such a rumpus in the world as there is today. War, mass poverty, crime in the streets, Civil Rights demonstrations, dominate the front pages of the press and provide grist for TV and radio networks.

Doesn’t it make you wonder why it is that, in spite of all the well-meaning attempts to eradicate these horrors; in spite of the marvelous advance in technology and in friendship among different peoples; these problems remain? Socialists contend that the trouble originates in the type of society we live under. Let us approach the problems with an analogy from fiction.

Most of us are acquainted with the story of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp. All Aladdin had to do was to rub the lamp and a genie appeared out of nowhere to provide whatever might be his wish. So, although Aladdin did no work, he wound up with all the affluence of an oriented potentate of those times simply because he had control over the magic lamp.

It would almost seem that this is how capitalism works. The capitalists do not use a magic lamp to acquire their wealth, they simply rub their magic checkbooks. Once rubbed, the genie appears in the shape of a multitude of working people who hasten to do the master’s bidding. They swarm into his factories, his shops, his mines, his forests and wherever he may order them to swarm. And they produce all of his manufactured goods and his services even to the factories, transportation, and stores which they also operate.

What does this collective genie receive as payment for all this wealth, this mass of goods beyond the imagination of Aladdin or his genie? It is obvious that a horse or a machine must receive a minimum of oats or oil to keep functioning. It is also obvious that horses and machines — despite all care — do break down and ultimately do have to be replaced. And this is just what happens to our modem genie, the working class. Workers receive for their efforts a wage, or a salary, which is sufficient on the average to keep them functioning, to repair them when they break down, and to replace them with their own offspring when they are old. No more than did Aladdin participate in the production of wealth do the modern Aladdins, the capitalists.

Now in the case of Aladdin, the sudden production of vast amounts of wealth created no problems because it could be accomplished at his whim. It was not a continuous process, and whoever it was who did the actual work were somewhere out in limbo and not around to flaunt their poverty in the face of the Master. But such is not the case in the society we are considering, for although future civilizations might well look back on our times as something hard to believe as true, there is nothing fictional or magic about It. Nothing, that is, but the fiction that is fed in the schools, churches, press, radio and TV, the fiction that the workers (our modem genie) and the capitalists our up-to-date Aladdin), have a common Interest; and that it is theoretically possible for workers to rise out of their poverty and insecurity into the affluence and ease of the capitalists simply through their own efforts.

But the case of Aladdin's genie and that of the working class is different in another respect. There is no indication within the pages of The Arabian Nights that Aladdin’s slave desired, or even thought of, freedom. Class society in fact, however, is entirely different and the chief problem with which the capitalists must contend is minimizing the class struggle which rages despite the headlining propaganda of the mass media. The time will surely come when that modern genie, the working class, will realize that riots, demonstrations, and support of wars is not the answer. They will, we are confident, grow to understand that they must organize on the political front and organize for one purpose only, the abolition of capitalism and the introduction of a system based upon production for use rather than for sale on the market with a view to profit. There will be, under socialism, a different kind of genie — a genie made up of automated and computerized equipment, a mechanical genie who can release mankind from drudgery permitting to all the enjoyment of leisure under a sane system of society.

Link to Canned profits

Foreward to the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Link to the Introduction

Foreward

To the World Socialist Movement the important function of revolutionary socialist organization is the propagation of socialist knowledge. We insist that the socialist revolution must be the political act of a consciously socialist working class. We reject the concept of violence, vanguardism and reformism.

Now, because the membership of the World Socialist Party, as with its companion parties, consists almost entirely of men and women who must earn a living and whose time for propagating socialism is necessarily limited, our efforts cannot take advantage of every arena or they would be spread too thin with our relatively small numbers. Fortunately, one of the more important of the media for mass propaganda is to a certain extent available on both a free and charged-for basis. This media is, of course, the air waves . . . the radio of commercial, public service and sustained programs. Over a period of fifteen years we have made frequent use of this medium one way or another and, recently, have experimented with the extra dimension afforded by television.

We have arranged for broadcast interviews without dilution of our principles, particularly with visiting comrades from home and abroad. We have participated as guests on a number of live telephone-style talk shows and at least two debates. Comrades, especially in Canada, have made copious use of call-in programs to present our perspective on the issue under discussion.

But our most frequent and consistent efforts over radio have been carried on for some 10 years In various series of WSP-sponsored programs over Greater Boston radio stations, chiefly over WCRB, AM & FM. We have had several formats but the most enduring has been the weekly four- to five-minute script, a selection of which we have published in issues of The Western Socialist for many years. We have enjoyed a cordial relationship with the station management despite some pressures directed against it from commercial and political groups.

The scripts, sampled herein, run the gamut of socialist propaganda. They are, in effect, a continuing soap-box program and are designed to cast light on the socialist attitude toward the very many questions and problems that confront society in general and the working class in particular. We have had, we think, more responses from these spoken and written messages than from any other single type article. The responses have been mainly favorable but not altogether so. Some of our polemics have infuriated defenders of the Faith and the status quo.

Because the consensus of our membership believes that these radio messages incorporate the kernel of socialist thought, as understood by the Companion Parties, the National Administrative Committee was instructed at our Conference in September, 1973, to produce a special Issue of The Western Socialist, made up chiefly of a selection of the talks, in commemoration of the 300th consecutive issue of The Western Socialist since its founding in Winnipeg, Canada, in October of 1933.

The selection of these scripts from the hundreds available has not made for an easy choice; every one hits the mark in some area of interest. There were also included scripts that had never been printed and existed only as the spoken word on tape. Eliminating local, highly topical and personality elements lightened the task somewhat, and sigh by sigh the job got done. We have avoided redundancy of subject matter and argument as much as possible, but it is the nature of the socialist perspective to see the interrelations of society and to express It.

A word on credits. These brief polemics are the work of Harry Morrison (Harmo), who readers of The Western Socialist will recognise as being a frequent contributor to this journal over the past third of a century. Many of them contain ideas which socialists have presented throughout the years. But the manner of presentation of these ideas, reasoned and dramatic, is distinctively Harmo's, although, as he too has stated, styles of writing are not developed in a vacuum, and his style has been influenced undoubtedly by socialist propaganda past and present.

N.A.C.

W.S.P. (U.S.)

August. 1974

PRINTED IN BOSTON, MASS. U.S.A.

This Special 300th Issue of The Western Socialist will also be available to the Companion Parties of Socialism (and any other interested parties) as a pamphlet that will make possible a cover of their own choice. Incorporating everything but the specialized Party detail contained in each issue of our Journal.

Link to The Magic Checkbook

Introduction to the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Introduction

The everyday experience with the sophistication of modern technology, transportation and communication has made evident the increasing international nature of Man's economic affairs and social interests. This fact has been well noted by writers of science fantasy as well as having influenced the equally fictional extrapolations of organizations and individuals who may be inclined to philosophize on the future of society.

The expression one world is often used in this connection as a vague, tentative goal of this social direction. It has a nice friendly ring to it, and while it offends practically no one, it offers very little information either. Whatever the extent of any particular concept of one world, the typical description invariably retains vestiges of propertied relationships, nationalistic overtones and other hangovers of capitalist values and behavior.

The world socialist likes the sound of one world too, but its implications lack substance. He realizes that an understanding of the social relationships and historical forces of a continually evolving human society must be the basis of his analysis of the present and projections of the future. This is his perspective, free of preconceptions and wish-thinking, and its development leads to the inexorable conclusions that result in and are expounded by the broad concept of world socialism.

That’s what this pamphlet is all about. It is a selection of lively essays from the perspective of the world socialist on the problems and questions that beset society. They expose the assumptions, shibboleths, imponderable fantasies and false codes for what they are and not for what we are told they are. They are never ambiguous in pointing out the necessary alternative to the present human condition and the means of realizing it. In time, the reader learns that not only should he do something about a world plagued by inhumanities but, more important, what he can do. This perspective is represented by a world socialist movement that demonstrates a consistency of analysis and objectives that transcend all social and geographical divisions; In essence, these essays could have had their origin in many parts of the world.

The supplement at the back features our popular amplification of the more formal Declaration of Principles endorsed by the companion parties of world socialism. It has been published and reprinted both as a leaflet in English and French and as a feature article in The Western Socialist and Socialisme Mondial and may soon be more widespread. The original document was propounded by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904, the year of its formation. During the entire existence of this political party and of companion parties In various countries, these principles have pointed the way to a sane society — world socialism.

Link to the Foreward

Editorial: Once over lightly (1974)

Editorial from the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Those who have had the opportunity to attend genuine socialist outdoor propaganda meetings will recall —upon reflection—that the Marxian soap-boxers invariably involve themselves and their audience in a variety of subjects. Over the course of a typical 2-3 hour session the speakers will be compelled, willy-nilly, to air their knowledge of politics, economics, history, sociology and anthropology, comparative religion and who knows what else? The fact that many socialists are capable of expatiating to some lengths in a wide area of disciplines indicates the degree to which the science of socialism inter-relates all knowledge. Socialists do have a penchant for sticking their noses into just about everything.

The radio scripts contained in this Special Issue certainly can be said to cover a multitude of topics. The problem is in separating them into neat categories. One finds that it makes for more tranquility to refrain from such departmentalization, considering the message of each on its own merits.

So far as we are concerned, one thing is certain. Whatever is said might well be said better so far as construction is concerned. But the attitude expressed throughout is a socialist perspective of capitalist society and Its problems.

The same can be said for the commentary on the Declaration of Principles of the Companion Parties. As goes the saying In the vernacular: it is double in spades.

We believe we have provided. In this Special Issue, a veritable Guide to Revolutionary Socialism — a sort of Handbook of Scientific Socialism in thought in action.

"The source of capitalist (national) power . . ." (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

High political offices — whether occupied by presidents, prime ministers, chairmen or monarchs — are not the real fountains of national strength. The source of capitalist (national) power is the support by the working class of the wages (capitalist) system. World socialism’s goal is a world without nations, owned by all who inhabit it.

Edgar Hardcastle in Dutch

Party News from the SPGB Discussion Forum

"The Dutch-language section of the Marxist Internet Archive has started a section on Edgar Hardcastle (“Hardy” as he was known in the Party) with his articles translated from the Socialist Standard."

Burned out and six feet under (1992)

From issue 8 of the World Socialist Review

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) discovered a while back that homicide tops the list of occupational hazards causing job-related deaths among women in the U.S. “Violence is a contagious disease,” as H.G. Wells once said. On average, 158 female wage-slaves in the U.S. lose their lives each year serving the capitalist class. The CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health division chalks up this phenomenon to women working in retail sector jobs and to a lack of safety precautions like better lighting, safer cash handling, bulletproof barricades and the like. Despite their medical expertise, they are being most unscientific in distinguishing symptoms from causes in this morbidity. Even Mahatma Gandhi had a better grasp of cause and effect, as we can see from his diagnosis: “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”

So long as we live in a society where one must buy life’s necessities, there will always be a desperate compulsion to acquire money by any means possible. Why are women in this dangerous position of confronting desperate robbers to begin with? The same reason. Like their killers, they too must make the acquisition of money a top priority to live in this capitalist set-up. For the ruling (capitalist) class will have it no other way. No reform or precaution will change this objective fact of competitive society. It can’t help but breed violence and death.

Dr. Catherine Bell, an epidemiologist with the CDC, alluded to the trends in the sexual division of labor as a contributing factor. She inadvertently indicted the conditions of labor in general as a systematic killer of the working class. “Part of it may be that women tend to be employed in places where the risk of homicide is elevated instead of places where they are likely to be electrocuted or crushed or killed in traffic accidents.”

Right to self-obliteration

Life’s little career trade-offs! You can risk being murdered at the cash register, or you can utilize your “right” to equal employment and increase your chances of being electrocuted, crushed or wiped out in a traffic accident! Only in a free (to exploit) society can such challenging choices of self-obliteration be put before us. The CDC report finds that most on-the-job fatalities involve male workers dying from the above-mentioned non-homicidal causes. Whether from a robber’s gun or a boss’s job requirement, the end result is the same.

Violence at the workplace is clearly a problem symptomatic of the class oppression of both sexes in general. It is the quest for profits that makes production (and work generally) a life-threatening activity. It is the artificially imposed poverty that compels the working class to run the gauntlet daily. Each day many are struck down. The hazardous conditions in which this takes place are only symptomatic of the disease, not the cause of it. The disease is capitalism.

Capitalism, with its parasitic ruling class that owns and controls the means and instruments of production: subjecting the overwhelming majority to inhuman conditions like violent competition, pay-as-you-go insecure housing, second-rate food, dangerous daily amounts of stress. The list of these symptoms could go on and on; capitalism creates countless avenues of misery for the human condition.

The cure for this ailment is socialism, and it begins with socialist consciousness. The administration of this cure includes you. Your clinic is the World Socialist movement. With enough house calls and mass innoculations, we can witness the eradication of this morbid scourge in our lifetimes!

W. J. Lawrimore

They're all Utopians now (1991)

Editorial from issue 7 of the World Socialist Review

The “failure of communism” has come to be peddled as the latest version of the usual ideological hamburger on the mass media’s instant menu. What has happened, however, is not that communism has failed but only that Leninism has collapsed. Right from the very beginning, in What is to be Done? Lenin had expressed the view that the working class was “exclusively by its own effort . . . able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc.” [1] This was the view adopted by the Bolshevik majority within the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (“the theoretical doctrine of Social Democracy”). Buttressing that, Lenin’s thesis on the origins of the theory of socialism was accepted as a good replacement for the Gospel: it “grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals.” [2]

For a very long time, this belief that revolutionary theory could arise “altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement” jammed the only channel by which workers could in fact formulate their protests against the ravages of capitalism. It made Bolshevism, as a chrysalis stage of Social Democracy, reinforced by the authority of the Soviet state, the dominant vehicle of working-class aspirations around the world. Any attempts at directly conceptualizing an alternative to capitalism out of the experience of the class struggle were thereby sentenced to exile. A smothering blanket of pseudo-communist legitimacy helped to choke off a burgeoning trend toward “raising hell” in the workplace.

Capitalist butterfly

With the opening movement of a Solidarity government in Poland, followed by a chain reaction of similar upsets throughout the Leninist countries, the Bolshevik chrysalis has at long last given way to a dazzling (capitalist) butterfly. The market system has made an ideological comeback in the state-capitalist countries in a big way—although, as socialists have been pointing out assiduously ever since the November Revolution, there never ceased to be a market system operating in those countries; it had simply transformed itself into a “central plan”. Thanks to the nomenklatura system (a system of patronage which assured the respective “Communist” parties a vice grip on the strategic economic and political positions), the well-protected capitalists who spent decades consolidating their vulnerable position behind the “iron curtain” now feel confident enough to “rise to full stature in all their giant strength,” to use Lenin’s phrase.

And now that the spectre of communism has finally melted away, some space has again opened up for the real thing to resume its interrupted trajectory. But it can always be interrupted again if we let our thoughts remain centered on the main institutions of class division—profits and wages—rather than on its replacement. For purely business reasons alone, a capitalist will always tend to be incapable of understanding socialism as a concept (as a system of society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production); doing so would require stepping outside the market frame of reference and looking at the world from the vantage point of a human being. This is not impossible; but it can obviously happen only rarely. Then there are, of course, the numerous supporting ideological arguments generated by the world of business as a secondary form of self-defense.

Alternatives to the system

Less obvious is the case of the worker/ professional who fails to grasp even the basics of socialism. What we fill our minds with forms a pattern of energy use which precludes the development of other patterns of thought, and filling our minds with thoughts of struggling to get by in the market leaves little room for choosing alternatives to the market system. Without being steeped in any direct form of pro-capitalist ideology—even being against capitalism in general but not specifically against the market system—millions of people can go on, year in and year out, remaining indifferent to the real possibilities life could hold for them in a system of wealth production which didn’t require them to be poor so it could function.

The “spark” of consciousness is always present, because the poverty enforced by capital is endlessly generating new discontents (and leaving old ones to fester). Capitalists have a built-in incentive to deny the very possibility of eliminating capital; wage-earners (including salaried professional workers), on the other hand, have a devil by the tail and are constantly compelled to find new ways to rationalize their exploitation. The mass media are there to help them in this—but even these are only a band-aid solution, and other machineries of repression either have already been deployed or are being researched. (The idea that wealth is something to be enjoyed simply as the outcome of human labor and that a whole system of society could operate worldwide without the use of money is in any case airily dismissed by the information commandos.)

Utopia now

Capitalists see no need for any system beyond capitalism because their utopia is already an historical fact. The abundance promised (eventually) by capitalism is everywhere; its delivery is nowhere in sight. Life in this utopia is so beautiful and so perfect that the happy workers could not rationally entertain thoughts of doing wealth production differently than on a profit basis—and now, even that paragon of communism, the international group of Leninist parties, has “failed” in its historic mission to take over the world and impoverish everyone. Yet people are starving on a scale as never before in world history while food surpluses are stockpiled or destroyed because their existence threatens profits; poverty is the lot of more human beings now than in any previous period; and even the environmental basis for conducting exploitation is in the process of breaking down under the pressure of continuing systematic abuse.

The time has never been better for junking a system that only works in the eyes of its advocates. Now that it has been shown that Leninism could be scrapped with impunity, why not take a much more productive step and move on to replacing capitalism itself? 

Footnotes:

[1] What is to be Done?, "The Beginning of the Spontaneous Upsurge".

[2] What is to be Done?, "Primitiveness and Economism".

Oscar Wilde on “Living for Others” (1988)

From issue 5 of the World Socialist Review

The following article is taken with permission from The Nation (2/20/88), where It appears as "Minority Report" (a feature column) . The writer— Christopher Hitchens— not only expresses an insight into the underlying realities of exploitation and social class but also reminds us of a few things about Oscar Wilde that the capitalist class would presumably prefer to play down as quaint or awkward.

 

That said, we do take exception to what seems to be the author's implied existence of a "middle class," since the liberal middle class of Wilde's time has itself become today's conservative "upper class", having changed only its ideological diapers in the process. Developed capitalism knows only two classes: those who own the means of production and those who work for them to produce and distribute wealth, either to the former's profit or to their minimum cost. A worker is anyone whose only source of income is the sale of their mental and physical abilities.

 

—The Editor

. . .  The salient point about (Oscar) Wilde was the economy and address of his wit. He did not froth with bons mots like some second-rate charmer. He was a tough and determined Irishman who more than once flattened bullies with his fist, and most of the time—if we exempt pardonable and tempting sallies about blue china and decorative screens—his drawling remarks were not snobbish or mannered. I suppose that people need to see him as a species of languid dandy, which is why The Soul of Man Under Socialism is almost never discussed when dear Oscar's name comes up.

Try to find that essay in any of the current anthologies of Wilde. First published in 1891, it was geldingly retitled The Soul of Man while Wilde was in prison. It expressed the sensibility that had impelled him to take the side of the Irish rebels and, in particular, to oppose the British government's attempted frame up of Charles Stewart Parnell, who, like Wilde, was destroyed on a charge of immorality when all else had failed. It gave Wilde the same distinction as that which he acquired by being the only writer in London to sign George Bernard Shaw's petition for the Haymarket martyrs. And it contains the following imperishable sentence:

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.

This is not the flippant remark that philistlnes might take it to be. It is in fact what is truly meant by "compassion," a word now made to sound sickening in the mouths of Democratic hypocrites.

What those hypocrites mean when they intone the hack word "compassion" is that we should not forget the needy and the desperate as we pursue our glorious path of self-advancement. This is the rough equivalent of the older injunction that we should remember the wretched in our prayers. Wilde was proposing something infinitely more daring and intelligent—that we regard poverty, ugliness and the exploitation of others as something repulsive to ourselves. If we see a slum, a ghetto, a beggar, or an old person eating pet food, we should not waste pity on the victim. We should want the abolition of such conditions for our own sakes. The burden of enduring them is too much.

This is why early socialists were quite proud to be accused of spitting in the face of charity. The principle that an injury to one is an injury to all is not just talk; it is the expression of a solidarity that recognizes mutual interest. As Wilde also wrote, in his review of Edward Carpenter's Chants of Labour, "For to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing." His appreciation of paradox here makes an excellent match with his rejection of sentimentality.

There is another sense in which it would be nice to think that Wilde intended his insight about "living for others." In the great working class novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists the laborer Robert Tressell describes the feelings of charity and gratitude that, overwhelm the credulous, patriotic men who worked alongside him. They were content to spend their entire lives living for others—their betters—each of them confident of his own sturdy independence. This type did not disappear with the waning of the Industrial Revolution. You can meet him today, the despair of "progressive" intellectuals, as he bellies up to the bar with his "can't fool me" talk and proceeds to speak, sometimes using the very same phrases, in the tones of the President's last lying paean to native virtues. Praise for these philanthropists, especially at times when they are needed to be expended in war, is the only official rhetoric you hear that mentions the word "class." Almost the only place that class distinctions are stressed these days is at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Class Factor Downplayed

They deserve to be stressed more often. Society labors on, supporting both an enormously wealthy upper class, whose corporate holdings are frequently tax free or even tax subsidized, and a growing underclass, which is sporadically and pathetically cited as a spur to conscience. Never is it asked, What are these classes for?

A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles. The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth. A rising tide, as we have recently learned, does not lift all boats, nor does a falling tide sink them all. If people were to recognize that they are all in the same boat, they would take better care of its furnishings, its comfort and its general decor. This is what Wilde meant by the importance of the aesthetic. 

Radicals have been taught to distrust any too great display of individualism, and where they forget this lesson there are always conservatives to remind them (a madly sweet but slightly lugubrious example of this style appears In the current New Criterion, reprobating my good self). Wilde himself was haunted by a Podhoretz-like chaplain in prison, who reported that the cell reeked of semen. (How could he tell?) We are in the debt of the brave man who taught us to ask, of their majesties, whether they deserve us, or our continued amiable subservience.

Christopher Hitchens

Editorial: Of Contras, Pros . . . and Socialists (1987)

Editorial from issue 3 of the World Socialist Review

From the inordinate amount of attention being given to the Reagan Administration's double-dealing in the two affairs of arms to Iran and the diversion of funds to the contras, yon would think something really big was happening in US capitalism these days. For Irangate/contragate has become a major media event.

Despite the apparent ferocity of the clashes currently taking place between rival political factions within the capitalist class, from one angle they are actually beneficial to the capitalist class as a whole: they obscure from view the more basic scandal of the division of the world into political entities or nation-states; they deflect attention from the more insidious ongoing misappropriation constituted by the monopoly of the capitalist class of the means and instruments of wealth production.

Media-generated concern over the poor little Reagan Administration's predicament masks (or perpetuates) the working majority's confused identification of its interests with those of the "top ten" per cent of the population making up the owning class. And—every bit as much as the more flamboyant histrionics of Dallas or of Dynasty— this fondling of the rich and the powerful belies a pernicious cult of personality on the part of the media around the world (and one by no means limited to Russia and China).

The World Socialist Movement, for its part, does not find much of an issue in all of the hoopla. Its one and only reason for existence is to disseminate information relating to the functioning and foundations of capitalist society as well as to sow the seeds of socialism. The crises that shake our planet and even threaten the viability of life on it do not spring from the actions of conniving, dishonest politicians—though these latter certainly may help to trigger catastrophes.

The real problem is rather the continuation of the system of producing goods and services for sale on the market (ie, commodities) with a view to profit. The real solution is a socialist organiza­tion of society, the introduction of a worldwide society based on production for use.

So while we as socialists may derive some enjoyment from watching the capitalist class being forced to do its dirty laundry on TV (there is after all no reason why its own propaganda can't occasionally degenerate into farce), we ought not to imitate the reformists and ignore the real issue that we never find presented in the media: the urgency of common ownership.

Short of that, all that is really possible is the replacement of one governing party or regime by another. Socialism, or common ownership of the means of production, will on the contrary only come about through the conscious action of the working class around the world, aimed at replacing the entire system of exploitation, and it is only in helping to bring this about that socialists can ever hope to distinguish themselves from both the witting and the unwitting supporters of capitalism.

—Editorial Committee, WSP (US)