Genoa and Anti-Capitalism (2001)

From the September 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

An eye-witness account of what it was really like at the anti-capitalist demonstrations in Genoa.

The coach driver had been told not to take us into the city because it was dangerous, and left us at the outskirts. The Convergence Centre was five hours walk away. We had no maps, no money, and no idea where we were. All the shops were closed, and the banks. The buses were not running their full routes, there were no taxis, and the government had ordered the mobile phone networks to close down. An hour walking in ferocious heat and we encountered the steel barricades of the "Red Zone", fenced by ranks of heavily armed carabinieri in battle formation. It looked like a scene from Gladiator, apart from the incongruous armoured cars and gas grenade launchers. In the harbour, the politicians' luxury ship sighed gently at anchor.

"No bus. You walk, capito? Ha ha."

Genoa is built on a cliff face. They had sealed off the centre of town, and the only way to reach our Convergence Centre was to go up and round, for a distance of six miles. The carabinieri grinned at us as we went. They might be hot under their armour, but we were going to be a lot hotter. There was nowhere to leave our luggage and large packs of leaflets, it all had to be carried. The older ones amongst us gritted their teeth, and said nothing. We were not fit, or trained, and it was clear this was already a battle, and one for which we were unprepared.

We were tired before we even arrived, that was the trouble. The journey had taken twenty-seven hours including three searches by British, French and Italian customs. One coach member was deported at Calais for possessing a gas mask. A move by some gung-ho SWP women to stage a sit-in there and then was defeated after much argument. We SPGB members kept an amazed silence as teenagers attempted to talk fifty people into certain deportation at the hands of French police who were clearly not going to tremble in the face of SWP agitation. Much the same thing happened at the Italian border, where two more were turned back for obscure reasons and certain SWP members again proposed blockading the whole road. The carabinieri looked on with amusement. You could imagine them thinking, like Dirty Harry: "Go on punks, make my day." None of these setbacks, however, prevented certain members of the coach party from making speeches from the front about how we were all going to close down the G8 and bring down the multinationals. The young first-timers applauded, wide-eyed and enthused. The old-timers like me shut our eyes and thought, oh please.

When we were finally decanted at the drop point, it became apparent for the first time that Globalise Resistance, the SWP front which organised the coaches and trains from Britain, had not really thought the matter through. Nobody knew where the hell to go, and nobody had a decent map. Thoughts about buying what was needed evaporated into the hot air as it became obvious that the Italian government wasn't joking about closing down the whole town. Even the gung ho women looked at each other uncertainly. It wasn't that the plan was going wrong. There wasn't any plan to begin with. Within half an hour the group was dispersed, "affinity groups" split up, and nearly everybody lost.

We climbed for hours, taking wrong turns and blind alleys, descending only to meet barricades, climbing again. For every mile we advanced, we wasted at least three. Every step was heavier than the last. A smoky cloud descended on us, a bittersweet and perfumed smell. Oh great, now they were tear-gassing us as well. Out came the masks and goggles, the vinegar, the lemon juice. This is the new stuff that sticks to clothes and skin, designed to make you suffer for hours. It all seemed ridiculously unfair, as if we were innocent bystanders in someone else's war.

At one point we jumped a bus that should have taken us where we were supposed to go. Instead, after a few stops, it met a petrol tanker parked across the road, placed there by the police. Nothing for it, everybody out again.

Six hours, seven, eight, and we were close to collapse. We had still not found the Convergence Centre, that Shangri La of civilisation, food, shelter and money that all our hopes were pinned on. We never did find it.

"Don't go there, it's been gassed and burned out. Try and get across the river."

Just as well we didn't make it, or we'd have been batonned in our sleep and dragged off to the detention centres where, some embarrassed police later confessed, widespread torture took place.

From the heights we could see the fighting. Someone pointed out the Police Station, which had been attacked in an orchestrated assault that morning by the Black Bloc. Across the city there was a huge march down a boulevard. Between us and the river there was a street battle. Nobody wanted to go downhill, but we couldn't stay where we were. The heat was unrelenting. Some nuns stood outside their convent gates and smiled at everyone while filling water bottles with a hose and offering sugar to keep people's energy up.

We didn't know much then about the Black Bloc, or the petrol bombs, or the dead boy and the terrified recruit who shot him. We only heard later about the wave after wave of Ya Basta forcing the police lines and retreating under gas and baton charges. But we were experiencing a profound political process of our own, the mutual aid and generosity of people who had almost nothing in common but who knew how to act in common. People helped us, and when we could, we helped them. In the heights above the war zone, a strange camaraderie took shape among political strangers. We relied on people for what they could do, not what they believed. Out of conflict, harmony, or at least tolerance. I thought, why can't we be like this back home? Dunkirk spirit, I suppose. Pity we only get it when being comprehensively stuffed.

Finally we descended into the devastation. The streets were deserted, silent, horrific. Cars lay upside down, burned. Shops, banks, bottle bins, all smashed and laid waste. A cyclone had swept through the centre of town and left an eerie calm in its wake. On a bridge I saw a burned-out bicycle, former possession of some capitalist health nut, presumably. We trudged unmolested to the Carlini sports stadium, where 20,000 people were trying to rest amid endless Tannoy speeches, and constant low-flying police helicopters.

"ASSASSINI, ASSASSINI!" Fists waved as they passed. Everyone knew by now about Carlo Giuliani. A perpetual fear of police attack pervaded the place. Yet among the anarchists, the Wombles, Ya Basta and numerous injured fighters we at least felt safe. In the noise and the fierce glare of the stadium lights we finally fell asleep, exhausted, on the sloping concrete sides of a fleeting metropolis of Europe's radical youth.

The march next day was vast and seemingly endless. The streets had been cleared and cleaned in the night, so that, but for the smashed windows, there was almost no trace of what had gone before. It was bizarre, as if the city itself was in denial. Meanwhile the ordinary Genovese leaned out of their high-rise apartments and, wonder of wonders, cheered the procession, waving red handkerchiefs and throwing buckets of water down on the sweltering crowd. An enormous sign read: Workers of the World, Welcome to Genova. After everything that had happened, it seemed incredible that they were still on our side. The Black Bloc had not won, despite their best efforts to discredit everything about the anti-capitalist movement. The police agents who were no doubt behind most of the violence had not succeeded. The spirit of resistance to capitalism and to global poverty was alive and flourishing. A shout thundered through the crowd, as if from the heart of a mountain: "Genova Libera, Genova Libera!"

We gave out what leaflets and cards we had left, feeling like boys throwing pebbles in the ocean, but we couldn't stay with the march. We had five hours to walk in an uncertain direction to find our pickup point later that evening. Once on the outskirts we found an open supermarket, and some kind SWP members who gave us Italian money, and we were at last able to buy food. In Italy, interestingly, they give away yesterday's bread for free. We ate together that evening, feeling almost like family now who had formerly been strangers, preparing for the marathon coach journey home.

Reaction set in, under the stone arcades. In the incessant wail of police and ambulance sirens, we sat and regarded each other silently. Two days had felt like two months. We were lucky and we knew it. As this goes to press, 100 protesters are still missing and a second subsequent death has been reported.

More discussion of politics took place on the return journey, yet now it was more muted, more speculative and exploratory. The gung-ho had gone home for a rest. For the first time I felt able to contribute something, and some people came and talked afterwards, and asked questions. For what I had said was not something they had heard before. In the organisations they belonged to, Socialist Alliance, SWP and others, there is very rarely any discussion of what kind of society they would like to replace capitalism with. That this was our whole purpose in going to Genoa seemed a novelty to them. Even the few anarchists we had met showed no real curiosity about this aspect of anti-capitalism. It seemed as if, for the sake of a desperately fragile unity, it was better not to express any idea which might cause division. Not only did most of those present have no knowledge of the SPGB case, they seemed to have almost no knowledge of their own organisation's case either. This is what happens when people idolise activism at the expense of "theory". The Argentinean writer Miguel Benasayag , writing in the French paper Libération (21 July), summed it up:

"When you want to learn the clarinet, you know it'll take time and hard work. You don't expect to be a great musician straight away, and think it perfectly normal to take lessons. Changing the world is altogether more complicated but everyone wants to do it all at once."

Whether anyone learned anything from Genoa is debatable. Members of the Black Bloc not actually working for the police still seem to believe they are the heroes and pioneers of a new social disorder, and that the rest of us should somehow be grateful for their courage and sacrifice. The white overalls, the "tutte bianche", piously condemn violence yet manage to justify direct confrontation with the police as politically useful and ignore the inescapable conclusion that it was by their instigation that violent tactics became an inevitability. Some people shook their fists at the "vicious state murder" of a young worker while privately calculating the advantages of having a martyr and procuring more of the same. Others, confused and saddened, saw only two frightened young workers, one in uniform and one in denim, set against each other by forces neither could control. A senior Carabinieri officer complained bitterly that the killer was an untrained boy who should never have been there. Another unnamed policeman later expressed shame and humiliation that he had taken part in gratuitous beatings while his friends had threatened to rape captive female protesters with their truncheons. Politicians floundered for words as Berlusconi, the Italian PM, came out for the police and Romano Prodi, the EU president, came out against. Police violence overshadowed the anti-capitalist agenda almost completely, while the actual proceedings of the G8 summit disappeared without trace. If there was a point to all this it was not clear to anybody.

The repercussions continue still. There is talk of holding the next G8 summit somewhere remote and inaccessible in Canada. Yet everyone knows the G8 is just a photo-call by the puppets, not a meeting of the puppet-masters. For that, you need to target the annual and semi-mythological Bilderberg conference, yet strangely the anti-capitalist movement does not seem to have thought of this. All the argument is about the "next move" by both sides. As we warned at least a year ago in an SPGB leaflet, there would be deaths if this confrontational strategy were continued. There is still no consensus about any other strategy, even though it is obvious that you can't defeat the army and airforces of the world's capitalist states by street violence. The logical direction, into the political, ideological and economic spheres, seems shunned because it doesn't fit most young activists' concept of political activism. But despite all this, only a fool would write off this movement as politically doomed. It may thrive or it may die, but we are still only watching it being born.

Eight hundred different organisations are not a movement. They are not even anti-capitalist, in the sense that they haven't yet agreed on a definition of capitalism. Far less is there yet any talk of "post-capitalism", or what that might mean. But they are a stirring. In a world where political parties all offer listless soothing platitudes to cover the global screams of suffering, the initiative for change obviously does not lie with governments. There will probably be other Genoas. There will certainly be more violence, especially if the state gets its way. But if the police agents and the adolescents don't succeed, the history of the future may well be written by the more sober-minded and serious majority who were there at Genoa and who have still to settle their own differences of opinion. That, of course, is the where the real battleground lies.

Paddy Shannon

Joining the Party (2000)

From the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politically speaking before I applied to join the Socialist Party of Great Britain I had all but given up. Many years of my life had been spent either within or on the periphery of reformist organisations. I voted Labour and for years I marched in the columns of CND. I was a member of the Young Communist League and later the Communist Party. I became a Trotskyist and admit that to my shame I joined the Labour Party for infiltration purposes. I was twenty five years old and thought of myself as madly revolutionary. I must have been suffering from chronic amnesia. I had forgotten how excited I had been, to what extent my imagination had been fired, when at about the age of thirteen my father talked to me about a world without money.

I must have heard talk of free access when I was still in my pram. The theory was according to my father that the then Soviet Union had state capitalism but eventually the state would wither away and money would be abolished. Every day I scanned the Daily Worker to see whether the Soviet Union had turned into a moneyless society. Needless to say there was no sign of the state "withering away".

At school I embarked with zeal on my own propaganda exercise. In every essay set for us by the teachers I managed to include in mine a reference to the idea of a world without money. I was childishly optimistic about this. I was convinced that one day the English teacher's interest would be aroused and a class discussion would ensue. When this didn't immediately happen I decided to talk to my classmates about it. They thought I was nuts. Then one day a marked essay was returned to me and to my chagrin all my remarks about money had been deleted with red ink. It was a composition about the English countryside and I had waxed lyrical about the beauty of Kent. My suggestion was that if we did not have a monetary system the countryside could be even more beautiful. I supplied a few reasons for why I thought this but can no longer remember what they were. I adored my English teacher. She and I shared a love of reading but from that day on my conviction grew that she wasn't all I had cracked her up to be. I exchanged my interest in free access for boys, clothes and dancing.

I joined the SPGB in 1994. Yet I feel I have always been a member. A comrade was selling the Socialist Standard in the city and I bought a copy. My preconceptions warned me that the SPGB was just another one of those outfits like the Socialist Workers' Party. I skipped through the pages, skimmed one or two of the articles and tossed it aside. My husband asked if I had read the Declaration of Principles. I had not.

I read the Object: "The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community." And I read on. That did it. SPGB, where have you been all my life? Whilst I was marching against war, agitating for better conditions in the workplace and voting for a Labour government that supported capitalism the SPGB was waiting in the wings. How had I missed it?

Every member knows that it is not easy to join the Socialist Party. It is not just a matter of filling in an application form and receiving that little red membership card through the post. I know of no other political organisation requiring potential new members to understand their aims and be capable of arguing for them. I mildly resented the twelve questions. I felt the Socialist Party should be grateful to me for wanting to join their ranks. It was rather like sitting an exam. I thought it would be a doddle. It wasn't. But goodness how it focused my mind. I do not think I made a very good job of the twelve questions but my answers must have been satisfactory enough for someone to write back and tell me I could join if I liked. There are times now when I am tempted to ask for those twelve questions again. Next time I may give a better account of myself.

Heather Ball

Cleaning Houses (2000)

A Short Story from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is something about the interiors of other people's houses that makes me feel uncomfortable. In about eight out of ten visits I might make to a friend's or a neighbour's home, I return to my own abode, survey my sticks of furniture, my cluttered kitchen, my shabby living quarters and make a resolution to smarten the old place up a bit, then I become absorbed in something else and that's that. Until the next time.

Other people's houses are too clean. I have never lived in a very clean house and the reason for this is that I am a woman, and therefore there is an assumption that I am solely responsible for keeping it clean. I long ago ditched the idea that I should spend every minute of my available time making sure my house is dust-free. Yet it seems to me that almost every other woman I know takes her housework seriously. Spotless, fitted kitchens as well-tended as any Intensive Care Unit in a hospital, wall-to-wall carpets likely to suffer premature balding from so much vacuuming, immaculate chairs and sofasno crumbs, no stains, no tears, and bowls of fruit as perfect as wax imitations. Perfect houseplants too. And never a book out of place. Often never a book. No piles of papers abandoned on rickety shelves (as in my house) and no vases harbouring very dead flowersbeen there for weeks, months even. In these same houses no grimy jars on dusty shelves containing this and that; all essential to the sort of alchemy that takes place in my kitchen. Here things are prepared, cooked and eaten all from scratch, and jars of what will one day be wine stand in rows to ferment for months. I could take a bet on it that the inside of my house is never going to arouse feelings of envy in any other woman or man in the world. But it hasn't always been that way.

When first married I did dust and polish and remove cobwebs from corners, but you wouldn't catch me doing that these days. Within a very short space of time I grew depressed by it all. Outside the sun shone, books were waiting to be read, life was waiting to be lived. And what was I doing?polishing a table. I became resentful. I not only went out to work, I shopped and cooked and cleaned house too. We are only willing slaves to something all the time that we are unaware. Just as soon as there is awareness then the slave-mentality is challenged.

Few of us would choose to live in a slum, but it seems to me that a fetish is made of housework. How often have I called on someone unexpectedly and been asked to "Excuse the mess." What mess? Could she mean the magazine lying on the arm of the chair? Some women immediately rush to the bathroom to pull the chain if I casually express a wish to visit the loo. And in the kitchen a well-known brand of disinfectant is at the ready in case the plague strikes suddenly.

Most women are assigned this role from birth and that is not to deny that men are assigned roles too. When living at home I did not help my mother much in the house but there was, I think, a tacit agreement on both our parts that I would one day do exactly as she did. When later I didn't I knew that she was horrified. She would run the tips of her fingers over my furniture when she thought I wasn't looking and become tight-lipped when she found dust, as she invariably did. I had challenged her role in the world as a woman. I cleaned the house, yes, but not very thoroughly and not very often. It was scandalous. What kind of a daughter was I? I tried to tell her what kind of a daughter I was. I said that when I was born nobody had announced "It's a girl. She'll clean houses." And even if they had it still didn't mean I wanted The Housewife of the Year Award. What I wanted was to live and learn and become a real person, not someone who cleaned houses because they thought it would bring respect from other people, envy even. What sort of a life was that anyway and what was enviable about it?

Mine was a mini-rebellion and you may not think of it as significant, but it seems to me that unless we question what appears to be our lot in life then we stand in darkness or at least half-shadow. In other words we accept. And when you think that there is an acceptance of war, poverty and that biggest confidence-trick of all (the cause of much misery, ignorance and injustice) money, then perhaps you will see that my objection to becoming a slave to cleaning houses is just another example of how we can escape the conditioning we each of us experience before we can throw off our chains. As the proverb says, from little acorns oak trees grow.

Heather Ball

George Orwell, Spain and anti-fascism (1997)

From the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sixty years ago this month the events began which inspired George Orwell to write Homage to Catalonia. Left-wing militias in the Catalan capital, Barcelona, opposed to the government's policy of restoring capitalist normality in the territories which had not fallen to Franco, were attacked by Republican paramilitary forces under Communist command.

Orwell witnessed these events while on leave from the front where he was fighting as a member of one of these leftwing militias, that of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista, or Workers Party of Marxist Unification). The POUM was basically a dissident Communist Party which didn't believe in taking orders from Moscow. It has been called a Trotskyist party (not least by supporters of Stalin) but, although it did contain some Trotskyists, this is inaccurate. Trotsky did try to tell it what to do, but the POUM no more followed orders from Trotsky than it did from Stalin.

Orwell had joined the POUM militia because he wanted to fight Franco not because he agreed with their political views. He knew some people in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and they put him in touch with the POUM with which the ILP had some links. He was not a dissident Communist himself and never had any sympathy with Leninism or Trotskyism. As he pointed out in a book review in January 1939:

"It is probably a good thing for Lenin's reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind. The essential act is the rejection of democracy - that is, of the underlying values of democracy; once you have decided upon that, Stalin - or at any rate someone like Stalin - is already on the way." (from George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters , Vol 1, as are all the quotes in this article).

After May things in Barcelona got worse. In June the POUM was banned. Its leader, Andres Nin, was arrested and later murdered by agents of the GPU, the Russian secret police. Other POUM members were detained and tortured, including non-Spanish members of their militia. Orwell and his wife had to go into hiding and eventually got over the border into France.

Homage to Catalonia describes Orwell's own experiences in Spain but it also defends the POUM and the anarchists against the lies the Communist Party and their stooges put out about them to the effect that they were in contact with and acting on behalf of Franco's fascists.

Orwell knew this to be completely untrue and, out of honesty as well as loyalty to his former companions-in-arms, he denounced this. Needless to say, the Communists suggested that he too was a fascist sympathiser and "Trotsky-Fascist". It left him with an abiding disgust with the Communist Party, its ideology and its methods, which was to inspire his later novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eight-Four which, rightly, show them no mercy.

Russian Foreign Policy

Orwell had gone to Spain as someone who had vague pro-working class feelings. His experiences there politicised him and he left holding radical leftwing views. What he learned in Spain was, first, a respect for the capacity of ordinary workers to run things on their own and, secondly, that the Communists were bastards: that they were committed, not to furthering the interests of the working class, but to furthering the foreign policy objectives of the Russian state and that, to this end, they were prepared to lie, cheat and kill. Hence his damning, but wholly accurate, description of them: "the more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a Russian publicity agent posing as an international Socialist." (Inside the Whale)

In 1935 the Comintern under Stalin carried out one of its U-turns. When the 1930s began, Social Democratic and Labour parties were still being denounced as "social fascists" and seen as being as bad, if not worse, than the real fascists. With the coming to power of Hitler, however, Germany came to be seen by the Russian rulers as a threat to their interests. Russian foreign policy then changed, from a more or less equal hostility to all the openly capitalist powers to seeking an alliance with capitalist France and Britain against capitalist Germany.

The Communist Parties had their role to play in this strategy: to work for the broadest possible anti-fascist alliance to include openly pro-capitalist elements as long as they were anti-fascist, i.e. in effect anti-German. Everything was to be subordinated to the creation of such a broad anti-fascist front. All talk of "revolution", "soviets" and the like was dropped; the red flag was replaced by the Union Jack, and patriotism became de rigueur.

Orwell, having experienced first hand the application of this policy in Spain, saw through this, writing in a private letter n September 1937:

"Of course all the Popular Front stuff that is now being pushed by the Communist press and party, Gollancz and his paid hack set etc, etc only boils down to saying that they are in favour of British Fascism (prospective) as against German Fascism. What they are aiming to do is to get British capitalism-imperialism into alliance with the USSR and thence into a war with Germany. Of course they piously pretend that they donât want the war to come and that a French-British-    Russian alliance can prevent it on the old balance of power system. But we know what the balance of power business led to last time, and in any case it is manifest that the nations are arming with the intention of fighting. The Popular Front baloney boils down to this: that when the war comes the Communists, labourites, etc instead of working to stop the war and overthrow the Government, will be on the side of the Government provided that the Government is on the 'right' side, i.e. against Germany. But everyone with any imagination can foresee that Fascism, not of course called Fascism, will be imposed on us as soon as the war starts. So you will have Fascism with Communists participating in it and, if we are in alliance with the USSR, taking a leading part in it. This is what has happened in Spain. After what I have seen in Spain I have come to the conclusion that it is futile to be 'anti-Fascist' while attempting to preserve capitalism. Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism when the pinch comes. We like to think of England as a democratic country, but our rule in India, for instance, is just as bad as German Fascism, though outwardly it may be less irritating. I do not see how one can oppose Fascism except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of course, in one's own country. If one collaborates with a capitalist-imperialist government in a struggle 'against' Fascism, i.e. against a rival imperialism, one is simply letting fascism in by the back door".

This position put Orwell far, far to the left of the Communist Party and in June 1938 he joined the ILP. The ILP, which had been one of the original founding elements of the Labour Party, had broken away from Labour in 1932 and was a home for all sorts of leftwing critics of Labour's short-sighted reformism. At different times, both the Communists and the Trotskyists tried to take it over, but without success. While some of its members had notions of socialism, generally speaking it was a confused organisation which was unclear both as to what socialism was and as to how to get it, and was itself reformist in the sense that it campaigned for reforms of capitalism.

Orwell was not out of place in the ILP since he, too, only had a vague notion of socialism. For him it was the general idea of a decent society without private ownership of the means of production or a privileged class and where ordinary people would run things democratically in their own interest. Orwell, however, was clear on one thing: Russia was not socialist or anything like it.

In a book review in June 1938 he asked of Russia: "is it Socialism, or is it a peculiarly vicious form of state capitalism?" His answer was that, whatever it was, it wasn't socialism. Later he embraced the theory that Russia was a new exploiting, class society best described as "oligarchical collectivism" where a self-appointed and self-perpetuating oligarchy ruled through a one-party dictatorship on the basis of the state (collective class) ownership of the means of production. For although Orwell was primarily interested in literary matters he also followed very closely the arguments that went on in Trotskyist, ex-Trotskyist and ex-Communist circles on the nature of Russian society, a knowledge he was able to put to later use when writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Capitalism and War

In one of his letters Orwell mentions that he had written an anti-war pamphlet. This has not been found, but it is not difficult to work out from his other letters and articles what it would have said. Its basic premise would have been what Orwell set out in book review he did in August 1937:

"1. That war against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
2. That every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac ('militarist' Germany in 1914, 'Fascist' Germany next year or the year after).
The essential job is to get people to recognize war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda".

Orwell, as we have seen, regarded the campaign for an anti-fascist "people's front" as just such war propaganda disguised as a peace campaign. It merely opposed one type of capitalism by another type of capitalism, in the interest of one particular alliance of capitalist-imperialist powers. So his anti-war pamphlet can be expected to have denounced mere anti-fascism as a means of preparing workers ideologically to support Britain, France and Russia in the coming war against Germany and Italy

But if mere anti-fascism was not a genuine alternative to fascism, what, in Orwell's eyes, was? Orwell looked to the emergence of a mass democratic revolutionary movement that would be anti-capitalist as well as anti-fascist. Reviewing Franz Borkenau's The Communist International (which should be read by anyone wanting to learn about the various turns the Comintern effected in the 1920s and 1930s) in September 1938, he wrote:

"Where I part company from him is where he says that for the western democracies the choice lies between Fascism and an orderly reconstruction through the cooperation of all classes. I do not believe in the second possibility, because I do not believe that a man with 50,000 pounds a year and a man with fifteen shillings a week either can, or will, co-operate. The nature of their relationship is quite simply, that the one is robbing the other, and there is no reason to think that the robber will suddenly turn over a new leaf. It would seem, therefore, that if the problems of western capitalism are to be solved, it will have to be through a third alternative, a movement which is genuinely revolutionary, i.e. willing to make drastic changes and to use violence if necessary, but which does not lose touch, as Communism and Fascism have done, with the essential values of democracy. Such a thing is by no means unthinkable. The germs of such a movement exist in numerous countries, and they are capable of growing. At any rate, if they don't, there is no real exit from the pigsty we are in".

Unfortunately, no such movement did emerge and in September 1939 the widely predicted war broke out. Although previously he had envisaged going underground to oppose the war (in January 1939 Orwell had written to Herbert Read, the anarchist art-world figure, "I believe it is vitally necessary for those of us who intend to oppose the coming war to start organising for illegal anti-war activities"), when the war did break out he not only didn't go underground but he actively supported it - and not just on anti-fascist but on old-fashioned patriotic grounds.

He tried to enlist to go and kill German workers himself but was turned down because he had signs of TB. Instead, he spent the war churning out patriotic propaganda (some of it nasty stuff: he referred to pacifists as "fascifists" and denounced conscientious objectors as "pro-Nazis") aimed at getting British workers to go and kill German workers and Indian workers to kill Japanese workers.

It was a betrayal, an unpardonable one from a socialist point of view, of the working-class internationalism he had initially adopted as a result of his experiences in Spain.

Adam Buick

Darfur: Not Yet A Genocide? (2004)

From the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again the world is faced by an artificial humanitarian disaster. Once more pictures and accounts of victims of a war not of their making confront us daily Taking advantage of the respite provided by an "interim" "peace settlement" signed in April the Government of Sudan has turned its attention to its troublesome citizens in the western region of Darfur. Killing, rape, pillage and abduction are the order of the day. The international "community" and its political leaders, while frequently condemning genocide elsewhere, have been slow to interfere for fear of jeopardising the recent ceasefire between Khartoum and its southern rebels.

As with the conflicts of the past twenty years in Sudan the situation in Darfur is not simply a bloody-minded continuation of long-standing ethnic conflict. It is part of a struggle over resources. Claims that uncontrolled rebels alone cause the mayhem are untrue. The victims are pawns in a power struggle over the distribution of the profits from oil and other resources, and the economic advancements they make possible. The exploitation of the oil reserves in the south of the country some of which underlie the southern part of Darfur province are leased to foreign oil companies from as far apart as Canada and China. Central government has redrawn internal boundaries so that the benefits of development are appropriated by the Northern elites through their control of the state machine. Revenue from the oil industry is now used in an attempt to repress rebellion there.

Shut out from the possibilities of social advancement in Khartoum part of the excluded ruling elite have taken advantage of local grievances in the hope of using them to topple the ruling National Islamic Front. Darfur has a history of clashing economic interests over access to water, land and grazing. The two main groups are the largely nomadic "Arab" pastoralists who herd camels or cattle, and the mainly "African" sedentary subsistence farmers. In the past these difference, both within and between groups, were worked out locally by elders of the tribes concerned. However a period of drought, increasing desertification, and subsequent large-scale population movements, have recently sharpened differences. It is these troubled waters that outside interests have begun to fish.

The government of Sudan had in the 1980s started providing weapons for militias of Arab descent (the "Jangaweed" armed horsemen) who were already in the habit of raiding both Arab and non-Arab alike in search of plunder. According to Amnesty International, the Jangaweed now "work in unison with government troops, with total impunity for their massive crimes." Crimes mainly against people taking no part in the armed rebellion.

In response to this proxy military and policing arm local tribes have now started arming and training their own defence militias. Claims and counter claims are made about supposed attempts to appropriate the best land and about supposed minority domination of the local administration in Darfur. The ruling National Islamic Front has only a very low level of support in Darfur and has suffered defections to other parties there. In 2000 Hassan al-Turabi (then speaker of parliament in Khartoum) split with the NIF and in a bid for popular support made advances toward the majority but marginalized non-Arab population. In reaction the central government jailed al-Turabi until late last year. According to the International Crisis Group, he and others have hijacked the Darfur rebellion for their own purposes.

The manipulation of "race" and ethnicity has polarised the situation. Assertions of Arab cultural and economic superiority have been made in order to justify their claims to greater representation at all levels of government. The uncovering of an alleged plan to establish Arab domination in Darfur backed by disaffected Islamists from outside the region has led to the mobilisation of non-Arabs. Local army opinion favoured negotiations with the rebels with the intention of reaching a political solution. This was rejected by the central government and the then-governor of North Darfur, was sacked for making the suggestion. A number of initiatives by exiled opposition leaders and others aimed at reaching a peaceful political settlement all failed.

In the meantime denial of access to Darfur has prevented international relief aid reaching those most in need and a programme of village burning has been implemented aimed at denying the poor what very little they do have. President al-Bashir has opted for a military solution: "Our priority from now on is to eliminate the rebellion . . . We will use the army, the police, the mujahedeen, the horsemen to get rid of the rebellion."

Opposition to the the government in Khartoum has, according to the recently emerged Sudan Liberation Movement/Army, coalesced around them. Their objective according to their Political Declaration issued in March, 2003 is "a united democratic Sudan on the basis of equality, complete restructuring and devolution of power, even development . . . and material prosperity for all Sudanese." A viable unity must be based on an economic and political system that addresses the uneven development in Sudan and ends "political and economic marginalisation" under "a decentralised form of government based on the right of Sudan's different regions to govern themselves autonomously through a federal or co-federal system."

To the outside world the twenty year long civil war with its death toll of an estimated two million was presented as an ethnic and religious conflict between an "Arab" and Islamic north and an "African" and Christian or animist south. As usual this picture is vastly oversimplified for ease of sound-bite presentation and consumption. Other Northern groups who are also Arab and Islamic oppose the government in Khartoum, dominated by an elite centred on the northern river provinces. In the south much of the fiercest fighting has been between nominally Christian African tribal groups forming and reforming a shifting system alliance and defections as the leaderships pursue personal gain.

In reality the civil war concerns interests related to economic development between a politically privileged central ruling group of capitalists and a politically and economically marginalised periphery of would be capitalists. The outcome of the struggle will settle just who determines the priorities of economic development of land, water and oil. The Sudan Liberation Movement/Army were not included in the Naivasha Agreement on Wealth Sharing signed in January. This interim agreement covered the division of oil and non-oil revenues, the management of the oil sector, the monetary authority and the reconstruction of war-affected areas and the SLM/A are concerned to make sure they do not miss having a say in the carve-up.

And precisely how long the current "interim" agreements will last is unclear. On past evidence the whole process could break down and return again to a vicious resource war between organised armed groups and the consequent murder and displacement of local populations none of whom will benefit economically from any final outcome.

Gwynn Thomas

Socialists and Parliament (1988)

Book Review from the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anti-Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers’ Councils in Britain, 1917–45 by Mark Shipway (Macmillan)

Despite a good. seven-page description of socialism as a society of common ownership, democratic control, production for use and free access, this entire book is based on a myth: that there was, to quote its sub-title, a "movement for workers' councils in Britain, 1917-1945". That no such thing existed emerges from the text itself. Unlike Germany, Italy and some other European countries, Britain did not see the setting up of a single "workers' council. After the initial enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution among radical-minded workers died out here at the beginning of the 1920s, those who advocated them as a way to achieving a society of common ownership and free access were to be numbered, not in hundreds but in tens.

Mark Shipway an anti-parliamentarist himself really has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to sustain his thesis. Apart from a few anarchists in Glasgow during the last world war (who, to their credit, opposed fighting in it, as we did), all he can come up with are two individuals who were able to publicise what must be regarded as essentially personal views rather than those of any "movement".

One of these was Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the suffragette leader and a militant feminist herself before being bowled over by events in Russia. By 1924, however, she had tired of this and eventually went off to Africa to "help" the Abyssinians. It remains true, all the same, that during this period she did advocate a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society (see, for instance, her article "The Future Society" reproduced in 1980 in Socialist Fulcrum, journal of our companion party in Canada, from the One Big Union Bulletin of 1922) and eventually realised that Lenin was establishing state capitalism in Russia.

The other was Guy Aldred, a Glasgow eccentric who besides advocating "workers' councils" was also into free thinking, pacifism, abolishing marriage and republicanism. Nor is it clear how he qualifies to be called an "anti-parliamentarist", for when the Socialist Party contested a parliamentary by-election in 1962 one of the other candidates was . . . Guy Aldred! Shipway reveals that Aldred was also a parliamentary candidate in 1922 and 1945 as well as standing on fourteen wards in the Glasgow municipal elections in 1934. Aldred also tried to stand for Parliament before the first world war. So we are dealing here with a life-long commitment to contesting elections by someone Shipway tries to present as an "anti-parliamentary communist".

The fact that we opposed real (if ephemeral) "anti-parliamentarists" like Sylvia Pankhurst as well as half-baked ones like Aldred does not mean that we accept the label "parliamentarist". We certainly hold that workers must use parliament in the course of establishing socialism but it is the socialist-minded working class majority and not their "messenger boys" who will actually do so. And we emphatically reject the idea that socialism can be established by a series of reform measures voted by MPs, which is the more usual meaning of the word "parliamentarism".

When Shipway asks "who else besides the anti- parliamentary communists was putting forward such a vision of emancipation?" he knows the answer very well. Having borrowed the form of words we pioneered to describe socialism/ communism, he is fully aware that the Socialist Party has sustained this vision much more effectively than his "council communists.

Adam Buick

Labour Without End? (2006)

From the forthcoming May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Futurologists, Alvin Toffler being the best known, have long heralded the imminent arrival of the "post-industrial society" an arcadia in which automation has almost done away with work and our main problem will be how to cope with an excess of leisure. Indeed, labour productivity has risen steadily and at an accelerating rate throughout the last century, except for a blip in the period 1975-85, when labour productivity in the US (though not in Western Europe) fell slightly. But it is only in a rational (i.e., socialist) society, where the means of life serve the community as a whole, that higher productivity will equal less work.

It is a little recognized fact that since the 1970s working hours have tended to rise. There appear to be only two books about recent trends in working time: Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (BasicBooks, 1992) and Pietro Basso, Modern Times, Ancient Hours. Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century (translated from Italian by Giacomo Donis; Verso, 2003). Schor is concerned with the US and has a reformist orientation, while Basso attempts a Marxian analysis and focuses more on Europe. Today's young wage and salary workers work longer hours than their parents and grandparents did at the same age. There is less time not only for relaxation, hobbies, self-education, and political activity, but even for parenting, family life, sleep, socializing, and sex much to the detriment of our quality of life and physical and emotional health.

It isn't just a matter of the number of hours per day, week, or year. Working time has been "rationalized" as well as increased. That means greater intensity of effort and reduced opportunity for rest, social interaction, and even going to the toilet during the workday (zero "dead time," also known as the Toyota system). It means "variable" or "flexible" schedules flexible for the boss, not the worker with more night and weekend work to keep costly machinery in nonstop operation. Many couples now meet only to hand over the kids as they change shifts. And while some are mercilessly overworked, others are thrown out of work altogether, all in the name of profitability.

Working time has gone through some dramatic ups and downs in the course of history. Chattel slaves, of course, were forced to work long hours, though not always as long as wage slaves in the early days of capitalism, when 14 or even 16-hour days and 7-day weeks (i.e., 5,000 hours a year or more) were imposed on children and adults alike. Medieval peasants, by contrast, had led a more leisurely life. Thanks largely to the numerous holidays of the church calendar, according to four studies of Britain in the 13th to 16th centuries they typically worked 2,000 hours a year or less. The working hours of "primitive" tribal people also tend to be relatively short. Capitalist "progress" put paid to such idleness.

In the mid-19th century working hours stood at about 3,500 hours a year (according to studies of Britain in 1840 and the US in 1850). In England the Ten Hours Bill (May 1, 1848) brought the work week down to 60 hours in the countryside (where the Sabbath was enforced) and 70 hours in the cities (where it was not). For decade after decade the working class movement struggled for the 8-hour day, but it was not achieved until after World War I. Children were finally taken out of the mines and factories and put in school. Eventually the weekend and annual vacation came (though not for all). By the late 1940s the typical work year in most "developed" countries was down below 2,000 hours just about where it had been in the middle ages.

After this the story varies somewhat from country to country. In France and Germany, where the trade unions fought for "work sharing" and the 35-hour week, the postwar decades saw a further modest decline in working hours. Paid vacations are much longer in these countries than in the US and Japan.  In the US working hours were stable in the 1950s and 1960s, only to start rising again in the 1970s: the average work week increased by almost three hours between 1973 and 1997. In Britain the rise in hours appears to have levelled off in recent years. According to the UK Labour Force Survey, the proportion of employed persons usually working over 45 hours a week rose from 21 percent in 1991 to 24 percent in 1997 and then fell to 19 percent in 2003.

Many American activists make a great deal of the contrast between the US and Europe and point to Europe as a model for the US to emulate. However, the same processes are underway in Europe, and indeed throughout the world, even though they are more advanced in the US and Japan. (And in China the 11 or 12-hour day is standard.) Only certain groups of European production workers ever won the 35-hour week. For example, German metalworkers and typographers won an agreement for the 35-hour week in 1984, though it did not come into force until 1995. In exchange they had to accept intensified work regimes and "flexible" hours, including weekend work. Moreover, the employers have since launched a largely successful counteroffensive against reduced working hours.

Why are working hours rising and what can we do about it?

Some commentators blame "consumerism" and the "work and spend cycle". No doubt there are those who overwork, often in two full-time jobs, for the sake of conspicuous consumption "to keep up with the Joneses". But the usual pattern is probably for people to work more in an effort to preserve their accustomed standard of living despite another trend of the last quarter century: the decline in real wages. Many overwork to save for their children's education or for retirement, although the overwork makes it much less likely that they'll survive to enjoy their "nest egg". And many have to overwork just to make ends meet or under pressure from their employers (e.g., compulsory overtime). Managers are especially vulnerable to such pressure: thanks to the cell phone, they can be called upon at any time and are thereby deprived of any guaranteed non-working time.

One important part of the explanation must be that it is cheaper for employers to hire a small number of employees to work long hours than it would be to divide up the available work among a larger number of employees. Many labour-related costs training, administration, fringe benefits depend on the number of employees, not total employee-hours. So "downsizing" is always an appealing way of quickly improving a firm's profitability and competitive position. Long hours also have the advantage of making workers more dependent on a specific employer and therefore easier to control.

So could reforms change the incentive structure for both employers and employees in favour of shorter hours? Suggestions include improving the status of part-time work, abolishing higher rates for overtime, and banning compulsory overtime. Tax incentives could be devised for spreading available work more thinly. In principle such changes might have a certain effect. But if capitalists were to come under strong pressure from a reformist government in one country to shorten hours, they would surely move their assets elsewhere, as they already do to escape unwelcome regulation of other kinds.

Historical evidence does point to a clear relationship between working time and the willingness of workers and their organizations to fight for its reduction. Reduced hours have never flowed automatically from increased productivity. They have been won though long and intense struggle. And in today's world the struggle has to be waged on a global scale not for the "right to work" but for the right to live, which includes the right to leisure. Or, to borrow the title of a classic pamphlet by Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, the right to be lazy.

Stefan

Letter From Europe: Interpreting Marx (1982)

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the books the Socialist Party recommends to those wanting an introduction to Marx's ideas is Karl Marx: Selected Writings on Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited and introduced by T.B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel. First published as a hardback in 1956, it has since gone through many Pelican paperback re-editions and is, as its title suggests, a collection of extracts from Marx's writings. What does not come out in the introduction is the extent to which Rubel (as opposed to Bottomore) endorses our interpretation of Marx on a number of key points. However, in a later work, Marx Without Myth (1975), also written jointly in English (this time with M. Manale), Rubel clearly spells out that Marx stood for a classless, stateless and moneyless society.

   

Rubel himself is not from Britain but is a professor (maitre de recherche) in France and in fact one of the leading continental Marxologists, or experts on Marx. Besides editing a French edition of Marx's works, he has done considerable scholarly research on Marx's writings and sources. He describes himself as an independent researcher on Marx (which is true), but his sympathy for Marx's social and political ideas is only thinly disguised. His contribution to Marx-studies is his view that Marx was not a Marxist and his interpretation of Marx's commitment to socialism as ethical.

   

Marx himself of course is on record as saying half-seriously that he wasn't a Marxist. Rubel's theory is that Marx did not regard himself, and is not to be regarded, as the founder of a new philosophical school or ism. Marx, Rubel points out, himself described communist (socialist) theory as in no way based on ideas and principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from an historical movement going on under our very eyes (Communist Manifesto). It is thus quite contrary to Marx's own ideas to call socialist theory Marxism as this is to suggest that it was the invention of some Great Thinker and would not have existed had Marx never been born. Rubel is right here and all we can say in defence of our use from time to time of the word Marxist is that we need some way of indicating our agreement with the theory first clearly formulated by Marx as a reflection of working class experience under capitalism. Rubel gets round this problem by using the adjective marxien (literally Marxian but perhaps more accurately Marxs).

   

But Rubel's objection is not to Marx's ideas or even to their systematisation, but to those who have called themselves Marxists, from Kautsky and the German Social Democrats to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, and the rest. In Marx Critique du Marxisme, a collection of essays he wrote between 1957 and 1973 (published together as a book in 1974), Rubel traces the origin of Marxism, as a new ism, back to Engels who, he says, after Marx's death eventually gave in to the temptation to make his lifelong friend the founder of a new theoretical school. Rubel also objects to Marxism, that is, to those who call themselves Marxists, on the grounds that they have forgotten Marx's commitment to a classless, moneyless, stateless society.

   

Rubel first developed his theme that there is an ethical, or moral, element in Marx's commitment to socialism in 1948 in the introduction to his Pages de Karl Marx pour une ethique socialiste (the French equivalent of the Bottomore and Rubel selection mentioned earlier and just as good).

   

Rubel's argument is that Marx became a socialist out of a moral objection to what money and the state were doing to human dignity, before he began his scientific study of capitalism and the working class. Historically this cannot be challenged: Marx became a socialist sometime in the winter of 1843-4 and only later interested himself in economics; Capital, written in the 1850s and 60s, was in fact not published till 1867. Although in the end Marx's motivation is really quite irrelevant (or no more relevant than the motivations of the rest of us), Rubel's work on the so-called early Marx does back up our insistence that Marx used the word socialism as we do by showing that, right from the start, Marx stood for a society without class conflict, without State power and without monetary fetishism (Pages).

   

Rubel is not saying that Marx's objection to capitalism was just ethical, but only that this was one element in his position. According to Rubel, Marx was both a man of science (his studies of capitalism) and a revolutionary who saw the working class having the ethical, or historical, mission to abolish capitalism and to take mankind on to socialism. Actually, apart from the use of the word ethical, Rubel's position here is very similar to ours: the abolition of capitalism is not mechanically inevitable, but can only come about as a result of a conscious choice by the working class; if they don't make this choice or ethical decision, as Rubel would put it then capitalism will continue or (Rubel's view) be replaced by something worse; indeed, capitalism has continued precisely because the working class has not yet chosen to establish socialism.

   

This position of Rubel's leads to the same conclusion that we have reached: that the task of socialists is to make socialists, to get the working class to reject capitalism and to choose socialism. Rubel does not shrink from this conclusion and this has led to him being criticised, along with us, for educationnisme (see La Gauche communiste en Allemagne 1918-21 by Denis Authier and Jean Barrot, p. 199 on us and p. 372 on Rubel). Rubel also points out that this was Marx's position too and that Marx held that socialism could not be established unless a majority of workers had come to want and understand it:

Without the hypothesis or the premise of an acquisition of revolutionary consciousness by the victims of capitalist exploitation, the abolition of the wages system, the condition sine qua non of a socialist economy, is inconceivable for Marx (Marx critique du marxisme, p. 220).

Rubel also frequently quotes, with approval, from Engels Preface to the 1890 German edition of the Communist Manifesto:

For the ultimate triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto Marx relied solely and exclusively on the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action and discussion.

Rubel even concedes (we say concedes since, as we shall see, he does not entirely agree with Marx here) that Marx held that the working class should take political action to end politics and the state and that one of the forms this could take was democratic electoral action:

The economic and social barbarism brought about by the capitalist mode of production cannot be abolished by a political revolution prepared, organized and led by an elite of professional revolutionaries claiming to act and think in the name and for the benefit of the exploited and alienated majority. The proletariat, formed into a class and a party under the conditions of bourgeois democracy, liberates itself in the struggle to conquer this democracy; it turns universal suffrage, which had previously been an instrument of dupery, into a means of emancipation (Marx critique du marxisme, p. 56).

   

As this quotation suggests, Rubel has no time for Lenin and Bolshevism; in fact when it comes to analysing Russia and the Russian revolution there is complete agreement with us. Not only does he regard Russia as state capitalist (now a fairly commonplace view) but he also talks about the myth of socialist October with regard to the Russian revolution. But let him speak for himself:

In 1917 none of the conditions needed for Russia to enter into the way to socialism were present: the economic conditions and class relationships within an essentially peasant society as well as the social weight and level of maturity of the proletariat forbade this, barring a miraculous intellectual and moral change at all levels of Russian society (pp. 140-1).

In Russia Lenin, his party and the bureaucracy took up the social role which everywhere else had fallen to the bourgeoisie, and performed it with great efficiency. And when we speak of the bourgeois revolution carried out by the Bolsheviks, we mean that this revolution took place in the closed field of capitalism and not within socialism (p. 115).

We mentioned earlier that Rubel does not agree with Marx's view that the working class could gain control of political power through universal suffrage. Referring to events since Marx's day, he wonders whether universal suffrage can still, as Marx believed (and as is our view), be converted into an instrument of emancipation. He feels that the working class has in the meantime found a new and better instrument: their own self-organisation into councils, as in Russia in 1905 and 1917, in Germany after the first world war, in Spain in 1936 as well as the so-called revolutionary trade-unionism of pre-1914 France.

   

Universal suffrage has not failed, however. What has failed is the reformist (Labour and Social Democrat) use of universal suffrage, but socialists have been saying this would happen ever since our foundation in 1904. For capitalism simply cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the wage-earning majority; as a system based on the exploitation of wage-labour for profits, it is constitutionally incapable of being made to do this. Therefore any government which tries, whether elected by universal suffrage or not, is bound to fail. To reject universal suffrage because reformist electoral action has failed is to throw out the baby with the bath water.

   

We fully understand Rubel's criticism of political parties calling themselves socialist or Marxist: their aim has been state capitalism and they have essentially only sought to exploit working class discontent with a view to coming to power and installing themselves as a new ruling class in place of the private capitalists. They have always seen the working class as playing a subordinate, following role, either as passive electors (Social Democrats) or as material to be manipulated by a vanguard party (Bolsheviks and Leninists of all hues). But how can this be held against our (and Marx's) position of working class democratic self-organisation into a political party based on socialist understanding, with a view to taking political, including electoral, action to abolish capitalism?

   

In theory, workers, once they had come to want and understand socialism could, we suppose, organise in some sort of workplace committees or councils; but they would be ill-advised to do so without at the same time organising politically, since this would be to invite a violent head-on clash with a state machine still controlled by the supporters of capitalism. But why take this risk when the existence of universal suffrage and limited political democracy make it unnecessary? Why not organise, democratically and without leaders, with a view to using the potential weapon that is the vote to win control of the state, so neutralising it? This is our policy based on an analysis of todays political circumstances and not on a dogmatic adherence to Marx's view. On other questions we are just as prepared to criticise Marx as Rubel is on this-which we think is, in todays circumstances, the most appropriate and most intelligent way of proceeding to establish socialism. 

Adam Buick

What the Fascists Need (1993)

From the February 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is too easy to hate fascists. The sight of chanting skinheads, half Stormtrooper of the Year 1932, half late adolescent tantrum, fills us with memories of a genocidal past and fears that the jackboots are being polished up again. Ridiculous screwballs stand in East End markets with swastika tattoos, boots for brains and snarling detestation for the world in which they are impotent merchants of mean-spirited outrage.

What are we to say to them-think of them? "Drive the Racists of the Streets!" says the wallposter from the people who brought us "The Socialist Motherland". But who would be left on the streets except for rival sects of Leninist paper sellers arguing over whose central committee will make the most effective job of dictating over the proletariat? There are hundreds of thousands of racists on the streets. There are one or two in most of our houses. Are we supposed to give them all a good doing? And what good is a sore head to a racist-racism thrives on battered minds.

It is all too simple to paint caricatures of the monstrous jackbooted swine. TV pictures show us them in Germany, spewing hate before them, like primitive fertiliser spreaders. Not just murderous thoughts, but now they burn and kill and rejoice at the suffering of their enemies. Just like British workers did when bombs fell on Iraqi cities and who knows how many burned to death or were crushed in an underground medical centre. And when the conscripts met their death as the Belgrano sailed away from the Falklands exclusion zone, were not we told by the Mad Priestess that we should rejoice at the victory. Rejoice as men drown and babies are buried under rubble and bombs unknown to the non-professional terrorists explode with priestly sanction. Where does war stop and monstrous atrocity start?

The fascist moron follows his leader. The comical sight of fancy-dress Nazis doing their Mosley impressions to a few dozen Bash Street Kids from Povertyville is almost worth a smile. Of course, nobody will be smiling when the petty-fuhrer's words have been heard and another black family gets a petrol bomb or kicking on the way home. But there is an amateurish hooliganism about such viciousness: not an army but a venomous gang of no-hopers.

The military moron follows his leader and is paid well for it. The barking, and often barking mad, fuhrer is given medals and "our boys" are allowed to play with more than home-made bangers. The pseudo-militarism of the neo-Nazi boneheads, drilling in Hackney Marshes for the day when Enoch gives the word to get the Asians, is all rather ridiculous. Not so the official military training camps where violence is taught as a respectable art.

Fascists breed on false divisions. They seek to turn us against each other, as if life is not hard enough having to share the misery as one unhappy family. But what is new about the propaganda of Divide and Rule? it is the basis of all nationalism. "He's one of our lot; he was born under their flag. He is our enemy". Fascists might be the ultimate flag-fetishists, grasping on to their little Union Jack rag on the end of its pointy stick as if it is their lifeline to lunacy, but they did not invent them. The flags, and all the other emblems of nationalist idiocy, were here long before boys with muscles and not many brain cells decided to call street violence a political philosophy.

Let's rock against racism, by all means, but let's do a bit of rocking against nationalism while we're at it. How often is it the case that the right-on lefties who want to smash all racists find no difficulty in supporting the narrow bigotry of trendy nationalism?

So, why fascists? What horrible moment in history set in motion such movements of undiluted venom? The dung-like soil in which fascists are bred is fear. Because behind those hard-as-rock, we're gonna-get-you looks of enmity to the world, what we are seeing are a load of frightened people who are confused, threatened and deeply alienated from their social selves. The fascist is the human who aspires to be antihuman. The social nature which allows us to co-operate allows them to seek refuge in artificially constructed groups based on skin colour, flag colours, football team colours-colour-blind fascists often have a hard time with their pseudo-identities. The unique ability to use language is adapted by the fascists into a snarling, animalistic rage of incoherence. Rational discourse is swapped willingly for brute feeling. That is what the fascist wants life to be. Everything else seems to have failed.

It is a miserable, frustrating and disempowering alienation which is the lot of many under the profit-system-and so many more than those who are foolish enough to go down the fascist path-which is at the root of the fascist mentality. Alienation from a society where life as a conscious being seems unimportant and negligible leads some perhaps many-to seek comfort in the false security of national, racial and vanguardist loyalty. As the squeeze gets tighter, with a deepening world recession and the collapse of the elementary security offered by the welfare net, is it any surprise that new size twelves are slipping into new jackboots in the futile search for an honourable place within capitalist history?

The psychology of despair is one of the main symptoms of a society which converts the vivacity of the individual into purchasable chunks of labour power to be bought as cheaply as possible-and often left on the shelf to rot. The fascist mentality is part of the rot. And just as you don't blame the woodworm for the damp and dingy wall in which it thrives, it is futile to blame the rotten fascist for the stupidity of his position.

Fascism is a celebration of irrationality. The National Front should be called the Irrational Front. The confused wage slave is capitalism's very best friend. And confused, irrational, unscientific thinking will not be cured by socialists learning to fight better than the fascists. When it comes to brutality we are willing to come last. What the fascist needs is to be hit in those cerebral parts least used and most in need of life support. What the fascist needs, in fact, is to be educated by those who him not as a despicable fascist, but as a bloody stupid worker.

Steve Coleman

The Rebuilding of the International. (1915)

From the September 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

A historic document: our vindication

In the course of the last few years the German Social-Democratic Party has been dealt with more than once in these columns, and the exactness of our criticism finds striking confirmation in the article here reprinted from the International Socialist Review. The unity, the large membership, the huge voting strength, factors that would count for so much in a working-class movement born of and maintained by Socialist knowledgethese things, when brought about by desire for reform of the capitalist system are seen to be fleeting phenomena. Again, therefore, it is permissible to point out that on the way to working-class emancipation there are no short cuts whereby the necessity of Socialist education can be obviated. All this has been demonstrated time and time again, but this article of Rosa Luxemburgs is something more than a repetition of an old warning. It shows that one of the most important lessons for the working-class movement is being learned, the errors of the past recognised. And that is why, although we cannot endorse the writers remarks as to rebuilding the International, we welcome the pronouncement. For if, in the conditions obtaining to-day, there are those in Germany who even now are engaged in combating the old policy of compromise, it is certain that this work and its results will increase greatly when normal conditions return.

The Rebuilding of the International by Rosa Luxemburg (From the International Socialist Review)

[Note. In April Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring published the first number of a magazine called The International. It proved to be also the last number, for the censor forbade its further publication. But many a journal has run on for years without printing as much interesting matter as was crowded between the covers of this one issue. Rosa Luxemburg's article was left unfinished, for she was hustled into jail before The International went to press. Karl Liebknecht was prevented from making his contribution; the recruiting officer laid his hands on him and sent him to a military camp. But the two editors, Clara Zetkin, and other brilliant and earnest comrades managed to set into this single number of their journal a fairly complete statement of the position of Germanys anti-war Socialists, and a thorough-going criticism of the actions and theories of the war Socialists. The following article is reprinted here because it shows what the real Socialists of Germany are thinking at the present time. There could be no better proof of the fundamental soundness of the international movement. Rosa Luxemburg and her fellow-workers are the very best evidence to show that she is not entirely right when she says, The International has broken down. [W.E.B] [The plain facts refute this ridiculous statement of W.E.B.s Editors of the Socialist Standard.]

On August 4, 1914, the German Social Democracy handed in its political resignation, and on the same date the Socialist International went to pieces. All attempts to deny this fact or to conceal it merely serve to perpetuate the conditions which brought it about.

This breakdown is without parallel in history. Socialism or Imperialism, this is the alternative which summed up the political life of the various labour parties of the world during the past decade. In Germany especially it has formed the basis of countless programmes, discussions and publications. One of the chief purposes of the Social Democracy has been the correct formulation of thought and sentiment with regard to this alternative.

With the outbreak of the war the word became flesh; the alternative changed from a historical tendency to a political situation. Face to face with this alternative as a fact the Social Democracy, which had been the first to recognise it and bring it to the consciousness of the working class, struck its sails and without a struggle conceded the victory to imperialism. Never before, since there has been a class struggle, since there have been political parties, has there existed a party which after fifty years of uninterrupted growth, after the attainment of a pre-eminent position of power, has thus by its own act within twenty-four hours wiped itself off the map.

The apologists for this act, Kautsky among them, maintain that the whole duty of Socialists in time of war is to remain silent. Socialism, they say in effect, is a power for peace, not against war. But there is a logic of events which none can elude. The moment Socialists cease to oppose war they become, by the stern logic of events, its supporters. The labour unionists who have discontinued their struggles for improved conditions, the women who have withdrawn from Socialist agitation in order to help minimize the horrors of war, and the Socialist party leaders who spend their time in the press and on the platform securing support for the government and suppressing every effort at criticism, all of these are not merely maintaining silence. They are supporting the war as heartily as any Conservative or Centrist. When or where was there ever a war which could exhibit a similar spectacle?

Where and when was the disregard of all constitutional rights accepted with such submissiveness? When was there ever such glorification by an opposition party of the strictest censorship of the Press? Never before did a political party sacrifice its all to a cause against which it had sworn again and again to sacrifice the last drop of its blood. The mighty organisation of the Social Democracy, its much praised discipline, gave the best proof of themselves in the fact that four millions of human beings allowed themselves to be hitched to the war chariot at the command of a handful of parliamentarians. The half-century of preparation on the part of the Socialist party comes to fruition in this war. All our education of the masses makes them now the obedient and effective servants of the imperialist state. Marx, Engels and Lassalle, Liebknecht, Bebel and Singer, trained the German proletariat in order that Hindenburg may lead it.

II

Our official theorists are not without an explanation of this phenomenon. They are perfectly willing to explain the slight disagreement between their actions of to-day and the words of yesterday. Their apology is that although the Social Democracy has concerned itself much with the question as to what should be done to prevent war it has never concerned itself with the problem as to what should be done after the beginning of hostilities. Ready to do everybodys biding, this theory assures us that the present practice of our party is in most beautiful harmony with our past theories.

The delightfully adaptable theory is likewise ready and willing to justify the present position of International Socialism in reference to the past. The International treated only the question of the prevention of war. But now, war is a fact, and, as it turns out, after the outbreak of war Socialists are to be guided by entirely new principles. After war has actually begun the great problem for each proletariat is: Victory or defeat? Or, as an Austro-Marxist explains, a nation, like any other organism, must preserve its existence. In plain language this means: The proletariat has not one fundamental principle as scientific Socialism hitherto maintained, but two, one for peace and another for war. In time of peace, we are to suppose, the workers are to take cognisance of the class-struggle within the nation and of international solidarity in relation to other countries; in time of war, on the other hand, class-solidarity becomes the dominant feature of internal affairs and the struggle against the workers of other countries dominates the proletarian view of foreign relations. To the great historic appeal of the Communist Manifesto is added an important amendment, and it reads now, according to Kautskys revision: Workers of all lands unite in peace and cut one another's throats in war! To-day, Down with the Russians and French! to-morrow, We are brothers all! For, as Kautsky says in Die Neue Zeit, the International is essentially an instrument of peace but no effective agent in war.

This convenient theory introduces an entirely novel revision of the economic interpretation of history. Proletarian tactics before the outbreak of war and after must be based on exactly opposite principles. This presupposes that social conditions, the base of our tactics, are fundamentally different in war from what they are in peace. According to the economic interpretation of history as Marx established it, all history is the history of class struggles. According to Kautskys revision we must add: except in times of war. Now human development has been periodically marked by wars. Therefore, according to this new theory, social development has gone on according to the following formula: a period of class struggles, marked by class solidarity and conflicts between the nations; and then a period of national solidarity and international conflictsand so on indefinitely. Periodically the foundations of social life as they exist in time of peace are reversed by the outbreak of war. And again, at the moment of the signing of a treaty of peace, they are restored. This is not, evidently, progress by means of successive catastrophes; it is rather progress by means of a series of somersaults. Society develops, we are to suppose, like an iceberg floating down a warm current; its lower portion is melted away, it turns over, and continues this process indefinitely.

Now all the known facts of human history run counter to this new theory. They show that there is a necessary and dialectic relation between class struggle and war. The class struggle develops into war and war develops into class struggle; and thus their essential unity is proved. It was so in the medieval cities, in the wars of the Reformation, in the Flemish wars of liberation, in the French Revolution, in the American Rebellion, and in the Russian uprising in 1905.

Moreover, theoretically, Kautskys idea leaves not one stone of the Marxian doctrine on another. If, as Marx supposes, neither war nor the class struggle fall from heaven, but both arise from deep social-economic causes, then they cannot disappear periodically unless their causes also go up in vapour. Now the proletarian class struggle is a necessary aspect of the wage system. But during war the wage system does not tend to disappear. On the contrary, the aspects of it which give rise to the struggle of the classes become especially prominent. Speculation, the founding of new companies to carry on war industries, military dictatorship, all these and other influences tend to increase the class differences during time of war. And likewise the class rule of the bourgeoisie is not suspended; on the contrary, with the suspension of constitutional rights it becomes sheer class dictatorship. If, then, the causes of the class struggle are multiplied, strengthened, during war, how can the inevitable result be supposed to go out of existence? Conversely, wars are at the present time a result of the competition of various capitalist groups, and of the necessity for capitalist expansion. Now these two forces are not operative only while the cannon are booming; they are active in peace as well, and it is precisely in time of peace that they influence our life in such a way as to make the outbreak of war inevitable. For war is, as Kautsky loves to quote from Clausewitz, the continuation of politics with other means. And the imperialist phase of capitalist rule, through competition in building armaments, has made peace illusory, for it has placed us regularly under military dictatorship, and has thereby made war permanent.

Therefore our revised economic interpretation of history leads to a dilemma. Our new revisionists are between the devil and the sea. Either the class struggle persists in war as the chief life condition of the proletariat and the declaration of class harmony by Socialist leaders is a crime against the working class; or carrying on the class struggle in time of peace is a crime against the interests of the nation and the security of the fatherland. Either class struggle or class harmony is the fundamental factor in our social life, both in peace and war.

Either the International must remain a heap of ruins after the war or its resurrection will take place on the basis of the class struggle from which it took its rise in the first place. It will not appear by magic at the playing over of the old tunes which hypnotised the world before August 4. Only by definitely recognising and disowning our own weaknesses and failures since August 4, by giving up the tactics introduced since that time, can we begin the rebuilding of the International. And the first step in this direction is agitation for the ending of the war and the securing of peace on the basis of the common interests of the international proletariat.