Thinking of Abstaining On May 3rd?

From the blog, A Revolutionary Act:

You are again faced with a bunch of politicians who can only be distinguishable by the colour of their rosettes, and you may already be of the opinion that there is little that separates the mainstream parties and have no intention of voting. Millions of people are not prepared to support any of them. Indeed, election results since 1997 when Blair came to power have revealed the lowest turnouts since World War II and the trend is repeating itself across the globe. It is particularly to those members of the electorate who are not prepared to follow leaders, who think they are all tarred with the same brush, and unwilling to put their faith in the promises of local politicians, that this article is dedicated.

Many of you will know little about The Socialist Party or our idea, unless you are a regular reader of the letters pages of the local press (particularly the Shields Gazette). Certainly many people have heard the word "socialist" and may mistakingly imagine it has something to do with the nationalised industries or with countries like China and the former Soviet Union. It is understandable that many people regard socialism as just another political cliche, once used by Labour politicians to win votes, but having very little meaning.

The Socialist Party stands solely for socialism because we do not think that the present social system - capitalism - can ever be made to work in the interests of the majority of the people. This is not the fault of government policies, but the present social system in which they are operating. Capitalism always puts the needs of a minority who own and control the factories, farms, offices, mines, media, the means of wealth production and distribution before the needs of ourselves, the working class.

It is a hard but undeniable fact that no political party - including The Socialist Party - can legislate to humanise capitalism or make it run in the interest of the working class. That is why it is important that the working class stops giving its support to politicians who support the profit system. None of them can solve unemployment or crime or any of the other social problems we face today, despite their proclaimed recipes for success. None of them will prevent tens of millions starving to death each year. None of them will provide decent housing for everyone. None of them will end the threat of human annihilation as a result of war, because militarism is inevitable within a system based upon the ferocious competition for resources, markets and trade. Why waste your time voting for parties that cannot make any of these urgently needed changes? Why go on in the hope that some miracle will happen and end the insanity of the profit system?

So what's the alternative? We say that the resources of society must be taken into the hands of the whole community - and by that we do not mean the state, but all of us, organised together, consciously and democratically.

In a socialist society we will produce for use, not profit. This means producing food to feed the world's population, not to dump in the sea if it cannot be sold profitably. Producing for use means ending the colossal waste of resources on armies, armaments, trade, banking and insurance and all the other social features which are only necessary within capitalism. By running society on the basis of common ownership, democratic control and production for use we can all have free access to all goods and services.

Two points should be clear to you by now. Firstly, this is no ordinary political argument. We have made you no false promises; we have not patronised you and neither do we beg for your support. Indeed we do not ask for your support unless you are convinced that the case for socialism is a rational one and in your interest. Socialism, if it is to be the democratic and sane society that we envisage it will be, can only be established when a majority of the people understand it and want it, so there is no point in seeking support on any other basis.

Secondly, you will have noticed that what we are advocating is different - it has never existed. The Tory have-beens have nothing new to offer. The local Labour Party, if re-elected, will continue its futile exercise of trying to manage Blair's system based upon exploitation in the interest of the exploited. The Liberals, if given half the chance, will pursue the vicious policy of dancing to the tune of profitability while human needs are ignored, with just as much gusto as Blair's henchmen or Cameron's confusionists.

This short pre-election statement can be summarised: Do you agree with the following statements:

- Capitalism puts profits for the few before the needs of the many.
- Labour governments, "Communist" states and proposals to reform the present system cannot establish socialism.
- Socialism is yet to exist.
- Socialism means a society of common ownership and democratic control, where production is solely for use.
- Socialism means a world without buying or selling, where people give freely of their abilities and take according to their needs.
- When a majority - including those who abstained in 1997 - understand and want socialism, the new system will be established.

If you think the above statements are correct then we thank you - if you are on the electoral roll for the Monkton Ward - to take the time to vote for us. If you disagree, please tell us why.

John Bissett

John Bissett is The Socialist Party candidate for the Monkton Ward in the forthcoming South Tyneside local council elections. For more information about the Socialist Party - and its companion parties in the World Socialist Movement - please send an email to spgb@worldsocialism.org

Joseph Dietzgen - The Workers Philosopher

From the Socialist blog, Mailstrom:

"April the 17th 1888 Joseph Dietzgen died . In memory , I post this article written by Adam Buick for the journal Radical Philosophy 10. Spring 1975."

Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy (1958)

Book Review from the December 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan at the age of sixteen came from Dublin to Liverpool with an I.R.A. "do it yourself Kit." for the purpose of blowing up Cammell Lairds. He was arrested, and after a stay in Walton Detention Prison, Liverpool, was sent for three years to a Borstal Institution in East Anglia. The book (published by Hutchinson) tells of his experiences in these places.

He speaks of the filth and brutality which existed at Walton Prison, and there is no reason to disbelieve it. Life in Borstal, however, was much different. In fact, it smacks of Tom Brown's Schooldays and the Gem and Magnet. Chaps played the game - the Borstal game - apart from the occasional cad, house masters and house captains were sports. There were escapades, larkies and some horseplay. In fact, Behan and Co. at Borstal looks rather like Harry Wharton and Co., at Greyfriars. The youthful I.R.A. terrorist even assumed a Borstal school tie attitude, and he said his chinas came to regard the college boys they met via the Rugby field as being something of bounders. Behan also considered that he had a more cultivated and educated mind than the college products.

One of the defects of the book is that the conversation is so loaded or over-loaded with barrack room lingo that it fails to trigger off effectively. In fact, the constant repetition of stereotyped swear words takes on the chant of a litany. If one wants to substitute the soporific effect of counting imaginary sheep-jumping over a stile, then counting the swear-words which appear at such regular and monotonous intervals in the book will prove just effective. One feels that the author exploits the swearing gimick in an attempt to impart a vitality and excitement to the conversation which it often lacks. In any case, bad language is not necessarily a criterion of bad boys, even "good boys" often indulge in it.

Behan himself outswears the wide boys, the screws, toughies and ponces. But surely if one is describing a drug addict one does not have to take dope for the purpose of so doing. He seems naive enough to believe that "wicked words" are the hall mark of masculinity, especially his masculinity, when more often than not they are a bawdy blanket to cover a paucity of effective expression.

In spite of all the tumult and violence of the book, it has a monastic quality in that nothing of any significance from the outside world ever seeps in. Not even the war which was going on at the time is mentioned, in fact, the author never seems to have really noticed it. There is no serious discussion, not even about Ireland. Behan indulges in rodomantade about Irish politics, religion and history, but never indicates that he has any grasp of the underlying economic and political factors of Irish history.

Behan might say that he takes the world as he finds it. But what he finds in it is precious little, although he is often a little precious about it. His characters might be incorrigible and by certain standards a little impossible, but it seems vide the author that they live in the best of all possible worlds. He sees nothing wrong with the world and his only "revolutionary" aim, it seems, to use his own words, is to become a rich red.

Behan at least went to Borstal wearing a slightly glamourised would-be Martyr's crown. He came out none the worse, perhaps even a little better for it. But what of the mal-adjusted, the misfits and the unfortunates; what happened to them? That, perhaps, is the most disquieting thing of all, but Behan never mentions it.

He has nothing to say against patriotism or nationalism either of the English, Irish or any other variety. He seems to regard many Englishmen as stiff-necked and arrogant, but sees no reason why they should not be either in their native country or to people who come from other countries. But in a world of conflicting national interests, being pro Irish, English or American, means even at the best of times being negatively anti-something else. In the worse times such feelings take on an active and hostile form.

Behan's book is of a piece with Behan himself, bumptious, bouncing and bawdy, with a hint of hindsight and flashes of poetry. It is genuinely funny in places, but suffers from repetition. Behan at least has a sense of bubbling humour which pops and fizzes in all sorts of unexpected places and is a refreshing contrast to the "look back in anger," chip on the shoulder, the world owes me a living, writers who have set a literary fashion.

He has himself become rather fashionable, but literary fashions, like women's fashions, change quickly, and unless his future output is more significant than his past and present ones, Behan might easily become an has Behan.

Ted Wilmott

Next Sunday in France

From the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back

Next Sunday people in France will be voting in the first round of the French presidential elections. They will have a choice of 12 candidates, including one from the so-called Socialist Party, another from the so-called Communist Party, three Trotskyists and an "anti-capitalist".

We are often asked why all those calling themselves socialist don't just get together. The programme of the Trotskyist candidates in these elections provides one answer. When we contest elections, we campaign only for socialism as a worldwide system of society, without frontiers, based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, with produced solely for use not for profit. When the Trotskyists contest elections, they hardly ever mention even their (mistaken) conception of socialism (which in reality is state capitalism). They assume that capitalism will continue and offer only reforms to it, thus contributing to the illusion that capitalism could be made to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers.

A case in point is Lutte Ouvriere, the premier Trotskyist organisation in France. Here's how they describe their candidate's programme in the latest issue of their French-language theoretical journal Lutte de classe:

"The three major problems for the popular classes are the persistence of unemployment at an unacceptable level, the continual decline of the purchasing power of the toiling classes and the catastrophic state of housing for the people. These necessitate an urgent solution. This urgent solution requires a different use of the high profits realised by enterprises over many years. It is from these profits as well as from the hand-outs given to enterprises by the State at a loss that must be taken the funds needed to finance the maintaining of employment in the private sector and to create new ones, useful to the population, in the public sector".

In other words, capitalism, including a private sector, is to continue and there is a "solution", even an "urgent" one, within it: to use the profits of capitalist enterprises to create new jobs and build new and better houses. This is just demagogy as there is no solution to unemployment and bad housing under capitalism, as the experience of capitalism shows let alone a knowledge of Marx's analysis of how capitalism works.

But it gets worse. The naughty capitalists have, apparently, not been using their profits properly:

"The unprecedented profits accumulated by enterprises are not used for real investments, i.e. for the building of new factories, the manufacture of new machines, the enlargement of productive capacities with jobs as a consequence. That's the essential reason for the present economic crisis. Instead of enlarging the basis of production, the accumulated money is more and more financialised and only used for those false investments that are the take-over of enterprises by each other. Unable to enlarge the market with a sufficient rate of profit, the main aim of enterprises is to dispute with others their share of the market. The competition between them to outbid each other sustains a speculative spiral which, in addition, threatens the economy with a new stock exchange or monetary crisis".

There's a solution to this too:

"The only way to stop this rush towards the abyss is for the popular classes, the population, to impose their control over enterprises, over the choices made by their managements. The population must be able to exercise control over the enterprises day by day, over their finances, their strategies, their choices, their short and long term projects, so as to be able to oppose projects which manifestly go against the interests of society".

We don't know if they really believe that all that is needed to get enterprises to produce in "the interests of society" rather than for profit is popular control over their investment decisions, but that's what they say, so giving the impression that this would be possible under capitalism. That capitalism could be reformed in this way is of course just another reformist illusion.

We suspect we know what they are going to reply in response to this criticism: that these promises are only a "transitional programme" designed to lead workers, who can't understand the "abstract" idea of socialism, to realise through the experience of the failure of these reformist measures the need to get rid of capitalism (actually, to establish state capitalism as in Russia under Lenin and Trotsky).

In other words, there's a subtle theory for the "vanguard" and demagogic reformist promises for the thicko "masses".

Either they believe their promises (in which case they are reformists). Or they are just offering them as bait to win followers (in which case they are disreputable manipulators). Either way they stand condemned. Which is why we are just as opposed to them as to the openly pro-capitalist candidates.

We say that workers in France who want socialism can show this by dropping a paper marked "SOCIALISME MONDIAL" into the ballot box.

Adam Buick

Consumerism or Socialism?

From the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back:

According to Channel Five TV, consumerism is one of the Big Ideas that Changed the World. Jonathon Porritt, hobnobber with royalty, supporter of reformed capitalism, and pale green activist, was presenter of the programme on consumerism of 10 April. He made some good critical points about the threat to sustainability of growing world consumerism, but concluded by advocating reforming it rather than getting rid of it.

It is fast becoming clear that the growing capitalist world market will not be able to raise the material standard of everyone living on the planet to that enjoyed at present by people living in the "prosperous" west. The present world population is around 6.5 billion and is expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050. The population of the "developed" world is expected to stabilise at around 1.2 billion. All of the extra 2.5 people expected to be living in 2050 will be in the current "developing" world.

There has been speculation about where the resources needed to sustain a larger world population at a good standard of living will come from. Optimists writing in 1995 thought it would take three additional planets to support the whole world's increased population at the standards of the industrialised world. In 2005 a more pessimistic estimate was that "we would have to discover four Earth-like planets to accommodate them all."

A big part of the problem is that capitalism isn't really geared to meeting human needs; it likes to create, and then satisfy human wants. The top end of the market lavishly caters for the wants of people with plenty of money to spend. The bottom end of the market sells cheap (and often shoddy or unhealthy) goods and services to people with little money but who need them. The market doesn't cater at all for people with no money - they have to rely on stealing, charity or handouts.

When William Morris was writing about socialism at the end of the 19th century the term "consumerism" hadn't been invented. Imagine if he were writing about the situation today (with apologies to Fiona MacCarthy, arguably the best of Morris's biographers):
A-z-list celebrities? Bargain breaks? Bottom-line accounting? Business parks ? Buy to let? Chat shows? Corporate sponsorship? Craft fayres? Customer loyalty? Debt counselling? Designer clothes? Drug culture? Enterprise environment? Fast food? Freebie magazines? Gurus? Health farms? Junk bonds/food/mail? Leisure centres? Life-style coaching? Money laundering? Niche marketing? Paparazzi? Pet boutiques? Political correctness? Pulp fiction? Reality shows? Retail therapy? Sell your story? Shopping malls? Soap operas? Sound bites? Spaghetti junctions? Surveillance cameras? Theme parks and pubs? Trophy wives? Two for the price of one? Video porn? Vip lounges? War memorabilia?

"Damned pigs! Damned fools!" You can hear Morris expostulate, robust, fidgety, tremendous, pulling out the hairs (singly) from his great prophetic beard.

Stan Parker

A Message To The Troops

'Since Patsy died, I've not really liked country, but . . .'

William Wilberforce was a nasty Tory

From the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Back:

If you believe all the eulogies to him recently for pushing through the Act of Parliament 200 years ago banning slave trading in the British Empire you might be surprised that he's not called Saint William. But for that he'd have to have been a Catholic whereas he was an evangelical Christian of the Anglican persuasion. He was a founder of a "Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion" which specialised in prosecuting people for enjoying themselves on the Sabbath. He supported "the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate" as the natural order of things and preached to the poor that:

"their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects, about which worldly men conflict so eagerly, are not worth the contest".

In other words, pie in the sky when you die. And

"Remember that we are all fallen creatures, born in sin, and naturally depraved. Christianity recognizes no innocence or goodness of heart" (both quoted by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class).

A nasty piece of work, then. But there's worse. He was a King-and-Country Tory who encouraged mobs to burn effigies of Tom Paine and other "Jacobins", i.e., sympathisers with the democratic pretensions of the French Revolution. He was also instrumental in the passing of the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 under which the Tolpuddle Martyrs were later sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay.

A. L. Morton says of him in A People's History of England:

"When the industrial discontent was crossed with political Jacobinism the ruling class was terrified into more drastic action, and the result was the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800. These laws were the work of Pitt and his sanctimonious friend Wilberforce, whose well known sympathy for the negro slave never prevented him from being the foremost apologist and champion of every act of tyranny in England, from the employment of Oliver the Spy or illegal detention of poor prisoners in Cold Bath Fields gaol to the Peterloo massacre and the suspension of habeas corpus".

Yes, he was opposed to chattel slavery. From a capitalist point of view, this was an outmoded and inefficient method of labour exploitation. They wanted the only form of slavery to be wage slavery. To which Wilberforce had no objection whatsoever.

Kurt Vonnegut on the socialists who fought for workers

It was sad to read of the news of Kurt Vonnegut's death. It probably sounds daft, but I thought he would always be with us.
Reproduced below is something from Vonnegut that I found on the net, where, in accepting the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, he speaks of Sandburg's - and others - commitment to the radical transformation of society. In other circumstances, I'm sure there would be much that I could find to quibble about politically in the piece, but that's not the point. It captures the playfulness, wit and insight of Vonnegut at his best. The piece is reproduced from Socialist Worker, the paper of the International Socialist Organization.

From Socialist Worker November 2, 2001 | Page 8

KURT VONNEGUT is one of America's best-known novelists, with half a century of writings and close to 20 books to his name.

He's also earned a reputation as an opponent of war and injustice, both in his literature and as a public speaker who has participated in movements for change.

In October, Vonnegut was given the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library - and used the opportunity of his speech to discuss Sandburg's commitment to socialism.

Sandburg's poetry and essays can be found in many grade-school literary anthologies, but few people learn that he got his start as a writer as a labor and socialist journalist.

For example, in the early decades of the 20th century, Sandburg wrote regularly for the International Socialist Review, an ancestor of Socialist Worker's sister magazine of the same name.

His fiery articles took on the greed and corruption of big business, government repression and - in his commentaries on the famous evangelist Billy Sunday, for example - the way that religion was used by the powers that be to prop up their rule.

Here, with permission, Socialist Worker prints Vonnegut's acceptance speech.

WE ARE America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

I thank you for this honor, although it is a reminder that I am not nearly the passionate and effective artist Carl Sandburg was. And we are surely grateful for his fog, which came in on little cat feet.

But tonight seems an apt occasion as well for celebrating what he and other American socialists did during the first half of the past century, with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity and political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class.

That wage earners, without social position or higher education or wealth, are of inferior intellect is surely belied by the fact that two of the most splendid writers and speakers on the deepest subjects in American history were self-taught workmen. I speak, of course, of Carl Sandburg of Illinois and Abraham Lincoln, of Kentucky, then Indiana, and finally Illinois. Both, may I say, were continental, freshwater people like ourselves.

Hooray for our team!

I know upper-class graduates of Yale University who can't talk or write worth a nickel.

"Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal, and shalt not starve.

Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a two-fer. He named his party the National Socialists, the Nazis. Hitler also had crosses painted on his tanks and airplanes. The swastika wasn't a pagan symbol, as so many people believe. It was a working person's Christian cross, made of axes, of tools.

About Stalin's shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx's statement that that "religion is the opium of the people." Marx said back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum.

When Marx wrote those words, by the way, we hadn't even freed our slaves yet. Whom do you imagine was more pleasing in the eyes of a merciful God back then: Karl Marx or the United States of America?

Stalin was happy to take Marx's truism as a decree, and Chinese tyrants as well, since it seemingly empowered them to put preachers out of business who might speak ill of them or their goals.The statement has also entitled many in this country to say that socialists are anti-religion, are anti-God, and therefore absolutely loathsome.

I never met Carl Sandburg, and wish I had. I would have been tongue-tied in the presence of such a national treasure. I did get to know one socialist of his generation, who was Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. After graduating from Harvard he went to work as a coal miner, urging his working-class brothers to organize, in order to get better pay and safer working conditions. He also led protesters at the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927.

We met in Indianapolis after the end of World War Two, and he had become an official in the CIO. There had been some sort of dust-up on a picket line, and he had just testified about it in court. The judge had interrupted the proceedings to ask Powers Hapgood why, with all his social and economic and educational advantages, he had chosen to lead such a life. And Powers Hapgood replied, "Why, because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir."

Another of our freshwater ancestors was Eugene Victor Debs, of Terre Haute, Indiana. A former locomotive fireman, Eugene Debs ran for president of the United States four times, the fourth time in 1920, when he was in prison. He said, "As long as there is a lower class, I'm in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there's a soul in prison, I am not free."

Some platform. A paraphrase of the beatitudes.

And again: Hooray for our team.

And our own beloved Carl Sandburg had this to say about the fire-belching evangelist Bill Sunday:

"You come along-tearing your shirt-yelling about Jesus. I want to know what the hell you know about Jesus? Jesus had a way of talking soft, and everybody except a few bankers and higher ups among the con men of Jerusalem like to have Jesus around because he never made any fake passes, and he helped the sick and gave people hope.
"You come along calling us all damn fools - so fierce the froth of your own spit slobbers over your lips - always blabbering we're all going to hell straight off, and you know all about it. I've read Jesus' words. I know what he said. You don't throw any scare into me. I've got your number. I know how much you know about Jesus.
"You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it up all right with them by giving them mansions in the skies after they're dead and the worms have eaten 'em. You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need is Jesus. You take a steel trust wop, dead without having lived, gray and shrunken at 40 years of age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross and he'll be all right.
"You tell poor people they don't need any more money on pay day. And even if it's fierce to be out of a job, Jesus'll fix that all right, all right. All they gotta do is take Jesus the way you say.
"Jesus played it different. The bankers and corporation lawyers of Jerusalem got their murderers to go after Jesus because Jesus wouldn't play their game. I don't want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion."

Hooray for our team.

And I now take advantage of your hospitality by declaring myself a child of the Chicago Renaissance, powerfully humanized not only by Carl Sandburg, but by Edgar Lee Masters and Jane Addams and Louis Sullivan and Lake Michigan, and on and on.

And I propose a toast to an individual who wasn't an artist or working stiff of any description. She wasn't even a human being. Ladies and gentlemen of Chicago, I give you Mrs. O'Leary's cow.

And I thank you for your attention.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Canvassing For Christ

I think they might have been canvassing in Larchmont in Westchester

don't click on this if you are easily offended.

The military are not that unintelligent

From the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back:

Everyone has heard the one about "military intelligence" being a contradiction in terms. But military planners can't afford to be stupid - and aren't, as a recent Ministry of Defence publication shows.

The Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) of the Ministry of Defence has just published a document on Strategic Trends which sets out their view on the context for the activity of Britain's armed forces over the next thirty years. The man in charge, Rear Admiral Chris Parry, explains in the introduction that the trends identified in the document are "probability-based rather than predictions". The degrees of probability being will, likely, may, possible.

What emerges from the document is that the military thinkers behind it share the socialist analysis that conflicts in the modern (capitalist) world arise out of competition between states over sources of raw materials, markets, investment outlets, trade routes and strategic points to control and protect these.

Against the sub-heading "securing natural resources", the document says:

"Key natural resources, especially oil, gas and minerals of strategic value, will continue to be sourced from unstable areas and unreliable regions. Maintaining access and containing instability risks in these areas is therefore likely to increase in importance, alongside wider developmental and stabilization roles. Where oil and gas sources are located in areas of doubtful security, military intervention may be used to protect the integrity of sites and to secure investments" ( p. 29).

In fact, the document regards "competition for energy" as one of the "hot topics" of the period. "Competition for energy supplies", it says, "will dominate the economic landscape during the next 30 years" and that "requirements to access sources of supply in unstable regions or countries could lead to intervention to protect assets and investments" (p. 31).

"Overheating of energy markets may lead more countries to follow the example of China in establishing bilateral arrangements that seek to dominate or control the global market in their favour, possibly fuelling tension among those who are excluded or who cannot or will not compete in a market environment. This may lead to political and even military interventions in order to protect access and safeguard supply" (p. 26).

Then, there's the trade routes:

"Most of the world's trade by bulk, particularly energy, will continue to transit by sea and through maritime choke points such as the Straits of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and the Straits of Malacca, in areas which will remain highly unstable. This will demand high levels of international cooperation and a continuing dependence on the deployment of maritime power." (p. 54).

And the strategic points:

"There is likely to be more emphasis on the active containment of aggressors, symptoms of crisis and irregular elements, to deter and defeat military threats to partners and the international system. In these circumstances, the ability to secure and maintain free access to areas of strategic and operational interest will remain vital" (p. 54).

The MoD strategists don't think that these tensions will lead to war in the sense of "state-on-state" conflicts ("Major interstate wars will be unlikely", p. 67), at least not until after 2020:

"Although large-scale interstate warfare is unlikely, competition for finite resources and intolerance at market forces may lead to tensions and greater potential for confrontation and conflict between 2020 and 2035" (p. 43).

"Global economic and financial interdependency is likely to reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of major interstate warfare before 2020. However, increasing pressures on resources, particularly energy, and the growing assertiveness of emerging powers such as India, China and Iran, beyond this date may result in the return of great power rivalries as the defining characteristic of geopolitics, with a consequent increase in the risk of interstate and inter-bloc conflict" (p. 48).

"Conflict and crisis will become increasingly complex and unpredictable, both in their incidence and character, during the period to 2035, with serious interstate rivalry probably expressing itself through proxy actions by hostile groups who may or may not have issues of their own" (p.67).

Even before 2020, however, the strategists think that conflict between states will take place through proxies (as already happened during the Cold War period):

"In the absence of direct, open state-on-state conflict, there will be a marked increase in the prevalence of irregular activity . . . There will also be increased sponsorship of irregular activity and groups by states, seeking to utilize and exploit, through proxy, gaps in the international system, either to assert themselves or secure advantage without exposing themselves to state-on-state risks" (p. 52).

The document is not confined to narrow trends that concern the military directly but also mentions economic, political and other issues, singling out as climate change, globalization and global inequality as the three "areas of change" which "will touch the lives of everyone on the planet" and underpin all the other trends.

On the world scale, the strategists think that:

"while life for most people is likely to improve materially, a significant number will continue to experience hardship, and unevenness and fluctuations within a globalized market-based economy will still mean that life will be uncertain for most" (p. 1).

"While material conditions for most people are likely to improve over the next 30 years, the gap between rich and poor will probably increase and absolute poverty will remain a global challenge. . . Absolute poverty and comparative disadvantage will fuel perceptions of injustice among those whose expectations are not met, increasing tension and instability, both within and between societies and resulting in expressions of violence such as disorder, criminality, terrorism and insurgency. They may also lead to the resurgence of not only anti-capitalist ideologies, possibly linked to religious, anarchist or nihilist movements, but also to populism and the revival of Marxism" (p. 3).

Let's hope that on this very last point they are right.

The full report can be read here.

Adam Buick

Mark Twain's 'The War Prayer' (1904/05)

Found via the website of the North East Branch of the Socialist Party

Mark Twain submitted this piece to Harper's Bazaar. It was rejected as being unsuitable. It was first published after his death in 1923.

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclone of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came - next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams - visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, and surrender! - then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

- "God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,
Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!"

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory.

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness, With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there, waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside - which the startled minister did - and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne-bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import - that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of - except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two - one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this - keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! Lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray from the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servants prayer - the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it - that part which the pastor - and also you in your hearts - fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ' Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory - must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them! With them - in spirit - we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hears of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

(After a pause) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Mark Twain

From the wikipedia entry on Mark Twain:

"During the Philippine-American War, Twain wrote an anti-war article entitled The War Prayer. Through this internal struggle, Twain expresses his opinions of the absurdity of slavery and the importance of following one's personal conscience before the laws of society. It was submitted to Harper's Bazaar for publication, but on March 22, 1905, the magazine rejected the story as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine." Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Dan Beard, to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth." Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Mark Twain could not publish The War Prayer elsewhere; it remained unpublished until 1923."

The Falklands War Remembered

From the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back (See also 'Doing The Bulldog Thing')

Twenty five years ago today Argentina and the United Kingdom went to war over control of the Falkland Islands/Los Islas Malvinas. That war along with others during the last century and start of this one resulted in the meaningless mass murder of millions. What we said at the time - not to mention 1914, 1939, etc., etc - is worth recalling as it shows the validity of the Socialist Party's consistent opposition to all wars and that none justify 'the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood'.

THE FALKLANDS CRISIS

In the face of the imminent threat of war over the potential wealth of the Falkland Islands the Socialist Party of Great Britain affirms:
1. That despite the wave of jingoistic hysteria in the press and its endorsement by Labour and Tory politicians alike, no working class interests in Britain, Argentina or the Falklands themselves can be served by war.
2. That neither the military junta in Buenos Aires nor the elected representatives of British capitalism, least of all the business interests of the Coalite-Charringtons, can justify the shedding of a single drop of working class blood.
3. That the new-found outrage at the undemocratic and oppressive nature of the Argentine regime rings false coming from a government which was arming that regime until the eve of hostilities.
4. That the crucial role of Argentine capitalism in profitably making up the notorious shortfall of agricultural production within the Russian Empire goes far to explain the support given to the junta by the local "Communist Party" and the muted criticism of it by the same circles who so vociferously denounce the similar dictatorship in Chile and its parallel suppression of trade unionism and free speech.

We therefore reiterate that having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow-workers of all lands the expression of goodwill and socialist fraternity and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism in all its guises and the establishment of socialism throughout the world, the only way to end war.

The Executive Committee, 13 April 1982

The statement above appeared in the May 1982 Socialist Standard, which had the provocative image of a "No. 10 Falklands Thatcher's Navy Cut" and "Warning: Jingoism Can Seriously Damage Your Health".

The Socialist Party holds that nations compete over mineral resources, trade routes and areas of domination. The potential wealth referred to by the Executive Committee includes today what is estimated at up to sixty billion barrels of crude.

Such competition manifests itself as diplomatic disputes (for current examples see 'Who owns the North Pole?') to wholesale death and destruction, as in strategically important, oil rich Iraq.

The concluding paragraph to 'Doing the bulldog thing' is just as valid today as when in was written in 1982:

"So British and Argentinian service men went across across the ocean to do battle with each other in their masters' cause. It was another doleful example of ignorant workers being easily duped by the empty jingoism of desperate politicians. Animals do it better; at least they don't take themselves willingly to the slaughterhouse."

Post Falklands War fact: More British soldiers have committed suicide since returning from then Falklands than were killed in the conflict.

Rob Stafford

Bogdanov, Technocracy and Socialism (2007)

From the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The terms "Bolshevism" and "Leninism" are usually treated as synonyms. In view of Lenin's enormous influence over the Bolshevik party, that might seem fair enough. But in fact Lenin did have political and intellectual rivals inside his own party. The most important of these non-Leninist Bolsheviks was Alexander Bogdanov (1873—1928).

Bogdanov was a man of many talents and interests. His formal training was in medicine and psychiatry. He invented an original philosophy that he called "tectology" and is now regarded as a precursor of systems theory (synergetics). He was also a Marxian economist, a theorist of culture, a popular science fiction writer, and of course a political activist. Even today most of his work is not available in English. The only book devoted to him is Zenovia Sochor's study of his ideas about culture (Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy, Cornell University Press 1988).

A volume of Bogdanov's science fiction has, however, appeared in English (Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, translated by Charles Rougle and edited by Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites, Indiana University Press 1984). Here we have two novels set on Mars (Red Star and Engineer Menni), a poem "A Martian Stranded on Earth," and interpretative essays by each of the editors. Red Star recounts how Martians take the Russian Bolshevik Leonid to their home planet to learn about the communist society there and act as a link between earth and Mars.

Engineer Menni is also set on Mars, but at an earlier stage, shortly before the transition from capitalism to communism. Menni's mission in life is to design Mars' great canals - it was widely believed at the time that there are canals on Mars - and organize and manage their construction.

Cult of the engineer?
Both Russian and Western commentators have called Bogdanov an advocate of "technocracy" and the promoter of a "cult of the engineer."

Thus Richard Stites speaks of his "celebration of technocratic power [and] the technical intelligentsia." On the surface this assessment seems justified. Engineer Menni was popular among Soviet planners at the time of the first Five Year Plan, and Menni is certainly a heroic figure with whom any aspiring technocrat might readily identify.

But you do not have to search very hard to find evidence that suggests a different assessment. In Red Star Bogdanov presents communist Mars as a society beset by serious problems - by no means a utopia. Technology is a major source of these problems. Leonid discovers, for instance, that some workers are so mesmerized by the machinery they operate that they refuse to stop working and have to be forced to rest. And Nella, Menni's abandoned lover, sings a song in which she complains that for all his virtues Menni is lacking in compassion:

"His heart is of ice, no pain does it feel
For the creatures brought low by Fate . . .
The tears of the wretches cast into the fray
Warm not his heart of stone."

The Martian political system portrayed in Red Star - little explicit detail is provided - does indeed seem to be technocratic rather than democratic. Thus, the speakers at a conference convened to consider Martian colonization of earth are an astronautical engineer, a physician, and a mathematician (who argues in favour of annihilating all earthlings and is later killed by a distraught Leonid). Martians in managerial positions move around in flying "gondolas" that do not seem to be available to ordinary Martians. (If they were, air traffic control would be a nightmare.) This is not a society that I would wish to call socialist or communist even though the exchange of commodities has been abolished and production is for use.

In Engineer Menni we find a clue as to why the revolution has given birth to a technocratic society. A workers' delegate at a trade union congress bemoans the fact that the workers' ignorance prevents them from judging matters for themselves and puts them at the mercy of experts, whom they have no choice but to believe.

Technocracy or socialism?
Both Bogdanov's fiction and his political writings as presented by Sochor suggest that he expected the coming revolution against capitalism to lead to a technocratic society. This was because the workers lacked the knowledge and initiative to seize control of social affairs for themselves. One reason fort his situation was the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of the capitalist production process. Another was the hierarchical and authoritarian mode of organization of the Bolshevik party, although Bogdanov considered such organization necessary and inevitable - he was a Bolshevik, after all.

This, however, was not a prospect that Bogdanov welcomed or idealized. He knew that real socialism (or communism) could only be a fully democratic society. And he knew that only a highly cultured and knowledgeable working class could achieve real socialism. That is why questions of culture and education were so central to his thought and work. The emphasis on knowledge and understanding as prerequisites for real socialism (as opposed to technocratic pseudo-socialism) is common ground that he shares with us in the world socialist movement.

While Bogdanov remained loyal to the Bolshevik regime in Russia until the end of his life, his ideas were deeply subversive of the society over which that regime presided. Bogdanov's ideas were the inspiration for a dissident group called "Workers' Truth" that was active for a time in the early 1920s (although it appears that Bogdanov did not have personal ties with them). In their manifesto, "Workers' Truth" declared that the old bourgeoisie had been replaced as masters of production by "the technical intelligentsia under state capitalism"; the Communist Party had become the party of this intelligentsia, which was the nucleus of a rising new bourgeoisie.

Stefan

Sound Bites and Soldiers (2007)

From the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently there have been a number of sound bites, profiles and coverage of NATO soldiers in Afghanistan and US soldiers in Iraq on CNN and BBC. Rank and file at 19/20, sergeants at 23/24 and officers in their late 20s /early 30s. My first response is generally emotional and angry - look at them, boys, just boys and young men.

What are they doing? Who are they doing it for? And then, simmering, I turn to the same old questions, trying to rationalise, to find the answers to stop the terrible slaughter going on around the world in the non-stop battles for resources and/or control.

How is it that year after year, war after war, the military establishments around the world are able to either conscript or (even worse?) persuade volunteers to join up? Young, impressionable, mostly male, suckered in by the projected macho image of recruiting videos and sophisticated video games. You've mastered the game, now how wonderful to be part of a non-virtual, real-life, grown up skirmish, battle, war! Are they really appealing to the sense of excitement, adrenalin rush, the biggest rush of your life? Even at risk of your life? And then, how is it, whatever you stand for, there's always an enemy ready to fight you? An enemy with recruits just as passionate about their cause as you are about yours? Can you always be in the right and your various and varied enemies always in the wrong? It's not statistically possible, is it?

Being a volunteer, i.e. choosing to join up, presents several other questions. Is it for the pay? To learn a trade? Because father and grandfather did it before you? Because there's nothing else on offer? As a show of patriotism? Or is it support for a particular cause? If the latter, then what if you agree with the current engagement but are opposed to the next? The main business of the leaders of the armed forces of all sides is that of instilling a sense of morality, justice, rightness about the fight, of invoking patriotism, nationalism and a whole lot of image building and supporting myths.

Aside from numerous combatants, willing or not, civilians, innocents, young, old, male, female continue to be killed both deliberately and accidentally as collateral damage on most continents of the world on a daily basis and there is absolutely no indication that this can ever change under the capitalist system.

The sound bites are part of the business of convincing the general public to support or have sympathy for the troops in achieving the capitalists' goals. For me the sound bites succeed in reinforcing the socialist principle that all warfare is destructive of human values, simply pitting one section of the working class against another with the sole aim of furthering the capitalist cause. The young men of the world are worth more than that, much more.

They are part of a world society which collectively could choose to work for peace, justice and prosperity for all in our time, putting aside the divisive issues of capitalism and recognising at last that with socialism unity is strength.

Janet Surman

The Rebel Sell (2007)

Book Review from the April 2007 Socialist Standard

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter: The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture.

I finished this book wondering just what I'd been reading. It's largely aimed at the 'counterculture', a notion which seems to encompass everything from anarchism and the Sex Pistols to Naomi Klein's No Logo and the Situationists.

The countercultural critique of capitalism, so Heath and Potter argue, is far more wide-ranging than that of Marxism, which is concerned with abolishing exploitation and establishing common ownership. In contrast, the counterculture aims at a society without institutions and regulations, though it's usually very vague as to what a free society would actually be like.

But, the authors continue, countercultural rebellion is in practice counterproductive: it distracts attention from initiatives to bring about real improvements in people's lives and even encourages contempt for such changes.

To the extent that attacking such an ill-defined set of ideas makes sense, there is a fair amount here that Socialists could agree with. The whole notion of 'fair trade', for instance, has become itself part of the competitive selling industry, as has other merchandise produced by various countercultural organisations. If you buy from the Body Shop because it makes you feel morally superior, then you're just being driven by a desire not to conform.

However, it's in their positive prescriptions that Heath and Potter go wrong. You might interpret their critique of countercultural rebellion as applying also to the Socialist insistence on advocating revolution and opposing reformism. Their case for this rests on two pillars. The first is that it's better to 'plug the loopholes, not abolish the system', i.e. they advocate reforms of capitalism. But the measures they advocate are pointless, such as introducing a progressive income tax on the grounds that lowering income would lower consumption.

The second pillar is, in effect, the impossibility of a socialist society. Of course, the authors never actually deal with the idea of a society based on production for use, since they consider that the only alternative to a market system is centralised production of the type formerly seen in Russia. But they regard a market system as inevitable, and advocate the kind of ideal market described in economic textbooks (presumably because these only exist in books, not in the real world).

Writers like Murray Bookchin (author of Post-Scarcity Anarchism) are criticised on the grounds that 'in our society, scarcity is a social, not a material, phenomenon'. Scarcity therefore cannot be overcome through increasing production: fast cars and 'cool' clothes, for instance, are necessarily scarce because their value depends on providing a distinguishing feature to those who consume them. But a society of free access will work on a very different value system and so won't involve people trying to look or live differently from their friends and neighbours.

So perhaps the answer to my wondering about what the book is would be that, though the authors never use the terms directly, it offers an unconvincing defence of reformism and criticism of socialism.

Paul Bennett