Sting in the tail: China's destiny (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

China's destiny

In an interesting article on China in the Guardian (18 March) John Gittings  considered, among other things, where Deng's economic reforms are heading and why Mao's policies failed. He asked:

"What is meant by Mr Deng's famous phrase, used to justify his economic innovations, of 'socialism with Chinese Characteristics'? It is simply code , many suggest, for 'capitalism under the Chinese party rule.'"

Of course, what "many suggest" is spot-on, and Gittings adds that ordinary Chinese understand where Mao went wrong. They say: "Marx said that capitalism was a necessary stage, but Mao tried to skip it." 

Marx expressed his view in his preface to Capital where he pointed out that a nation "can neither clear by bold leaps nor remove by legal enactments the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development."

The Chinese Communists' short-cut to "socialism" was inevitably a blind alley, and they now have China on the road it was always bound to take—the road to capitalism.

God, the holy boss

"Clergyman was employed by Church, not God."

This headline appeared over a story in the Independent (16 March) about a clergyman who had been handed his cards by the C of E and was claiming unfair dismissal before an industrial tribunal.

The Church in its defence stated that the "minister of religion owes his primary duties to God, rather than his Church". Although the tribunal agreed it still in favour of the jobless one because his contract was with the Church and not the Almighty.

The story also revealed that the C of E's little ploy has been tried on several previous occasions by the Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.

Obviously, the tribunal's ruling has very wide implications because there are many, many Gods. For example, military personnel and prostitutes who may in the future claim unfair dismissal will not have to take Mars, the God of War, or Venus, Goddess of Love, to some earthy tribunal.

Shattered dreams

Many workers dream about becoming their own boss, and 170 Scottish miners thought they had realised this dream when they took over Monktonhall colliery from British Coal three years ago.

Alas, their dream has been disturbed. A seam fault caused production to fall below target, so management cut bonuses and one shift of worker-shareholders staged a wildcat strike.

This was not what these miners had expected: "When we bought into Monktonhall it wasn't going to be them and us. It was going to be just us" (Daily Mail, 10 March).

The Monktonhall chairman's answer was a bit less idealistic: "If this place is going to be viable we have to cut somewhere."

Workers may dream about a secure and strife-free life but the realities of capitalism's economics usually bring a rude awakening.

We don't deserve them

How shamefully an ungrateful society treats its Great Men. A case in point is Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, head of the newly-independent Palestinian state, and Nobel Peace prize winner.

Besides having to worry about the conflict between resident Arabs and Jewish settlers on the West Bank and the inter-Arab quarrels in the Gaza strip, he now has another worry on his plate.

According to a story in the New York Post, US Federal investigators are conducting a global search for his assets to see if the PLO's claim of poverty are true.

The investigators are looking into allegations that Arafat has access to huge assets including bank accounts, jetliners, factories and oil refineries. Hints of his wealth include a remark made by his wife in Washington last year, that it was difficult to run 12 homes.

She has to run 12 homes? Ye Gods, even this Great Man's poor wife isn't spared her worries!

Oxfam futility

There are over 170,000 registered charities in this country. Perhaps the most famous is Oxfam. Founded in 1942 it is still busy trying to raise funds to combat "hunger, disease, exploitation and poverty".

By any standards, it has failed miserably to deal with these problems, which far from decreasing are growing worse every day as capitalism spreads its tentacles throughout the world. As Oxfam itself says: 

"Take Bangladesh: the world was shocked by the catastrophic cyclone and floods in 1991, in which 140,000 people died. Yet the same number of children are killed by poverty in Bangladesh every two months. The main killers are common diseases, often spread by dirty water, like diarrhoea. Worldwide, a mother watches her child die of diarrhoea every 8 seconds."

Only world socialism can stop this carnage. The existence of 170,000 charities is an effect of the poverty of capitalism, not its solution.

Energised by contempt (1996)

Book Review from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics by Anonymous (Chatto & Windus, 1996, £15.99 hb.)

Actually, despite all the hype, it's quite good. Whoever wrote it knows how to use words. They know how to stab politicians in the back too. Whoever wrote this novel clearly worked on the 1992 Clinton primary election campaign. They saw the man for the pseudo-caring, vulgar little swindler that he is. Read this novel and, if you ever did before, you will it hard to take Clinton seriously again.  This novelist does to Clinton and those like him what Tariq Ali's Redemption did to Tony Cliff and Ted Grant. Great stuff: all leaders deserve to be exposed in such nakedness, grotesque for all to witness.

The language of this novel drags vulgarity to new depths, but there is no sense of it straying from reality. The cynical role of the spin doctors is depicted superbly. Not that there are any longer specifically US phenomena: features of an uglier, inferior political culture. These days Major calls European leaders "a bunch of shits" and his cabinet colleagues "bastards". As for the power of spin, read Nicholas Jones's new hardback, Soundbites & Spin Doctors (Cassell, 1996, £17.99) or Margaret Scammell's Designer Politics: How Elections are Won (St Martin's Press, 1995, £15.99) to remain in no doubt that manipulating the media is now the key part of any successful election campaign in Britain. The old cry "that Britain will soon be as bad as America" has now virtually come to pass. Despite the insights of the accounts by Jones and Scammell, the sordid strategy of utter dishonesty, energised by almost complete contempt for those who vote, was most powerfully presented in Primary Colors—a work of fiction, but only just.

Steve Coleman

Postscript: It was revealed in July 1996 that the author of the novel was Joe Klein.

Class-Consciousness - Its meaning and value. (1919)

From the May 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the terms most frequently in use in Socialist propaganda, and one which may prove most mystifying to the uninitiated, is the term "class-consciousness."

What do we mean when we speak of "class consciousness"? We mean simply a thorough knowledge of the position in society of the class to which the class-conscious subject belongs.

Socialists claim that class-consciousness is a mental condition which must necessarily precede working-class emancipation. The reason is because, owing to the peculiarly complex nature of the modern social system, the interest of the classes is obscured, and only a clear understanding of the working-class place in the social system can enable the workers to see in what direction their interests lie, and therefore what they have to fight for.

The chattel-slave, who was the property of his owner, was never in any doubt as to his place in society. His relation to his master, and his class to his master's class, were too simple to allow of obscurity. He knew that he was mere property, and hence he was in no danger of identifying his master's interest with his own. That is is true is proved by the fact that those ruling races of antiquity whose States were based on chattel-slavery could never get their slaves to fight for them—or trust them to do so—except under pledge of granting them their freedom.

With the modern wage slave the case is entirely different. He has the freedom of selling his labour power, not where he will, but where he can. He may enter into "free" contracts. These things make him think there is no essential difference between his class and his master's save such has has arisen from difference of ability. He sees, occasionally, one of his own class rise into the ranks above, so he knows there is no impassable barrier. He finds he cannot live without wages, therefore the class who own the money which provides wages have their useful place in society. He finds he cannot get wages without work, hence it is no less to his interest, he reasons, than to his master's, to follow the policy which will provide most work. So the complexity of the relations of modern society hide from the worker the fact that he is just as much a slave as the old chattel slave, working to produce wealth for his master, and getting for himself just enough to enable him to do it.

Class-consciousness, the knowledge of his slave status, makes clear the opposition of class interests, and fits the worker for the class struggle.

A. E. Jacomb.

Hypocrisy of politicians (1996)

Book Review from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The New Untouchables: Immigration and the New World Worker by Nigel Harris (I.B. Tauris. £25)

In its quest for profits, capitalism is prepared to look anywhere for cheap labour power. One consequence has been the massive growth in numbers of immigrant workers, who travel, (legally or illegally) to another country for the sake of employment. Nigel Harris's recent book contains a number of pertinent observations on this phenomenon.

One point he makes is the hypocrisy of politicians who demand free trade and the relaxation of market restrictions while at the same time calling for strict rules on immigration. Consistency would require a "free" market in the movement of labour just as in investment and exporting. But immigrant workers are a convenient scapegoat, and can be blamed for everything from unemployment to inner-city riots. Politicians therefore find it all too easy to play the immigrant (usually, race) card and claim to defend the national way of life.

But there is a tension in such politicking, for the simple fact is that developed capitalism needs immigrant workers. As the labour force in western capitalist countries ages, and is not replaced adequately because of low birth-rates, immigrants offer an invaluable source of new, young labour power. They may also have fewer qualms about doing unpleasant work or working anti-social hours than "indigenous" workers have. Harris quotes one witness to a US congressional committee:

"As our population becomes older, the problem will not be to find jobs for people, but people for jobs. For many years, Mexico, with its relatively young and expanding population will complement and balance our own as well as provide a formidable defence to the attack on our position in world markets."

Thus capitalism relies on immigrant labour, despite all the anti-immigrant noises its political representatives make. So hospitals in New York advertise for nurses in Irish and Philippine newspapers.

Harris also notes that migration is part and parcel of the global economic order. From the 1970s onwards, for instance, the Middle East oil industry was staffed by a multinational workforce of several millions; the massive increase in oil production would simply not have been possible without such  migration. Large companies often face the choice of importing workers or relocating production in a cheap-labour area. The wheel is now turning full circle, with production of Ronson cigarette lighters being moved to South Wales, as wages there will be lower than in South Korea (Guardian, 25 April). 

Migrant workers are often "over-qualifies" for the work they do, and usually have to endure appalling wages and conditions. In order words, they are exploited the way all workers are. The real lesson to draw is not that politicians are two-faced but that, while capitalists wish to divide workers from each other, working people, whether migrants or not, face a common enemy, the world capitalist class and their system.

Paul Bennett

Obituary: Harry Young (1996)

Obituary from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have to report the death last December at the age of 94 of Harry Young who was a member of the Socialist Party between 1940 and 1991.

When Harry Young joined the Party in 1940 he already had a history behind him. As a teenager he had been a member of the British Socialist Party and of the Herald League both of which were absorbed into the Communist Party when it was formed in July 1920. He became the first national organiser of the Young Communist League, and from 1922 to 1929 lived and worked in Moscow as a member of the secretariat of the Young Communist International, where he met many leading figures in the CPSU.

On his return to England the Communist Party found him employment in various capacities, including for a while the manager of Collet's Bookshop in Charing Cross Road. But he eventually became disillusioned with that party's subservience to Russian foreign policy and resigned in 1937. Unlike others in his position he turned not to Trotskyism but to the SPGB, which he joined three years later.

A conscientious objector in the war, he was ordered to stay in his job as a cab driver and work as an ambulance driver helping the victims of bombing raids. He soon became one of the Party's main speakers in Hyde Park, using his rumbustious wit to good effect, and an indoor speaker and debater. For a number of years he also wrote a regular 'By The Way' column in the Socialist Standard under the pen-name of Horatio.

In the 1950 general election he was the Party's candidate in the East Ham South constituency. After the war he obtained a BA degree as a mature student and became a science teacher and an active member of the National Association of Schoolmasters. After retiring he concentrated his efforts on Speakers' Corner an served on the Party's Executive Committee for a number of years.

The Gorbachev cuts (1989)

From the March 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Mikhail Gorbachev offered to cut Soviet forces in Europe by half a million, there was an enormous surge in the dollar on world stockmarkets. The cold war is no longer good business.

This thought was uppermost in the minds of the Politburo when they decided on their change in policy. The Soviet economy is in serious difficulties, and spending on arms is throttling the profitable redevelopment of civilian production. Officials concede that military spending is over 2£0bn, but it is probably lose to five times that amount, or 16 per cent of Gross National Product. Their total does not include the cost of weapons research, development and production, and fails to take into account the cost to the rest of the economy of the diversion of scientific personnel and the priority allocation of scarce material resources to the military sector. This should be set against an expected budget deficit of £33.3bn next year. The Russian press is openly calling for reductions in defence spending to arrest the continued decline in living standards. Cuts in nuclear forces of the sort envisaged in the START talks will have only limited benefits for the civilian economy. Large-scale cuts in the more expensive conventional sector can be expected to show immediate and tangible results, particularly in the release of skilled labour power.

The result of these economic pressures has been a shift in the basis of Soviet military strategy. After the Second World War emphasis was on the primacy of attack, and the building up of sufficient forces in East Europe and the western USSR to overwhelm NATO in the event of a war. The NATO countries meanwhile exploited their superior technological/economic base to counter the larger but cruder Soviet forces. Today, the Soviet economy can no longer support the scale of production required to maintain that numerical advantage. As a result, the doctrine of attack has been replaced by the defensive doctrine of "Reasonable Sufficiency".

And this is not just a personal whim of Gorbachev. Military leaders are becoming concerned at the decreasing numbers of eighteen year-olds available for military service. There is also an increasingly vocal opposition to conscription in the turbulent Baltic republics and among university students, and the army is having increasingly to rely on "non-Russian" youths from Central Asia whose loyalty to the state cannot be guaranteed. When the Defence minister, Dmitri Yazov, addressed the armed forces in Red Square in November, he emphasised the need for a smaller, more professional and better equipped army along Western lines.

This is the background to cutbacks outlined by Gorbachev at the UN in December. He pledged to remove 10,000 tanks, 8,500 artillery pieces, 800 combat aircraft and 500,000 troops from eastern Europe and the Western military districts of the USSR within two years. Of particular significance is the decision to scrap six of the fifteen forward-based tank divisions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. This will remove 5,000 tanks, or 40 per cent of Soviet strike potential on the Central Front. Assault crossing troops will also be withdrawn, along with their combat equipment. The cumulative effect of these measures will be to curtail severely the ability of Soviet forces to attack NATO from a standing start, especially in view of the series of river barriers which would have to be crossed. Furthermore, a reduction in forces in the western USSR would deprive an attack of critical reserves. Gorbachev has promised that the forces which remain would take up a defensive posture.

In political terms, this marks an important transition. The Cold War confrontation is being transformed, as the superpowers wrestle with declining economies and seek to consolidate their international positions by negotiating agreed spheres of influence which can be held at an acceptable cost. The Soviet state now accepts that the priority must be domestic reconstruction, which requires capital and technology from the West. It wants, therefore, to see a stable balance of power in Europe at much lower levels of force, while it pursues closer economic ties with the EEC; Gorbachev has called this the construction of a "common European House". Last summer the Soviet state officially recognised the existence of the EEC, and despatched an ambassadorial team to talk about trade deals. At the end of October a German delegation packed with businessmen and bankers visited Moscow to put the finishing touches to a £1bn credit agreement to modernise Soviet light industry. Thirteen joint industrial ventures are already under way and thirty-five more were discussed during the talks.

The consequences of the new Soviet strategic thinking will be keenly felt in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev has explicitly renounced the so-called "Brezhnev doctrine" which committed the Soviet Union to intervene militarily if Moscow's clients were in danger, as they were in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979. The troop cuts give substance to his assertion that military force cannot solve the economic problems faced by the Soviet Empire at this historical juncture.

In sum, we can say that the Soviet retreat from its garrison positions in east Europe and its reduced capacity for offensive conventional warfare have come about, not because Gorbachev is an overwhelmingly pacific character, but as a result of the economic weakness of the Soviet state. It should also be noted that this is not disarmament; the Soviet Union will still retain a formidable armed capability. The thrust of the present policy is to bring the structure of the armed forces into line with the capabilities of the economy and a growing crisis of labour power.

Andrew Thomas

The Death of Marxism? (1994)

From the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Has the funeral of Marxism taken place? Is there nothing left but to remainder the once-popular volumes of Marxology and totter off to the wine bar for a spot of "deconstruction" the latest buzz-word in the Halls of Pseudo-Academe? Steve Coleman investigates

If you are a journalist, a politician, a publisher or an academic onlooker you will be well aware that "Marxism is Dead". The funeral has taken place and there is nothing left but to remainder the once once-popular volumes of Marxology and totter off to the wine bar for a spot of "deconstruction" (the latest buzz-word in the Halls of Pseudo-Academe).

Now, death is a pretty permanent condition. With the exception of Biblical conjurers, the dead do not rise again. So, if Marxism is dead we must assume that it has disappeared forever. Which is all rather odd. Because this article is not being written by a ghost (ghost-written) and socialists, though described by Marx himself as "spectres" haunting Europe, are not dressed in white sheets and have no plans to depart this world. The rumours of our death have been exaggerated.

Actually, there is something rather fascistic about trying to kill off a body of ideas. For that is what they seek to do when they assert repeatedly that "Marxism is Dead". It is as if they have opted intellectually for the Final Solution; after decades of distorting Marxist ideas or banning them or ignoring them or deriding them, now they want to bury them. Death is forever. And relevant ideas will not go away for ever even if you kill every person who holds them. For the ideas are bigger than the minds in which they are at home, and the material conditions which have made these ideas meaningful and urgent to us today will soon enough occur to others who come along later.

The revolutionary ideas which have come to be called Marxism existed in people's minds before Marx came on to the scene. Marx did not invent the capitalist system. It was the system which created the material soil in which revolutionary ideas would grow. Before Marx there were workers who opposed production for profit and wage labour - there were thinkers who explained history in terms of material conditions rather than ideals - there were elementary recognitions of the fact that labour is the basis of value. Marx did not give birth to revolutionary thought, but added to it.

Who 'killed' Marx?
So why the claim that "Marxism is Dead"? After all, if Marx was right in explaining that labour is the source of value and the unpaid labour of the wealth producers is the source of profit; if he was right in claiming that material conditions determine ideas, and that economic forces are the principal determinants of historical change; if he was right to point to the conflict of classes throughout all property societies; if Marx's theories were "alive" ten or twenty years ago, why possibly could they be "dead" now? A correct analysis is valid until it is disproved. Who has repudiated and thereby "killed" Marx's correct analysis?

The twisters who are so enthusiastic to report Marxism's death will say that the refutation is quite obvious. Look at what has happened in Russia. We are looking. It was the Marxist materialist conception of history which enabled socialists to identify the Russian Revolution as a transition to capitalism within months of it happening. It was Marx's definition of capitalism as a system based upon wage labour and capital, which were characteristics of Russian state capitalism, which enabled us to avoid the error, so easily accepted by our modern "intellectuals", that Russia was a non-capitalist society. Indeed, it was because we have used Marxist analysis as our method that socialists have been able to predict that Russia and its fellow state-capitalist countries would soon enough have to allow for the mobility of capital by integrating into the global capitalist economy without pretensions to ideological distinction. This has happened. We have been proved right. That is hardly a reason for being classified as dead.

The Leninist Left, forced by their ideological defence of state capitalism to twist Marx to fit in with Stalin, Mao and a host of other wretched dictators, are discredited by the fall of their tyrannous paradises. But that is the death of Leninism, a funeral at which no socialists will be found mourning.

Leninists were not alone in believing the lies and distortions of Stalin and Co, for they were in the company of the ideologists of the Right who were quite content to accept that somehow state-run capitalism was something to do with Marxism. Even though Marx himself advocated a society in which the state, as the coercive force on behalf of a ruling class, will not exist. To blame Marx for the failure of statism is as fair as cursing the Methodists because you have a hangover.

Complacent and foolish
The "Marxism is Dead" brigade, often to be found consorting with the "End of History" boys, are complacent and foolish. They have failed to understand that as long as the capitalist system exists, with its inherent contradictions between profit accumulation and the satisfaction of needs, there will be a persistent need to explain why capitalism is like it is and how it can be replaced by a new historical order: one based upon production for use. Marx, together with the other great thinkers in the revolutionary tradition, supplied this explanation. It will not go away and die just because defenders of capitalism want it to.

Of course, what has often been referred to as "Marxism" has frequently been dogmatic and mechanistic in its over-simplified approach to analysis. Socialists have no interest in defending dogmatism. The function of Marx's analysis is to be used as a critical tool for clear analysis of real, material social affairs with a view to changing them. The object of Marxism is to change the society which it is explaining. That is why it has always been so feared by those whom change threatens.

The dancers on the grave at Highgate Cemetery have little to celebrate. After all, their capitalist system is faced by a mass of insoluble problems as ever, and right now there is a global economic crisis which these pro-capitalist triumphalists are wholly impotent to end. We might suggest that their tedious sloganeering about the "Death of Marxism" is a pathetic case of whistling in the dark.

Marx Lives!
Like Karl Marx, socialists want a revolution in which The Wages System will be abolished forever. That will spell The Death of Capitalism. There will be no problem when this happens about identifying the corpse - we will be able to smell its stench from afar. While we wait, we challenge all and any of these anti-Marxist mourners to have the courage of their convictions and climb on to the platform of democratic debate. Are our ideas dead? We'll leave them in no doubt.

Steve Coleman

Religious Police and Women Drivers (2013)

The Halo Halo! column from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Government advice to anyone visiting Saudi Arabia includes the following:

‘Saudi Arabia is an exclusively Islamic (Muslim) kingdom and Islam governs nearly every aspect of life. The public practice of any form of religion other than Islam is prohibited in Saudi Arabia. Severe punishment including imprisonment and deportation can result should such activities come to the attention of the authorities.’ ‘… certain sexual behaviour like adultery or homosexual acts carry the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. So does apostasy (renunciation of the Muslim faith). The death penalty is carried out in public, usually by beheading’ (www.gov.uk/living-in-saudi-arabia).

Yes, in Saudi Arabia Allah doesn’t mess about when making sure his laws are observed. And to keep an eye on what’s going on, according to the Koran, (Surah 82) we each have two angels watching over our shoulders recording everything we do (and yes, some people do take this nonsense seriously).

And, as if that were not enough, in Saudi Arabia Allah also has his own religious police force, the ‘Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice’ to keep an eye on things and enforce Sharia law.

During the recent National Day celebrations for example, when nationwide festivities were planned, they announced a ban on singing and dancing in public and warned that violators would be punished.

In another incident in March 2002, in order to preserve moral values, they prevented schoolgirls from escaping a burning school because the girls were not wearing headscarves, and were not accompanied by a male guardian. Fifteen girls died, and many more were injured as a result.

Exactly what qualities are required for the job is not clear, but claims have been made that they are staffed by ex-convicts whose only qualification is that they memorised the Koran in prison in order to reduce their sentence.

Another of their duties is to enforce the ban on women drivers – only men are allowed to hold driving licences in Saudi Arabia. Although the ban is informal (there is no section on driving violations in the Koran) it is strictly enforced. There is, however, a growing campaign to overturn the ban and activists are calling for women to take to the roads in protest.

This, of course, is seen as a threat to public morality by the devout, not to mention being a danger to the women themselves. One cleric, Sheik Saleh al-Lohaidan issued the following warning:

‘If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological medical impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards. That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees’.

Could this ridiculous situation get any more absurd? Well, yes, it could. Back in 2010, in a completely unrelated controversy, another nutty cleric, Sheik Abdel Mohsen Obeikan announced that to overcome problems caused by the illicit mixing between sexes, women could be alone with, or appear without a veil in front of an unrelated male if he drank her breast milk. This, the good cleric explained, would establish a mother-son bond in Islamic tradition.

A group of women protesters, who until now have had to rely on male drivers in order to get about, are now threatening (if that is the right word?) to breastfeed their drivers if they are not allowed to drive themselves.

And no, this is not a sketch from an old Monty Python show.

NW

Obituary: Campbell McEwen (1996)

Obituary from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Members throughout Britain will be saddened by the death at 65 of Campbell McEwen. Many will remember him for his forthright contributions at our conferences during the last 30 years.

Campbell became interested in working class politics when in his teens, and his first serious political act was to register as a conscientious objector. He appeared before the tribunal and, without any assistance, argued his case so convincingly that he won a rare full exemption from military service. Not bad for an 18-year-old!

A spell in the Communist Party soon brought disillusion and Campbell's courage (or foolhardiness, he had both aplenty) was shown when he and his lifelong pal Eric Darroch chose to leave the CP, not by simply dropping out, but by going along to their branch to present their reasons for resigning, and there they were denounced in the standard CP phraseology of the period. Soon after this, Campbell encountered the Socialist Party at the old Glasgow Workers Open Forum and he joined the party in 1953.

His job record resembled those often attributed to adventure-story writers by their publishers, but his loathing of wage-slavery ensured that he never settled at anything. He was a railway porter, tram driver, salesman, clerk, tally-man, trade union organiser, telephone operator, etc, and had a fund of hilarious and sometimes sobering stories to tell about all of them.

About 15 years go Campbell had a serious illness and life-saving surgery was necessary. Towards the end of last year cancer was diagnosed but this time not even prompt surgery could save our comrade. At the cremation a large turn-out of members heard comrades Donnelly and Darroch deliver valedictory addresses befitting a staunch materialist.

Campbell McEwen's contribution to the party was a generous one, and he spoke in his own uncompromising style at outdoor and indoor meetings for many years. He was a larger-than-life character and we will miss him. We extend our deepest condolences to his family.

An enemy of the state? (1995)

Book Review from the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Enemy Within: MI5, Maxwell and the Scargill Affair, by Seumas Milne (Verso, 344pp, £16.95)

In a letter to me which Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, wrote in August 1992, he said: "It is now obvious from all the documentation in our possession that every single smear and allegation made against Peter Heathfield and myself has been discredited, disproved, thrown out by the court or been subject of a legal agreement which has vindicated the two National Officials and the Union itself."

Seumas Milne's long-awaited book on the 1984-5 miners' strike, and its aftermath, confirms this and much more besides. Unlike Paul Routledge, in his Scargill, Milne generally asserts that Scargill was more wronged than wrong.

Milne claims that there has been a twenty-year secret war against the NUM in general, and Arthur Scargill in particular. This was spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher, Robert Maxwell and Stella Rimington, now head of MI5. It was, he asserts, an unholy alliance. "For the Tories and the British Establishment as a whole," he writes, "Arthur Scargill came to embody all that they most feared and hated about trade union power in general, and the miners in particular." Scargill was "a man apart"; the living "embodiment of the enemy". The ruling class hated, and did everything it could, to defeat the NUM and Scargill.

Although the NUM was defeated in the 1984-5 strike, the end of the strike did not end the war against Scargill and the miners. In the war against the NUM, the Maxwell-owned Daily Mirror was probably more vociferous than the traditional anti-union papers. Together with ITV's Cook Report, the Mirror accused Scargill and the NUM general secretary, Peter Heathfield, of theft and embezzlement of money donated for strike purposes; of using money sent from Libya to pay off mortgages; and of receiving million of pounds from the Soviet Union. Almost all the media, the government, and many Labour Party leaders, joined in the chorus of abuse - which continued well into 1990.

But as Arthur Scargill said in his letter to me, and as Milne demonstrates in meticulous details, every one of the claims proved to be untrue, unfounded or wildly exaggerated. Neither Scargill nor Heathfield paid off mortgages with Libyan money, because neither had a mortgage and neither received a penny from Libya. And although the Soviet Union belatedly sent a million dollars to the pro-"Communist" international miners' organisation for general purposes, none of this money reached the NUM, or its leaders, during the strike. The British state seized the NUM's assets, and Scargill arranged parallel, supposedly secret funds. But, as Milne demonstrates, MI5 and GCHQ, using all kind of illegal methods, knew about most of the money. They also, apparently, had a spy right in the headquarters of the union. Indeed, the government used every trick in the book to destroy the NUM and its top officials such as Peter Heathfield and Arthur Scargill. For instance, Scargill and the NUM were tricked into concentrating mass picketing at the British Steel coking plant at Orgreave near Sheffield and the resulting pitched battle with the police.

Although Milne is largely sympathetic towards Scargill and Heathfield, it is obvious from his account, and what we already know, particularly of Scargill, that he made many mistakes before, during and after the strike. This was largely due to his peculiar political views - an unholy mixture of Bolshevik/Stalinist vanguardism and ill-digested syndicalism.

Nevertheless, he was considered to be a danger to British capitalism. To the British ruling class, he was very much an "enemy within". Milne's book is well reading, even if it only demonstrates to what extent the capitalist class and its lackeys will go.

Peter E. Newell

Alienated worker (1985)

From the August 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

All workers are forced to offer their labour for sale. If successful, they immediately forfeit all control over how, when and where it will be utilised. It is this loss of control which produces alienation between the worker and his labour. In my own circumstances this tends to occur frequently but varies in intensity.

I am employed as an engineer selling combustion equipment, and obviously have no control over what fuel is burnt, how the energy produced is used or how much pollution of the atmosphere is allowed to occur. Recently I was phoned in the early hours of the morning by a hospital in Glasgow which deals with geriatric patients. A combustion failure meant that they were running short of steam for heating and sterilisation. I rushed to the hospital, but it took several hours to repair the mechanical and electrical faults on the outdated equipment. I washed up and discussed the problems with the hospital engineer. "You know those burners are now illegal", I said. "Yes, I know, but I can't get the money to replace these units even though they contravene the Clean Air Act", he replied.

I was sharply reminded of this conversation when I travelled to an RAF base the following day to commission a new combustion unit on a new boiler. The base was playing war games and it took an hour to negotiate the sentry posts before I reached the boiler house. It took all day to commission the burner and complete efficiency tests. The engineer arrived to verify the combustion readings and I enquired what work the steam would be performing. "It's to keep the fighter planes in that hangar warm at night", he replied. "They must be kept at the right temperature so they can take off at a moment's notice." I was to learn later that the fuel bill for keeping the planes warm at night was over £650,000 a year.

The long drive home gave me plenty of time to reflect on a system which cares more for machines of destruction than the health of its elderly citizens.

SASS

How Did Social Inequality Arise? (2013)

From the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at one theory of the origins of hierarchy and social inequality

In The Creation of Inequality: how our prehistoric ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus begin with the notion that the fields of Anthropology and Archaeology should inform one another. Anthropology learns from humans within living memory what they think and feel; while archaeology provides silent clues to the past: buildings, tools or bones.

They build a detailed account of how over the last five thousand or so years, humans have built unequal societies. They examine the underlying cultural logic of different social formations to show how inequality, and subsequent formations, can arise. They deny any straight line model of social development, that one stage leads to another, but rather that each stage can allow the next development. They also note that it isn’t a given level of technology or natural abundance that gives rise to different social formations (they note how the Andes, where the wheel was never even invented, can be seen as the graveyard of such theories). They suggest that over millennia, societies have oscillated between relatively equal or unequal forms, following ‘social logic’.

Hunters-gatherers

They begin with the most equal form of society: the nomadic extended kin group (such as has been encountered in the Arctic within historic memory). They observe that these groups of hunter/gatherers are relatively egalitarian, without formal leaders or classes. They also note that this distinguishes humans from our near primate relatives, who in similar bands operate either with alpha males or an alpha male/beta male coalition. They propose, though, that such dominance hierarchies and behavioural traits do remain in human communities; but that, rather, the function of the alpha male has been replaced by ‘God' with beta coalitions replaced by interceding ancestors and spirits.

That is, people treat the deity and ancestors as if they were above them in a dominance hierarchy (such as, by adopting submission positions), and thinking of themselves as subordinates to these entities. All living humans thus become gammas, in effect equal in subordination. Religion, they suggest, is accompanied by collective ritual, and by inducement of euphoric states to reinforce its effects.

As an aside, this is a fascinating concept, firstly because it does provide for the notion that there was a positive evolutionary reason for the development of the idea of god (which rebuts the arguments of some pro-theists who suggest the disutility of the idea as evidence for some real basis for religion). Secondly, it suggests a useful interpretation of contemporary political psychology. When dictators and their boot boys elevate themselves to godlike status or servants of god, they free themselves from the constraints imposed by such submission. As we shall see, below, the development of inequality was in part about the appropriation of divine sanction.

The hunter gatherer bands may have engaged in gift relations with other nearby bands. As the authors note, the emphasis would have been on seeking and maintaining social relations and retaining the possibility of help and assistance when things may have gone bad. They suggest that, rather than developing language to assist in practical tasks, language and symbolic thinking emerged as a means of coalition building and enabling links between extended kin groups. A development of this, for example, was the nomination of special friends for young males. They give the example of an Eskimo tribe, whose boys had friends allocated parts of a slaughtered seal, indicating their sharing of the goods. They also note the ‘magic of names’ where a bond is assumed between people sharing a name, even beyond a kinship relation.

They conjecture that it was such behaviour that gave rise to the extended clan-based society. A key feature of such a society is the notion of social substitutability. If a person commits a murder, say, it becomes acceptable to kill one of their clan as a substitute for retaliating directly against them individually.

Clan-based societies

Clan-based societies can be very complex. Often, they are divided into two moieties, and the members of one clan from one moiety cannot marry with the members of clans from that same moiety. This can be further complicated by lineages within clans, and much more specific clan-marriage-based arrangements (such as members of clan A always marry into clan D but not clan C).

Flannery and Marcus identify two important features of the cultural logic of such societies. The first is the principle of ‘We were here first’. This has repercussions as certain clans begin to claim pre-ordinance based on clans that are putatively descendants of later arrivers. The second is that individuals may have or acquire virtue. At first, this may be simply the difference between initiated men and un-initiated boys, later there may be stages to initiation, so that even some full grown men may lack virtue. They also note, by reference to Australian aboriginal tribes, that some clans can lay claim to a certain copyright of prestigious rites and rituals.

This sets the scene for the development of the next stage, the achievement-based societies. In hunter-gatherer and tribal societies, anyone getting too big for their boots and bossing others around would be quietly taken into a field and murdered. They also note that mockery, too, was a powerful tool for curbing ambition. In achievement based-societies, an individual could achieve the rank of chief, through a number of routes: success in warfare, or religious/ritual means being among them. The achievement at this stage is individual, and the chief is required to maintain their position through feasts and gift giving. Rank does not pass automatically to off-spring, but chiefs can take steps to try and confer honour on their children and put them in a strong position to achieve rank themselves.

The archaeological evidence at this stage consists of the examination of grave goods. The general absence of children with expensive funeral goods indicates that people did not have exalted status from birth, for example. A common feature of early human societies is the men’s hut, a place where men go and perform rituals (possibly a development from the men staying together while hunting). In achievement societies this becomes the chief’s hut, and the gradations within the men become apparent based on their sleeping position (the lowest ranked sleeping next to the door, thus being most at risk of being killed in a sneak attack).

Entire groups of people become known as ‘Nothing men’ with no status and no property to live off. The chief controls the land and natural resources: sumptuary goods come into existence, in the form of jade, gold or certain shells.

As the authors note, a feature of early human religion was that it could be frequently rewritten, based on new experiences and circumstances. In achievement societies, the leading members of society try to cast themselves as nearer to god (or descended from god) and, often, as different from the rest of humanity. A part of this attempted appropriation, they suggest, is the gradual transformation of the men’s hut into the public temple, and so that building becomes a key archaeological indicator of the development of hierarchy within a society.

Hereditary rulers

At its most fully developed, chiefly rank becomes hereditary. The chief becomes taboo, and no one may look at or touch him (often meaning foreigners have to be employed to assassinate him). Even his waste becomes charged with dangerous levels of virtue, and has to be safely disposed of. Instead of commanding great skill himself, he controls craftsmen who produce status goods, which he can distribute.

At this point, it should be noted, the authors present evidence of societies oscillating between equality and hierarchy, and elite groups lose their grasp on power (through incompetence, or in-fighting, or both). It should also be noted that these developments are not dependent on the state of agriculture or prevailing techniques of production, and seem to stem as much from the capacity of individuals at the right time taking chances and staking a claim to pre-eminence.

This is certainly the case for their model of the emergence of kingship: a distinct caste apart with an hereditary leader. Their basic model is that kingdom’s emergence comes from a usurper taking control of a tribe and annexing nearby groups, in short, through a sort of revolution. They produce examples from African and Polynesian anthropology and history. They note that as hereditary rule emerges within one society, neighbouring societies begin to adopt more and more of its attributes, as a defensive mechanism. As with the move from achievement society to hereditary society, they suggest that multiple attempts to assert sovereignty may have been tried and failed before any given monarch ascended to the purple.

Empires continue the process of creating inequality, by denuding local elites of their power/virtue and creating a hierarchy of civic centres, with each successive layer subordinated to the centre and the king. Multiple strategies can be employed to achieve this (as can be said of each of the previous stages). Often, empires were born out of the ruins of preceding empires (as in the Andes), with successive waves of domination refining the process of conquering and absorbing neighbours.

If there is a flaw with the book, it lies in one of its great strengths. There is a wealth of detail about a great many societies, but the continued listing of the dimensions of huts does get slightly in the way of progressing the book’s points (and may inhibit its utility as a popular book).

Throughout there is a running side argument, around the nature of marriage. They note that historically it was a primarily economic arrangement, and they list at least seven different permutations of marriage (one man two women; one man one woman, two men, one woman, etc.) Their argument is very much with the so-called traditionalists whose model of marriage, they note, goes all the way back to the particular bureaucratic conditions of ancient Sumeria. Marriage, though, is often a route towards hierarchy, with control of marriage between people of high status being a means to create and sustain inequality.

They also touch on ancient warfare. They note how in clan societies, it has been known for the victors in a war to compensate the defeated for their dead, as a means of retaining social bonds and preventing conflict continuation. They show, through anthropological data from Polynesia, that tribal warfare was particularly brutal, with the sneak attack and massacre being favoured (the other evidence they have for this is the increasing incidence of defences around settlements as they develop). They point to Mesoamerican carvings to show how captives were taken and tortured in public display in kingdoms there.

The book does not conclude with any political programme. They do note that the attempt to impose hierarchy has been resisted at every stage. The nearest they come to a suggestion is an anecdote about an archaeologist whose proposal was to ‘put hunter gatherers in charge’.

Overall, this is a worthwhile and important book in the description and articulation of how we came to be where we are. At the very least, it is an eye-opening description of the amazing and varied forms of human society. If nothing else, you can finally discover exactly what a Big Kahuna was.

Pik Smeet

The First and Only Liberationists (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The inclusion of the phrase "without distinction of race or sex", in our Declaration of Principles, might today seem rather trite. Until we remember when it was written. Who else in 1904 was interested in the freedom of women? Indeed the idea that they might need a wider horizon than could be provided by a home and family had scarcely dawned. In the earliest Standards Socialism is proclaimed as the "only hope of the working class irrespective of sex". In the Socialists' definition it was easy to see that most women (like most men) were part of the propertyless majority. Whether or not they were actually employed did not alter their position as members of the working class. Certainly it would be nonsense to speak of an immense majority of that class unless it included women. During the difficult days of the first world war it was the women members who helped the Party going.

As for the "distinction of race", who else in 1904 saw all the world's people as members of one human race? The study of anthropology was still in its infancy and even Engels had not been entirely certain about the position of black races.

The founder members of the Socialist Party had no such doubts. The words had not simply been used to round off a sentence but reflected the level of their Socialist understanding. In capitalism, which was now the dominant social system, there was a division between those who owned the means for production and the vast majority who were obliged to work for the owning class in order to live. This class division cut across all differences of nationality, race or sex. The working class were the modern equivalent of all previous oppressed peoples. It was their historic task to abolish private property and establish Socialism thus ending forever the domination of one group by another. As every human being would have free access to the wealth produced by society, personal relationships would not be bound by material considerations.

Working-class problems are only  complicated by racial, sexual and religious prejudices. A little effort would reveal that the cause of the problems, and the prejudice, lies in capitalism. In the words of those early comrades the establishment of Socialism will freedom for the working class and thereby "the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex".

Pat Deutz

Letter: Herland (1994)

Letter in the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

While I would agree wholeheartedly with Kerima Mohideen that the gender roles we are expected to play in property society are injurious to the great majority of men and women, there were several aspects of the article "Herland" (Socialist Standard, March) which I found confusing as a contribution to a class-based analysis of the problems and potential of humanity.

1. Semantically a matriarchy ("form of social organisation in which the mother is the governing head") cannot be egalitarian and I was unable to gather from the context which of these characteristics the writer regarded as more desirable.

2. I was under the impression that, as socialists advocating the abolition of the wages system we were not merely suspicious of "wages for housework" but hostile to such campaigns and had recently debated a group with the precise title.

3. It is, frankly, outrageous to claim that a fable which sidesteps an inconvenient reality by positing a biological impossibility (asexual reproduction) is "firmly rooted in material possibility". Such literary devices are perfectly valid to make a point but the article sheds very little light on what point is being made. It is clearly sterile to argue that if things weren't as they are they'd be different so we must assume some point is being made about female potential: I cannot but suspect that here we have the extremely dubious contention that there is something intrinsically female about the more positive aspects of humanity. In fact in the course of capitalism women have developed their potential for being every bit as destructive as men; real flesh-and-blood women (as opposed to fictional characters) have become active participants in military carnage, fervent spouters of superstitious nonsense from pulpits and avid consumers of pornographic displays - all activities which are not only profoundly negative but were once almost exclusively masculine. In other words, the prospect which is truly "rooted in material possibility" is that of the female of this species becoming as brutalised as the male. To say that "women should always be able to organise as women as well as with men" is to say nothing: unless working class women and men choose to organise together for the overthrow of the system which threatens to dehumanise us both, it seems to me far more likely that the negative trends will continue than that the utopian ideal will be realised.

John Usher, 

London

Reply:

1. Perhaps "matriarchy" ought logically to be the exact opposite of "patriarchy" and therefore incompatible with an egalitarian society, but this is not the way the concept has been used in anthropology. The 19th century pioneers of anthropology believed that the first human societies had been matriarchal in the sense of tracing descent through the female line. Engels took this up in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State arguing that originally society had been communistic as well as matrilinear and that the switch to descent through the male line (which he described as "the world-historic defeat of the female sex") was part of the same process that led to the replacement of egalitarian "primitive communism" by class-divided, state-rule society. In other words, in the socialist tradition matriarchy has been seen as a feature of the egalitarian, communistic conditions in which humans originally lived while patriarchy was the form the family took in the unequal, class societies which have followed. Although later anthropological research did not bear out a one-to-one link between matrilinear and non-property societies as some unequal property societies were found to be matrilinear, it remains a fact that societies where  women were not oppressed have existed.

2. It was to this past existence of societies where women were not oppressed that the article was referring when it said that the Utopias of writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin were "firmly rooted in material possibility". Obviously, this wasn't a reference to the mode of reproduction (without men) in Gilman's Herland but to the fact that societies in which women were the equals of men had existed and so could exist again. Gilman used the literary fiction of a long-established all-woman society, as a society in which literally every task was performed by women, to make the point that women were just as capable as men of being architects, engineers, scientists, decision-makers and the like. Socialists have never doubted this, but many people used to especially in 1915 when Herland was written.

3. The article did not say that Socialists advocate wages for housework, which is really a demand for bigger payments to be made to women by the capitalist state so as to make them less economically dependent on men, less of "a slave of a slave". Maybe it would be in the unlikely event of it being achieved (where's the capitalist state going to find the money to finance it when it's already cutting back on its existing social security payments?), but this would still leave women economically dependent - on the capitalist state instead of on a wage - or salary-earning man. Socialists want an end to the economic and social dependence of women on men, i.e. women's liberation, but the way to achieve this is to establish Socialism, a society of common ownership and production solely for use, not profit, where everyone - men, women, children - would have free access without money to what they require to satisfy their needs.

4. Nor did the article say that women are somehow better than men. What it did was to re-iterate Gilamn's elementary point that women are just as capable of running society as men, concluding with the additional socialist point that women have an important role to play in the movement to establish socialism and that in fact an all-male or male-dominated socialist revolution is a contradiction in terms. The Socialist Party has always said that the majority class must actively participate in their own emancipation, so, since half are women, how could this happen if women did not participate just as actively and as massively as men, with all that this implies about the relationship between men and women?

Editors.

Herland (1994)

From the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have always been fascinated by accounts of societies that are different from ours, whether they be real or imagined. They serve as a reminder that things need not be as they are in our world today and that our lives need not be one endless round of compromise with the grim and confusing reality that surrounds us. Women's Utopias such as Herland and the more recent Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy describe forms of social organization that historical and anthropological research has shown to be possible. They also respresent a development of the ideas of Marx and Engels but as is the case with much that women have to say, and perhaps because it is not expressed in the dry, pseudo-scientific style of political philosophers, these Utopian visions, firmly rooted in material possibility, are vastly underrated. Herland was written in 1915, twenty-five years after William Morris published his News from Nowhere. Both novels describe a world where private property and class privilege no longer exist. News from Nowhere however barely explores the role and status of women in its Utopia and, in failing to do so, throws little insight into a deeply-engrained power relationship of present-day society. As a consequence, it is limited in exploring how people can bring about social change. In that respect, Herland is a less comfortable read than News from Nowhere as it reminds us of how deeply crippled most of us are by social conditioning and how much there is to overcome in order to bring about the necessary fundamental changes in society if we are to survive on this planet. Fortunately, what could be profoundly depressing is leavened by sparkling wit, and the book is a really entertaining read. Personal is Political For the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the personal was also political and her own life and ideas were intimately connected. Like William Morris, she was familiar with the ideas of Marx and Engels and other prevailing political and economic theories of the time. She was involved in the American Socialist Movement and saw herself as a socialist-humanist. She always brought her own experiences to bear on her work and studied ideas in order to understand her own insecure and intensely unhappy early life and first marriage and to gain control of her own destiny. She had little time for the psychological leadership of experts and the detached, academic and so-called scientific approach to understanding human behaviour, in particular that of women. In Herland, she exposes the fallibility of the sociologist who makes assumptions about the society he is about to experience on the basis of observing a single fact. He notices some women climbing trees and deduces thereby that the inhabitants of the society he us about to involve himself in must be arboreal. In fact they are not, and all his scientific insight and his role as commentator on human behaviour is about to be rendered useless as he is gently drawn into ways of living and relating that are completely new to him. The author after coming close to losing her mind, herself rejected the authority of the psychiatrist who attempted to cure her depression by advising her to rest, to live as domestic a life as possible, to limit her intellectual life to two hours a day and to never touch pen, brush or pencil. Instead, she faced the fact that she was not happy in her marriage or in her role as a mother, left home and divorced her husband. He promptly married her best friend and the couple took on the care of Charlotte's child. Charlotte, from a position of great financial insecurity launched herself into a career as a writer. The three adults remained close friends for the rest of their lives but Charlotte was severely censured by the press for divorcing her husband amicably and for no apparent reason, for maintaining a warm relationship with his new wife and for, as the media saw it, abandoning her child. This very honest working out of relationships finds a different interpretation in Herland. The community of Herland is characterized by sisterly solidarity and friendship which is not destroyed even when the men appear. In their world it is also recognized that while every woman may at some point feel the urge to be a mother, not every woman is either interested in or suited to bringing up children and children are better off with those who are. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's experience as a woman under capitalism forced her to recognize that our society is not merely class divided but patriarchal in nature as well. For her, the subordination of women dehumanized half of the human race and retarded all human progress and this has important implications for how we organize for change. In order to make our society truly human, women need to regain power over their minds and bodies and challenge the centuries of dominance that men have become used to. This is the central theme of Herland. Unlike News from Nowhere, Herland is not a static Utopia that we arrive at after a period of social upheaval - it is a society that has spent generations perfecting itself and remains always open to change. It is both a strategy for change and a complete way of life. Amazon Jungle Herland is written in the style of a Boys' Own adventure story. Deep in the Amazon jungle, three amateur explorers, men of course, find their way into a world inhabited only by women. Instead of meeting with exciting adventures in which they can display their superior macho skills - one man even has notions of ending up King of all the women - they are gently disarmed of all their prejudices and pre-conceptions about women and two of them are re-educated into new ways of thinking and relating to women. This is altogether a much more painful and demanding experience. far from behaving like detached and culturally-superior observers of an alien culture as did many of the anthropologists of Charlotte's day, all three of the men become heavily involved in the lives of the Herlanders and learn to adjust to their ways. Herland is a matriarchal society. A matriarchy is not simply a refelction of a patriarchal society which is also hierarchical in nature. It is an egalitarian society, a sisterhood in which women's capacity to bear children is of central importance and held in high regard. The anthropologist Evelyn Reed in her book Woman's Evolution has shown that many of the earliest human societies are likely to have been matriarchal and such societies continue to exist - just about - to this day. There have been no men in Herland for centuries. This has given the women the much-needed personal and social space to recover their automony as women. Every woman needs that space for herself. Women should always be able to organize as women as well as with men. In Aboriginal society, individual members of a group might express their need for personal space by going on a walkabout. Men and women retained control over separate spaces for themselves as two distinct and autonomous groups. They often led much more separate lives than we understand in our society and Aboriginal women tend not to be impressed with women who are dependent on the views and approval of men. Biological Urge The women of Herland reproduce simply by responding to the urge to be a mother. This biological urge is the driving force behind all their creative activity. Indeed in the interests of population control, collectively agreed by the community, the women restrict themselves to one child each and channel their mother urge into other activities. They are not at the mercy of their childbearing capacity although the idea of abortion is abhorrent to them. In many of the matriarchal societies described by Evelyn Reed, it would appear that women had similar control over their fertility. They knew about contraceptive medicines and practised periods of abstention from sexual intercourse. It is possible that they had a better sense of their biological rhythms than we do and knew when they were most likely to be fertile. Travelers noted that women in some Native American communities only had three or four children and they were shocked to hear that women in our society sometimes had ten or more children. All the women of Herland are single mothers - like many lesbian mothers today, they are not dependent on a relationship with a man for their sexual pleasure or in order to become mothers. Unlike for most women in our society there is no tension between their responsibilities as mothers and fulfilling a socially-useful and challenging role in the community. This is because in matriarchal societies, child-rearing is a communal and public activity. No mother is separated from other members of the society with solitary responsibility for her children. The women of Herland have managed to fulfill their need for food, shelter and transport in ways that are technologically developed as well as ecologically-sustainable. As far as food production is concerned, they are gatherers and cultivators. But there are no farms on Herland and virtually no domesticated animals, apart from a few cats left over from a previous era. The idea of eating meat and drinking the milk of animals other than themselves strikes the women of Herland as a rather cruel and abhorrent idea. Instead, they live on the rich variety of fruits and nuts which they have gathered from the forest which surrounds their dwellings. The trees bear the marks of cultivation. Their branches are trained so as to make the fruits easily accessible and species have been bred so as to obtain a high yield. While Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision of food production might seem a little twee by comparison with real-life examples, it is not dissimilar from the way some forest-dwelling peoples use their environment even to this day. In fact, the destruction of the forests by large-scale capitalist development projects such as dams and mines has particular implications for the lives of women among indigenous forest dwelling communities around the world. For the women who used the forest as a source of food, fuel, as a hygienic place to relieve calls of nature and a place of spiritual retreat, it represented social and economic independence. The impact of capitalism on their lives has thrust them into dependence on the wage-slavery of the men in a matter of months in some instances. There are no schools in Herland but learning as an ongoing process is of central importance in the women's lives. They are all open-minded and critically receptive to new ideas and fail to understand how religious beliefs going back thousands of years continue to hold such a powerful grip on the minds of people in our society. They set out to teach the men about Herland by enquiring about the world they have come from. Teaching for them is about sharing ideas and experiences, a much more egalitarian process than we experience in our schools and colleges. They meet the most conservative and sexist views of the men with patience and respect and draw them gently away from their prejudices and preconceptions with questions and information that might open their minds to alternative ways of thinking. Having captured the three explorers, the women of Herland decide that it is in their interests to allow this contact with men to develop. Nevertheless, they continue to retain their material and intellectual independence. Three of the women form intimate relationships with the men. Two of the couples marry but retain independent living quarters. Their relationships, particularly that of Ellador who marries the former sociologist who is perhaps the most receptive to the women's culture without feeling either that he has to challenge it or lose his own cultural and sexual identity in the process, are not dogged by the possessiveness and insecurity that so dogs relationships in our society today. Instead, they have an easy-going friendship based on shared interests, a meeting of minds, mutual trust and pleasure in each other's company. As far as Ellador is concerned, sex does not figure very highly in the relationship. It is an aspect of our culture, which she says she has yet to understand but she treats their different sexual needs with honesty and sensitivity and her partner finds himself being drawn into a calm and and deeply-rewarding understanding such as he has never experienced with a woman before. Terry on the other hand who is the most macho of the three men attempts to impose his desires on his partner during a much more stormy relationship. Unlike in our society where rape within marriage and date rapes are only just beginning to be recognized as such, the whole community of Herland responds to this attempted rape and Terry is asked to leave with no hope of reconciliation with his partner. Even the other two men recognize that they have a responsibility to deal with this man who they liked at the beginning of the book and whose behaviour they tolerated as long long as it did not implicate their own wives, sisters and daughters. Continued Relevance Although it was written nearly eighty years ago, Herland continues to have relevance today. In News from Nowhere there is a chapter on "How the Change Came About". We read of much that is familiar, of workers organizations, of mass demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and much more. In Herland the author reminds us of the central role that women have to play in bringing about a revolution. We should bear in mind that during the period when Charlotte Perkins Gilman and William Morris were writing, women had already made an enormous contribution to the working-class movement. Yet that is barely acknowledged today. In the early days of the trade union movement, their role as workers as dependent on a wage as the men was not recognized by those who advocated the family wage as opposed to equal pay. The enormous amount of unpaid work that women do continues to remain largely unrecognized and the women who do it largely unorganized. Any efforts to organize by such groups of women such as the wages for housework campaign is viewed with suspicion even by many of the male-dominated organizations on the left. The women who so staunchly supported the Miners' strike of 1984 were denied membership of the NUM. These are just a few symptoms of the deep-rooted sexism in our society that continues to exclude women from political action by failing to recognize the particular ways in which capitalism affects their lives. Herland demonstrates how class conscious women in full control of their minds and their bodies can organize themselves in peaceful co-operation and overcome this sexism and how they must play an important role in bringing about and maintaining the revolution. Men, deprived of their patriarchal role, will find for themselves a much more meaningful existence in the process. Kerima Mohideen The article elicited the following response in a later issue of the Socialist Standard.