Becoming a socialist (1984)

From the August 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

A baby has been defined as a loud noise at one end and little sense of responsibility at the other. However that may be, it is certain that, give or take the odd precocity, the newly-born are not customarily noted for political and economic understanding. Were it otherwise, the year 1929—that of the Wall Street crash—might have made a sight more of an impression on me that, in fact, it did. As it turned out, the only crash that assailed my infant ears was that of the decaying ceiling of the third-floor back room in the borough of Lewisham, which was to be my home for the first few years of my life. (I believe this inelegant apartment later received the undiscriminating attentions of Adolf Hitler, who, it has to be admitted, knew a thing or two about slum-clearance.)

Suffice it to say, then, that my earliest years were, ceiling notwithstanding, as relatively cushioned as caring, if impoverished, parents could make them. (My father, who had suffered serious injuries at Ypres in 1914, was, in recognition of his services to his country, unemployed.) However, as hitherto indicated, my innocence in all these matters was absolute. And this, surely, is the point. We are, each of us, born into a world not of our own choosing. The conditions into which we are thus involuntarily thrust depend not, then, on ourselves (how can they?) or on some mystical preordination, but rather on the material circumstances of our parents and their immediate social condition. At birth a prince is as clean a slate as a pauper. Sooner or later, however, it is the pauper who is the more likely to start asking the awkward questions. So it was with me.

Well, to be strictly accurate, it was my father who put the questions and I was expected to struggle for the answers. For example, he would emerge from behind a cloud of cheap tobacco smoke to ask: "Why is it, do you suppose, that whereas the shoe-shops are bursting with children's shoes, there are thousands of children running about in the streets of London barefoot or ill-shod?" (The same type of question could be asked in connection with the Common Market food surpluses in our own times.) Anyway, I soon became familiar with the idea of capitalism as a generator of crises — the boom/slump cycle. Then there was gold: we had a lot of fun with this one. Not that we possessed any ourselves apart from my mother's wedding ring. But at least I early understood the difference between intrinsic and commodity value. For while gold is rustless, conducts heat and electricity, fills (some) teeth, and can be used to decorate books, fingers and religious houses, these qualities and uses can hardly account for its current (15 June 1984) mark-up of three hundred and seventy-five dollars an ounce. Or for the fact that, having been quarried and mined from the earth at the expense of colossal human hardship it is promptly buried again in places like Fort Knox and the Bank of England. Such idiocies serve to remind us of the fundamentally irrational nature of the capitalist system. No wonder that the logic of socialism is such anathema to its—capitalism's—practitioners.

So where did this paternal tutelage take me? Well, er, the Labour Party, would you believe it? Anyway, the least said the better, I think! A few years and much frustration later saw me out of the "broad church" charade and, er, into the Communist Party. Despite what I found to be a lack of trust within the Party, and notwithstanding, among many other anomalies, what I then interpreted as an incomprehensible backsliding which went under the euphemistic title of "Eurocommunism", I stuck it out with the CPGB. Until, that is, I made the acquaintance of an old anarchist with whom I played a few games of chess. I quickly discovered that my contempt for, and rejection of, the capitalist system was more than matched by his own. One evening he handed me some old leaflets and pamphlets, together with some back numbers of the Socialist Standard. My heart sank! As if I hadn't choked on enough political "literature" in my time!

Eventually I got round to reading some of it. At first I treated it as I might have done a typical Labour Party leaflet. I gradually came to realise, however, and almost unconsciously, that this was different. Nobody was trying to con me with hyperbole or waffle or vague promises impossible of fulfillment. I was getting socialism straight. It worked on me like a purgative. The sheer futility of labourism; the vicious obscenities of Soviet-style capitalism; all this was washed out of my system once and for all. Hitherto I had read quite widely: Marx, of course, and Engels; Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists; Zola's Germinal; the poetry of Shelley (only latterly his political prose writings) and Wilfred Owen. I had dipped into William Morris, Jack London and George Orwell.

All I needed, it is now clear to me, was a corrective — a catalyst. A much read, tea-stained fistful of pamphlets had provided it. Waters muddied by the empty platitudes of pseudo-socialists and phoney "communists" rapidly cleared. There remains a great deal to learn but at least it is now possible to build on a firm foundation. However, I have to confess that, had it not been for my own obstinacy, I could have provided myself with this foundation long ago — before I joined Attlee's Labour Party, in fact.

That same father I have spoken of, long since dead, I'm afraid, occasionally referred to the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its message. He had evidently heard some of the Party's speakers as they threw out their challenging and abrasive truths from their (at the time, more numerous) open-air platforms in London. "These people" he would say "are the real socialists in this country." Well, I could hardly be expected to take for gospel everything the old boy told me, could I?

Richard Cooper

LA Law or class war? (1992)

From the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Riots and anger on the streets of LA. What ignited the flame? The frustration of poverty. In the USA today one in five families live below the official poverty line; the majority of these are non-white. The American Constitution claims that all men are born equal but in 1992 black workers stand more chance of being in prison than in college. In Washington DC 42 per cent of blacks between the ages 18 and 35 are either in prison or on parole. In Harlem, New York City, the life expectancy of a black male is lower than in Third World Bangladesh.

The riots have added fuel to various spurious theories about violence in society. White socio-biologists, wedded to outdated notions of human nature as determinants of anti-social behaviour, have argued that rioters are over-endowed with violent genes. For example, Mark and Ervin Violence and the Brain published with the support of the US Law Enforcement Assisance Agency argue that:

The kind of violent behaviour related to brain malfunction may have its origins in the environment, but once the brain structure has been permanently affected the violent behaviour can no longer be modified by manipulating psychological or social influences.

 Perhaps the authors of this crass rationalisation can explain why such violent brain cells seem to evolve amongst poor unemployed hopeless wage slaves and not amongst the rich people, both black and white, in Beverly Hills, Greenwich Village or Knightsbridge.

The long-held racist ideology of the USA is a reflexion of the fact that chattel slavery ended in the 1860s but that wage slavery persists in the 1990s. The brutality of the plantation owner has given way to the profit-grabbing claim to inherent superiority by the capitalist owners and controllers of the means of wealth production and distribution. Capitalism does not have inequality and divisiveness as an accidental and eradicable feature. Inequality and division are endemic to all class societies.

Some black political activists have seen the division in American society in terms of race or skin colour rather than class and in doing so they are avoiding the root cause. As early as 1865 a black convention in Charleston formulated an "Address to the White Inhabitants of the State of South Carolina" which called for an elusive equality amongst all men:

We simply ask that we shall be recognised as men; that there be no obstruction placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white men shall govern black men; that we have the right of trial by jury of our peers; that schools be established for the education of coloured children as well as white; and that the advantages of both colours shall, in this respect, be equal; that no impediment be put in the way of our acquiring homesteads for ourselves and our people; that, in short, we shall be dealt with as others are—in equity and justice.

This statement assumes that there is one human race rather than that society is divided into antagonistic interests on the basis of property possession. In 1965 the Watts riots in Los Angeles shattered the self-deception of American ideologists who thought that they lived in a land of equality where the wretchedly impoverished would never embarrass them by resisting publicly. Vincent Harding describes the Watts riots:

For five days fighting went on; blacks attacked police, firemen, white stores—but no white civilians. The flames from dozens of fires lighted the nighttime sky; bullets, tear gas shells, screaming sirens, shouting of men and women poured out a cascade of sounds closely approximating those of battlefields and it was. When police and 13,000 national guardsmen finally quelled the uprising 34 persons were dead, more than 1000 wounded and nearly $40 million of property had been destroyed.  (The Other American Revolution).

The then President, Lyndon B. Johnson, responded to the display of working class indignation by making pious reformist noises about The Great Society which would be created out of so-called equal rights legislation. The exhibition of police and court racism in LA is proof that the Great Society was a fiction utterly unrealisable within a system which creates economic waste and an environment unfit for human habitation.

The Bush government will not learn from the LA riots nor can it learn except how to contain its subjects more successfully. The rioters will have gained little from the riots but for some looted cheap goods and a sense of being noticed. And the results of the riots are more working class wounds; the enmity of wage slaves against wage slaves, many left dead. Workers will get nowhere fighting each other and calling for capitalist justice. What we must do is unite anger with understanding and turn these upon the real enemy: those who rob us of the fruits of our labour.

Steve Coleman  

Reminiscences of an old member (part 2) (1964)

From the December 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part 1 can be read here.

When the 1914-1918 war broke out I was put in an internment camp. The long confinement at least offered opportunities for further enlightenment and discussion on politics. Lectures and meetings were held and prisoners were also free to debate subjects in all kinds of private circles, language classes, etc. Soon groups particularly interested in Socialism were regularly gathering around our platform. The discussion became particularly lively when Comrade Neumann, also an active member of the S.P.G.B. (translator of Kautzky's Erfurter programme) later joined the army of internees. Apart from lectures, a very successful May Day meeting was held with Neumann as the principal speaker. Among the many adherents to the Socialist case were Mundl, Guilke, Bankofsky, who all joined the S.P.G.B. after their release. With others, after I had been deported, I kept in correspondence from the Continent for many years. Most of them have long since died.

If there was comparative freedom to propagate revolutionary socialism on the Continent for a few years after the first war, it became rapidly more risky with the advent of Hitler. Even here, in Austria, the struggle for power between the two big electoral machines, had become so intense and bitter that it led to that terrible butchery on the Vienna Ringstrasse in July 1927, when nearly a hundred demonstrators were shot dead by Austrian police and army—and to other innumerable victims. Then in February 1934 Dollfuss and the Heimwehr smashed the Social Democratic Party in another, far greater, bloodbath. In 1935 Dollfuss was murdered and in 1938 Austria was incorporated in the German Reich. Then came the Second World War and the four power military occupation, lasting till 1956.

Even what little the few of us did, or rather could do, was not without peril, especially as personally I had, of course, not always kept my socialist light under a bushel before the years that were so fatal for Austrian, German, Italian and Spanish democracy. In Vienna alone more than 1,500 persons were executed by the Nazis for political reasons.

I may be allowed to repeat here what I wrote in a letter to the S.P.G.B.'s International Secretary:

"While the very democratic British government takes the credit for my one and only victimisation for political reasons (they repatriated me to the Continent against my will in 1919 after four years internment as alien-enemy and undesirable subject) the family (wife, mother-in-law and two boys) survived unmolested the fascist onslaught on democracy in the civil war in Austria in 1934, the Anschluss of Hitler in 1938, and the second world war. As a socialist I never lifted a finger in support of those criminal capitalist operations. Though I could not, of course, after the 1934 upheaval continue socialist propaganda (as I had done in England, especially in the Internment camp) and had, until the departure of the occupation troops in 1956, to keep underground, I am proud to share with other comrades the merit of never having allowed the socialist light to be extinguished. My radical politics were known (if not shared) by the colleagues at the office where I worked and in wider circles, so that a really anxious time began for us in Vienna in 1934; especially for my wife, who had never forgotten our fate at the end of the first war. But I was lucky—nobody ever betrayed me or played me a dirty trick, although practically everybody who knew me and mostly appeared to agree with my criticism of things, turned out to have actually been or had become Nazi."

Considering the very troublous times we lived through, we did relatively well and had many good opportunities with jobs here, traveling extensively in Europe. My son Lawrence returned to London before Hitler came; he was greatly helped by the comrades and soon joined the Party, in which he is heart and soul.

My family and I had to leave my job in London at the outbreak of the 1914 war. After my internment in 1915 and repatriation at the end of the war, my London employers offered me a job at one of their enterprises in the Rheinland, with accommodation for my family near the works. If we left the firm and the Rheinland three years later for Austria, it was only to fill a contract I had previously made with the Austrian Krupp Metalworks Berndorf, where we stayed for four years. Our late comrade Fitzgerald visited us there in 1926 and again in 1928. By that time we had moved to Vienna, where Fitzgerald saw me at my final job, with the Austrian Official Tourist Office. Both his visits were fruitful for Socialist propaganda, as arrangements were made for distributing the Socialist Standard in quite a number of bookshops in Vienna. A large number of the pamphlet Socialism and Religion was also distributed at "language courses" I held at the Krupp works. I am sorry that not a single copy of that pamphlet is left in my hands now. Sorry also that interest in Socialism could not easily be revived after the dark years that followed, and that a good number of comrades I had gathered around me dropped out. But new contacts have now been made with a group of dissenters from the big S.P.A. the Bund Demokratischer Sozialisten, which issues a monthly typed paper called the Wiener Freies Wort. Direct contact with the S.P.G.B.'s Overseas Contact Secretary has long been established and it is  our ambition to make the S.P.A. dissenters adopt the Declaration of Principles and eventually to make it a true revolutionary companion party. There is real hope for the future, but we must not lose patience with those  undoubtedly earnest workers. A challenging sixteen page pamphlet and Election Manifesto is being distributed. It contains, of course, the Declaration of Principles.

Has the world changed since I set out? In some respects it certainly has. As I have mentioned before, in 1902 there was no thought or fear of war that was to come; you could travel across Europe without passports, you could work in any country without labour permits. In all my wanderings in Germany, Switzerland, France and England, the first time I ever had to report my presence to a police office was in London at the outbreak of the first war. What a change indeed has come over all this! Today people are hedged in everywhere by frontiers, barriers and police guards, exacting and scrutinizing your personal documents. Some frontiers, made more impassible by barbed wire, often electrically charged, and hidden bombs, run across big cities like Jerusalem, Berlin, and others. There is one thing that has not changed in well over a hundred years, one thing that has so far survived all crises and upheavals, and dozens of major capitalist wars. This one unchanged feature is the fundamental status of the working class of the world, as the disinherited wage slaves of the capitalist class.

R. Frank

Cooking the Books: Labour is All Capitalist Now (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his column in the (London) Times (24 January) former Blair speech-writer Philip Collins recounted how he had met a ‘nameless plutocrat’ in Davos this year who had told him that Labour, despite its protestations to the contrary, was anti-business and that Miliband was indulging in ‘intellectual Marxism’. How ungrateful and how weird is the idea some people have of Marxism.

Collins commented:

‘Mr Miliband does think Marx is a better prophet of capitalism than those who cannot see beyond their own profits. Quite right too. Business people believe in competition just so long as they are benefiting from it. They soon realise competition means somebody else might take their winnings. Echoing Adam Smith on the conspiracies that businessmen practised against the public, Marx pointed out capitalism’s inexorable tendency towards monopoly. Competition, in other words, producers its own grave-diggers.’

This is alright, except that Marx didn’t see all industries as necessarily ending up as a monopoly. He wrote rather of the concentration of production in bigger and bigger productive units and of the centralisation of the control of these by a ‘constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital’ (Capital, volume 1, chapter 32 on ‘The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation). For him, this was an expression of the fact that production had already become ‘socialised’, operated by co-operative labour of the working class as a whole. He envisaged that eventually the working class would organise to bring ownership and control into line with productive reality and ‘expropriate the expropriators,’ ushering in a socialist society based on the common ownership of land and industry with production directly for use not profit. This hasn’t happened but ‘intellectual Marxism’ still has to see this as being the future for humanity.

Labour’s answer to monopoly is not this (of course). It’s more competition. Miliband’s ambition, according to Collins, is to ‘reform capitalism’. Or, as shadow business Chuka Umunna told the Financial Times (16 January):

‘We are all capitalists now. The question is, what sort of capitalism do we want? We embrace free markets but we want competitive and free markets and more responsible capitalism.’

This is the opposite of what socialists want. Labour wants to mend capitalism; we want to end it.

Labour is not anti-capitalist or anti-business at all. Most ‘nameless plutocrats’ and ‘magnates of capital’ will know this perfectly well, but this hasn’t prevented them, and their supporters in the Tory party (the party of the rich, as most people recognise), raising a howl of protest at a rather innocuous Labour promise to restore the 50 percent rate of tax on that part of anyone’s income over £150,000 a year.

There is nothing anti-business about this as it is a tax on personal income whereas the aim of capitalist production is to extract and accumulate profits as more capital. It is not to provide a privileged income for capitalists, though of course it does do this. The ‘entrepreneurs’ (as capitalists prefer to call themselves these days) who London Evening Standard columnist Richard Godwin said he had met were behaving more capitalistically:

‘When they started their businesses, they had neither the means nor the inclination to withdraw a six-figure salary for themselves. They preferred to reinvest’ (29 January).

But the plutocrats and magnates are people and they like their privileged income and the lifestyle it enables them to enjoy. In complaining about an increase in their income tax they are not being pro-business. They are being pro-themselves. As Godwin put it, ‘That’s not entrepreneurship – it’s self-interest.’

Reminiscences of an old member (1964)

From the November 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

To escape from the narrow and limited conditions of existence in my home town in northern Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia), where I was apprenticed for three years in a textile factory's office and received private English lessons, I left home in 1902 for a bigger industrial centre in Germany. I worked in Plauen (Saxony) famous for its lace industry, and found excellent contacts there with English, French and American students working and learning in the factories.

As one could in those days travel right across the whole European Continent without let or hindrance, without passports or labour permits, I went a year later to Switzerland, to Lyon in France and eventually to Paris, where I worked during 1904 and 1905. One of the great advantages of my stay in Paris was that I was able to get certified at the Austro-Hungarian Embassy as exempt from military service.

Returning to Austria in 1905, I worked in Vienna for four years as foreign correspondent with a large export firm, and in 1909 went to try my luck in England. After a three week search, I found a job in an important commercial concern in London, where I soon felt securely enough established to get married. Before I made that plunge I made another, to join the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1910. I was a member till 1919 and have kept in happy and close contact to the present day, with the exception of the second world war years. It has been my great ambition from the very day I set foot on the Continent again to found here a companion Socialist organisation. If greater success has so far been denied us, the stalwarts of the SPGB will, in view of their sixty years' experience, readily understand our difficulties.

My contact with Socialism really dates back to the turn of the Century when, in 1898, my father had already taken me to a Sunday afternoon meeting of the Social Democratic Party, going in our home town under the name of Lichstrahl (Sunbeam). Teenager as I still was, I hardly knew what they were talking about. I remember that evening lectures on Darwin and Marx were often advertised in the local party press, but my mind at that time was bent on my job, on learning English, going dancing, enjoying cycling and skating, etc. No political contact worth mentioning was made afterwards in Germany or in France. In Vienna from 1905 to 1909 contact with people interested in Socialism had been quite by accident, not by design. Occasional talks with party members there were not stimulating. I went to "Socialist" meetings but their propaganda also was far from arousing sufficient interest even to envisage joining the movement. It is then remarkable that within a few months of my arrival in London, my views and interest in social affairs should have undergone so swift and radical a change that by 1910 I felt impelled to join the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Living near Finsbury Park, I strolled on one of the first Sunday mornings over to where public meetings were in progress. My particular attention fell on the political platforms—the Labour Party, Social Democratic Federation, Christian Commonwealth, etc. I found the speakers lustily criticising and attacking each others' policies for which I had at first little understanding. My interest had, however, been so deeply aroused that I went again in the afternoon, when I discovered an additional platform with the name SPGB. No sooner  had a speaker mounted the platform than the bulk of the audience of most of the other speakers rushed over. Listening attentively, I was surprised to hear the speaker showing up not just one or the other opponent, but the lot of them for misleading and confusing the people on vital issues concerning their lives. In my bewilderment, and anxious to better understand, I bought all the papers I could get hold of—Labour Leader, Justice, Christian Commonwealth, and the Socialist Standard. At home I began studying them all, and on the following Sunday I was early around the platform of the SPGB again. Much wiser, I now enjoyed even more what the speaker out for. I also go to know his name—it was Anderson—and it was evident that the impact of what this speaker had to say, in his rare and convincing way, was as decisive on many listeners as it was on me. I heard other speakers from that platform on many following Sundays, with the result, as I have already mentioned, that I applied for membership of the party they represented, and was enrolled in the Islington branch.

At Head Office I joined a class on economics with Comrade F. C. Watts as teacher. I met there young comrade Gilmac, who remains my life-long friend to this day. Soon I knew a great number of equally inestimable and unforgettable comrades, among them Fitzgerald, Adolf Kohn, Jacobs, Jacomb. Gostick and wife, Sandy Pearson.

Anderson sometimes came to my home. I remember a Christmas party my wife gave to some children, including Anderson's. At the end of the party Anderson (an inveterate teetotaller) thanked us very much, especially for the "wonderful lemonade"—the "best he had ever drunk in his life." My wife afterwards smilingly confessed to me that, of course, she had mixed some spirit with it, as she invariably did.

Anderson was a born speaker and an eminently able man, invaluable for the only cause that is worthy of the fervour and devotion of such a rare and unforgettable character. He was evidently happy on the platform and excelled in ready and witty answers to questioners. "What about the missing link?" somebody once shouted from the audience. "The missing link," promptly retorted Anderson, "is not far away."

Becoming a Socialist meant that I rapidly changed my whole outlook and attitude on such questions as "earning your living" by a "fair day's work for a fair day's wage," on "social justice," ethical and moral codes, religion, etc. What I had been taught about history had to go by the board, to be irremediably replaced by the Materialist Conception—the scientific theory of the evolution of society. Words like value, price, the source of interest and profit, and the true role of money and capital; why wealth was produced for sale at a profit instead for the sole purpose of satisfying human wants and desires, etc.—things I had never explained at school—all received thorough attention. The knock-out blow was delivered to falsehoods and fallacies. And all this, be it noted, before the two world wars, during which churchmen were doing overtime blessing the guns and the fratricide.

(To be concluded)

R. Frank

The YCL's Land of Hope and Glory (1967)

From the June 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

One thing about the Young "Communist" League: no one can accuse them of being internationalists. Time was, of course, when—like their CP senior—they were slavish Kremlinites. Today their old Russian nationalism has given way to a more respectable British nationalism.

"It is plain to see that Britain, with an outdated way of life, no longer stands among the foremost nations of the world", they lament, adding, Wilson-like: "We want to change the whole way the country is run, to get Britain out of the rut and moving forward." (The Trend—Communism).

Not so long ago, discussion with members of the "Communist" Party or Young "Communist" League produced, from their side, little more than naive eulogies of the Russian workers' paradise. Today, any mention of Russian state capitalism on our part usually gets the embarrassed rejoinder: "We'll build British socialism so as to make the Russians envious", or some such disclaimer. It has become increasingly difficult for any well-informed person to hold that the Soviet system is fundamentally different from the West: a more plausible line is to claim that here and there they can plan things a bit more efficiently. Not that we want to accuse the YCL of being well-informed, either. But the spectacle of the world's two biggest "socialist" states rattling sabres at each other with jingoistic ferocity should be enough to shake the most paranoid of the Moscow flock.

Naturally the YCLers want the best of all worlds: the Romantic legend of the barricades and red banners, plus an ultra-modern teenage image—and of course, dear old Britain. Their horrible mixture of trendy imbecility, starry-eyed echoes of revolution, and patriotism, is summed up in passage of lyrical splendour like

The old-fashioned way our country is run is turning Britain into a backward-facing country; in the past we have see Conservative and Liberal governments; these are old parties with old ideas; they have failed to make Britain a country for all people, not just the rich. Now we have a Labour government which could change Britain, but which is following the old out-dated ideas. We want to change Britain into a Britain for everybody. (Who is Wrong—Youth or Britain?)

They do talk a lot about "socialism". They do use Marxist terminology. They do draw attention to many of the abuses of capitalism. (What capitalist party doesn't?) And they do insist, at least verbally, on making radical changes in the structure of society. "We Communists make no secret of our aims," they state—a ludicrous near-quote from the 1847 Manifesto. To some extent this is true. Through the fog of image-building phrases it is possible to interpret broadly what the YCL wants. What is it?

First of all, as we have pointed out, they are good patriots. Secondly, they are full of advice about how to run capitalism: "U.S. Hands Off Vietnam," "Jobs Not Bombs" etc. They are bold reformists, unaware that it is impossible to run capitalism in the interests of its wage-slaves.

They will be quick to point out that these are only "immediate demands." What they're ultimately after is "socialism." But words are cheap. What do they mean by this? There can be no doubt about this. They persist in referring to Russia's allies as "the socialist countries." They are still firmly committed to support a type of society basically like that in Russia. But they also give a description of "a socialist Britain": a list of reforms including cheaper rents, cheaper transport, ending unemployment, shorter working hours, equal pay for women, more sports and arts facilities, "democracy in industry," cheaper holidays, and "a good pension." Most of these are advocated by every capitalist party, and none of them touches the basis of capitalism. Of course, they are all to be welcomed if we can get them (with the possible exception of  "democracy in industry," which if Russia is anything to go by means castration of the unions). But they do not affect the root cause of most human misery, which is the system of production for profit.

There are two items missed out of the above summary of the YCL's "socialist Britain," because they are worth examining more closely:

"You go to work . . . to a factory that used to be owned by Fords. But that was in the past. It's against the law now to make money out of others' work. Ford's belongs to the people who work there and so do the profits of course.
. . . but would you be free? Well, if you mean are there other political parties, yes there are. Mind you, there no millionaires to back the Tory party." 

Obviously the YCL has the idea that it is possible to look at society and just eliminate its undesirable features piecemeal. It is not. There are some aspects of society which entail certain consequences. For instance, if there is production for sales at a profit, there are bound to be great inequality of wealth, as the example of Russia has shown. Lenin apparently sincerely thought his government could introduce equal wages for everybody, but the economic laws of capitalism dictated that there should be wide differentials. There are millionaires in Russia, after 50 years of "socialist" rule. Why? And would Britain, if the "Communists" came to power, allow them to do what they are unable to do in Russia or Eastern Europe?

At least the YCL doesn't want to take away the measure of political democracy we have—but why don't they draw the logical conclusion and denounce its absence in Russia?

The YCL is currently selling copies of "a great, new, top quality, hand screen-printed poster of an original lithographic drawing of Karl Marx."

A father-figure for the bedroom wall isn't good enough. If the YCLers claim to be Marxists they ought to read Marx, and try it without the spectacles of Lenin or Emile Burns. They might them wonder why Marx put such emphasis on his "revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wages system!'" Or why he stressed that the existence of the state was a sure sign of class coercion. Pondering questions like these would lead unbigoted members of the YCL to see through the pseudo-revolutionary catchphrases of the "Communist" Party to the the reformist futility these shoddy words conceal.

STEELE

The New Yorker discovers Marx (1998)

From the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

One hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the New Yorker has discovered that "Marx's version of free enterprise also chimes with the views of many contemporary businessmen, who would rather be flogged than labelled Marxist".

John Cassidy's 5,000-word essay "The Return of Karl Marx" in the October 27 issue of this magazine from the bastion of American capitalism does not include Marx's view of a future world based on common ownership. Nor does it support his labour theory of value. It is however amazingly laudatory when dealing with Marx's analysis of how capitalist accumulation operates. Cassidy quotes one Wall Street organiser of stock issues as saying: "The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right . . . I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism."

At first Cassidy was astonished at that claim and recalled that he had studied economics with his financial friend at Oxford in the early eighties when their teacher had taught them to agree with Keynes that Marx's economic theories were "complicated hocus pocus". He decided to re-examine Marx's writings and found himself agreeing with his Wall Street friend.

After sneering at Marx's writing style he goes on to heap praise on his analysis of capitalism:

"When he wasn't driving the reader to distraction, he wrote rivetting passages about globalizaion, inequality, political corruption, monopolization, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence--issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realising that they are walking in Marx's footsteps."

Cassidy is unstinting in his praise for Marx's materialist conception of history:

"Indeed, as Sir John Hicks, a Nobel Prize-winning British economist, noted in 1969, when it comes to theories of history Karl Marx still has the field pretty much to himself. It is, Hicks wrote; 'extraordinary that one hundred years after Das Kapital . . . so little else should have emerged'."

Globalisation

On the growth of global markets Cassidy again praises Marx. "Globalization is the buzzword of the late twentieth century, on the lips of everybody from Jiang Zemin to Tony Blair, but Marx predicted most of its ramifications a hundred and fifty years ago. Capitalism is now well on its way to transforming the world into a single market, with the nations of Europe, Asia, and the Americas evolving into three rival trading blocs within that market."

While criticising Marx's view of the struggle between worker and capitalist as "too rigid", Cassidy provides some startling figures about ownership in the USA in modern times. "Between 1980 and 1996, the share of total household income going to the richest five percent of the families in the country increased from 15.3 percent to 20.3 percent, while the share of the income going to the poorest sixty percent of families fell from 34.2 percent to 30 percent." Even more to the point he writes: "According to Edward Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University, half of all financial assets in the country are owned by the richest one percent of the population, and more than three-quarters of them are owned by the richest ten percent."

In discussing the role of the unemployed in keeping down wages, Cassidy is in no doubt that Marx got that right too. "Marx believed that wages were held down by the presence of a 'reserve army' of unemployed workers who attempt to underbid the employed. Reduce the ranks of this army, he said, and wages would rise--just as they have started to do in the last year."

The role of the state

This remarkable essay ends with the writer discussing the relationship of politics to ownership. "Perhaps the most enduring elements of Marx's work is his discussion of where power lies in a capitalist society . . . Marx, of course delighted in declaring that politicians merely carry water for their corporate paymasters. 'The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie,' he wrote in the 'Manifesto', and he later singled out American politicians saying they had been 'subordinated' to 'bourgeois production' since the days of George Washington. The sight of a President granting shady businessmen access to the White House in return for campaign contributions would have shocked him not at all."

For socialists reading any praise for the works of Karl Marx in such a supporter of American capitalism as the New Yorker magazine is astonishing. It shows that once an enquirer frees himself of the prejudices of orthodox thinking the only way to understand how world capitalism is developing is from the standpoint of Marx's materialist conception of history.

With a little more application Cassidy may even rid himself of the orthodox nonsense that he at present embraces; namely "supply and demand curves, production functions and game theory", and realise that Marx's labour theory of value is the view that best explains production, exploitation and surplus value.

But let's not look for too much. We still relish his conclusion that "despite his errors, he was a man for whom our economic system held few surprises. His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures."

Richard Donnelly

Five myths about class (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class is determined by how you speak, how you dress or where you live.

Class is not a subjective concept, but is determined by the objective relationship of a n individual to the ownership and control of the means of producing and distributing wealth (the factories, mines, offices, docks and so on). In Britain, over half of all wealth is owned by the richest ten per cent and top one per cent own more wealth than the poorest eighty per cent. The working class produce all wealth and the capitalist class, who own the productive and distributive apparatus, receive the profits which result from production.

There are three classes: Upper, Middle and Working

Sociologists invent class labels to fit their own images of society. There are in fact only two classes in society: workers (about ninety per cent) and capitalists (about ten per cent). The characteristic of a worker is that he or she owns virtually nothing but an ability to work (labour power). A capitalist owns sufficient capital to have no need to sell his or her labour power for a wage or a salary. If you can't live without seeking employment, you're a wage slave, no matter what class you claim to be in.

Class used to be important, but these days it's irrelevant.

Any worker who thinks that class is irrelevant should try living the life of a capitalist - he or she will soon discover the extent to which class determines lifestyle. The capitalist is free to exist as a social parasite, living in luxury on the labour of others. Being in the working class guarantees a life of social insecurity; if it is not profitable to hire you the boss will soon fire you.

Under Labour governments, class differences diminish.

Between 1974 and 1976 the richest one per cent increased their concentration of wealth ownership. This under a Labour government pledged to redistribute wealth. (That was one promise they kept.)

Socialists advocate class hatred.

Socialists are opposed to capitalism, not to specific capitalists - some capitalists are bastards, others may be "jolly decent chaps". It is the capitalist class whose interests are antagonistic to those of the working class. The workers must dispossess the capitalists, and to this end the Socialist Party of Great Britain (and our companion parties) call upon workers of the world to join our movement. Should capitalists wish to join, they may do so if they are principled advocates of the working class interest. Should any capitalist object to what we say, too bad.

Steve Coleman

Questions Answered - and Asked (1998)

From the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are often asked about how socialism would deal with certain situations that might arise in that society. What about anti-social behaviour, or people who refused to work? How would we allocate genuinely scarce resources? And so on.

Because our definition of socialism is so different from that used by some opponents and those who would also claim to be socialist, it requires a leap in imagination to get one's head round what it will involve. Socialism will not be about equal wages, equal sharing, state control or world government. Nor will its democratic system involve systematic physical coercion, though, in social relations perhaps some form of moral or emotional persuasion, of a non-hierarchical nature, might be needed occasionally. There is often an assumption underlying the questions put to us that there will be some sort of hierarchy who will lay down the law on what and what not to do.

Socialists can deal with general questions of, say, how production and distribution would be carried on. (Readers are directed to our pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative for an outline of this.) But then we get queries about one-off and awkward situations that might arise. Of course we can't always give clear-cut answers to these, nor is it our responsibility to do so. People in that society will have to deal with such situations by using then existing institutions and mechanisms (including emergency and contingency plans) or by introducing new ones to deal with problems when they arise or are anticipated.

The belief behind some of the questions put to us is that members of the Socialist Party and its companion parties, or their successors at the time of the introduction of world socialism (and it has to be world-wide, because it will be replacing the world-wide capitalist system), will have (or claim to have) some sort of collective wisdom which they can call upon to deal with any and all situations, and if they don't then the whole thing will collapse like a house of cards. This is not so. Our contention is that socialism will be established not only when a majority understand and want it, but that there will also have been prior lengthy discussion among members of the working class, who after all are the people that actually run the world today, on how it will be administered and organised.

Socialists came to the conclusion a long time ago that capitalism cannot work in the interest of the working-class majority. That majority, as we said, today runs society from top to bottom, but not for their own benefit, and do so under artificially difficult, dangerous and needlessly complex conditions. Socialism will entail those same people running the world in their own interest, in a benign and much simplified environment. If you agree with all this, then it incumbent upon you to make the effort to bring it about.

What would you propose?

Perhaps it's time socialists started asking the questions. After all, there are many of you out there-people with the relevant scientific knowledge, technical skills and organisational abilities-who are able to offer suggestions on how we can deal with the problems that will inevitably occur. For instance, how to go about setting up a production unit, firm, enterprise, endeavour-call it what you may-to deal with a particular need. In capitalism accountants are brought in to do a costing, involving how much wages it will involve, what is the effective (i.e. ability to pay) demand for the product, and how much raw materials etc. are needed and if their calculations predict a profit then, subject to any local restrictions, the work usually goes ahead. In socialism it will be rather different. It will have to be decided by those appointed to do so whether the production is really necessary. Is there sufficient demand? (Real demand-not can we pay for it.) This could be carried out by some form of consumer-as opposed to market research. How much raw material-in amount not cost-will be required? How much labour will be needed to work on the raw materials or build a factory? What, if any, will be harmful to the environment? If it seems that the amount of resources required will outweigh any immediate general benefits that might accrue, it may be decided to abandon the scheme unless some overriding reason (such as health, safety or some long-term consideration is involved) dictates otherwise.

No-one can say that wrong decisions won't be made-that would be foolish-but we can be certain that any mistakes made won't be in the pursuit of profit

We need your help, not just in terms of increasing our membership, though we welcome that, but also for developing and expanding ideas on how the new society will be organised. If socialism has to wait until everyone has their questions answered in the minutest detail, then we will never achieve it. Now is the time to speed up that process by involving yourselves in the technical and theoretical work that needs to be done.

Dealing with any anti-social behaviour that might occur will take on an entirely different dimension from that pertaining today. First of all, property crimes will have disappeared. So what are we left with? Domestic crime and irrational behaviour. The first are usually the result of people living in intolerable conditions from which, for economic reasons, they are unable to walk away. The second are caused by various mental conditions, and one would assume that these will be dealt with in that context-i.e. as a medical problem. Perhaps there may remain a small rump of anti-social behaviour-much of it a hangover from capitalism-that couldn't be dealt with, that would cause a problem here and there. Surely this would be infinitely better than the uncertain world in which we live today, with millions dying in conflicts and from disease and starvation.

Julian Vein

Pathfinders: Under the Ground and Over the Moon (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

One way for the capitalist class to prevent any future repetition of miners’ strikes, in any country, is the thrilling idea of not digging coal out of the ground but setting fire to it in situ and sucking the choking but exploitable gasses out through frackstyle L-shaped tubes (New Scientist, 15 February). Anti-frackers will probably be aghast at the idea of lighting the fires of hell under our collective feet, and there are all sorts of predictable questions about 1100 degrees of heat fracturing erstwhile impermeable layers and subsequent leaching of benzene and toluene into water boreholes, as happened at one UGC site in Queensland, Australia. But it’s worse than that. While fracking does at least offer one built-in environmental brownie-point in having only around 50 percent of coal’s carbon footprint, underground coal gasification (UCG) offers no such saving, and instead relies on the pious promise by extractive industries to invest in money-losing carbon capture and storage schemes (CCS). Enthusiastic capitalists on fire to cash in on a process offering a potential 1000 years of global energy say the giant subterranean ashtrays created by UGC are the perfect spot to stuff all that unwanted CO2, while the fabulous profits will easily pay for the required CCS pumping hardware. Conversely it won’t only be socialists who, understanding why industrial pollution exists in the first place, will easily foresee that the mining will happen because there’s money in it, but the CCS won’t because there isn’t. Humanity may have set its sights on a zero-carbon energy future, but as ever when capitalism gets a whiff of the filthy lucre, industry dashes off in the opposite direction.

With renewable energy as always in a sinkhole of unprofitability, what is the current state of play in nuclear fusion, that ultra-powerful and ultra-clean energy source that stubbornly refuses to exist in reality? Well, some good news there, as the National Ignition Facility in California has just announced a breakthrough with the first ever ‘fuel gain’ test, where 10 kilojoules of energy were put in and 15 kilojoules came out. But hold the champagne, because to run this test in the first place required an overall expenditure of 2 megajoules, meaning that overall net fuel gain is still orders of magnitude away. Part of the problem is the fact that fusion technology is currently based on heavy hydrogen. Hydrogen has just one charged proton, but its isotope deuterium carries an extra uncharged neutron, while tritium lugs about an extra two like an overloaded tourist.

Fuse the tourists together at sun temperatures and a barrage of uncontrollable neutron baggage fires off in all directions, destroying and irradiating everything in its path including the reactor walls. This means that a) fusion is not clean at all but creates highly radioactive building waste and b) most of this neutron heat hurricane is wasted in the conversion of water to steam to drive a turbine, just like a fission reactor.

For a long time fusion freaks have been talking about using a light isotope of helium instead. Helium-3 or 3He is heavy on spare protons rather than neutrons, so protons get fired off instead. Because protons carry a positive charge you can channel and direct them with magnets, like a flock of excitable sheep, but they also convert directly to electricity without the need to boil water for a turbine. The result is that a) they don’t burn your house down and b) they give an enormous increase in efficiency.

And the point of all this? The point is that there is hardly any 3He on Earth because being lighter than air it tends to float off into space, but there’s tons of it on the Moon, where there isn’t any air so it isn’t lighter than anything and therefore stays put. Like UGC, the estimated potential for global energy usage for lunar 3He is around 1000 years. Which is precisely why China has got a Jade Rabbit up there. It plans to strip mine the Moon.

On the face of it not much has changed since the last time the Standard covered the Great Moon Rush (see Material World, December 2008). China may have set, if not foot, then robotic wheel on the surface, but this feat is dismissed by carping critics who point out that this only places China 50 years behind the US and the Russians, and that the Chinese tech is all old Russian knock-off anyway. Still less impressive that after two weeks in the freezing lunar dark the poor Rabbit emerged into the solar glare to stand transfixed with barely a pulse flickering.

But there is a key difference today, because water-ice has been found at the poles, buried in deep and permanently dark craters. A human requires around 2 litres of water a day, and with the cost of lifting water from Earth at around $25,000 a litre, even with intensive recycling of every last sweat globule a manned moonbase looked out of the question. Not anymore. With that discovery, strip-mining of the Earth’s ‘seventh continent’ is finally becoming feasible. Being pragmatic about such things as all capitalists are, China wouldn’t pay too much for labour, but would send Tibetans, or convicts, so don’t be surprised if future miners’ strikes take place on the Moon.

Still, it’s early days. The Moon Rush is at present more of a stroll. Budget-strapped NASA is in cahoots with private firms to get back in on the act, but private capitalists have to date shown less than cosmic  achievement. The $20m Google Lunar XPrize for the first privately-funded rover on the Moon, which blasted off in 2007 with much media fanfare, has so far not paid out so much as a bus fare, even though the deadline has been repeatedly extended. There is some debate about revising the terms of the various Space Treaties, according to which common ownership somehow exists in space, in order to allow private ownership to intrude into this absurd and uncapitalist anomaly. But the debate is civilised at the moment because nobody is in a position to stake much of a claim, and besides everyone knows that these treaties are mostly unsigned anyway and worth about as much as the Kyoto Agreement. The main legacy of Jade Rabbit thus far has been, rather like with the US Apollo missions and the Soviets, that China is winning its regional pissing contest with Japan. But the Japanese aren’t taking this lying down, and plan with an appropriate sense of bushido to have their own rover on the Moon by 2017.

It’s a curious fact that the glassy regolith dust on the Moon’s surface smells like gunpowder, and there may come a time when Earth goes to war over this rock, perhaps for the platinum group metals expected in concentrations in the dark ‘sea’ areas you can easily see with the naked eye. An even more distant possibility is that mining won’t stop at the Moon, but that it becomes a fuelling station on the way to the other planets and the moons of the gas giants.

One thing is beyond reasonable doubt. Were it not for the fact that the stars are permanently out of reach by any conceivable technology, the capitalists’ eyes would be fixed greedily on the entire cosmos. For many people, forced to the realisation that there is literally nothing in heaven or earth that capitalism would not rob and rape and destroy, a space-age future without socialist sharing and collective resource management will be a prospect as chilling as the lunar night.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: Red Wedge (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

With reference to your article Rock Bottom (March) I should like to make the following comments. I attended two Red Wedge concerts and was also present at a "Day of Action" in which Billy Bragg and the "Wedgies" were questioned about their motives for the tour and I feel that your article gives the wrong impression.

The tour was not thought up or arranged by the Labour Party but by Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and other left-wing artists; in fact, your first line is incorrect as Red Wedge is not just a campaign by rock musicians but also by comedians, cabaret artists, actors and writers who have been or will be on the road with their own tours.

Propaganda did not come from the stage but MPs—and a certain (ex) GLC leader—were in the foyer to be approached only if so desired. The theme of the tour was to make young people aware that politics is something that affects everyone, and also to get young people to register to vote—whatever party they may vote for, as many young votes had been lost in the 1979 election due to "punk" apathy.

In all, socialism was more the issue than the Labour Party, and at one concert Joolz stated that "no mighty thing" called the Labour Party would change anything—only the people can do that.

Amongst the leaflets on chairs were ones on behalf of CND and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Socialist Worker and Militant papers were for sale (where was the Socialist Standard?) and even the slogan on the official T-shirts, like the songs of the artists involved, advocated socialism, and I don't think that is a thing to be knocked.

Yours faithfully,

Philippa Britton

Jersey

Reply:

It was an omission on our part to refer to Red Wedge as including only musicians; it does also include comedians and actors. It is, however, definitely a pro-Labour movement, even though it is officially independent of the Labour Party. During 1985, Billy Bragg performed some fifty concerts as part of the "Jobs For Youth" campaign in conjunction with the Labour Party. That tour led directly to the founding of Red Wedge which declared itself, from the start, "committed to a Labour victory at the next election". Needless to say, the "Jobs For Youth" campaign had not made great play of the fact that Labour policies have proved as hopeless as those of the Tories in trying to control capitalism: every Labour government since the 'thirties has left office with unemployment higher than when they were elected.

It may be true that Labour Party propaganda has not been featured on stage, but the performers would not have to tolerate the politicians "in the wings" if they did not wish to. It would be rather surprising if, come the next election, Red Wedge performers such as Robbie Coltrane, Paul Weller and Billy Bragg were to withhold their votes from the nationalist and fundamentally pro-capitalist Labour Party, and, of course, they make no secret of this. Indeed, Billy Bragg tried to defend his active canvassing for Kinnock in a Sunday Times article of 26 January 1986. "Anybody who cares about politics has their part to play, and that's best done as a local party member". He went on to say of earlier protest singers, "All that generation came to nought. They thought if they joined hands and sang Imagine the world would change". Of course, it is essential for people to think critically and to organise politically; but when John Lennon asked people to "imagine . . . no possessions", was that not more challenging than Bragg's sad badge of slavery in Between The Wars: "I'll give my consent, To any government, That does not deny a man, A living wage"?

Meanwhile, the political hacks were gloating. In the Sunday Times article referred to above, Andy McSmith, co-ordinator of the Labour Party's Jobs and Industry campaign, was quoted as saying "Billy is worth his weight in gold to us", and Eric Heffer comments: "It is a good thing that an ordinary working-class lad like Billy should identify himself with the Labour movement".

It is fair to conclude that Red Wedge does not exist purely to encourage young people to vote and to think in any way they might feel like, but to vote and think Labour. The T-shirts might refer to "socialism", but this would not be the first time this term has been used for its popular appeal. Perhaps some performers are being "used" by the politicians to some extent, and any comments they might make about young people thinking for themselves can only be supported by socialists. But it is contemptible for artistic popularity to be prostituted to the sale of stale and second-hand ideas for an alternative brand of "people's capitalism".

The Socialist Party did produce a leaflet which has been distributed at Red Wedge events, which we quote from here:

Enjoy the music, but do your own thinking. Beware of the smooth talking leaders who are waiting in the wings to sell you their sterile ideas. Workers are capable of building a future which might now seem like a dream. That future has nothing to do with swapping the inhabitants of Ten Downing Street. It is about establishing a society of common ownership, democratic control and production for use—a genuine socialist society. You owe it to yourselves to consider the case not for the Labour Party but for socialism.

Editors.

A tale to encourage Socialists (1996)

Theatre Review from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose, Comedy Theatre, London

When we go to the theatre or the cinema—or watch TV for that matter—our reactions to what we see and hear are complicated. Two matters seem of particular importance. First, we have a series of expectations about the play or the film. We expect that we will see some kind of story unfold before our eyes. But is it to be a comedy or a tragedy? Is it set in the past, present or future? What is the story about?

Second, what we hear and see, and its significance, validity and impact, depend on how we interpret the events taking place in front of us. Can we identify with the characters being played by the actors? Do they seem real and credible? Do some or all of them enlist our sympathy? Does the history and how it unfolds encourage our interest and involvement? Does it seem plausible? Does it square with our beliefs about how and why people react as they do? How do we interpret the play for the film? What is its meaning for us?

Socialists have particular beliefs and insights; they are part of our world view, and they largely determine our responses to both events in the real world (sic) of employment, politics, family and friends, etc., and the supposed fictions of the stage and screen.

I don't know the intentions of Reginald Rose who wrote Twelve Angry Men—initially as a TV drama, then as a famous film (Academy Award nominations galore), and now as a play—but I think he would be surprised by the inspiring messages which socialists draw from the tale.

Simply stated Twelve Angry Men is the story of a murder case jury which is about to vote guilty, but decides otherwise in the face of the arguments of one doubting member. It is a paean to the virtues of non-conformity in defence of "the truth"; of one man standing alone and courageously demanding that his fellows confront the facts of the case; the triumph of common sense and reason over guesswork and prejudice.

Socialists will identify with juror number eight who fights his corner with such tenacity, and who demands that his fellow jurors confront the evidence rather than speculations founded on hearsay and prejudice. And they will applaud his respect for his fellow jurors. He argues his case persuasively, but requires that his colleagues take responsibility for their own actions. They must decide they are free mean living in a notional democracy; they must take charge of their own lives and determine the fate of the prisoner for themselves. He presents his case but respects their autonomy. He wants their knowing, full-hearted agreement not just their votes. He is an educator rather than a propagandist. His actions are those of a socialist revolutionary committed to equality and truth seeking, rather than a reformist politician wanting to win at any price. And his respect for his fellow jurors bears fruit. They emerge as reasonable men, capable of changing their minds and behaving responsibly.

Twelve Angry Men makes for a stirring evening for imaginative socialists. The present production is uniformly excellent and thoroughly recommended.

Michael Gill

Education and socialism (1980)

Editorial from the September 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conditioned assumptions and prejudices instilled during the earliest, most formative years of childhood induce, in later life, a profound hostility to socialist ideas. Adult attitudes and social behaviour are unwittingly based, in every minute detail, upon those contrived conceptions, painstakingly taught in the first years of life.

A young child's anguished cry on being prevented from taking home and playing with some toy it has been conditioned to enjoy but which its parents cannot afford, marks natural hostility to a scheme of organisation not designed to cater for the needs of the majority of its participants. But this cry of discontent is soon transformed, by thorough social conditioning, into a whimper of begrudging but tolerant humility.

In their years of almost total dependence, of weak reliance and therefore great susceptibility, young children are forcefully and persistently taught that there is a superior, external, mystic force governing our every move. It is proclaimed that the way in which society is presently organised is the only way it has ever been, or could be, organised. Such damaging and unfounded myths would be seriously questioned by young, fertile minds; but they are also discouraged from the start to use any kind of logical or objective reasoning when it comes to matters of such immense human import. Consideration of cause and effect is reserved for use in the science laboratories.

The current failure of humanity to organise for its own survival without recurrent periods of organised mass destruction of life during wars is presented as a failure which must continue in the future. The education system turns out individuals with a profound comprehension of atomic particles or astrophysics but who suffer a blind spot when it comes to matters like the social satisfaction of human needs.

Neo-Malthusian myths of scarcity are swallowed, gullibly by scientists conditioned in the schools and universities. Poverty amid plenty, and all the contradictions of capitalism, are written off glibly as due to "human nature" or "man's basic evil". If any schoolchild points a finger at the system itself and rejects the obscure moral conundrums of religious mythology, then they are swiftly silenced and told to get on with their work. At school, children are taught to chant nursery rhymes, keep in line, follow leaders. Individuality, originality or dissent is often punished as "disobedience" or "disruption".

When socialists propose the establishment of a system of society without national frontiers or governments, buying or selling, wages or profits, the negative responses this often elicits result from a fastidious process of indoctrination undergone from the very moment of birth. Apart from the crude exhortations of the media to pledge support for the profit system, there is also a much more insidious and subtle persuasion which begins long before its victim can read. This based upon emotion and psychological obsession rather than on any rational argument. It has to be, for the prolonging of capitalism cannot be defended by rational argument.

In a hideous regeneration of misery, children are taught by the adults whom they most trust, the parents who have produced and protected them, that the set of social relations into which they were born must remain as they are for the whole of their lives. This harsh rule of acceptance is sometimes expressed in a modified form, when socialists meet with the objection: "It could never happen in my life time."

The means have long been at hand to provide a material abundance sufficient to supply all the needs of the world's population. In 1976 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation stated that enough grain is now produced to provide everyone on earth with as much as 3,000 calories a day, taking no account of any other available foodstuffs. At the same time, more than a quarter of the earth's population is on the brink of starvation. The implications of such facts are not taught in schools. It is the profit system, in which food is actually destroyed to maintain prices and profits, and in which vast human resources are consumed in the unnecessary domains of war, coercion, finance and commerce, which is responsible for the untold suffering of those not born of properties parents.

Socialism, production for need, based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution, is not just immediately possible and practicable, it is also an urgent necessity, long overdue. All that is lacking for the institution of a system in which all will enjoy free access to the wealth we produce, is conscious, working-class political action. It can and must happen "in our life times". Any other attitude is a concession to the bleak and impotent outlook the capitalist class hopes will confront its employees. 

A socialist is generally one who has experienced a process of complete mental reconstruction. Years of thoroughly impregnated prejudices and attitudes towards social behaviour must be overcome. But as workers develop awareness of where their interests lie, the whole ideology of capitalism will be rejected lock, stock and barrel; in the schools as much as in the offices and factories. With a rational alternative to contrast with the system they have been taught to accept as the sole possibility, schoolchildren will consciously discard the body of misconceptions and myths they are offered.

Currently, self-styled "rebels" throw off school uniforms only promptly to don their own uniforms, as dictated to them by the fashion industry. These angry young people are accommodated by capitalism; the fundamental myth of the inevitability of a system of wage-labour is left intact. But as consciousness develops, the young, fertile mind will readily rebut the anarchic structure of the capitalist mode of production. The cry of a discontented child must become not a snivel of acceptance, but a defiant declaration for socialism.

Marx against the state (1995)

From the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1988 Alan Carter wrote a criticism of Marx's views from what he called a "libertarian communist" position under the title Marx: A Radical Critique. His basic argument was that Marx's theories of history, economics and politics all paved the way for the emergence, not of a stateless, classless communist society, but of a new class society ruled by a new exploiting class similar to what was then about to collapse in east Europe and the USSR. His conclusion was that radical critics of capitalist society should actively oppose Marx's ideas.

Marx of course is not above criticism—and we have our own criticisms of some of the things he said and did—but to see him as nothing more than the precursor of a state capitalist society is inaccurate and unjustified.

Marx genuinely wanted to see established a stateless, classless society and the means he advocated to achieve this—democratic political action by a democratically-organised working class—are still relevant and valid. But how does carter reach the opposite conclusion?

Somewhat surprisingly, Carter gets Marx's theory of the state more or less right. That, as a coercive institution standing above the rest of society, the state is a product of the division of society into antagonistic economic classes, and that, once these classes are abolished through the common ownership of productive resources, then the state will become redundant; its coercive features will be dismantled and its useful administrative functions merged into the democratic structure of classless society.

This was a position Marx reached in 1843 and maintained for the rest of his life. As he wrote at the height of his controversy with the anarchist Bakunin in 1874:

"All Socialists understand by 'anarchy' this: the aim of the proletarian movement, the abolition of classes, once achieved, the power of the State, which serves to keep the great producing majority under the yoke of a small exploiting minority, will disappear and the functions of government will be transformed into simple administrative functions" (Conspectus of Bakunin's 'Statism and anarchy').

So, how does Carter get round this? How does he turn Marx into an accomplice of Lenin and even Stalin? This is not an easy task since Marx never used the Leninist terms "vanguard party", "professional revolutionary", "workers' state" or "socialist state". He did unwisely once or twice use "dictatorship of the proletariat" but this was meant to be a contrast to dictatorship by a revolutionary elite as advocated by some other revolutionaries of his day.

This is recognised by Carter who doesn't rest his case on Marx's unfortunate use of this misleading term. What Marx had in mind was the working class winning control of the state and using it, for a relatively brief period, to abolish capitalists' class monopoly over the means of production, thereby abolishing classes and so also the need for a state, which would then be dismantled.

Carter's argument is that it is Marx's theory that the existence of the state is in the end dependent on the economic structure of society that opens the way for Leninism:

"Lenin did not build his theories on air: they arose on the basis of serious inadequacies in  Marx's conception of the state and political power" (p. 218).
"The perceived need for authoritarian and revolutionary organisation is sanctioned by Marx's theory because his theoretical subordination of political power to economic causes apparently renders post-revolutionary political power unproblematic" (p. 231).

This is a very weak argument based not on what Marx actually said (Carter can't produce any evidence that the supposed need for "authoritarian and revolutionary organisation" was "perceived" by Marx himself) but rather on what Marx allegedly omitted to say.

What Carter appears to be trying to say is that because Marx believed that the state would automatically disappear once economic classes had been abolished, he didn't attach much importance to the form the state should take during the brief period when it would be bing used to abolish classes. and that this allowed others to "perceive: that it needed to be controlled by an authoritarian vanguard during this period.

This is wrong on two counts. Marx did in fact have something to say about the form of the state during this period. He thought it should be thoroughly democratic, with mandated and recallable delegates. This, for instance, is what Marx write about the Paris Commune of 1871 which he then described (somewhat inaccurately, as he later conceded) as a government of the working class", i.e. having the form the state should take while being used by the working class to abolish classes:

"The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms  . . . Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the official of all other branches of the Administration . . . Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsive and revocable" (Civil War in France, 1871, Section III).

But even if Marx had omitted to specify  this, this would not justify the inference that the state during this period could take any other than this ultra-democratic form and authoritarian or a one-party dictatorship. This has to be ruled out as incompatible with Marx's aim of a stateless, communist society based on voluntary co-operation, which just could not be promoted by such means. How could people be forced to co-operate voluntarily? They can only do this if they want to, which means that socialism has, by its very nature, to be the outcome of a consciously expressed desire of the majority. Because socialism can only be a democratic society, it can only come about democratically. In the phrase Marx endorsed: the emancipation of the working class can only be the work of the working class itself.

So, Carter is factually wrong as to what Marx's views on this subject were. He is also wrong in urging radical critics of capitalism to shun Marx's ideas. Although Marx's views, like anyone else's should not be accepted uncritically and dogmatically, they are still relevant today. Among other things as a criticism of the sort of elitist and vanguardist ideas peddled by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the others.

Adam Buick