Greasy Pole: Tony Benn – Getting it Wrong (2014)

The Greasy Pole Column from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the matter of political funerals and their selectively phoney eulogies, Tony Benn had to be outdistanced by Margaret Thatcher, which should not obscure a few significant similarities between them because after all they were both in that same business of politics. In their time as back benchers they each cosseted an intention to rule as much of the world as possible starting with a considered process of undermining their party leaders by an implicit claim to represent a simpler, clearer, more effective style of managing this chaotic social system. They were bolstered by a conviction that they would leave a non-fading mark on history which in itself, as an implacable reality reduces them, will provide material enough to keep a tribe of biographers at work. There were of course some divergences between them; for one thing Thatcher chose to pass into the ermine comforts of that same House of Lords that Benn had devoted so much energy to escape from. And he remained active to the end, passing on his delusions to others rather than endure their exposure. He died as President of the Stop the War Coalition, with an established reputation as '...one of the few politicians to have become more left wing after holding ministerial office'.

Liberals

It was not always like this. Benn came from a family well established in politics with both his grandfathers elected as Liberal MPs as was his father, before 1929 when he crossed to the Labour benches under Ramsay MacDonald. This did not, apparently, quell his political appetite because in 1941 he reluctantly agreed to augment the Labour Party in the House of Lords by accepting a peerage, making him Viscount Stansgate and a member of the Attlee government. So in 1950 when Stafford Cripps MP – who had his own reputation for being disruptive of party discipline – had to retire through ill health there was a vacancy in Bristol South-East and, with the help of his friend Anthony Crosland, Tony Benn was selected as the Labour candidate. To begin with Benn was an unremarkable back bencher, taking a place in the political centre with a leaning towards the right wing and critical of the restless Bevanites. He was a follower of the party leader Hugh Gaitskell, a leader who after an aberrant phase of opposing the Suez invasion was nervous of further damaging the party's electoral chances, and pursued a noisy campaign to revise the worrisome Clause Four of the party constitution with its policy of widespread nationalisation and warned that he would '...fight, fight and fight again' to overturn a conference decision to ban nuclear weapons.

Wilson

The image of a party persistently at war within itself was not voter-attractive and among the candidates offering a more peaceable and seductive style was Harold Wilson with his strategy of soothing the edges of inconvenient policies rather than abandoning them. Benn transferred his allegiance to Wilson and Gaitskell retaliated by no longer actively supporting him as a Labour MP. The matter was temporarily resolved in 1960 with the death of Benn's father which transformed him into the new Viscount Stansgate, thereby disqualifying him from the Commons. Nevertheless he grimly contested the resultant by-election in Bristol – which made the case for changes in the honours system, but inevitably he was again disqualified. He then resorted to a long, determined campaign to change the law which eventually, in August 1963, resulted in the Peerage Bill and after yet another by-election he won his way back into the Commons. (There were other results of that Bill, for example it allowed the excessively wealthy, heavily aristocratic, massively land-owning Lord Home to change into Alec Douglas-Home and to succeed that other Old Etonian Harold Macmillan as a Conservative Prime Minister).

Technology

Gaitskell died suddenly in January 1963 and the following year Wilson led the Labour Party to victory, on some vague assumptions about a Britain fed, cared for and stimulated by something he had called the Technological Revolution. By this time Benn was occupying a niche as an untiring advocate of a rabble of superficially attractive policies. In his first ministry as Postmaster General he covered the opening of the Post Office Tower and then, more memorably, he had to compromise on his proposal to remove the Queen's head from all postage stamps, instead using a miniaturised version of it. As Minister of Technology he recommended to patriotic British workers the supersonic Concorde airliner, which was promoted as a knock-out blow to the American company Boeing. As part of the process of getting the Concorde into service it was decided to run trials of the effect of its supersonic booms on the general population. It did not take long for this to be assessed as too much by way of pollution and misery inflicted on the people below and Concorde had to be confined to going supersonic over oceans or deserts or the like.

Leadership

In 1974 when Labour came back to power Benn reacted with the assumption that the establishment of socialism was surely a technological process. As Secretary for Industry he operated a policy of industrial rationalisation leading to the merging of large companies with all that entailed by way of a better organised and applied exploitation of the labour force. In the miners' 1984/5 strike there was some residual resentment that the miners' cause was actually damaged by the effect of such policies. But Benn's typically obscure justification was that 'We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values'. In the background to this there was the recurrent struggle for leadership of this disgraced and floundering Party. In the 1981 contest for Deputy Leader Benn lost by 0.5 per cent to Denis Healey and in 1988, against Kinnock for the Leadership, he was defeated by a large majority. He eventually gave up, with his well-publicised declaration that he was 'leaving parliament in order to spend more time on politics'. If nothing else, this gave him more time to amass his archives – his diaries, newspaper cuttings, and minutia of correspondence. Like all Labour politicians, his career can be summarised as an unremitting distortion of the meaning of the word socialism and all that implies, wilfully confusing socialism with state capitalism. In spite of all his obsessive energy, sadly he died leaving capitalism as brutal and wasteful a system of human affairs as it ever was.

Ivan.

Why I Joined the S.P.G.B. (1938)

From the September 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like most of you, I was always interested in politics to a certain extent. My first object of affection was the Labour Party, and whilst I never joined, I always gave them my vote and between elections occasionally went to meetings and applauded Labour speakers. That was before 1929—when the Labour Party took office for the second time. I had not thought deeply about the issues involved, it was just a matter of instinct and sentiment with me—just as it is with millions of working-men and women.

After a year of Labour Government my enthusiasm for the Labour Party had vanished. but, unlike others, I never got it back again. Instead I began to look for something different, something more "extreme." I found it in the speeches of Harry Pollitt. Perhaps you, too, remember some of them, when, in 1930 and 1931, Mr. Pollitt contested Whitechapel and St. George's as Communist candidate for Parliament? By his fiery outbursts against the Labour Party and wholesome condemnation of working-class poverty I was won over. But, had I been asked whether I wanted Communism, or whether I understood it, I could not have given a satisfactory answer. No doubt I could have read the works of Marx and Engels had I wanted to, but the issues around which the Communist Party was arousing attention, and the general impression given by their propaganda, did not stimulate an interest in works on Socialism.

Yesterday's Problems—and To-day's

Then I came across an S.P.G.B. meeting. I immediately noticed the fundamental difference in approach used by the speaker. Everything he dealt with—political parties, topical events—looked so much different in the light of his reasoning. Of course the issues were not of "the day-to-day struggle," or so it seemed. For I have discovered this fact: capitalism can find something new every day, some problem which can occupy your time until another comes along to take its place in your mind. That is the trap which capitalism sets and into which reformist parties are continually falling. They said then, just as they are saying to-day: "This problem can't wait until we have Socialism, so we must deal with it first." And capitalism continues to produce problems of apparent immediate urgency; so that somehow they never get to Socialism—and, in the MEANTIME, CAPITALISM REMAINS.

Socialism Demands Knowledge

When I first listened to those S.P.G.B. meetings I did not understood this much. I've learnt it since, and it's about time some of you who are always asking us to do this, that, and the other, found it also.

Perhaps the most important fact that speaker brought home to me right at the beginning was the impossibility of Socialism without a majority of Socialists. Socialism, he pointed out, meant such a revolutionary social change, that to achieve it was out of the question unless most of the people understood what it was all about and wanted it. That's heart-breaking for those who are looking for a short cut. But has anyone found that short cut so many were talking about ten, twenty and thirty years ago? I didn't argue with that speaker about the impossibility of the workers ever learning what Socialism really meant. I set to work learning it! Perhaps some of our hecklers will take a tip from that and, instead of continually interrupting our speakers with that bogey question, keep quiet and give themselves a chance to learn!

The Importance of Numbers

Another matter. It simply did not occur to me to ask how many members the S.P.G.B. had got. That was the problem to tackle when I was inside the organisation. It has certainly nothing to do with the merits of the S.P.G.B.'s policy, except as a measure of its popularity with the working class (and, remember, the Labour Party's popularity was at its height at the very time when that Party became an instrument of attack on working-class wages and conditions!). So when you hear or read about the smallness of the S.P.G.B., try to be logical. If our policy is right, and you are convinced of that, then it's your job to help us put it across; and if you don't agree with us, then remember our size does not alter the merits of our policy in any way whatever. I would assert, moreover, that there is not another organisation which is as active as the S.P.G.B., considering that all the work of speaking, writing, literature-selling, and the hundred-and-one other jobs, are all done voluntarily in members' spare time without payment. How would some parties look if they had to carry on under similar circumstances?

Are We Sectarian?

Another factor that added to my resolve to join up was the way in which all kinds of objections to Socialism were dealt with by the S.P.G.B. (It is amazing how many so-called "advanced" people oppose Socialism!)

Those who argue that all we need do to-day is get rid of the National Government and replace it by a Labour-Liberal Coalition (euphemistically called a "Popular Front") in order to "keep open the door to Socialism," are begging the question. That "door" (Democracy) has been open for a long time. Why hasn't it been used? Why isn't it used to-day? There is only one answer: the workers don't want to use it to establish Socialism, because they're not Socialists. If you don't believe me, come to some of our meetings and hear their protests when Socialism is explained. That is why I endorse the S.P.G.B.'s attitude when they insist that, when joining the Party, applicants should know what Socialism stands for. Otherwise they would be a hinderance to the work of making Socialists. And that, after all, is the only justification for the existence of a Socialist Party.

Of course, this means that our membership is limited—to Socialists only. Our opponents say this question makes us a sect. It depends on the way the question is looked at. For instance, the New Leader has been featuring some letters from people who recently joined the I.L.P. In several cases the writers as good as stated they were not quite satisfied with the I.L.P., but joined because they could find nothing better. One writer went further. He actually disagreed completely with the I.L.P. on a fundamental question.

Well, that's perhaps one way of showing that the I.L.P. does not intend to be a sect. But then, a Socialist Party cannot be built up that way. Labourites, Pacifists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, and others banded together in an organisation might give themselves a Socialist label, but they cannot work for Socialism. That much is evident when you know what the I.L.P. is and has been. Such a situation could not arise in the S.P.G.B. We are a small organisation because membership is recruited on the basis of a clear understanding of Socialism and how to obtain it. Those who accuse us of being a "sect" produce no evidence except that we are small.

Many people who appreciate the quality of S.P.G.B. propaganda say: "You should be in the movement" . . . "get inside the Labour Party and put your Socialism across in there."

It is difficult to believe that anyone really thinks that that is possible. Would we be allowed to join as an organisation? And, having joined, what could we do there? Get busy telling the members that the Labour policy is completely wrong, anti-Socialist, and that their leaders are simply politicians depending upon mass political ignorance? That would be the truth, but we would certainly not be allowed to say it.

The I.L.P. was never Socialist. They left the Labour Party when they found it too awkward to defend what the Labour Government had done during their two years of office in 1929 to 1931. To-day, when the memory of that fiasco has dimmed, the I.L.P. is trying to crawl back again into the Labour fold. So little do they differ from the Labour Party that a welcome should be certain!

Fellow-workers, the Socialist Party has to stand on its own feet, even if it means that, for the time being, we can't make a big noise. Big demonstrations are excellent things, we would like to indulge in them, but we want demonstrations of working-class understanding, not political dupes whose flags are beginning to look very much like the Union Jack!

Pity—or Power?
And the pity of it all is that the workers really feel that they are doing something useful when they march in demonstrations and attend huge meetings. They really believe they are contributing towards the alleviation of the terrible distress that exists the world over. Many come to our meetings and ask: "What is the S.P.G.B. doing about China, Spain, Abyssinia, Germany, Austria?"—and we could add many other countries to that list ourselves: Palestine, Jamaica, Trinidad, India—why, the whole world is a crying indictment against the system and the class responsible for it. Do we not feel the horror of it all, too?

The brutal truth us that these demonstrating masses can do nothing to end the real trouble. They are frequently merely the playthings of politicians. Posing as the Messiahs of the world, so-called leaders cannot even find a solution for the problems on their own doorstep.

So that is another lesson the S.P.G.B. has taught me. In the words of Marx: "In every country the workers must settle matters with their own ruling-class first."

Our job here is to win power for Socialism; then, and not before, will we be able to help others.

Now I put the question to you: Are my reasons for joining the S.P.G.B. sound? Do they tell the truth? Without exaggeration, I honestly assert that, on the answer the working-class gives, the fate of the world depends.

Sid Rubin

The First of May (1955)

From the May 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Then turn, and be not alarm’d O Libertad

– turn your undying face,

To where the future, greater than all the past,

Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.”

WALT WHITMAN

It is sixty-five years since half a million people poured through London, “an interminable array with multitudinous banners,” on the first International May Day. No celebration, no insubstantial pageant this: column upon threadbare column they came, signifying and expressing labour's strength and labour's aspirations, with an eight-hour day as their rallying call. For sixty-five years it has continued, but the columns are smaller now. And the eight-hour day? They have it and, so generous is life to the working class, work overtime.

May Day is workers' day, the day of our class. However hollow the cries and futile the demonstrations, it remains the anniversary of protest, a continual reminder of exploitation and, subjection. “Class” is the reason and the theme of May Day – class in its fullest, truest sense. The working class is not the labourers or the artisans or the machine-minders: it is all people to whom wages are life. The working class is international: so is its cause. Among the cries and chants and slogans of May Day, only one has meaning: “Workers of all countries unite!”

Class consciousness was never more needed than now. Sixty-five years have seen war, dereliction, fear and disaster; today mankind is under a shadow without precedent. The working people of the world have it in their hands to end poverty, fear, hatred and war. Nationalism is not their interest but their rulers'; submission is taught, not conceived. That is where the tragedy of the May Day processions lies. The hundreds of thousands who paraded their rights in 1890 lined the streets again seven years later, still threadbare, still of one mind – to cheer and wave streamers for their Queen.

To the Socialist, class-consciousness is the breaking-down of all barriers to understanding. Without it, militancy means nothing. The conflict between the classes is more than a struggle for each to gain from the other: it is the division which reaches across all others. The class-conscious working man knows where he stands in society. His interests are opposed at every point to those of the capitalist class; his cause can only be the cause of revolution for the abolishing of classes. Without that understanding, militancy can mean little. It is not mere preamble that the Socialist Party's principles open by stating the class division in capitalism: it is the all important basis from which the rest must follow.

For nearly fifty-one years the Socialist Party has addressed its case to the working class on May Day, demanding not support but understanding. In those years, it has seen movements rise and fall, heard slogans die away, known panaceas acclaimed and discarded. In 1904, the great working-class party was the I.L.P.; now, the giant is a pantaloon. The Labour Party was not yet formed; now, it is torn by its members' disillusionment. Incredibly, they tell the Socialist he is impractical: impractical, when through their denial of what the Socialist knows they have fallen, and with them the hopes of millions!

The Socialist Party’s proposition is the only practical one. Class-conscious people need no leaders. The single, simple fact which all working people have to learn is that capitalism causes capitalism's problems, so that the remedy – the onlyremedy – is to abolish capitalism. In that knowledge they must take hold of the powers of government – for one purpose only: that the rule of class by class shall end. Socialism is not a benevolently-administered capitalism: it is a different social system.

Can the working class do that? He who doubts needs only look round him. The wonders and the splendours of modern civilization all are made by the working class. The knowledge, the skill, the perception are theirs – often, indeed, unwanted by the capitalist to whom trash is the soul of profit. Often, too, wanted for destruction: see the boy taught mathematics who has fine judgment, that he may drop bombs.

Reform is no answer, even though at times – rare times – it benefits working people. The reformer (he may not know it) has not even set out to change the world; he has agreed that capitalism shall continue, and is merely trying to alleviate its worst effects. Has poverty – extreme, dire poverty – been abolished by the reformers? Ask the old; ask the public assistance cases or the slum dwellers or the sick. Has life been made more satisfying by the Welfare State? Ask the thousands snatching at Billy Graham's promise of peace, joy and contentment.

From the beginning, the Socialist Party has been intractable in its opposition to reformists. Working class action, in fact, must be revolutionary. That is the real message of May Day, for people all over the world. The workers of Britain have common cause with the workers of every other country. They are members of an international class, faced with the same problems, holding the same interests once they are conscious of them. There is only one way of realizing those interests: the immense productive powers of the world must become the common property of every man, woman and child.

“Common ownership” is part of the definition of Socialism, but it is not an end in itself; rather is it a beginning, a condition. Private ownership by the capitalist class of the means of life is the condition of all that is deplored today – the wars, the poverty and the rest; that is why, without abolishing that ownership, there can be no solution to those problems. And in the same way, the common ownership of the means of life is the condition of another sort of world. The system so based would be incapable of causing wars, incapable of producing want.

The need for Socialism grows more urgent each day. It awaits the conscious will of the workers of the world, and nothing more; when they desire it, it can be. In the clamour of rivalry between factions and nations, the voice of the Socialist is a small one, but it must be heard. Exploitation and conflict must be ended; the catastrophe of worker killing worker must be prevented. Fifty-one years ago a small group of working people made plans for a new era in human history – today, more than ever before, it is vital necessity.

May Day has come again. Let it be an occasion of fresh resolve. There are many who are with us but not of us. The struggle for Socialism is a long and arduous one, needing the help of every class-conscious man and woman. On this day, then, we urge the need to work for Socialism within the Socialist Party. To spread Socialist understanding is the great task of our time: every fresh adherent to the Socialist Party Principles is another step towards the emancipation of mankind.

Robert Barltrop

Cooking the Books: Capitalism and Inequality (2014)

The Cooking the Books Column from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Observer (13 April) carried an interview by Andrew Hussey with Thomas Piketty, a French economist whose views on capitalism are, apparently, the talk of the town amongst economists. He is the author of a book Capital in the Twenty-First Century which is said to show that growing inequality is a built-in feature of capitalism.

In the interview Piketty says that, going through the data from the 19th century for Britain and other countries, ‘I saw a pattern beginning to emerge, which is that capital, and the money it produces, accumulates faster than growth in capital societies.’ What he is saying he has discovered is a tendency for a larger and larger proportion of new output to be accumulated as new capital. As a result, over time, the income from capital (property incomes such as profit and interest) grows faster than other incomes (mainly wages and salaries). The rich get richer. He claims, ‘I have proved that under the present circumstances capitalism simply cannot work.’

The key phrase here is not the claim that capitalism cannot work (it clearly can, even if this involves the rich getting richer) but the ‘under the present circumstances’ which suggests that under other circumstances capitalism could work. That this is his view can be seen by his proposal in the interview for ‘a progressive tax, a global tax, based on the taxation of private property.’

However unlikely it might be that any government would adopt what he calls in French a ‘révolution fiscale’ and impose high taxes on property and property incomes – Will Hutton in a comment in the same paper on the interview writes of ‘a top income tax rate of 80%, effective inheritance tax, proper property taxes and, because the issue is global, a global wealth tax’ – the implication must be that Piketty thinks that, if ever this was done, it would stop the rich getting richer.

It is not clear from the interview how Piketty defines capitalism. He seems to mean what the French call capitalisme sauvage, or unregulated, wildcat capitalism. If so, then his claim to have shown that ‘capitalism simply cannot work’ is reduced to the lesser claim that unregulated capitalism cannot work. This is a powerful refutation of the free marketers but is still suggesting that capitalism can be reformed ‘to work’.

The similarity between Piketty’s view and that of Marx on how capitalism works to make the rich richer is obvious but there is a difference. Piketty is more concerned with the distribution of the income from capital while Marx was concerned with the accumulation of capital itself irrespective of who owns it (whether individuals, corporations or the state) or who benefits personally from it.

Piketty claims in the interview that the data his research uncovered ‘contradicted nearly all of the theories [of inequality] including in Marx and Ricardo.’ He doesn’t say in the interview what he thinks Marx’s theory was, but elsewhere he has made it clear that he is criticising the theory of the long-run tendency for the rate of profit to fall (a position held, in different forms, by both Marx and Ricardo). He doesn’t think that there is any such tendency.

And of course, unlike Piketty, Marx never advocated trying to stop or reverse capital accumulation and/or the rich getting richer through legislation or government action. The distribution of property income amongst the rich can be changed, but that would make no difference to those whose income is derived from working. The way out is to get rid of capitalism.

Editorial: People not Profits (2014)

Editorial from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Things are not produced today to meet people's needs. They are produced to make a profit. And that's the cause of the problems we face.

Under the profit system profits always come first. Before providing basic services like health care and transport, before improving conditions at work, and before protecting the environment.

It’s profits first, people second.

Under the profit system production is in the hands of profit-seeking business enterprises—whether state or privately owned—all competing to maximise the rate of return on the money invested in them. Decisions as to what to produce and how much, and how and where to produce it, are not made in response to people's needs but in response to market forces.

The health and welfare of the workforce and the effects on the environment take second place. This is why at work we suffer speed-up, pain, stress, boredom, overwork and accidents. This is why we have to work long hours, shiftwork and nightwork.

This is why the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe are all polluted. This is why the Earth's non-renewable mineral and energy resources are plundered. This is why natural balances are upset and the environment destroyed.

The profit system can't help doing this. It's the only way it can work. Which is why it must go.

What's the alternative?

One thing is certain. The Tories, LibDems and Labour—and now UKIP—have nothing to offer. They all support the profit system and are only squabbling over which of them should have a go at running it.

If we are going to improve things we are going to have to act for ourselves, without professional politicians or leaders of any kind. We are going to have to organise ourselves democratically to bring about a society geared to serving human needs not profits.

Production to satisfy people's needs. That's the alternative. But this is only going to be possible if we control production and the only basis on which this can be done is common ownership and democratic control. In a word, socialism.

We are talking about a world community without frontiers. Only on this basis can world poverty, hunger and the destruction of the environment be ended.

The socialist alternative to the profit system is:

Common ownership: no individuals or groups of individuals have property rights over the natural and industrial resources needed for production.
Democratic control: everybody has an equal say in the way things are run including work, not just the limited political democracy we have today.
Production for use: goods and services produced directly to meet people's needs, not for sale on a market or for profit.
Free access: all of us have access to what we require to satisfy our needs, not rationed as today by the size of our wage packet or State handout.

Cooking the Books: Capitalism will not collapse (2014)

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

‘NOT EVEN CLIMATE CHANGE WILL KILL OFF CAPITALISM. AS LONG AS THE CONDITIONS FOR INVESTMENT AND PROFIT REMAIN, THE SYSTEM WILL ADAPT. WHICH IS WHY WE NEED A REVOLUTION.’ 

This is not a headline from the Socialist Standard but the introduction to an article in the Guardian (6 March) by Razmig Keucheyan which does indeed put forward an argument similar to ours about not expecting capitalism to collapse of its own accord, in this case from an ecological rather than an economic crisis.

Keucheyan wrote of ‘ a worryingly widespread belief in left-wing circles that capitalism will not survive the environmental crisis’ and went on:

‘ The system, so the story goes, has reached its absolute limits: without natural resources – oil among them – it can't function, and these resources are fast depleting; the growing number of ecological disasters will increase the cost of maintaining infrastructures to unsustainable levels; and the impact of a changing climate on food prices will induce riots that will make societies ungovernable. The beauty of catastrophism, today as in the past, is that if the system is to crumble under the weight of its own contradictions, the weakness of the left ceases to be a problem. The end of capitalism takes the form of suicide rather than murder. So the absence of a murderer – that is, an organised revolutionary movement – doesn't really matter any more.’

We can add that, supposing the environmental catastrophists were right and capitalism did collapse from an ecological crisis, the outcome would not be socialism. In the absence of a strong socialist movement the outcome would be a social regression to the sort of dystopia portrayed in disaster films. So, there would still be a need to build up a movement consciously aiming to replace capitalism with socialism. In fact it would be more urgent than it already is.

Keucheyan counters ecological catastrophism by arguing that capitalism can adapt to the environmental crisis to the extent that this opens up profit-making opportunities, giving as examples ‘militarisation’ (investment in producing arms to defend or acquire diminishing resources) and ‘financialisation’ (in particular insurance against catastrophes). Others, which he didn’t mention, would be investment in technologies to reduce CO₂ emissions or in developing alternative energy sources to burning fossil fuels.

This is not to say that capitalism is capable of solving the environmental crisis, but merely that it will be able to adapt to it and make profits from attempts to mitigate it. Saying this can be interpreted as saying that capitalism is not as bad as the ‘catastrophists’ claim. To a certain extent this is true. Capitalist governments have intervened since its inception to prevent the unbridled pursuit of private profit from harming the general capitalist interest. A large section of Marx’s Capital is devoted to describing the struggle for Factory Acts which the government eventually adopted to prevent employers driving workers into the ground and so threatening future generations of wealth- and profit-producing workers.

A modern example would be the Clean Air Act of 1956 which ended London’s notorious smogs. So capitalism is capable of adapting to environmental problems, even if it waits till the last moment (when overall profitability is threatened) and risks doing too little too late. Not that this makes capitalism any more acceptable.

In any event, capitalism will not collapse of its own accord. It will have to be done to death by conscious, majority political action.

Has Bevan Sold the Pass? (1957)

From the November 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

A lot of people who have for years worshipped Aneurin Bevan have now turned against their hero because of his support for the H-Bomb at the Labour Party Conference. Bevan says that he is as strongly against the bomb as ever he was and that his speech and vote at Brighton (decided on "after a lot of agonising thinking"), were only designed to find "the most effective way of getting the damned thing destroyed": but this a bit too subtle for those who have passionately believed that Bevan was hundred per cent against the bomb and now find that he isn't.

But actually the disgruntled Bevanites have little ground for complaint for, as it happens, Bevan has changed his politics hardly at all. If any deception has been carried out it is their own self-deception; an obstinate refusal to take note of that Bevan has for years been saying and doing.

If a few of them are genuine pacifists who resolutely refuse to support armaments or war, they are fully entitled to be opposed to Bevan who supported World War II and the Korean War, and conscription and re-armament, but they cannot pretend that Bevan has deceived them about his record of war-supporting.

With others the revulsion of feeling may appear to be more soundly based, but again it will not stand examination. They take the view (like Bevan) that armaments are necessary and that war is sometimes unavoidable and must be supported no matter what the cost in death and destruction. They reject the Socialist view that war arises from capitalism and can only be got rid of by establishing Socialism. They can stomach it all, the millions of dead and maimed, the trench warfare, machine guns and artillery, the bombing raids, the napalm and even the A-Bomb—but the H-Bomb. No! The H-Bomb, they say is horrible, unthinkable, and on account of it they will destroy their beloved reader, Bevan. But they have no serious ground for indignation with Bevan on this count, for he long ago made it clear that in his view he and others supported the second World War and the Labour Government of 1945-51 have no moral or logical case against the H-Bomb.

Writing in the News Chronicle (9/3/1955) he said :-

"Those of us who concurred in the making of the atom bomb and tolerated the saturation bombing of the last war have no moral or logical case against the hydrogen bomb. All three are methods and weapons of imprecision, that is, it is known they will destroy the civilian population and all the civil installations of the enemy."

He went on to admit that the addition of the H-Bomb to the weapons of war would only be "carrying the logic of our past behaviour to its furthermost extremities" but put his own view that on practical grounds every effort should be made to get international agreement against the bomb. It is hard to see how those of his followers who swallowed all the other horrors of war making can justifiably wax indignant now because of a minute shift in Bevan's policy. Yet an irate reader of Tribune can write that Bevan's action has left "a gaping hole" in all the principles of the Socialist rank and file: "The tender, compassionate heart of our Socialism has been torn out and replaced with a dessicated calculating machine." (Tribune, 11/10/57).

Socialists, of course, never had any confidence in Bevan, or believed for one moment that he adhered to or ever had any understanding of Socialist principles; and, nobody with Socialist principles would have supported him or the Labour Government or the wars of capitalism that that government had a hand in.

But then Socialists do not believe in leadership, the danger and uselessness of which are well shown by the Bevanite movement. If the Bevanites had been Socialists they would have had their own clean clear conviction that Socialists do not take on the administration of capitalism, and they would, therefore, never have supported the Labour Government. They would have known that the government that runs capitalism has all to do all the obnoxious things that capitalism requires of them, including the waging of war. They would have seen the absurdity of putting a Labour Government in charge of British capitalism and of its war-machine with a mandate to keep it going and of then demanding of them that they behave as Socialists.

But the Bevanites were not and are not Socialists, they were everything and nothing, a motley collection of individuals united only by the leader's spell-bending oratory:-

"The Communist, the pacifist, the believer in the innate virtue of the Soviet State, the hater of American 'capitalism,' the general do-gooder," all see something of themselves reflected in the glowing rhetoric of Mr. Bevan." - (Manchester Guardian, 17/3/55.)    

Well, they have got what they asked for; they laboured to feed his vanity and build his reputation, and now he doesn't much mind what they do. Will it cure them? That remains to be seen, but there is no evidence yet that they have learned the uselessness of  leadership for the establishment of Socialism.

It might help them on their way to getting a better understanding if they noted that Bevan, whom they think has played them false, had his own ideas on leadership. The leader of the Labour Party ought to be, he said, not someone from "the top drawer of society" (meaning, presumably, Attlee and Gaitskell), but should be drawn "from those who had spent their lives in the Labour and Trade Union movement, and who not only understood Socialism with their heads, but knew it with their hearts." (Manchester Guardian, 18/6/51). And it all ends with the heart of Bevan and the head of Gaitskell and Attlee, uniting as one on the Labour Party's H-bomb policy. So little difference does the kind of leader make, and so necessary is it that the workers should learn to think for themselves and not leave their thinking to leaders. 

Edgar Hardcastle

Embarrassing Marx (2005)

Book Review from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and Anglo-Russian Relations and Other Writings.  By D. B. Riazanov. Francis Boutle Publishers, 2003, £10.

Marx’s views on the Russia of his day have, to be frank, always been a bit of an embarrassment. Not that they cannot be explained, and even to a certain extent understood, in their historical context, but it is still rather hard to take from the pen of Marx arguments about Russian Tsarism wanting, like Genghis Khan, to conquer the world and that it had been plotting to do so for centuries or talk of a threat to Europe of “Mongol rule” and “Eastern barbarism”, let alone constant calls for war against Russia. This was unacceptable even in Marx’s day, and we have said so on many occasions.

The historical context was that, for most of the 19th century, capitalist economic and particularly political forms were not all that securely established in continental Europe where the army of Tsarist Russia was a constant threat to them. This led Marx and other revolutionary democrats to regard Russia as the main enemy, to be contained and countered. In the 1850s when Marx was earning a precarious living as a journalist, some of the articles for the New York Tribune putting an anti-Russia position came to the attention of David Urquhart, a former Tory MP and Russophobe. Urquhart encouraged Marx to write more in the same vein published them in his papers which in 1857 he republished as a pamphlet entitled Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, republished in 1899 as The Secretary  Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century. In these Marx tried to show how British foreign policy under the Whigs had always been pro-Russia. He also ventured some ideas on the origin of Tsarism and on Russian history.

In a special supplement to Neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the German Social Democratic Party, in 1909, the Russian Social-Democrat David Riazanov analysed in detail Marx’s theories of Russian history and of British foreign policy towards Russia and, respectfully, argued that they were largely mistaken. This lengthy article makes up three-quarters of this 200-page book (the rest being two other pre-WWI articles by Riazanov, on Marx and Engels on the Polish Question - they wanted an independent Poland so there would be a buffer between Russia and Europe - and on the Balkans). It is well worth reading as an application of the materialist conception of history to Anglo-Russian relations from the 16th century onwards.

Riazanov in fact applies this better than Marx did in this instance, bringing out the importance of changing trade conditions which Marx had neglected in favour of purely political considerations. Riazanov’s article reflected a growing understanding amongst second-generation Marxists that the situation regarding Russia had changed since Marx’s day in that Tsarist Russia was no longer capable of being “the gendarme of Europe” but was now itself threatened by overthrow by internal forces; and that therefore it was no longer the main enemy. Even so, those members of the German Social Democratic Party who backed their government in WWI still quoted Marx’s anti-Russia stand as a justification for their position.

At the time Riazanov wrote this work he was not a member of  Lenin’s Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democrats but he did join the Bolshevik Party in July 1917. He became the leading Marx-scholar of his day, setting up the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in 1921 to track down and publish the collective works of Marx and Engels. He was dismissed from this by Stalin in 1931 and sent into internal exile. During the purges he was arrested and shot in 1938. 

Adam Buick

Halo Halo!: All Things Bright and Beautiful? (2014)

The Halo Halo! Column from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The rich man in his castle the poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate’.

Remember having to sing that during school assemblies? It was before schools discreetly dropped the verse because, to those of us whose estate was more likely to have been a council one than an ancestral mansion with a few hundred acres of land, it pointed out where God’s political sympathies lie just a bit too bluntly.

Ah, the good old days. The Church of England wasn’t known as ‘The Tory Party at Prayer’ for nothing and they could be honest about their views on the place of the working class. 

But things change. These days, just as in any other business, the old firm of Church of England Ltd has stiff competition, and to retain its share of the market has had to update and improve its public image. And the competition to recruit gullible believers has never been fiercer. While the C of E now attract smaller and smaller congregations, and thus smaller collection plates, the ‘happy-clappy’ born-again, and the born-yesterday brands are recruiting hard and forging ahead. And they frequently need plastic buckets for their collections.

So once the rumours that poverty and food banks do actually exist in working class Britain finally penetrated Lambeth Palace, and it dawned on them that unlike other banks, these don’t pay out millions in bonuses to their bosses every year, the bishops have swooped into action. Prodded on perhaps by stories in the press such as ‘Woman in coma told to find work by DWP’ (Independent, 28 February) and ‘Vulnerable man starved to death after cut to benefits’ (Guardian, 1 March) they have come flying to the rescue of the poor like a heavenly host of dog-collared Batman and Robins.

They’re quite cross too, and have told David Cameron that ‘We must, as a society, face up to the fact that over half of people using food banks have been put in that situation by cutbacks to and failures in the benefits system’. And to show they mean business they’ve launched an ‘End Hunger Fast’ campaign. This involves asking volunteers to join them for a ‘National Day of Fasting’ on 4 April and, as an added attraction, includes a couple of vicars announcing that they would only be taking fruit juice and water for 40 days. That will certainly give Cameron and Co something to think about.

Is the Halo Halo column being a bit churlish here perhaps, do you think? This attack by the government on the poorest in society is one of the most vicious for some time and, as the bishops point out, the fact that in the world’s seventh richest country thousands are forced to rely on food banks, 5,500 have been admitted to hospital with malnutrition since last Easter, and numerous single mothers are skipping meals to enable them to feed their children is nothing short of scandalous.

The problem is that religious do-gooder events are no answer to the problem. Thousands are already fasting full time – because they don’t have any choice. Instead of stunts where vicars pretend to go hungry, or Tory MPs pretend to live (for a couple of days) on fifty quid a week to show that it can be done, the only solution is conscious class action against the system which causes the problem.

The bishops may be outraged by unemployment and poverty, and rant on about loan sharks, but what the hell do they expect? That’s capitalism for you. And the Church of England itself holds investments of about £5.2 billion in capitalist ventures – which included, as came to light last July, a hefty sum invested in Wonga, the payday loan outfit. Political virgins they may be, but how do they think the profits on their investments are generated?

Patronising the poor with charity stunts is insulting and useless. Instead of skipping your corn flakes for Jesus, we urge all members of the working class get involved in the class struggle to end this degrading and unnecessary nightmare.

Pathfinders: Mission Statement (2014)

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

Interest was pricked recently in socialist circles by a Guardian environmental blog report of a NASA-funded study suggesting that a ‘perfect storm’ of five economic and environmental factors, namely population, climate, water, agriculture, and energy,  were leading to the imminent collapse of industrial civilisation (‘Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?’, Guardian Online, 14 March). According to the Guardian’s Earth Insight blog, the study is funded by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and is the product of a cross-disciplinary team of natural and social scientists based at the University of Maryland (UMD). Their argument is that there is a 5000 year history of civilisation collapses and that they all have two crucial and related factors in common, the ‘stretching of resources due to the strain on the ecological carrying capacity’ (also key in Jared Diamond’s 2005 study Collapse) and, somewhat more controversially to anyone but socialists, the ‘economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or ‘commoners’)[poor]’.

Reading eerily like a Socialist Standard editorial, the study states that ‘... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.’ Technology won’t help, the study says, because net consumption will simply rise to match net increased output. Neither will appeals to those elites themselves be any use, because their monopoly on wealth and resources means that they are protected from the ‘detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners’ with the result that they blindly continue their policy of ‘business as usual’. This I’m-alright-Jack mentality, argues the study, is why ‘historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory.’ But even where elites bother to address these problems at all, they tend to oppose any conclusion requiring fundamental structural change in society and instead ‘point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing.’

It’s worth distinguishing between collapse as envisaged here and two other kinds of collapse as described by ecologists and left-wingers. Ecological collapse, where the world simply dies, is an extreme and largely nonsensical idea. It’s also unlikely that humans could damage the world so badly that it became uninhabitable to humans. The collapse of capitalism through its own internal contradictions,  a kind of Get-out-of-capitalism-free card devoutly wished for by some on the left, is equally unlikely and anyway undesirable (see Cooking the Books, page 18). This study describes scenarios which are more plausible because they are consistent with evidence from historical events. In its view, it is not so much nature which fails but workers, through catastrophic immiseration: ‘the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this [possible scenario] is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature.’

The two key solutions in the study, as quoted in the blog article, are as follows: ‘Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.’ Since the study has already identified the fact that all the wealth and power are in the hands of elites who don’t listen to reason, the likelihood of achieving either of these aims through political reform of capitalism stands at zero. That being the case, the logical conclusion to draw is that the global elites must be forcibly dispossessed and overthrown along with the capitalist system which placed them in power.

Is budget-strapped NASA really promoting global socialist revolution? It hardly seems likely. It’s not so far been possible to obtain a copy of the study, and investigation of the sources behind the story has proved frustrating. A search of NASA’s website reveals no trace of any such study. Ditto the Goddard Space Centre. Apart from a brief synopsis of a seminar given by the named lead researcher last October, there is also no report offered by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), based at UMD and supposedly where the study originates. The researcher is a bona fide graduate student whose PhD studies may well be funded in some part by Goddard, and his cross-disciplinary colleagues are mostly respectable Maryland professors of public policy, hydrology, geography, meteorology and a weird hybrid, ‘econophysics’. However the study is set to be published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Ecological Economics, which has had a rocky history and some credibility issues, as has the field of ecological economics in general. According to its current Wikipedia entry the journal has lost focus on its core field and now ‘seems to accept anything to do with the environment and economics from any field’.

Hard to fathom too is the role of the Guardian journalist behind this scoop, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, whose by-line bills him as executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD). Apart from a member page entry on the Stanford University MAHB website (Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere) which describes IPRD as a London-based ‘voluntary global collective of specialist scholars, scientists, and analysts, working in different fields of the social and physical sciences’, this Institute appears to exist in name only, with a web address that doesn’t work. Dr Ahmed is also the author of a 2011 book, The Crisis of Civilization, whose main thrust seems if not identical to that of the UMD study then along very similar lines (see review of this in Socialist Standard, February 2011). He advocates certain key resources like energy and water being placed in a ‘global Commons’ which is immune from monopolisation by any elite. This is encouraging, but then why not all resources? He argues for ‘more equal access’ but then why not just ‘equal access’? Disappointingly the agent of much of this redistribution is, he proposes, banks, an idea which shows that even would-be revolutionary thinkers just can’t let go of capitalist institutions no matter how hard they try. It turns out that Dr Ahmed also has a day job as chief research officer for the London-based PR company Unitas, which lists among its services ‘media positioning’ and ‘pre-empting negative media coverage’. This prompts a number of wild speculations. One is that the research team have adopted the increasingly common but dubious practice among scientists of engaging a PR firm to ‘spin’ their study in the popular press prior to academic publication, either for simple promotional purposes or to offset anticipated hostile reactions. Another is that the Maryland team and the Institute are in cahoots, or even one and the same, while preferring to appear as objectively independent for purposes of academic credibility. As we go to press enquiries to Dr Ahmed and to the lead researcher of the Maryland team have not met with any response.

It would be good to know for sure whether NASA is genuinely behind this, even indirectly. It certainly ought to be. NASA gives itself a bold strapline: Earth. Your Future. Our Mission. So in among its studies of hurricanes, sinkholes, salt and the anatomy of a raindrop it really ought to find space for any serious study that suggests Earth has no future unless the mission parameters change drastically.

Paddy Shannon

Material World: Aussie Rules (2014)

The Material World Column from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is ironic that Australia, a nation built on immigration, enforces a strict policy upon newcomers, particularly those from countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan where it had a direct hand in causing much of the refugee problem. A far different position from a more welcoming attitude when thousands of Vietnamese Boat People were provided a safe haven.

It is equally incongruous that a government should take such pride in the effectiveness of its draconian approach that it declines to even disclose information and would censure the Australian media network ABC for not toeing the line with the appropriate subservience.

A convicted people-smuggler, serving a jail sentence in Indonesia, is in no doubt that he was assisting genuine political refugees and not as the Australian governments would prefer to describe them, economic refugees.

‘Of course they are genuine, of course. There are too many target killings, too many killings in [some countries]. They have no choice but to run. People fear for their lives’ (smh.com.au).

Ninety percent of Australia's asylum seekers are found to be genuine refugees. The majority of them have experienced trauma from war, violence or the loss of loved ones. Many are victims of gross human rights violations or torture.

Indonesia's foreign minister has called Australia's policy to tow migrant boats back into Indonesian waters inhumane. Foreign minister Marty Natalegawa spoke after reports of a boat carrying 34 people from four countries was found drifting ashore in West Java.

‘Can such an [Australian Prime Minister Tony] Abbott administration policy be called the policy of a government that upholds human rights and humanity?’ he was quoted as saying (www.sbs.com.au).

Australia has established off-shore detention centres on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, run by G4S private security. These are token sovereign countries which are economically and politically dependent upon Australia and have little choice but to oblige their powerful neighbour. Instead of finding refuge in Australia, those who arrive by boat are sent to Pacific island detention centres, with little chance of resettlement in Australia. The most recent government figures available put the number of people in immigration detention facilities offshore and in Australia at 6,101, including 900 children. Australia's Human Rights Commission has announced an inquiry into the mandatory detention of children seeking asylum.

‘These are children that, among other things, have been denied freedom of movement, many of whom are spending important developmental years of their lives living behind wire in highly stressful environments.’ AHRC President Professor Gillian Triggs said. Prof Triggs highlighted a lack of co-operation from the immigration department. ‘I think I'd have to say over the last few months, we've had minimal co-operation in relation to the kinds of details that I need to know, particularly mental health, self-harm and the processes for those that are transferred,’ she said (bbc.co.uk).
‘Asylum seekers are being held in extremely cramped compounds in stifling heat, while being denied sufficient water and medical help,’ Amnesty International Australia's spokesperson Graeme McGregor said, adding that they were ‘prison-like conditions.’

Human Rights Watch, in its 2014 report, said Australia had damaged its human rights record by persistently undercutting refugee protections. ‘Successive governments have prioritized domestic politics over Australia's international legal obligations to protect the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. … Too often, the government has attempted to demonise those trying to reach Australia by boat.’

Australia has international obligations to protect the human rights of all asylum seekers and refugees who arrive in Australia, regardless of how or where they arrive and whether they arrive with or without a visa. As a party to the Refugee Convention, Australia has agreed to ensure that asylum seekers who meet the definition of a refugee are not sent back to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened. Australia also has obligations not to return people who face a real risk of violation of certain human rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. These rights include the right not to be arbitrarily detained and not to send people to third countries where they would face a real risk of violation of their human rights under these instruments. These obligations also apply to people who have not been found to be refugees.

Once again we discover the reality that there is no such thing as ‘rights’ when a powerful ruling class decides to abrogate its legal responsibilities. When the victims are the weak, the vulnerable, and the helpless, it is all too easy for a callous government to incite populist prejudice and turn genuine human suffering into a cynical vote-catching ploy.

ALJO

Orwell in Limbo (1956)

Film Review from the April 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I observe . . . some lines of an institution which, in its original, might have been tolerable; but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions." Thus the king of Brobdingnag to Gulliver; thus one's thoughts ran, watching the Associated British Studios' film of 1984.

The credits describe it as "freely adapted" from George Orwell's novel. Some alterations were to be expected, and the minor ones obviously have been made with a view to the American market. Goldstein and O'Brien have become Calador and O'Connor, the dollar currency of Britain in 1984 is converted back to sterling, and two of the leading actors are American.

The last may not sound like an alteration but it certainly looks like one, since all the principals are remarkably miscast. Winston Smith is played by Mr. Edmund O'Brien, whose bulky physique speaks well for nutrition in 1984. Wearing a permanent puzzled look, Mr. O'Brien makes Winston an earnest, plodding chap, getting into trouble less through clear-than thick-headedness. Similarly, Miss Jan Sterling conveys languor instead of the sexy vitality from which Julia's rebellion arises, and thus never makes the point at all. O'Connor is played by Mr. Michael Redgrave, for all the world like a Frank Richards schoolmaster; indeed, one half expects him to flourish a birch in the torture-chamber and cry "Upon my word, Bunter! I shall deal with you most severely for this insensate behaviour."

Still, some alterations were expected. What was not expected was the transformation of 1984 into a reaffirmation that Luv Conquers All. True, the ending is not happy in the usual sense: Winston and Julia are shot down, reaching for each other, after finding their love unaltered (like Winston's weight) by the months of torture. The message remains, however. Brains can be washed, but not hearts; thought can be destroyed, but not Luv.

Orwell's is the best, most intelligent of the novels which have tried prognosticating what man will come to: far better, for example, than Brave New World or Ape and Essence, because it gives a more coherent account of human activity. Basically it is a throwing-up of hands: at the growth of central power and its obsessional wielding by the post-war Labour government, at Russia, at the new ground gained for mass suggestion, at the awful thought that this was where "State Socialism" would lead. For all its mistakenness, it has the virtue of being a passionate protest against the regimentation of minds, and the film scarcely touches that. With its torture machines and the plug-ugly police, it makes the 1984 regime dependent on physical suppression far more than inculcated acceptance.

Was Orwell mistaken, then? Of course he was. The assumption on which he founded Big Brother's utopia are that was war can be kept up permanently to sustain a particular economy and that power is an end in itself: neither can be justified. His book describes but never explains a class-divided society without a class struggle. Indeed, 1984 never comes to grips with the question of the proles: they love squalidly, they loll in pubs, their culture is pornography and sentimental songs—but what do they do? Presumably they are productive workers, since Winston, Julia and their Outer Party colleagues are government clerks—but what sort of production? Dictators and all other rulers rule just because of the labour and acquiescence of the great mass of productive workers, and that is the factor which Orwell discounted.

Most people have appeared unsure quite what to make of 1984 (except the Communists, who have danced with blind rage as if some cap had not only fitted but fallen over their ears). A not-uncommon reaction has been that it may be mistaken, but, well, it's a warning. So it is: a warning against prophetic works, especially when they are written with more indignation that understanding. All the same, Orwell's book is sincere and serious enough to have deserved better treatment from the film-makers. Television did much better by it.

The publicity for 1984 says with emphasis: "A Film of To-morrow to SHOCK you To-day." Fair enough.

Robert Barltrop

Miners in the U.S.A. (1963)

Book Review from the August 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Power by Howard Fast (Methuen 21s.)

Howard Fast has added another story to the many dealing with the bitter struggles of the American Trade Union Movement in the 1920's and 30's. His latest novel, Power, deals with a particular section, the mineworkers, and it is a tale of horror and bloodshed.

In those days the mine owners ("mine operators" Fast calls them) were quite prepared to use armed might against union organisers and striking workers. Threats, intimidation, violence and murder, none of these were shunned by the company police in their efforts to remove the threat to their bosses' profit margins. It is not really surprising, then, that mineworkers responded in like measure.

Fast builds his plot around two main figures—Ben Holt, a local mineworkers' leader, and Alvin Cutter, a young New York journalist who is sent to cover a strike which Holt is organising in West Virginia. "All characters . . . are fictitious . . . " says the usual caution at the front of the book, but the background against which the tale is told is certainly far from fiction. Like their British counterparts, the U.S. miners suffered terrible privations in those days. Tattered, hungry and emaciated, it is astonishing that they managed to fight back at all, and many were their defeats before they won even the legal right to organise.

Mr. Fast tells us all this, and more. Ben Holt endures agony with the rest of his men in the opening stages, but he is quick to realise the possibilities which leadership of the union holds for him. He claws his way to the union presidency, the very top, and ends up with a yearly salary of fifty thousand dollars. The rank and file, meanwhile, are struggling for a national minimum of four dollars an hour. It is, in fact, a familiar story of trade union leadership generally in recent years. Here in Britain, it has gone a stage further and we are quite used to ex-T.U. men are being appointed to lucrative posts by the government, to say nothing of the knighthoods which are dished out from time to time. We know, too, that mineworkers—and others—have had to come out on strike often in the teeth of opposition and even denunciation from their own elected officials.

Power is a hard-hitting book. It does not make its characters any more lovable than they need be. But then the story is hardly a pretty one. The struggling trade unionists of yesterday had to put up with naked and open brutality in their efforts to organise for better pay and conditions. That sort of thing is a rarity now, but we still have to battle with our employers over wages, hours, and the like. So in that sense, nothing has changed, and this is the point we can appreciate in retrospect when reading a book like this. It is a fight which is unceasing so long as it is confined to such a field. It will end only when the issue has broadened to embrace the very ownership of the means of life, and has been won.

E. T. C.

The Keir Hardie myth (1961)

From the March 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The myth about Keir Hardie's attitude to war is very persistent. At an anti-Polaris rally in Glasgow last December, the Co-operative Movement representative had only to refer to him, ". . . if we could get Keir Hardie here . . ." to have his words drowned by applause. Whatever the sentiments of the audience may have been, it was certainly in error about Hardie's attitude to war.

In 1914, with the Great War drawing near, the Second International called for "Peace demonstrations" throughout Europe. On August 2nd, in Trafalgar Square, Hardie spoke at the "Peace demonstration". Sentimentality and emotionalism were offered in place of the sound education and organisation needed by the workers. Two days later the War began, and the Second International collapsed, its unsound base giving way beneath the strain. In the Labour Leader Hardie proclaimed, "The I.L.P. will at least stand firm. Keep the Red Flag flying!" Brave words indeed, but wholly false. For the I.L.P. turned out to be standing firm on one issue and that was on the question of party unity. To preserve this unity, to retain the greatest number of members within the fold, the most opportunist and unprincipled formulas were applied to justify the conduct of individual party members. The flag hoisted by Hardie and his fellow "Labour Leaders" was a clear and unmistakable Union Jack.

In articles directed at his electorate in Merthyr, Keir Hardie made his position clear. "A nation at war must be united especially when its existence is at stake. In such filibustering expeditions as our own Boer War or the recent Italian war over Tripoli, where no national danger of any kind was involved there were many occasions for diversity of opinion and this was given voice to by the Socialist Party of Italy and the Stop the War Party in this country. Now the situation is different. With the boom of the enemy's guns within earshot, the lads who have gone forth by sea and land to fight their country's battles must not be disheartened by any discordant note at home." (Pioneer, Merthyr 15th Aug., 1914). The man who recoiled from the talk of waging the Class War was quite prepared to have workers serve "their Motherland" in Imperialist War; he wrote that "We must see the war through, but we must also make ourselves so familiar with the facts as to be able to intervene at the earliest possible moment in the interests of peace" (Pioneer 15th Aug., 1914). Let no one be deceived by the mention of the "earliest possible moment" because for Hardie this was a very long way off and he was in fact prepared to support a long, drawn-out conflict in Europe. As he put it on 28th November, 1914, "May I once again revert for the moment to the I.L.P. pamphlets? None of them clamour for immediately stopping the war. That would be foolish in the extreme, until at least the Germans have been driven back across their own frontier, a consummation which, I fear, carries us forward through a long and dismal vista" (Pioneer, Merthyr).

Time after time Hardie fed workers the lie that they were part of a "nation" and as such were bound up in the quarrels of their masters. Not "International Working Class Solidarity", but "Class Collaboration" was his rallying cry, for Hardie was a patriot and proud of it. "I am not a pro-German", he wrote, "and still less am I a pro-Russian. I am a pro-Briton, loving my country and caring for her people. Any war of aggression against the rights and liberties of my country I would resist to the last drop of blood in my veins. But I have not seen, outside the columns of the yellow Jingo Press, any proofs that our interests as a nation were in any way imperilled or threatened by a war in which Austria and Germany and Russia and France were involved" (Pioneer, Merthyr. 22nd Aug 1914).

But although he was a patriot, Hardie would not appear on the official Government recruiting platforms. In the first place he could not stomach the crude jingoism and Imperialism that emerged from these platforms and secondly he wished to remain free to present the I.L.P. version of the events that had led to Britain's involvement in the war. He believed that if the people were told frankly about the "Secret Diplomacy" that had piloted Britain into the war, and were shown how the war, though "unjust," had put the country in peril, the needed volunteers would emerge and there would be no need for jingoistic exhortations or conscription. This in Hardie's view was the "right method" and belief in this method led Hardie to boast that he had been instrumental (together with his colleagues) in securing more recruits for the Armed Forces than his Liberal opponents.

Writing in the Pioneer of November 28th, 1914, Keir Hardie made his claim thus: "I have never said or written anything to dissuade our young men from enlisting; I know too well all there is at stake. But, frankly, were I once more young and anxious to enlist, I would resent more than anything the spectacle of young, strong, flippant upstarts, whether MPs or candidates, who had the audacity to ask me to do for my country what they had not the heart to do themselves. Of all causes, this surely is the one in which actions speak louder than words. If I can get the recruiting figures for Merthyr week by week, which I find a very difficult job, I hope by another week to be able to PROVE that whereas our Rink Meeting gave a stimulus to recruiting, those meetings at the Drill Hall at which the Liberal member or the Liberal candidate spoke, had the exactly opposite effect." Hardie was so determined to prove his point that he tried on a number of occasions to obtain the relevant recruiting figures.

The figures were refused him, but this did not daunt Hardie. In the meantime, his staunch supporter J.B. (John Barr). writing in the Pioneer enthusiastically endorsed Hardie's claim; he wrote. "I am still of the opinion that the Rink meeting gave a fillip to recruiting, and my opinion is based on the belief that the I.L.P. method is the right one. . ."

Two weeks later Hardie was able to proclaim that he had obtained the recruiting figures for his constituency and was able to make good his boast. He set out his claim in this manner: "(1) That for the five weeks before the Rink Meeting. recruiting had been steadily going down week by week; (2) that our I.L.P. meeting was held on Sunday, October 25th, and that for the next three weeks the number of recruits secured in Merthyr kept steadily rising. . . If Mr. Jones challenges this statement I shall produce the figures, though not inclined to do so for very obvious patriotic reasons. Unlike my colleague I am more concerned with aiding the army than with trying to take a mean advantage of a political opponent" (Pioneer, 19th Dec., 1914).

Ample evidence exists to prove that in supporting the War Hardie in no way acted as a renegade. His actions were in fact in concord with the actions of his colleagues in the party leadership and these actions were never repudiated, but were endorsed and underwritten by the party as a whole.

Melvin Harris