News from Mars (1998)

Book Review from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod. Legend £5.99.

Here is an unusual novel, and not just because one of the major characters is the son of life-long members of the Socialist Party. It is a political science-fiction novel (like MacLeod's previous book The Star Fraction), with scenes ranging from recent student politics to a future "anarcho-capitalist" Mars.

Let's look as some of the passages relating to the Socialist Party. At one point the narrator meets his parents at that old Socialist stomping-ground, Speakers' Corner:

" . . . they were doing a respectable trade in a pamphlet. In between keeping half an eye on the demo and chatting to whichever of them wasn't in full flow, I flipped through 'Is a Third World War Inevitable?': its cover as lurid as any peace-movement propaganda, its contents a frosty dismissal of two centuries of peace campaigns—all of which had failed to prevent (where they hadn't actively endorsed) increasingly destructive wars."

This presents a reasonable description of the pamphlet in question, and gives a good idea of MacLeod's basic attitude to the Socialist Party: poking gentle fun at us, but in a basically friendly way. Elsewhere, the same character recalls some of his childhood memories:

"The Russians were in my mind a vague, vast menace. They had done something unpleasant and unfair to a friend of my father's, an old gentleman whose photograph was framed above the fireplace: Karl Marx. The Russians had distorted him. Whatever that was, it sounded painful."

A chance finding of the Russia today pamphlet Soviet Millionaires in a bookshop leads to the observation that "It hadn't stayed in circulation long, not after the SPGB had seized on it as irrefutable proof that behind the socialist façade the USSR concealed a class of wealthy property-owners."

In an article in the science-fiction journal Matrix, MacLeod has discussed his political activities and ideas. He was for many years a Trotskyist, but also acknowledges that he was influenced by "thinking about the implications of the 'non-market socialism' associated with the few but persistent propagandists of the Socialist Party of Great Britain". And he mentions with approval William Morris's idea of Socialism as "a world-wide classless, stateless, moneyless society", using language rarely found outside the pages of the Socialist Standard. It is plain, too, that he now has little time for the traditional left.

However, he also refers to having learned from the so-called libertarians, professed advocates of capitalism with a "free" market and a minimal state. These are the ideas that have influenced the Martian society depicted here, though it still has room for authoritarian legal structures but "privatised" ones, so perhaps that's OK.

MacLeod describes The Stone Canal as "a communist novel about libertarians", but frankly its communist/socialist viewpoint is not explicit enough for this. Despite his apparent sympathy for the Socialist Party's view of the world, he has not written a communist/socialist novel. But he has written a highly-interesting one that may get some readers interested in knowing more about us. Read it—and hope that in future novels he may write more about the moneyless, classless society he states he wants.

Paul Bennett

Proper Gander: A Barrage of Farage (2014)

The Proper Gander Column from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Switch on the BBC news and chances are you’ll be greeted by the sight of Nigel Farage’s face, usually stretched out in a smug grin. The BBC’s apparent response to accusations that it gives a disproportionate amount of airtime to UKIP has been to give it even more exposure, albeit with an expose of its seamier side. On Panorama’s The Farage Factor (BBC1), steely determined reporter Darragh MacIntyre hopes to wipe the smile off Farage’s fizzog.

Some of the dodgy practices MacIntyre reveals include Farage endorsing e-cigarettes after UKIP was given £25,000 by an e-cigarette manufacturer, and an allegation that Farage siphoned off more than his share of party funds to pay for his publicity campaign. The programme also points out that Farage co-chairs the ‘Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy’ group within the European Parliament, which includes openly homophobic and far-right members. Unfortunately, these claims aren’t explored in enough detail, perhaps because UKIP advised its staff not to co-operate with MacIntyre’s investigation. More vocal are the former members with a disgruntled axe to grind about Farage ‘stabbing people in the back’ and how UKIP is his ‘ego trip’. Farage describes them as ‘the dregs of our rejects’.

Despite these concerns, UKIP’s rise continues, with Farage leading the march to its mythical utopia, where society’s ills have been magicked away along with immigration. UKIP’s brutal and blinkered politics have found support partly because of Farage’s slick, confident image. He realises that maximum media exposure drums up followers, especially if he plays up to his persona. Farage (like Boris Johnson) promotes himself as a likeable bounder eager to crash through the usual way of doing things, but he still subscribes to the status quo, with his viewpoint being particularly harsh. And The Farage Factor shows that he behaves in the same self-serving, shady way as other politicians.

Mike Foster

Obituary: Phil Rabin (1995)

Obituary from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

An organisation calling itself the Socialist Party of "Great Britain" might not be where you would expect to find the grand old man of traditional east European Jewish cuisine but for most of the sixty years since he first joined our old Hackney branch, Phil Rabin was an active participant in our advocacy of a new world-wide social system.

Before the Second World War—when he joined—Phil was a keen amateur boxer and his talents in this field were sometimes called upon to protect our outdoor platform from being attacked by fascists when certain of our speakers were speaking. At that time he worked as chief carver at Bloom's Shoreditch restaurant and at the end of the war he played a key part in building up a chain of shops selling government surplus goods for recreational purposes trading as Millets, Victoria. That phase enabled him to set up his famous salt beef bar in Windmill Street, Piccadilly designed by his architect son. It became the focal point for figures from the sporting scene, the underworld and showbiz.

After Arthur Miller once brought in Marilyn Monroe for a snack she expressed her satisfaction by giving Phil a peck on the cheek, which he would never forget. Some of his comrades in Islington Branch like to think that the Beef King's adoption of a vegetarian diet in his later years might well have assisted in his reaching the ripe old age of eighty-five although for those interested he would still provide the recipe for making authentic salt-beef. To wash it down only he could make the perfectly thirst-quenching glass of lemon-tea.

Phil was a widower for thirty years but gained much comfort from his son and daughter and their families. He was a keen fisherman and guided by Isaak Walton was a "Brother of the Angle" of whom it might be said, "This dish of meat is too good for any but anglers, or very honest men". Years after he sold it the Windmill Street business still operated under the title, "Rabin's Nosh Bar" but he was to spend several years in the catering trade in Portugal and South Africa where he had relatives, before settling down in his flat in Dalston.

ESG

The Spanish Civil War Revisited (1998)

Book Review from the February 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Friends of Durruti Group: 1937-1939 By Agustin Guillamon, trans Paul Sharkey. AK Press 1996.

Buenaventura Durruti was killed on the Madrid front early in the Spanish Civil War. His comrades in the "flying column" of dedicated anarchists he led formed a group at his death dedicated to continuing his aims. These were to oppose collaboration with the Spanish Republican Government which the majority of the CNT had entered into, and to convert the war into a revolution by seizing the land and factories.

The CNT (National Labour Federation), which Durruti belonged to, was the biggest workers' organisation in Spain with a claimed membership of over a million. It had a core of political activists, the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) numbering some fifty thousand, and was strongest in the Southeast i.e. Aragon, Barcelona, Valencia, Alicante-the most economically developed part of the country. The language spoken there is Catalan, not regular Spanish (i.e. Castilian). The other languages of the peninsula are Galician, a Portuguese dialect and Franco's mother tongue, and Basque, a language unrelated to any other in Europe.

This linguistic-cultural diversity has always created problems for central governments in Spain, as did the landscape which has rivers and high mountain ranges running from East to West, making communications difficult. It is ideal guerrilla country, whence the word arose during the attempted occupation by Napoleon's army. This was the setting for the Spanish Civil War, something of a misnomer, since after the first few months it became a European War by proxy, and a dress rehearsal for World War II.

In 1936 a conspiracy of generals backed by conservative groups, the aristocracy and the high clergy had mounted a coup d'etat against the five-year-old Republic which succeeded the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The uprising failed; the main centres of administration-Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Valencia-were not captured and the rebels were left in the countryside with winter coming on. Most of Spain is a vast plateau and in the winter has more in common with Tibet than anywhere else.

At this point Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sent forces in to help their right-wing proteges, and Soviet Russia intervened, helping the Communist Party (which was a relatively insignificant organisation) rather than the government. The war ended with a million dead and the Franco dictatorship in power from 1939 until 1975.

The country which three centuries earlier was the first World Power had become moribund. Features which had virtually died out in the rest of Europe were still very much alive-a military class, a priestly class, competing monarchical claims, near-serfdom among seasonal rural labourers, and mass illiteracy. Consequently, understanding Spain is not easy even for those interested. But for those who are, Paul Preston's one thousand pages of text and notes deals splendidly with the enormous mass of data from before, during, and after the war.

He is not detached. It is difficult to imagine anybody with experience of representative government and a free press, secular education and freedom of movement-however heavily qualified-being indifferent to these questions. Hugh Thomas in his History of the Spanish Civil War came close to it. No doubt in good time creatures will emerge from the woodwork and try to do a revisionist job on Franco. It was Stalin's slaughter of his comrades and fellow Russians that allowed this malignant, pot-bellied dwarf to pose as the saviour of European civilisation, and caused many British conservatives, including Churchill to support his claim.

The losers, as always, were the common people, pawns in a struggle between power brokers. Those who weren't killed were crammed into Franco's concentration camps, penal labour battalions, or settled down to a hungry future. The country swarmed with 57 varieties of police. It really was government by machine-gun and terror.

Then twenty years after the war, a totally bizarre and novel factor entered the scene. Billions of pounds, francs, florins and deutschmarks poured into the country in exchange for blue skies, warm sea and sand, cheap wine and other agricultural surpluses, and a vigorous folklore. Spanish capitalism took off vertically. Mass tourism had arrived.

Other than as a dress rehearsal for World War II, the events in Spain from 1936-9 were not of great consequence for the rest of the world, but they have generated an enormous amount of debate.

At the time the issue appeared to be a simple matter of democracy versus dictatorship, and provoked passionate debate in the Socialist Party as it did in the reformists parties here and abroad. The attempt of the Communist Party to enter the debate was frustrated by their rejection of democracy in the first place ("democratic centralism" was what they called their version of dictatorship). But for libertarian organisations there was a real problem. If there is no democracy, how could Socialist ideas be spread? On the other hand, a war within capitalism could only be fought on capitalist terms. You can't have a democratic army, as the anarchists in the CNT found out.

"Arming of the people is meaningless. The nature of military warfare is determined by the class directing it. An army fighting in defence of a bourgeois state, even if it should be antifascist, is an army in the service of capitalism . . . War between a fascist state and an antifascist state is not a revolutionary class war. The proletariat's intervention on one side is an indication that it has already been defeated. Insuperable technical and professional inferiority on the part of the popular or militia-based army was implicit in military struggle on a military front" (Guillaman, p.10).

And if you have an overwhelming majority, you don't need any army anyway. No amount of oppression can be made to work against it, as the Communist Party found out in Moscow in 1989. But that overwhelming majority has to know what it is about. And that is what the Friends of Durruti concluded:

"What happened was what had to happen. The CNT was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory. We did not have a concrete programme. We had no idea where we were going . . . By not knowing what to do we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the Communists who support the farce of yesterday."

There are a number of traps for the unwary in Guillamon's book. The word junta does not mean the same to a Spanish speaker as to an English speaker. Also, the revolution we are told has to be "totalitarian". This cannot be personal dictatorship which is what the word has come to mean. It can only mean wholehearted, excluding the possibility of a halfway house between capitalism and socialism.

A greater problem arises on page 11: "why the revolutionary option was not exercised. And the answer is very simple: there was no revolutionary vanguard capable of steering the revolution". This Trotskyist recipe contradicts anarchist emphasis on personal responsibility and originally arose from keeping bad company and because the consciousness and conditions for real social change were not there.

The Friends of Durruti were "not brilliant theorists nor gifted organisers but essentially barricade fighters". Heroism is not enough, although there was plenty of that. These brave people deserved better from history.

Ken Smith

The First World War (1964)

Book Review from the March 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

The First World War: An Illustrated History by A. J. P. Taylor (Hamish Hamilton)

Perhaps Mr. Taylor is, in the strict sense of the word, our most eminent modern historian. Yet whatever a man's knowledge, nobody should be deluded into believing that his conclusions are unassailable.

Consider, for example, Mr. Taylor's opinion on the cause of the First World War:

Men are reluctant to believe that great events have small causes. Therefore, once the Great War started, they were convinced that it must be the outcome of profound forces. It is hard to disciver these when we examine the details. Nowhere was there conscious determination to provoke a war. Statesmen miscalculated. They used the instruments of bluff and threat which had proved effective on previous occasions. This time things went wrong. The deterrent on which they relied failed to deter; the statesmen became the prisoners of their own weapons. The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.

and

The First World War had begun—imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.

Now this may appeal to those who hold the "accidental" theory of history. But that theory does little more than spell out the process of events; it tells us nothing about the causes of those events nor does it illuminate the larger canvas of human history in all its social phases. Like the 1914/18 soldiers' song, it says, in effect, that we are here because we are here because . . . 

The theory that the First World War was an avoidable accident ignores the previous history of Europe. It ignores the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, the German ambitions in Africa and the Middle East and the threat which an expanding German capitalism represented to the established European powers. It ignores, even, the very fact that nobody tries to ignore—the massive build up of military strength on the Continent before 1914 and it certainly tells us nothing about the reasons for that build up.

Mr. Taylor, in truth, cannot ignore this fact: -

The German general staff did not believe that they could conquer decisively if they had to fight at full strength on two fronts, against both France and Russia at once. Therefore they had long planned, ever since 1892, to put practically all their armed weight in the west and to knock out France before the slow machine of Russian mobilization could lumber into action.

And if there is a contradiction in a theory which says that a war can break out by accident, although one power has planned for over twenty years to knock out another—well, that is Mr. Taylor's contradiction, not ours. We know how fallible the experts can be.

Apart from this, Mr. Taylor is fashionably harsh upon the generals (one picture of Sir John French, in morning coat and topper hurrying through a crowd, describes the B.E.F. commander as " . . . in training for the retreat from Mons.") and favourable to Lloyd George. The photographs are nothing less than brilliant; each one loaded with the atmosphere of its time. Here are pain and courage, pathos and provocation. Look at these pictures again and again—there seems to be something fresh there every time.

Those from the fighting itself are positively horrific—a legless French soldier, some Tommies who have been blinded in a gas attack and stand dumbly in line, each man guiding himself by his hand on the shoulder in front. The pictures from the home front are no less impressive. The shot of the Eton schoolboys on their way to dig over some plot shows how timeless are the fashions and the demeanour of our master class. These boys could have been photographed yesterday—unlike the working class lads who, on page 21, are cheering the volunteers outside a recruiting station.

And the pictures are supported with biting captions.

The First World War released a flood of human suffering such as few had foretold in 1914. It slashed a great gap into a hopeful generation and it wrecked Europe's morale. Yet in 1939 they were ready to go into it again, ready with the uniforms and the flags and the claptrap about the glory of war.

Let those workers who urge their fellows into uniform study the photographs in this book. Let them smell the mud and the cordite, feel the tight fear of men about to go over the top, share the endurance of a civilian population under bombardment. And let them see, almost at first hand, the pompous cynicism of the generals and the statesmen—the leaders who are at their most beloved and trusted when the world is at its deepest in agonised confusion.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Reckless In Rochester (2014)

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

This was not a fertile year for the party conferences what with Ed Miliband in his leader's speech 'forgetting' to mention what Labour would try to do about the economy and the mess it is in and David Cameron working to make everyone else ignore that the Tory party is having nightmares about mass defections to Nigel Farage and his UKIP. Most prominent among these was Mark Reckless MP for the highly vulnerable seat of Rochester and Strood. Reckless was one of the 2010 intake into the Commons but in so brief a time there he has made himself a name as both a rebel and a 'statesman' –which means he has a talent for adjusting to some of the most threatening aspects of capitalist society. In 1996 and 1997 while employed by the investment bankers UBS Warburg he was rated as one of the top three economists in that breeding ground of such life forms known as the City of London. And another similar rating in 2012 placed him as Conservative back-bencher of the year after he led fifty-three MPs in rebellion against the EU budget. Other issues on which he has stood out include tuition fees, the so-called pasty tax and restricting Child Benefit. On another theme – which may have been more appealing to Farage –he missed voting in a debate on the Budget because he was in a drunken stupor. This was in the small hours: 'I thought it was inappropriate' was how Reckless excused his lapse, which evaded the fact that it happened when he was just two months into his career as an MP and was supposed to be supporting the 2010 budget – Osborne's first contribution to the great Conservative crusade to salvage the British economy.

Blazing Row

His case for leaving the Tory party was that the leaders were 'not serious about real change in Europe... Britain could do better'. The matter came to a head when he was in a group of MPs at an 'away day' at Cameron's Cotswold home, when the guests were expected to wear casual clothes and, apart from other activities, play football on the house lawn while they composed the manifesto for the next election. Cameron had attacked him (but not on the pitch) over the rumours of his pending departure and a blazing row ensued which left Reckless 'losing faith' in Cameron. Apart from anything else he was reported to be disturbed by the pressure of the Whips on some MPs, at times using knowledge of embarrassing aspects of their private lives. Perhaps this example of our leaders' caring unity was among the titbits served to Reckless when he was taken to lunch in the Members' Dining Room by Chief Whip Michael Gove.

Clacton

It did not help Reckless make his case against the insincerity of the others when he gave so many assurances that, apart from not moving over to UKIP, he would be prominent in the party's campaign in the Clacton by-election: 'Good to lead coach for Team 2015 campaigning in Birmingham Northfield on Sunday and will be followed by our Clacton action day next Thursday' he announced, although this was at the same time that he had been busily plotting his changeover with the UKIP defector – and now UKIP MP for Clacton – Douglas Carswell. Typical among the flood of angry responses the chairman of his constituency Party trumpeted that he was '...astonished and disgusted... only 48 hours ago he proclaimed his support for the Conservatives and their plans for a referendum on Europe and he gave me assurances that he wouldn't defect'. This aggravated Reckless' own expectation that he would face an 'enormous personal risk' by changing his party and excused him concealing his intentions because he knew that to reveal it all would unleash 'a media onslaught on me . . . in a 'vicious, vicious way'. He has yet to explain why his awareness of so aggressive a potential in the Conservative Party did not dissuade him from joining it.

Shapps

As the rumours swirled and flashed about the intentions of so many Tory MPs (even Stephen Bone, the carelessly right-wing MP for Wellingborough who is famous for publicising his long-suffering wife, muttered an admission on Have I Got News For You that he also had thought about defecting) there was a fully primed machinery of abuse and threats ready to go into action. Early, and particularly nasty in this when Reckless eventually came clean was Grant Shapps, the Party Chairman. But he has not been free of controversy himself. Before he got into Parliament he was accustomed to use the pen name of Michael Green. It was Michael Crick (who was once assaulted by a prominent UKIP member with a loosely rolled-up leaflet) on Channel Four News who revealed that Shapps’ marketing website about his business included 'testimonials' from people and businesses who, if they did exist, could not be traced. But this revelation was no deterrent for Shapps as he sounded off in the Reckless affair: 'He has lied and lied and lied again' he bellowed at the Tory faithful '...Today, your trust has been abused. You have been cheated. But worse, the people of Rochester and Strood have been cast aside'. This is part of the very stuff of politics; change the odd word and it could have been Miliband going on about Cameron, or Clegg about Miliband or, at another time, all three about Shapps.

Rochester

With its cathedral and castle and Cornmarket and so many other such buildings Rochester is an interesting place, a particular favourite of Charles Dickens. On the coast of Kent, it was once a symbol of British naval power and of building the ships which went along with that. Symbolic of something else, it was nearby that the first of the supposedly enlightened penal establishments for youngsters was set up at Borstal. But as shipbuilding declined so did the town; the Chatham dockyard closed in 1984 and unemployment soared in what was feared to be a post-industrial economy. If there has been any kind of easing since then it might have been seen in the revival of the traditional May Day 'Jack In The Green Sweeps' dance. Will there be any relief in the by-election, in the bitter recriminations, the blackmail, the transparently dishonest promises about a better, safer world?

Ivan

Politics of poetry (1990)

From the December 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Words can convey different things to different people at different times and in different places. This is why definitions are so important—it all depends upon what you mean.

People play the cross-purpose game, confident in the belief that understanding is mutual. This is particularly true of words that are symbols for concepts like Socialism, Freedom, Democracy, Revolution, which are of a magnitude too great for single words to carry. On some occasions though, as in poetry, definitions are not only in the main absent, but would be out of place (inhibiting to flow and form), so that one is then free to make of the words what one will.

In 1929 D. H. Lawrence published a collection of poems entitled Pansies because, as he wrote in the preface, "they are rather 'pensees' (thoughts) than anything else". What is interesting about some of the poems in the book is how they can be seen to reflect socialist ideas and aspirations. Take for example the first and last verses from a poem called 'The Root of Our Evil':

The root of our present evil is that we buy and sell.
Ultimately, we are all busy buying and selling one another.
What we want is some sort of communism
Not based on wages, nor profits, nor any sort of buying and selling
But on a religion of life.

Lawrence was not a Socialist and, from a reading of his letters in terms of practical policies, very naive. But on the evidence before us his mind now and then flew on quite surprising social lines.

The nature of poetry wonderfully concentrates the mind, so what attempted in prose might be trite, in poetry achieves a cogent intensity. Critical accuracy is not important. If Lawrence says that "the root of our present evil is that we buy and sell", when in fact it is the ownership of property in the form of capital, this does not dampen its impact and essential social truth.

In the poem 'Kill Money' the literal interpretation is not the relevant point, more the power expression of working class life experience, that comes through.

Kill money, put money out of existence.
It is a perverted instinct, a hidden thought
which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul.

Make up your mind about it:
That society must establish itself upon a different principle
from the one we've got now.

We must have the courage of mutual trust.
We must have the modesty of simple living.
And the individual must have his house, food and fire all free like a bird.

This theme is extended in 'Money Madness; to show how money comes into the way we estimate or value people, and the shame and stigma of poverty:

For mankind says with one voice: How much is he worth?
Has he no money? Then let him eat dirt and go cold.
And if I have no money, they will give me a little bread,
So I do not die,
But they will make me eat dirt with it.

There is also to be had a touch of William Morris's ideas on how important work is for people and how different it would be in a Socialist world. In 'Men Are Not Bad':

Men are not bad, when they are free.
Prison makes men bad, and the money compulsion makes men bad.
If men were free from the terror of earning a living
There would be abundance in the world
And men would work gaily.

Lawrence sees a distinction between work and labour. What comes through in the next poem is the social character of work, or rather, how the social relationships of work pronounce upon the way we view work and its effect upon our lives:

All that we have, while we live, is life;
and if you don’t live during your life, you are a piece of dung.
And work is life, and life is lived in work
unless you’re a wage-slave.
While a wage-slave works, he leaves life aside
And stands there a piece of dung.
Men should refuse to be lifelessly at work.
Men should refuse to be heaps of wage-earning dung.
Men should refuse to work at all, as wage-slaves.
Men should demand to work for themselves, of themselves,
And put their life in it.
For if a man has no life in his work, he is mostly a heap of dung.

The wages system is central to working class slavery and Lawrence could see in his poem 'Wages' the irony in the need to work for wages being presented as the freedom to obtain ones wants and needs, whereas it is in reality, vicious and constraining:

The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious completion is - the world we live in .
The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
that ever turned men into fiends.

Lawrence's politics, whatever they were, are none but of academic concern. Occasionally, as mentioned earlier, he touched on politics in his letters, as in January 1921 writing from Italy to the author Eleanor Farjeon:

If I knew how to I'd really join myself to the Revolutionary Socialists now. I think the time has come for a real struggle. That's the only thing I care for: the death struggle. I don't care for politics, but I know there must and should be a deadly revolution very soon, and I would take part in it if I knew how.

Words indeed, but what do they mean? One could, of course, say the same of Lawrence's poetic writings, but at least we may take what we will and use their inspiration to illuminate—imagination to spark upon imagination. What any writer may intend in his work is of little importance. The act of presenting it to the world makes that world the heir and the interpreter, to make what it can from what it already knows and understands.

Ian Jones

Memories are made of this (2014)

Book Review from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Notes From the End of History: A Memoir of the Left in Wales'. Philip Bounds. Merlin Press.

Philip Bounds is an historian and journalist and this is his memoir about being attracted towards – and involved in – radical politics and organizations in Wales. It focuses mainly on the 1980s and 90s when he was growing up in a dynamic political environment punctuated by seminal events like the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5. In particular, he tries to answer the questions ‘Why has Marxism survived in spite of enduring so many defeats?’ and ‘What was it like to belong to the radical left at a time when Marxism was at its lowest ebb?’.

In some ways, he gives a more coherent answer to the latter than the former question though it is interesting that his political journey started out attending meetings of the SPGB as a teenager. His accounts are at times funny and nearly always insightful, a flavour being his vivid description of his first ever political meeting, addressed by late comrade Ron Cook:

‘I suppose he was the sort of socialist Orwell might have been too narrow-minded to appreciate. Grey haired, bespectacled and genial he came across like a university lecturer who had thrown it all up for a career in market gardening . . . I understood about a third of it but in my heart I embraced it all.’ (p.62-3)

Bounds says that despite his admiration for the SPGB’s vision of a peaceful, democratic socialist revolution (which has clearly stayed with him since) he moved on to associate with various of the more conventional organizations of the political left, saying of the SPGB that he was ‘thrilled by its internal culture but dismayed by its lack of activism’. He ended up – perhaps bizarrely – in the Communist Party of Great Britain and then one of its successor organizations after its demise, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), the group still associated with the Morning Star newspaper. The political journey he took, via meetings of the SPGB, an interest in the punk band Crass and the anarchist group Class War is a fascinating one, though despite all his self-reflection in this book, it remains something of a puzzle that he chose to end up in the CPB. Indeed, it is very clear that he retains an affection not only for the style of politics of the SPGB but for the Party’s insistence on majority democratic revolution and hostility to the totalitarian dictatorships of the former Soviet Union, China and North Korea, etc. These are dictatorships for which members of the CPB are normally want to retain something of a political affection.

At times there is a sense that Bounds wishes to challenge his readers to move beyond the stock-in-trade reformism and sloganeering of the far left. For instance, towards the end of the book there is a moving and insightful piece about the occasion he accompanied a poverty-stricken member of the CPB around Swansea late one night, as she rooted through leftovers behind a luxury hotel in search of free food to be distributed amongst those on her estate:

‘With her gift for locating  sources of free food in a hostile city and her uncompromising insistence that the booty be shared out equally among her kinsfolk, she gestured towards a past in which no one thought of themselves as better than anyone else and everyone said ‘this is ours’ but never ‘this is mine’. In reminding us that communism had once been the natural order of things, she incarnated the hope that one day – at a much higher level of technology and culture and at a much lower level of superstition – we could do it all again.’ (p.186)

There is another way in which this book challenges the reader and pushes them further than they might otherwise have gone in their thinking. It is exceptionally well written and the prose flows beautifully. However, it is best to realise that amongst all this are often some very unfamiliar phrases and words. It is almost as if Bounds like to lull the reader into a false sense of security through the fluidity of his writing style before including something more challenging that will have readers running for the dictionary: ‘aetiology’, ‘exegetically gifted’, ‘subfusc’, ‘manichean intuitions’, ‘marmoreal’ and the wondrous ‘gallimaufry of soporific guests’ are but a random selection.

A highly entertaining and enjoyable memoir that deserves a wide audience, in Wales and beyond.

DAP

Cooking the Books: The Quest for Superprofits (2014)

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

It can’t be often that Karl Marx gets a favourable mention in the Investors Chronicle. But he did in its 5 September issue. Chris Dillow, in an article discussing whether or not robotisation would be good for profits and dividends, quoted Marx as pointing out that new, more productive machines not only replace workers but also, as they spread, reduce the value of the older machines still in use. Part of the value of these machines is destroyed through what he called ‘moral depreciation’ (Capital, Vol 1, ch. 15, s.3b).

Dillow’s point was that this ‘moral depreciation’ reduced the value of the firm’s capital and so also of shares in it. There is another reason why an investor should steer clear of such firms. A firm with old machines will be less profitable as its machines won’t be able to produce its product as cheaply as its competitors who have installed the new machines.

Dillow claims that ‘profits come from monopoly power’ and, on this assumption, asks ‘will new technologies be a source of monopoly power or not?’ His answer: yes, at least for a while until the new technology becomes the norm.

In saying this he was pointing out that those firms that first employ a new technology will, because they can produce more cheaply than the average, be able to make an above average profit. This ‘superprofit’ attracts other firms to adopt the new technology, so bringing the average cost of production down and, with this, the end of the temporary superprofits of the innovating firms.

This is well explained by Ernest Mandel (despite his Trotskyism) in his Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory:

‘ … an enterprise or industrial sector with an above average level of productivity … economizes in its expenditure of social labour and therefore makes a surplus profit, that is to say, the difference between its costs and selling prices will be greater than the average profit. The pursuit of this surplus profit is, of course, the driving force behind the entire capitalist economy. Every capitalist enterprise is forced by competition to try to get greater profits, for this is the only way it can constantly improve its technology and labour productivity. Consequently all firms are forced to take this same direction, and this of course implies that what at one time was an above-average productivity winds up as the new average productivity, whereupon the surplus profit disappears. All the strategy of capitalist industry stems from this desire on the part of every enterprise to achieve a rate of productivity superior to the national average and thereby make a surplus profit, and this in turn provokes a movement which causes the surplus profit to disappear, by virtue of the trend for the average rate of labour productivity to rise continuously. ’ (www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1967/intromet/index.htm)

So it is not true that ‘profit comes from monopoly power’. Profits come from the surplus value produced by the working class. Monopoly power only enables a firm to draw more than average from this pool of surplus value. If monopoly power was the source of profits then if there was none, as in the ideal of so-called ‘perfect competition’, there would be no profits. Which is absurd. In that situation firms would still be making a profit, only the average with none making a superprofit.

Editorial: Foolish Protest (2014)

Editorial from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

So UKIP have won their first MP, Douglas Carswell, ex-Tory, currency crank and free-marketeer who wants to bash those on benefits even more. Quite how UKIP feel this can appeal to Labour voters is unclear. From a policy point of view, UKIP are still Tories,  an external faction of the Tory party, financed by jumped-up, opinionated businessmen who think they can buy themselves into politics.

The trouble is that people don’t always think rationally when it comes to protest votes. In this instance they are voting against something –the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem Westminster politicians – not for anything. UKIP voters won’t be interested in anything beyond the party’s anti-foreigner stance and don’t know or couldn’t care less what else it says it stands for. Nor would they expect UKIP to carry out its promises if they got into power any more than they expect the other parties to.

There have been protest parties before that have done well at by-elections. That’s what the Liberals used to be in the 60s and 70s, and then there was the SDP in the 80s. They attracted people who were put off by the Punch and Judy show between the Tories representing big business and Labour perceived as representing the trade unions, which they saw as reflecting the industrial disputes of the time. The Liberals were a pretty pointless lot but you could hardly describe them as nasty. In fact, in some ways they espoused some decent values such as tolerance.

It’s different today. Times are harsher and the protest vote is going to a nasty party. In periods of economic downturn people turn more easily to this kind of party. Nationalist, protectionist and anti-foreigner views flourish when people, who already mistakenly consider themselves to be a nation,  feel economically insecure. They tend to turn to the ‘nation-state’ to protect them from world market pressures and the competition of other states.

Panic-stricken, the Tories, who stand most to lose from the UKIP protest vote, are trying to compete with UKIP in the anti-immigration and anti-EU stakes. As far as the dominant section of the British capitalist class is concerned, this is a dangerous game. They don’t want to withdraw from the vast, single European market, nor to be excluded from taking part in decisions about it. And they see more advantages than disadvantages in the free movement of EU labour. They would be appalled if their favourite party, the Tories, in pursuit of the personal ambitions of its MPs and would-be MPs, manoeuvres itself into a position where they have to campaign for an Out vote in an In/Out  EU referendum.

People are right to be discontented and to protest about their situation, but they need to be more discerning and choose the right target. It’s not the Westminster politicians, nor the Brussels bureaucracy, nor the East European migrants who are to blame for their plight. It’s the world-wide capitalist system of production for profit. That’s what they should target. But protesting against it and its effects is not enough. They need to go beyond this and organise politically to bring the whole system to an end and replace it by one in which the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all humanity and used to improve the lot of people everywhere.

Party Notes. (1904)

From the September 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

That there is a good field for a sound Socialist party in this country is evident. The Socialist Party has been in existence barely three months, but the effect of the propaganda has already made itself felt.

Thirteen branches have been formed, and over twenty open-air meetings are held each Sunday, besides several others during the week.

Not alone have we secured a footing in the Metropolis, but enquiries have come in from various other parts of the country. Many of those who sought information have since joined the ranks.

The lack of an organ to give expression to our views has evidently hampered our work of teaching Socialism as the only way out of wage-slavery. But now that The Socialist Standard has been unfurled our task will be considerably facilitated.

The importance of the Party press as an instrument of propaganda cannot be over estimated, and comrades will see to it that The Socialist Standard is put into the hands of the working class.

At each propaganda meeting the Chairman should direct the attention of the audience to our organ—a paper written, published and paid for by the working class—and the comrade selling the paper should ask those who purchase copies to become subscribers. Then sample copies could be left at the houses in a given street in a suitable neighbourhood, and a call made say a week afterwards to ascertain results.

Comrades should not fear disappointment: Socialists are to be found in most unexpected quarters. By this method a good circulation can be kept up, and many new members secured to the Party.

Branches should see that a copy of our paper is supplied to each public library in their districts, and thus bring the organ and the Party under the notice of persons who may otherwise remain ignorant of the existence of either.

Arrangements are being made for the formation of Branches in Clerkenwell, Tottenham, and Ilford. Will members in these districts, and readers desirous of joining, communicate with me?

I shall also be glad to hear from readers in Coventry, Isle of Wight, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Oxford, Liverpool, Manchester, Rochester and Treharris regarding the establishment of branches in their respective localities.

Comrades, the watch-word is "Onward."

C. Lehane

A Design For Life (2004)

From the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Compared to most modern magazines and journals, the first Socialist Standard was huge, measuring a full 15-1/8” by 10” (38.4 cm by 25.5 cm). It was printed by Jacomb Brothers at their shop in Stratford, east London. A.E. Jacomb, the socialist half of the brothers, was one of the founder members, responsible for not only meeting the Party’s printing needs but also for much other behind-the-scenes organisation. The banner at the top of the Standard’s front page was configured in trendy art nouveau lettering. The price was just one penny for eight pages.

    

For the first few years perhaps the most noticeable things about the Standard were the full pages of ‘Party Notes’ and verbatim reports of Party meetings. The SS – as it used to called for short until this was abandoned, for obvious reasons – therefore could function as a kind of newsletter for members, helping create the esprit de corps which has been a feature of the Party ever since. Noticeable also, although never numerous, were the adverts. Perhaps the most interesting of these was for The Stores at 127 York Road, Battersea, purchases at which would render funds to the Party. In this the influence of the Party’s parent body, the Social Democratic Federation, with its boot works and bazaars, can be traced. The most familiar of the early features was ‘A Look Round’, a short items column partly based on newspaper snippets; a tradition which has been carried on over the decades in columns like ‘Notes By the Way’ and ‘The Passing Show’, and still evident in the current ‘Voice From the Back’.

    

In March 1908 a new pictorial banner was introduced. This was designed by F.C. Watts, a woodcarver by trade, and depicted a rising sun surmounted, slightly awkwardly, by the Party’s globe emblem. This little sketch summed up the exhilarating prospect of a “speedy termination” to capitalism which then seemed so likely. By this time many of the early features, such as the adverts, had vanished and ‘Party Notes’ was much reduced, to be banished to the back page to dwell with the branch directory, notices of meetings and the Declaration of Principles (which has appeared in every single issue of the Standard).

Subtle changes

The outbreak of the First World War did not immediately bring any major changes, although with many Party members ‘on the run’ before long, or just dropped out of activity, filling the Standard became a tough job. Towards the end of the war paper rationing brought a reduction of pages from eight to four, and the pages themselves reduced in size in September 1918. This new slimmed down Standard in cheap paper lacked the exuberant pre-war banner, bearing instead a plain title in gothic script (incidentally very similar to the contemporary appearance of Justice, the SDF paper). This was more fitting for the sober Party which emerged from the war. With the new look came also the snapping of ties to Jacomb Bros and a connection made instead with R.E. Taylor and Son of Banner Street. This was to be a long relationship which lasted from 1921 until 1966.

    

By the beginning of the 1930s the SPGB was growing rapidly, largely as a result of the Depression. Whether or not it was because the end again seemed nigh for capitalism, the pre-war socialist sunrise returned in September 1932. Accompanying this was a new innovation – a list of contents – a useful feature which has been present for the vast majority of the period since. The Edwardian-era symbolism must have seemed quaint and anachronistic even then, for within a year a new banner with plain serif letters was introduced and which possessed a spikiness which seemed suited for a party with all barbs out in defence of Marxism against the pseudo-socialist pretences of Labour and the CPGB.

    

Further changes came in 1939 with a completely new look, influenced by modernist advertising and design techniques. With its bold typefaces, bright-looking yellow covers, and well-spaced layout, this was in many ways an apogee for the Standard. It was, however, fairly short-lived. The outbreak of the Second World War instantly stripped off the Standard’s yellow shirt and paper shortages soon put paid to the rest of the fandoodle. Indeed, by mid-1942 the Standard was an eight-page propaganda sheet, tightly written in a tiny typeface.

Although ‘peace’ brought an increase in page numbers, the Standard stayed utilitarian in visage throughout the late 1940s. War-time problems, such as the destruction by bombing of the type and articles of the January 1941 issue, and power stoppages during the fuel crisis of early 1947, meant bringing out the Standard was at times a struggle, but it still came out regularly throughout the decade.

From organ to journal

Despite a few innovations, such as the introduction of cartoons, drawn by Robert Coster (Barltrop) in 1953, the Socialist Standard in the 1950s was a rather conservative looking periodical and by the end of the decade it was obvious that the design needed some attention and fresh input. This was an especially vital and pressing problem given the increasing difficulty of holding outdoor meetings, which up until this time had been the Party’s most important propaganda method. Therefore in 1959 the Standard was revamped, the first edition in May being ready for a big push during the Hackney and Bethnal Green election campaigns. As well as a spacious layout and a new banner, the introduction of photographs greatly modernised its appearance (and it became a “journal” rather than the faintly obscene “organ” it had previously been). The changes inaugurated a great period of almost constant experimentation in the design of the Standard which lasted throughout the 1960s. The new wave culminated in 1967-68 with a series of excellent covers professionally designed by Lionel Selwyn, who was responsible for the layout during this decade.

    

The early- to mid-1970s in contrast saw the Standard slip back to a more conservative look, even with a return to 1950s-type cartoons and non-pictorial covers for a time. But towards the end of the 1970s the it once again improved in appearance, culminating in yet another makeover in June 1979, just in time for the 75th anniversary of the Party. With internal pictures, a professional layout and an adjustment to true A4 size, this defined what became the ‘80s layout, with – by the mid-80s – a highly professional design, with innovative typefaces and striking front covers together with increased use of specialist columns, most notably the TV Review.

    

From the beginning of the 90s, typesetting – or rather typing to diskette – was taken over by Party members, thereby reducing production costs. In fact, for a period the Standard was also printed at the Party’s Head office from plates prepared by an outside firm. Further format alterations came in 1994 when the design and printing was taken over by Nigel McCullough from Belfast, who introduced a very slick and distinctive look for the Standard. The layout and design is still done by Party members. The turn of the century saw the appearance of an on-line version, at www.worldsocialism.org/spgb, where an increasing number read it, and the introduction of Peter Rigg’s ever apposite cartoon “Free Lunch”.

    

Today, the Socialist Standard has the distinction of being the longest running party political journal in the country. Despite world wars, depression, recession and slump, it has appeared every month without fail for 100 years. For an ordinary publication this would be a matter for self-congratulation. For ourselves, however, such longevity is to be regretted as we would rather have seen socialism established long since. However, we shall continue until the job is done – and a visually appealing and combative Socialist Standard can only aid us in that process.

Keith Scholey

Did Communism Collapse? (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ten years ago this month Gorbachev was nearly relieved of power in a coup. It is ten years since those heady days of tanks in Moscow, Yeltsin in “The White House”, Yeltsin giving a speech on a tank, and workers fighting for democracy—although they didn't know what else they wanted, only that it shouldn't be the CPSU. The coup collapsed and the USSR eventually went with the perpetrators into historical oblivion. The western media greeted these events, which they have never given any indication of understanding how and why the happened, with hysteria: capitalism had won; we had reached the end of history; there was a New World Order; and socialism, communism and Marxism were dead.

It is unlikely that the media will do anything but repeat their tiresome “death of communism” mantra. It is also unlikely that they will analyse why August 1991 happened, despite having ten years to think about it. So let's look at their claim that “communism” collapsed in the USSR via a linguistical route.

The CPSU leaders never claimed that Soviet Russia was “communist”; they described their country as being “socialist”. Socialism, for them, was to be a period which was preparing communism. So straightaway the media's claim is at odds with the old Soviet leaders' own pronouncements.

Logically, then, they should have said that “socialism” had collapsed. This is, of course, not a nice thing to admit, since then “communism” could hardly be said to be dead, nor that history was at an end, since the New World Order could still be replaced by a Newer (Communist) World Order. So was it socialism that collapsed? Such a claim would have created new problems for the media pundits. The left-wing have not all supported the USSR; indeed non-socialist writers have also questioned the socialist credentials of Soviet Russia.

In Leninist theory, the state machine has to be smashed through insurrection and the economy nationalised under the auspices of workers' councils, but in reality under the vanguard party's political dictatorship. This is termed “the workers' state” or “socialism”. When Stalin began to eradicate all opposition, Trotsky developed the theory of the “degenerate workers' state”. He argued that the Soviet economy was basically socialist but that a party bureaucracy had smashed workers' control.

A section of the Trotskyist movement, later to be today's SWP, found this view so ridiculous that they said Stalin had restored capitalism to the USSR. This “restoration-of-capitalism” view was to appear again in two guises. After Stalin died in 1953, Nikita Khruschev became General Secretary. The Chinese Communist Party (under Mao) began to openly attack the CPSU as “reformists”¸ who were overseeing the restoration of capitalism. When Mao died, Enhver Hoxha (the Albanian dictator) said that capitalism had been restored under Khruschev and the new revisionist Chinese leaders.

It gets more bewildering. Lenin said that they were creating state capitalism in Russia as a necessary step forward; in addition he added, for complete maxi-confusion, that “socialism” was nothing but state capitalism made to benefit the people. The non-Leninist tradition was quick to point out that he was saying the same thing as Social Democrats, only that he thought the means to gain state power should be different. (Paul Mattick, in Marx and Keynes, analyses this quite nicely.) So there you have it: the founder of the USSR called black white. Fans of Douglas Adams will instantly recall the theological argument for the non-existence of God from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which ends up with Man getting knocked down at a zebra crossing.

How did this all arise? 1848—the publication of The Communist Manifesto; 1875—Marx's The Critique of the Gotha Programme; 1917—Lenin's The State and Revolution. Engels explained that he and Marx had to call their 1848 manifesto “Communist” in order to avoid being confused or associated with various movements calling themselves “socialist”. Engels and Marx, otherwise, used the words interchangeably. InThe Critique Marx said that there would be two phases in communism – a “lower” and a “higher” phase, the lower phase rationing goods via labour vouchers (which aren't money). It was Lenin in 1917 who claimed that the lower phase of communism was commonly called socialism; which completely falsified the facts.

We in the Socialist Party have always insisted that socialism and communism are two words which differ in the same way as spade and shovel, i.e. not at all. We were also pretty clear in saying the Bolshevik coup d'état heralded the real onset of Russia's capitalist development, not the creation of socialism/communism. So what is the Marxist definition of socialism? A world-wide society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the world society. There will be no nations, states, commodity production, buying and selling, money or classes. Production will be based on the principle of: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their self-defined needs”.

So read this August's newspapers with a touch of salt; Marxism and Communism died in 1991? Certainly not!

Graham C. Taylor

Imagining a Socialist Society (3) (2013)

From the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The third, concluding part of our series on the possibilities of socialism.

Socialist society will inherit a number of problems from capitalism. So we must take some account of the prospect and estimates of likely changes in the near future as a result of climate change and a post-peak oil world society.

Inherited problems

On peak oil there seems to be pretty well a consensus now, worldwide, that we have a mounting problem on our hands and a marathon task ahead to sort out the problem. However, the biggest stumbling block is the manner in which the subject is presented to us –again, always in terms of money costs. We already have the technical know-how, and when scientists and technicians and engineers are finally freed from the constraints of the current system of having to make a profit at every step, there really is no doubt that they can come up with even more fantastic inventions than we can currently dream about. The solutions we are being offered are lack-lustre and extremely limited, only taking into account those who can pay. Are we drilling for oil and gas and mining for coal because of the positive benefits they confer? Are we building more and wider roads and increasing air travel for increased ease and convenience for travellers? Are we chopping down forests to plant palm plantations and using other crops for biofuels instead of for food because feeding people is more important than feeding engines? No!

The reason for trying to extract oil from way under the seabed –with all those risks involved to the environment –and from the filthy polluting tar sands is simply that it is profitable. Coal is even more harmful to human health but still profitable. Burning fossil fuels could go on for some little time yet with the various beneficiaries wheeling and dealing about the most profitable ways to prolong the despoliation of the planet and the negative effects to human health. We know we have much better methods already in our hands and hosts of people chomping at the bit to get started in putting these new technologies into practice on a very large scale at the household and industrial level. Many would have chosen to have done it years ago if it weren't for the prohibitive monetary cost. Clean electricity from sun, wind, wave and tides. Geothermal energy. Oil left in the ground or reserved for crucial manufacturing and extracted with care. Buildings constructed to use minimal energy and have minimal impact on the environment.

Similarly with transport. What we need is a system that doesn't require households to have one or more cars because the public transport system is so abysmal and work arrangements chaotically organised –read ‘organised to maximise profit’. Roads and airways are not the most efficient way of moving either people or goods. Presently they are huge polluters and the bane of many people's lives. We could take a holistic approach and could use clean electricity from renewable sources to provide an integrated transport system for people, products and industry. Recycling will be undertaken as a matter of course in every possible area. Materials, being our storehouse for the future, will be valued for their worth to our ongoing wellbeing; they will not be wasted by an obsolescence-mentality but used wisely, aesthetically and carefully in line with our philosophy.

Externalities, the negative aspects of transactions which have to be kept off the balance sheets in case they impact on profit margins –effluent in waterways, emissions dangerous to animal and plant life, the dumping of toxic waste on land and in the sea, any despoliation of our habitat and disregard for the conditions in which people live and work in relation to these externalities –will become an integral part of the planning equation, to be taken account of in full on the balance sheet of the common good.

Food and Farming

Farming methods will be adopted according to health benefits, not wealth benefits, and satisfying genuine hunger, not hunger for profits. For instance, how will the current water inequalities be resolved around the world? Water is vital to life, it's vital to agriculture and manufacturing and it's needed in both urban and rural environments. Right now agriculture is losing the price war for water.

On an international scale we now find countries making deals with other countries to grow the whole or the bulk of their grain crop because the water they save by not growing it domestically is more profitable used elsewhere. For others their own water shortage problems are relieved –never mind if the local populations of the grower nation have to go short or be put off their land and out of their homes for this exchange.

There is huge wastage of water with some countries' current irrigation methods, poor infrastructure, and old or outdated technology in some industries. There is also a billion dollar business selling bottled water at up to a thousand times the cost of water from the tap with how many thousands of gallons wasted in the process? Crazy! With shrinking aquifers and glaciers, and fertile land sinking below rising sea levels, water is seen only as a vital resource with an ever-increasing price tag. With the profit motive removed from the equation things will be managed very differently.

In the likely future, demographics will probably shift a great deal, but we shall be in a position to totally rethink the use of the global water supply and consider every stage from aquifers, dams, irrigation methods, industrial use and domestic consumption. Water and the infrastructure required will be considered in minute detail as to how best to use, reuse, conserve and generally value it as a basic necessity of all life –one of everyone's fundamental requirements.

Also within agriculture we shall be reassessing the relative values of different methods of producing our food. We shall be free to look at the results of studies knowing that there is no hidden agenda or biased information. It is well known that the United Nations Millennium goal of reducing extreme poverty by half by 2015 is failing miserably. Hunger, illiteracy and disease are still growing year on year. What actually isacceptable poverty or tolerable poverty anyway?Poverty at any level is pretty grim, surely?

When we have the correct, unambiguous facts in front of us decisions can be made unemotionally about land use. Chemical fertiliser or natural manure and traditional methods? Monocrops or mixed farms? Grain for food or fuel? Grain for humans or animals?

What's so important about grain? This depends on how you see the future. It depends on whether you consider it more important to use it for human food, for animal food or for transport fuel. It impacts on how you view population forecasts or global warming warnings and it depends to a certain extent on where you live in the world.

Surely it makes more sense in general to reduce food miles –to re-localise agriculture for everyone's benefit? By doing so huge savings will be made in fuel and energy use. Certainly in the period of social reorganisation whilst we are investing our human energies into appropriate infrastructure we can cut emissions drastically and restore food security and control to local communities, always remembering decisions will be made locally. On the global scale we will move right away from decisions imposed and implemented by world financial authorities and transnational corporations in favour of working for the common good. Respect will automatically be conferred to local knowledge and traditional methods, understanding that the objective will be to satisfy food, fibre, fuel and other needs, not monetary goals.

As to demographics, one proven positive knock-on effect of education for girls, especially, as recorded in places such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and some African countries is that in communities where the girls have the opportunity and encouragement to go to school they then grow up to marry later, have fewer children and the numbers of both maternal and infant deaths decline.

Statistics also show that more stable family conditions, e.g. security of food and income raises people to a different level of security where it isn't seen as linked to a large brood of children. The security of free access in a socialist society will fulfill that role. In these terms it is possible to see that population levels will decline because of mass conscious choice, relieving some of the pressures foreseen as a result of climate change.

Healthcare and Education

Socialism will involve life without healthcare budgets; waiting lists will be made history; there will be no treatment denial; there will be access to healthcare from prenatal to death, with preventive medicine recognised as the core of a healthy society; known cures such as for malaria will be available universally; unencumbered research into cures for diseases like multiple sclerosis will take place; unhampered individual choice and access to contraception, abortion, rehabilitation therapy, respite care and, where appropriate assisted suicide, will be the norm.

Basic schooling would take a huge shift away from the narrow confines of a rigid, test-based curriculum. Endless possibilities would be available from an early age to stimulate children. No financial budget means more 'educators, facilitators, trainers, coaches, mentors' etc. to guide young and old through a much wider educational experience. Learning is better stimulated through a holistic and experiential approach and would be available on demand at all life stages.

In Conclusion

Imagining a socialist society entails the following: we imagine many pluralist, co-operative, non-competitive, non-combative communities around the world, linked by their common goals of creating space for free thought, wider vision, acceptance of the other and tolerance of minority issues. We imagine a balance between 'back to nature' and 'into the future boldly', philosophically embracing both healthy body and healthy, enquiring mind. The process of developing this, the only viable alternative society to the market economy, will come from the local and familiar at community level from all the many diverse regions of the world, as all are recognised and welcomed into the free association as valuable parts of the whole. We imagine societies of individuals having vanquished the oppressive capitalist system at last and having satisfied basic needs, now conscious of their higher human faculties and aware of their role in the environment, focused on being all they can be.

Janet Surman