Backwaters of History - 7: The Paris Commune (1954)

From the April 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Paris Commune

Whilst crowds lined the streets of London to watch Queen Victoria pass on her way to open the Albert Hall, on Tuesday, March 28th, 1871, the streets of Paris were lined with denser and more exuberant crowds. Around Paris was camped the German army of Prince von Bismarck with a young lieutenant Hindenburg amongst his officers. On the previous Sunday Paris had been to the polls and on this Tuesday the results had been declared. Now, with a predominantly working-class Commune, the Parisians were jubilant and staged a monster procession.

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Napoleon I, who had made himself Napoleon III of France, had embarked on a war with Prussia, mainly in an endeavour to revive his failing prestige. His war had been unsuccessful and after defeats at Saarbrucken, Weissenberg and Metz, Louis Napoleon surrendered to the Prussians at Sedan on September 2nd, 1870. The French armies were held prisoners in Germany and at Metz. On the 4th of September Paris rebelled and proclaimed a republic. A collection of lawyers, professional politicians, careerists and job hunters constituted themselves a Government of National Defence and, although the Prussians were at the gates of Paris, this government proposed to offer resistance. Behind the scenes it prepared to capitulate.

On the 28th Juanuary, 1871, Paris, starved out, capitulated, its fortifications were disarmed and the weapons of the regular troops were handed over to the enemy. But, within Paris there was a military organisation known as the National Guard, a voluntary defence organisation composed mainly of members of the working class. This National Guard retained its weapons and cannons and entered into a truce with the Prussians. The troops of Bismarck who had besieged Paris for 131 days and were now prepared to occupy it, found that the workers of Paris would only allow them to occupy certain small sections of the city and, in those section, they were virtually prisoners.

The Government of National Defence resigned and on February 8th a National Assembly was elected at Bordeaux. This assembly almost unanimously elected a M. Thiers as head of the executive power. Theirs saw the danger that an armed working-class presented to French capitalism and made plans to disarm the Parisian National Guard.

He sent General Lecompte with troops to sneak away the cannons that the National Guard had purchased with its own subscriptions, claiming that these cannons were state property. The plan was to get the guns away before the people of Paris realised what was happening, but the scheme went awry. The people came out of their houses and surrounded the troops, offering them coffee and breakfast until finally the troops fraternised with the workers handing their rifles into the crowd in exchange for glasses of wine. In all parts of Paris the attempt to steal the guns had failed. Paris was now up in arms against the Thiers government seated at Versailles.

A Central Committee of the National Guard, elected without distinction of rank, from the various companies, took over the control of affairs in Paris and set about the job of maintaining distribution of what food and supplies were available and seeing to the general running of the city. This committee firmly met the opposition of the city mayors and other pro-government elements until it stood down in favour of the newly elected Commune.

The Commune got straight to work. On March 30th, it decreed the abolition of the standing army and conscription and declared that only the National Guard, to which all citizens should belong, might bear arms. The rents of all dwellings were remitted from October 1870 to April 1871 and if rent for that period had been paid it was to be deducted from future payments. Pawnshops were stopped from selling pledges. All foreigners elected to the Commune were confirmed in their jobs, it being claimed that "the flag of the Commune is that of the Universal Republic."

On April 1st it was decided that no member of the Commune, nor any of its functionaries, should receive a wage or salary higher than 6,000 francs a year—a workman's wage. On the following day the Commune disestablished the church, stopped payments from public funds for church purposes and decided to confiscate all ecclesiastical property on behalf of the people.

During the next few weeks Judges and other judicial functionaries were brought under the control of the Commune, so was the police force; the guillotine was publicly burnt; night work for bakers was abolished; Pawn shops were closed; Napoleon Bonaparte's triumphal column at Place Vendome, which was "a symbol of chauvinism and mutual hatred amongst nations," was overthrown and a chapel, built in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI, was destroyed.

Plans were prepared to organise a federation of co-operative societies into which working men were to be enrolled with a view to taking over and managing those factories and workshops that had been closed by the employers. Educational facilities were made available to all and many outstanding grievances were remedied.

The Commune was composed mainly of working men who made of it a working, and not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. With only workmen's wages to be earned all the political sharks and job seeking racketeers who had previously occupied the administrative posts, faded from the picture and working men took their places.

Whilst the Commune was passing its various enactments the Thiers government at Versailles was preparing to suppress the rebellious city. Attacks had been made since the early days of April, in fact the city was under shell fire whilst the Commune was sitting. Thiers persuaded Bismarck to release French troops taken prisoner during the war so that an army could be built to march on Paris. During April and early May thousands of the Parisians were taken prisoner by the Versaillese and subjected to revolting atrocities. Thousands more were killed.

On Sunday, May 21st, the newly formed Versaillese army marched into Paris through five breaches in the defences. The workers of Paris threw up barricades and fought like tigers.

"Let good citizens arise! To the barricades! The enemy is within our walls. No hesitation. Forward, for the Commune and for liberty. To arms!"
"Let Paris bristle with barricades, and from behind these improved ramparts still hurl at her enemies her cry of war, of pride, of defiance, but also of victory; for Paris with her barricades is inexpungable."

(Two proclamations of May 22nd, quoted by Lissagaray in his "History of the Commune of 1871.")

The government troops fought their way through the city inflicting great slaughter and destroying buildings. By the following Sunday, May 28th, the Parisians were defeated, the Commune was gone and most of its members were dead. When the city was subdued the Thiers government took its revenge.

"And now the murder of defenceless men, women and children, which had raged the whole week through in ever-increasing proportions, reached its highest point. The breechloader no longer killed fast enough; the conquered were slaughtered in hundreds with the mitrailleuses; the 'Wall of the Federals' in the Pere la Chaise cemetery, where the last massacres took place, remains to-day a dumb but eloquent witness to the frenzy of the crime of which the governing classes are capable as soon as the proletariat dares to stand up for its rights. Then, as the slaughter of all were seen to be impossible, came the arrests en masse, the shooting down of arbitrarily selected prisoners as victims for sacrifice, and the transference of the remainder into great camps, where they awaited the mercy of the courts-martial."

(F. Engels' introduction to "The Civil War in France," by Karl Marx.)

The "Wall of the Federals" was the wall against which one hundred and forty seven of the Communards were lined up and shot in cold blood on May 28th, 1871. Every Whit Sunday workers of Paris march and lay wreaths against this wall.

"Twenty-five thousand men, women and children killed during the battle or after; three thousand at least dead in the prisons, the pontoons, the forts, or in consequence of maladies contracted during their captivity, thirteen thousand seven hundred condemned, most of them for life; seventy thousand women, children and old men deprived of their natural supporters or thrown out of France; one hundred and eleven thousand victims at least. This is the balance-sheet of the bourgeois vengeance for the solitary insurrection of the eighteenth of March.
"What a lesson of revolutionary vigour given to the working men. The governing classes shoot in a lump without taking the trouble to select hostages. The vengeance lasts not an hour; neither years nor victims appease it; they make of it an administrative function, methodical and continuous."

(Lissagaray's "History of the Commune of 1871.")

It is easy, today, to see the faults of the Communards but we must not lose sight of the fact that they were not Socialists. Very few of them had more than a feeling of working-class solidarity, with an urgent desire to do something to remedy the evils of their day. If all their reforms had been fully operated capitalism would still have held sway, although with a different complexion.

Nevertheless, the Paris Commune stands as an heroic landmark in the history of the working-class and gives us an indication how workers can act when called upon to re-organise society.

Books to read:-

"Civil War in France," by Karl Marx.

"History of the Commune of 1871," by Lissagaray.

"The Paris Commune of 1871," by Frank Jellinek.

"The Paris Commune," by V. I. Lenin.

"The Paris Commune," by E. S. Mason.

Selected Chapters in:

"The State and Revolution," by V. I. Lenin.

"Terrorism and Communism," by K. Kautsky.

"Defence of Terrorism," by L. Trotsky.

"Vital Problems in Social Evolution," by A. M. Lewis.

W. Waters

Myths about capitalism (1981)

From the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

MYTH 1

That in all societies wealth must take the form of commodities.

It is argued that all goods and services must be produced for sale, as if the different values of various goods and services are inherent. Need-fulfilling wealth is seen in a fetishised way, as if its expression in terms of exchange value is a manifestation of its natural essence. In fact, value is a social relationship between people. wealth only takes the form of commodities when the system of production and distribution is based upon the class ownership and control of productive machinery. Buying and selling is only possible when there is privately possessed wealth to be exchanged. In a socialist society, where there will be common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution, goods and services will be the property of the whole community, and it is obvious that the community will not be able to sell back to itself that which it already owns. So, in socialism there will be use value (the production of wealth to provide for human needs), but no more exchange value (the sale of commodities with a view to profit).

MYTH 2

That the capitalists' profit is made in the market place.

It is a popular fallacy that workers are paid a price for their labour power which is equivalent to the value of what they produce. Then, the capitalist takes the commodity to the market place (any retail or wholesale outlet) and sells it at a price which is above what it had cost him to produce the commodity. According to this explanation of how profits arise, profit is the difference between the cost of production and the market price. Now, it is true that under special circumstances capitalists do sell their commodities for prices which are considerably above their value, but the Marxist case is that, on average, commodities sell at around their value. So how is the profit made? The profit is taken from the surplus labour of the workers at the point of production, the workers are paid less than the value of what they produce. Profit arises, therefore, from the exploitation of the working class, although it can only be realised when commodities are sold. So, the capitalist can still make a profit by selling his wares at their value.

MYTH 3

That prices reflect demand.

Prices reflect market demand—the money available to back up a need, but not real demand, or human needs. Supply and demand do affect price (which is the monetary expression of value), but do not determine it. A homeless family may demand that society give them a house, but in terms of capitalist economics, if their need cannot be backed up with money ('effective demand') they will remain homeless. Under capitalism, if you are rich you can afford to fulfill needs that you never knew you had; if you are poor you are limited in your access to the necessities of life.

MYTH 4

That capitalism causes problems because the capitalists want it to.

The operation of the capitalist economy overrides the wills of individuals within it. However wicked or altruistic, intelligent or stupid the capitalists may be, they must exploit their employees of they will not get their profit and will have to join the working class. Governments may have fine ideas—or nasty ideas—about how the economy should be run, but the capitalist economy will obey its own laws, not their. Workers can be as militant and radical as they wish, but unless they abolish the system they must be its slaves. Capitalists and workers may dance round the May Pole with each other every night after work, but still the class war will not cease, for the material interests of the two classes must always be antagonistic.

MYTH 5

That in a socialist society profits will be for the benefit of all.

This is the standard justification for the economies of the state capitalist countries, such as the Russian Empire, China, Albania, Cuba. It is based on the pernicious lie that the interests of the state bureaucracies who control the productive machinery in these countries are the same as the toilers who must work for wages. Profits can only result from the exploitation of the majority by the minority. When production is for use there will be no value, price or profit.

Steve Coleman

Doctor Smith operates (1993)

Editorial from the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

As Leaders go John Smith is something of a novelty. He did not campaign for the leadership as the darling of the left and then outrage his supporters by revealing himself as a man of the right.

His appeal was of a different kind. He studiously avoided any ideological commitment apart from vague phrases about a juster and more caring society. His promise was to be a shrewd and prudent managing director for British Capitalism plc. The implication was clear. This is a man you can trust. He will look after you like your family doctor. After the hysterical abrasive raving of Neil Kinnock some Labour supporters might have found relief in John Smith's more comforting message.

It was all of a piece, that Smith's election to the Labour leadership should be so blatantly and determinedly stage-managed. There was in fact no contest worth the name. It was a fix-up. Punch-drunk though they were over their fourth consecutive election defeat, some Labour Party members still had enough energy to have doubts about Smith's leadership and about how he got the job.

So it should have surprised nobody, when Smith declared that nothing would be exempt from his desire to revise Labour's policies. What Labour used to regard as its principles no longer exist. Everything they say and do must conform to two standards of judgement: Os it in the interest of British capitalism? Does it win or lose votes?

If this means disregarding everything the party has stood for, so be it. If it means an open admission that Labour is the Tory Party with a different emblem and different coloured rosettes, that is a price worth paying. If it means losing a few voters who believed however half-heartedly that Labour stood for a different social system—well, what party aiming at power over British capitalism needs such thorns in its electoral side anyway?

What Smith is doing is but the latest episode in Labour's drive to become a natural party of government whose only principle is to get into power. At times they have justified this on the grounds that they will run capitalism more efficiently and more humanely than the Tories. Smith has made it clear that even that excuse can no longer be used.

So what about all those people who want to contribute to the establishment of a new and better society and who have worked and voted for the Labour Party in the belief that this would bring it nearer? Many of them must be in despair, bitter and angry at what they see as the betrayal of their party.

But it need not be all loss. A society of common ownership, democratic control and production for need not profit remains worths struggling for. To do this people need to organise politically—not in the Labour Party. Labour has never been a socialist organisation and now more than ever is unworthy of anything other than working class hostility and contempt.

What is needed is a party that stands for socialism and which sticks to its socialist principles. We consider our record over the years shows us to be such a party. If you want socialism your place is in the Socialist Party.

Guru on the spot (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Roger Scruton arrived early to debate with the SPGB in Guildford. The debate wasn't due to start till 8pm, so one of the members suggested I take him to the pub across the road for a drink.

He ordered Irish Whisky and we started to talk. I was interested to see the human side of a man I only knew from difficult-to-read books on politics and philosophy, a highly reactionary weekly column in the Times and highbrow discussion programmes on radio and television. I'd read in the press that he was arrogant, conceited and intolerant. I found him modest and likeable and the more we chatted the less accurate the press descriptions seemed to be. I asked what had made him accept our challenge to debate and he said that he thought that opinionated people like himself should be called on to defend their opinions in public.

He hadn't made any detailed preparation for the debate and asked me if I'd tell him about the Socialist Party and what my arguments were going to be. I did, and he admitted that it wasn't what he'd expected. He said he'd make a few notes to speak from and did this while I went to the bar for more drinks. As we walked back to the hall he said he thought he'd got the message about the Socialist Party, but wouldn't a fully democratic socialist society be an impractical proposition because of the time and effort involved in people voting democratically on absolutely everything? I told him that everyone wouldn't have to vote on everything but only on those things that directly concerned them.

The swirling rain made me think we wouldn't have much of an audience. And when we entered the hall, there were about fifty—fewer people than could have been expected for a meeting with a "celebrity".

Scruton was introduced by the chairman as a leading conservative philosopher and editor of the Salisbury Review. He was answering no to the question: "Is Socialism Compatible With Freedom?" He opened with a joke—a funny one. He said he understood that the Socialist Party no more supported the countries that called themselves "socialist" than those which are openly capitalist, and this reminded him of an old, East European joke: "Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism it's quite the other way round".

On the subject of freedom he started off on a tack that he said would probably seem unusual. He talked about love. He said that love between two people placed limitations on their freedom but that nobody would say that this was a bad thing because they were limitations that had been freely chosen and desired. In the same way, he went on, capitalist society limited people's freedom in some areas but this was with their consent. They consented to it because they realised that these limitations—those involved in wage labour—were necessary in order to be able to enjoy the other freedoms and choices that capitalism gave them. Capitalism he claimed, with its markets, wage labour and money system, gave the maximum freedom available, and gave far more of it than previous societies such as feudalism.

He spoke fluently along these lines from the sparse notes he'd made in the pub, showed an accurate knowledge of Marxist ideas, and ended by stating that if socialists thought a different kind of society could be more free that the present one, then the onus was on them to describe and define it. But the "facts of human nature", he insisted, were on his side and all attempts so far to put socialism into effect had, far from increasing people's freedom, ended up restricting it.

This last point, I felt, was one below the belt as Scruton had earlier recognised and accepted the Socialist Party's description of countries like Russia, China and Cuba as not socialist but state capitalist. I began, therefore, by pointing out that Scruton couldn't reasonably damn the idea of socialism because of what had happened under state capitalism and because the state capitalist rulers happened to call their regimes socialist. I pointed to the openly repressive features of such regimes—one-party rule, political prisoners, press censorship, state-run trade unions—and agreed that by comparison countries like Britain, the USA, Germany and Japan appeared to enjoy considerable freedom. But, despite appearances, they did restrict personal freedom in an absolutely fundamental way—in operating the system of employment.

This meant that most people were bound for most of their lives to a set place of residence, set living conditions and a set job—whether they liked it or not. The job they did was not necessarily one they found pleasant or satisfying but one they needed to do to have money to live. The employment system was shared by countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. So in both East and West people were denied freedom by needing to work for wages or salaries and therefore by not having control over what they did with their own lives.

Despite his lack of preparation Scruton had timed his contribution to exactly the agreed twenty minutes. Looking at my watch I realised that I'd have to rush if I didn't want to run over. The chairman had already started putting slips of paper in front of me. I breathlessly tried to take up Scruton's challenge to describe and define a freer society than capitalism. It was clear, I said, that enough resources now existed potentially to satisfy people's needs the world over if production of goods and services could take place directly for need and not for sale and profit. This was the basis of the "freer society: Scruton wanted defined. It would be a worldwide moneyless system of free access—"the supermarket without the bottleneck at the cash desk". And the shelves of the supermarket would be kept full by the voluntary co-operative work of people for whom work would not be compulsory toil for money but conscious, freely chosen activity to satisfy their own needs and those of society as a whole. In a society of common ownership and democratic control no one would be able to compel others to do work in conditions they found unacceptable. In this society people would value work, as they often value leisure today, for the creative or pleasurable activity it represents, not for the money it earns them. I sat down just as the chairman was about to make me.

The question time was interesting. Scruton, although he didn't say so, must have been surprised by the friendly atmosphere and the cordiality of the audience. Any visions he'd had of meeting wild lefties must have been completely dispelled as contributors from the floor addressed him without hostility and with a clear desire to exchange ideas. It was he who became heated when it was put to him that rather than compare the amount of freedom in capitalism to the amount in feudalism, he should be comparing capitalist freedom to the kind of freedom there could be in a future society—socialism—where modern technology could be maintained and used but in a quite different setting. Scruton, argued the questioner, had presented no solid theory of "human nature" to show that such a society was not possible. Scruton went a bit wild, said the debate had been forced on him and referred to my own description of what socialism would be like as "a lot of air". My reply to this was that he lacked imagination in not wanting to contemplate anything beyond the narrow confines of present reality.

He soon cooled down as more questions came from both socialists and non-socialists in the audience. One was about whether you could organise society without leaders. I said you could. Scruton said that "little points control" would always develop and that seeking power over others was fundamental to human nature. Another question was about how in a society of free access people would be able to distinguish between "need and greed". Scruton thought they would not. I argued that people were quite capable of responsibly determining their own needs of they didn't live in conditions of rationing and scarcity as they did in capitalism where they were rationed by their wage packet.

At the end we had five minutes each to sum up. Again I tried to say too much and had to rush. My thrust was that at one time in history people (Greeks and Romans) had used intellectually sophisticated arguments to assert that chattel slavery was inevitable and eternal. Aristotle had said that it was a fundamental feature of civilised life. Scruton, I went on, was using the same kind of arguments to defend a different kind of slavery, but slavery nonetheless—wage slavery. Historically wage slavery was no more inevitable or eternal than chattel slavery had been and when the majority of people wanted to get rid of it and bring in a non-slave society in which no man or woman was subordinate to any other, they would do so. Then we would have socialism.

Scruton would up by stating that he was the only one who'd taken account of history, for the whole of history gave evidence that people sought power over others. For socialism to be set up fundamental human desires would have to be abolished. He said that the discussion had, however, been a "most instructive" one. He denied there was any proof that the pursuit of profit on the part of the few was a limitation on the freedom of the many and concluded by stating that he had not, that evening, heard a formula for what everyone, himself included, would like to achieve but what was unachievable—freedom from necessity.

He told me he'd enjoyed the occasion and asked if I could try to get the library of the institution I'd told him I was a teacher in to subscribe to his Salisbury Review. "A serious journal:, he called it. I promised I'd have a go.

As we left the hall he was approached by an excited gentleman who'd been taking photographs during the meeting and who, as I read later in a cutting sent me from a Guildford paper, was a local Greek-Cypriot businessman complaining about a pro-Turkish article on Cyprus which Scruton had written in the Times.

Over in the pub Scruton eased himself away from Mr Demosthenous only to be taxed by a very hairy teenaged socialist on the subject of pre-capitalist societies—tribal ones—which had operated with far greater freedom than capitalism on a basis of common ownership and democratic participation. Didn't this show that human beings weren't naturally power-seeking or grasping? Scruton must have been a bit nonplussed by an articulate argument from what he thought was an unlikely source because he didn't put up much resistance.

As I left I asked him if he thought private property itself was fundamental to human nature. He said he did and that he'd argued the point "very rudely" in one of his books. I felt like saying that the point got argued very frequently and very rudely too by visitors at my local branch meetings but that, despite his learning and sophistication, his arguments for it had been no more convincing than theirs. All the evidence, I said to myself as he vanished out the door, was in the other direction. But then he had taken a Socialist Standard away with him and if he read it maybe he'd find some of that evidence there. Come to think of it, maybe I should have asked him to subscribe to the Standard? After all my library's now agreed to take the Salisbury Review.

Howard Moss

Government or Democracy? (2001)

From the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Should we vote in a new government? Or should we link up with the struggle to usher in a democratic society?

We are being asked to elect a new government through what is said to be a democratic process. It is true that the vote, together with other hard-won rights such as the rights of assembly, political organisation and free expression, are most important. But can the act of electing a government result in a democratic society?

To govern is to direct, control and to rule with authority. Operating as the state this is what governments do. But to say that democracy is merely the act of electing a government to rule over us cannot be right because democracy should include all people in deciding how we live and what we do as a community. Democracy means the absence of privilege, making our decisions from a position of equality. Democracy means that we should live in a completely open society with unrestricted access to the information relevant to social issues. It means that we should have the powers to act on our decisions, because without such powers decisions are useless. So, be it Labour, Liberal, Tory or rule by any other kind of government, how does the operation of the state measure up to what socialists argue should be a democratic society?

For socialists the rule of government can never be democratic. Though it may include some incidental functions arising from the needs of people the main work of the state is the running of class-divided society; a system of economic exploitation. In the main governments work for a privileged section of society. They make the laws which protect the property rights of a minority who own and control natural resources, industry, manufacture and transport. These are the means of life on which we all depend but most of us have no say in how they are used. Behind Parliament governments operate in secret. They are part of the division of the world into rival capitalist states. With the back-up of their armed forces they pursue national capitalist interests. Though the politicians who run it may be elected, the state is the opposite of democracy

Production is owned and controlled by companies, some of them multinational corporations with massive economic power making the decisions on what should be produced for the markets for sale at a profit. Through corporate authority they decide how goods should be produced and the conditions in which work is done. Again, this is the opposite of democracy

Real democracy

So, how would democracy be fulfilled in socialism? This requires the abolition of the state and its replacement by a system of democratic administration. This can only work from a basis of common ownership and production solely for use. Common ownership means that all people throughout the world will stand in equal relationship with each other. This will be an association of all men and women making the decisions and co-operating to produce goods and organise communities in their mutual interests.

The democratic organisation of all people as citizens of the world would need to operate through different scales of social co-operation. Locally, in town or country, we would be involved with our parish or neighbourhood. Even now, there are many thousands of men and women throughout the country who work voluntarily on parish and district councils and in town neighbourhoods for the benefit of their communities. But these efforts would be greatly enhanced by the freedoms of a society run entirely through voluntary co-operation.

Such local organisation would be in the context of regional co-operation which could operate by adapting the structures of present national governments. Whilst some departments such as Inland Revenue and the Treasury, which are essential to the state would be abolished, others like Agriculture and the Environment could have an important job to do, especially in the early days of socialism. Such structures - adapted to the needs of socialist society - could be part of regional councils and would assist in the work of implementing the decisions of regional populations.

During the early days of socialism it is likely that the organisation of world co-operation would need to take place through a world council. Because the things we need now are produced and distributed through a world structure of production, and because its present capitalist nature has brought about immense problems, action to solve them would be required on a world scale, For example, it would be a priority to set up an ecologically benign world energy system as soon as possible. Similarly, the countless millions of people suffering from hunger and desperate poverty would need a considerable increase in food production. For this work the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN would at last be able to use its expertise and knowledge of world conditions to help with solving the problems of malnutrition. Again, to begin with, people in socialism would face a huge task in providing every person with secure and comfortable housing. This would call upon the efforts of communities throughout the world, especially in those regions where means of production were well developed. Such world projects could be co-ordinated through appropriate departments of a world council.

When we propose different scales of social co-operation such as local, regional and world scales, this is not a question of there being a hierarchy with power located at any central point. What we anticipate is both an integrated and flexible system of democratic organisation which could be adapted for action to solve any problem in any of these scales. This simply takes into account that some problems and the action to solve them arise from local issues and this also extends to the regional and world spheres.

Carrying out decisions

Crucial to the question of democracy is not just the ability to make decisions about what to do but also the powers of action to carry out those decisions. For many years, capitalist politicians seeking office have promised to solve the housing problem together with the problems of poverty, unemployment, pollution, crime, the health service and many more. They have failed because in fact they seek to run a system driven by profit, which imposes severe economic limitations on what can be done and which as a result cannot be rationally controlled. This makes a mockery of the idea of democracy. But with the abolition of the market system, communities in socialism will not only be able to make free and democratic decisions about what needs to be done they will also be free to use their resources to achieve those aims.

The apologies that we hear almost every day from capitalist politicians that they lack the money resources to solve problems indicates how completely the fetishism of money has distorted their thinking. In fact problems are not solved with money resources. They are solved by people using their labour, skills and the necessary materials and there is in fact an abundance of these material resources. But it will take the relations of common ownership to release them for the needs of communities and this will also mean that communities will be free to decide democratically how best to use those resources.

The corporate authorities or managerial systems which now dictate how production units such as factories or services should be run would be replaced. Small units could be run by regular meetings of all the workers. In the cases of large organisations these could be run by elected committees accountable to the people working in them. In this way, democratic practice would apply not just to the important policy decisions that would steer the main direction of development, it would extend to the day-to-day activities of the work place.

But democracy would not be confined to the serious work of production and the running of the work place. People in socialism will be free to create sporting and other cultural festivals. The entertainment of visitors from other parts of the world would bring diversity and richness to local life. The possibilities for decision making and the planning and enjoyment of such events are endless.

Socialism opens up a great range of new possibilities. With the populations of all countries co-operating as one people, working together in their common interests whilst celebrating their cultural differences and joining in democratically deciding a new future, the prospects can only be seen as exciting. What a contrast with the dreary prospects of electing yet another capitalist government and giving a further lease of life for an out-dated capitalist state.

Pieter Lawrence

Trotskyism (1985)

Book Review from the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Stalinist Legacy, edited by Tariq Ali, Penguin, £4.95

My heart sank on seeing over five hundred closely-printed pages on such a well-worn topic as Stalinism. Having persevered to the end of all twenty chapters, I can only say that my misgivings were well-founded: the view that the horrors of recent Russian history have been essentially due to the shortcomings of one man is developed here at great length and in a depressingly turgid style.

Things start badly, with Tariq Ali's introduction claiming that the book provides "a Marxist critique of Stalinism", when in fact it adopts a purely Trotskyist perspective. Ali's dismissal of the Marxist thesis that Russia is state capitalist is utterly dishonest. He claims that virtually everyone who sought to categorise Russia as neither socialist nor post-capitalist (as state capitalism or bureaucratic collectivism) "ultimately ended up as an apologist for capitalism". The fact that this is true of people like James Burnham apparently gives Ali an excuse to ignore the only consistent analysis of Russia as state capitalist—that put forward by the Socialist Party for the last sixty-five years.

One of the chapters is an essay by Trotsky in which he also attempts to counter the view that Russia is state capitalist. Again, the argument is mere sleight of hand: since the Russian system us supposedly progressive, and the kind of capitalist state'ism found in Fascist Italy and Germany is reactionary, therefore Russia cannot be state capitalist. This blithely ignores the existence there of wage labour, commodity production and class struggle.

Perhaps the worst contribution is Marcel Liebman's "Was Lenin a Stalinist?" This aims to justify the Bolsheviks' dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, in which they formed a minority. Liebman sees all electoral procedures as paralysing social progress: "The revolutionary is a bad voter, and the voter a poor revolutionary". This just reflects Leninists' belief in their own ability to lead and manipulate ordinary working people.

The book is not completely worthless. It contains in full Khrushchev's Secret Speech to the 1956 Russian Party Congress, the one which launched "de-Stalinisation", and there are interesting selections on Albania and Czechoslovakia. There is even a bit of light relief: leading left-wing economist Ernest Mandel proclaims, presumably in all seriousness, that "it is difficult to define closely what socialism is"! Don't worry, we'll be sending him a copy of the Socialist Standard.

Paul Bennett

Letter: CND and SPGB (1963)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

You claim in your April issue that CND's main fault lies in the fact that its members "are concerned with removing evils in isolation". I am pleased to tell you that the rank and file of the Campaign, unlike the "respectable" CND bureaucracy, seems to be in the process of realising more and more that nuclear weapons cannot be separated from politics and the fight for socialism. The folly of viewing the H-bomb as an isolated issue will, I am sure, be demonstrated finally in the overwhelming defeat of INDEC's candidate at Twickenham. The identity of war with capitalism has long been clear to those who are both CND supporters and members of the Socialist wing of the Labour Party. I know that the SPGB has little time for the Labour Party, and I imagine that you will consider it against your interests to publish a letter from somebody who favours membership of that organisation, but the fact remains that there are socialists in the Labour Party whose ideals are precisely the same as your own. Personally I think that this country will become socialist by the Labour Party becoming socialist, which seems far more likely than the SPGB forming the Government.

Although the reforms of a Labour Government will not, of course, bring socialism, nor will grinding the workers down, or starving them, one can fight for alleviation of the most immediate and harmful social problems, such as unemployment or the threat of nuclear war, yet still have socialism as one's long term goal. I hope you will not deny that the working class will be better off under a Labour Government even though capitalist society remains, and in the particular fight against nuclear weapons, which are the greatest danger to the human race, socialists in the Labour Party are able to enlist the help of many left-reformists, I fear that if we must wait for the SPGB to come to power and for Britain to become socialist before we can disarm, then there is every likelihood of our destruction. If you print this letter I shall be interested to read your answer.

 Richard D. Condon
Exeter College, Oxford.

REPLY.

This is not the first—nor will it be the last—time we have heard the complaint that an organisation's rank and file are sincere, convinced socialists who are being frustrated by reactionary, "respectable" leaders (although it is interesting to hear this from a member of CND, which was once supposed to the non-respectable organisation!) But if there are so many socialists in CND, why are their convictions never reflected by their leadership? Why, indeed, do they have leaders at att? It is one of the hallmarks of a socialist that he rejects leadership.

Mr. Condon can make what he likes of the big defeat which seems to be the prospect of the INDEC candidate at Twickenham. In fact any such candidate will fail simply because the working class continue to oppose the policies of CND; they still want British capitalism to have the most powerful armaments it can get. CND's lack of electoral appeal is most clearly acknowledged by the many Labour MPs who, although they support the Campaign, do not risk losing their seats by standing as pure unilateralist candidates.

If there are members of the Labour Party whose "ideals are precisely the same" as ours, why are they not members of the SPGB? Why do they remain in a party which is committed to running British capitalism? Mr. Condon does not think that the Labour Party will get socialism by reforms; but they have nothing else to offer apart from reforms, all of which leave capitalism intact and viable.

It is true that starving people are no more likely to be interested in Socialism than are the well fed. Mr. Condon uses this as a justification for a policy of reforms. Yet the facts say that reforms do nothing to alleviate the problems of capitalism. Despite all the reformers' efforts, problems like poverty, unemployment and war are still clouds over our lives. World Refugee Year, for example, was an attempt to reform the refugee problem. But at the end of that year there were more refugees in the world than there had been at the beginning. It will be interesting to see what effect the current Freedom from Hunger Campaign has on the level of malnutrition and starvation in the world.

In fact, the only effective reform would be to abolish capitalism altogether. To compromise on this—to support reforms while professing Socialism as a "long term goal"—is to support capitalism and therefore to cease to be a Socialist.

Will the working class be better off under a Labour Government? The last Labour administration persistently fought the working class on the issue of wages and did their best to hold wages down. They ruthlessly crushed strikes. They unhesitatingly went into the Korean War. They started making the nuclear armaments which Mr. Condon now wants to ban.

Perhaps Socialism is a long way off. What is certain is they it will not be helped by people like Mr. Condon, who support capitalist organisations like CND and the Labour Party. These organisations have spread an enormous load of confusion about Socialism among the working class. Mr. Condon is himself confused; he talks about "the SPGB forming the government" and about waiting for "the SPGB to come to power" and "for Britain to become Socialist". Socialism will not happen just in Britain or any other one part of the world; it will be an international social system. And it will not have governments and state machines and all the other coercive organs of capitalism. Thus the SPGB will never come to power, never form a government. When Socialism is established we shall cease to exist as a political party.

One final point. We are pleased to receive, and to publish, Mr. Condon's letter. We welcome criticism and discussion of the case of Socialism from all our opponents. We hope that many more of them will write to us.

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE. 

The War in Gaza (2015)

From the January 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The concluding part of our series on capitalism’s ongoing wars

The Israeli-Palestine war in Gaza last year was yet another round of fighting in a conflict that began in 1948 when the state of Israel was established. The Palestinians have no chance whatsoever of militarily overcoming Israel. Israel's economic might with its GDP of around $110 billion overshadows the Palestinian GDP of $4.2 billion.

In the 50-day military operation by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza in July to September 2014, 2,199 Gazans were killed, 70 percent of them civilians, 10,895 were wounded and 65,000 people left homeless. A third of hospitals were destroyed or damaged. Mufeed al-Hasayneh, Minister of Public Works, said Israel's offensive on Gaza has caused over $5 billion of damage to homes and infrastructure. Some 10,000 homes have been completely destroyed, and 30,000 homes partially destroyed. In Shujaiyya, where some 110,000 people live, 60 percent of the homes were completely destroyed (Ma'an News Agency, 5 August 2014). The tunnels between Gaza and Egypt which were bringing $700 million into Gaza's economy through goods or services were destroyed by bombing.

Israel destroyed 134 Gazan factories, and bombed Gaza's main power station. Without power to run treatment plants, untreated sewage was dumped directly into the Mediterranean Sea contaminating fish and sickening fishermen. The Food and Agriculture Organization reported that extensive damage to Gaza's agricultural sector had 'forced farmers and herders to abandon their lands and has paralysed fishing activities, bringing local food production to a halt and severely affecting livelihoods.' Losses among Gaza's fishing sector were estimated at 234.6 tons, or about 9.3 percent of the yearly catch. Farming gives a livelihood to 19,000 Gazans, while 6,000 people work in livestock raising and 3,600 in the fishing industry. The Israeli military also killed cows and camels. The FAO report went on to say 'The recent fighting has resulted in substantial direct damage to Gaza's 17,000 hectares of crop lands as well as much of its agricultural infrastructure, including greenhouses, irrigation systems, animal farms, fodder stocks and fishing boats' (Ma'an News Agency, 16 August 2014). Gaza factory owner Mohammad al-Telbani said 'This is a war on our economy' (Guardian, 22 August 2014).

Capitalist development

Palestinian capitalist development in Gaza is fettered by the Israeli state. The Gaza Strip was occupied by Israel from 1967 until 2005 but has been under siege by Israel since then. Gaza has a population of 1.8 million Palestinians, and over half of these are children who live in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The Israeli blockade means the borders and airspace are controlled by Israel so that foodstuffs, building materials, fuel and medical supplies have to be brought in via tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. Even livestock is transported through these tunnels. The fishing industry is restricted to within 3 km of land and thus 85 percent of its fishing waters are inaccessible due to Israeli imposed restrictions. As for farmland 35 percent of Gaza's farmland is inaccessible, and farmers are unable to get pesticides, fertilizers needed for their crops or permits from the Israeli government to export what they manage to produce.

Even the historical symbol of the Levant, the olive tree, has come under attack from the Israeli state. Thousands of olive trees have been cut down, devastating the Palestinian economy, and some of the ancient trees are dug up and transported to Israel and abroad for sale. The Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights reports that 'since 1967 Israeli authorities have uprooted or destroyed more than one and a half million trees, 70 percent of which were olive trees, the staple crop of Palestinian rural communities' (Middle East Monitor, 2010). Olives are the lifeblood of Palestinian agriculture, almost the only crop which grows on the stony hillsides of the West Bank without irrigation. Palestinian agriculture and people have always depended on the water of lakes and springs in the fertile hills of the West Bank as well as the Jordan river. Since 1967, these water sources have been taken into the control of Israel, which has drained lakes near Tiberias and rerouted the Jordan river to take the water to Israel. One of the results is the drying up of the Dead Sea. Palestinians are now having to buy back their water from settlements and Israeli companies.

The founders of the Israeli state in 1948 forced into exile about 800,000 Palestinian people in what is known as the 'Al-Naqba' or 'catastrophe' which was compounded in 1967 when a further 325,000 Palestinians became refugees. The 1948 UN Resolution 194 states Palestinians have the right to return to their homes. Today over 6 million Palestinians live as refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom still live in overcrowded refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

Zionism

Emma Goldman in her 1938 work On Zionism identified 'Zionism as the dream of capitalist Jewry the world over for a Jewish State with all its trimmings, such as Government, laws, police, militarism and the rest. In other words, a Jewish State machinery to protect the privileges of the few against the many.' The founders of Israel sought to expel as much of the Arab majority as they could and make their profits by creating an almost all-Jewish working class in the mistaken belief 'it is better to be exploited by one's fellow countrymen' (Marx 1848). Israel is the most economically and socially developed capitalist nation state in the Middle East with a large working class. It is a bourgeois democracy but also a sectarian state. Israeli capitalism not only exploits the Jewish working class but also a Palestinian working class and migrant labour. Palestinians in the state of Israel comprise 20 percent of the population and face discrimination, and are considered to be second class citizens because the very definition of a Jewish state excludes them.

According to the OECD '21 percent of Israelis live in poverty, the highest among developed countries that are part of the OECD' (Haaretz, 15 May 2013). At the bottom of the economic pyramid are the African migrants from Eritrea and the Sudan who cannot legally work but are used as cheap labour in hotel, restaurant and cleaning companies, and when arrested are put in detention centres such as the one in the Negev desert. Next there are the Bedouin Arabs who live in unrecognized villages unconnected to water and electricity systems. The 2005 National Insurance Institute reported that 52 percent of Palestinians in Israel lived below the poverty line as opposed to 16 percent of Jewish Israelis, and unemployment averages more than 50 percent for Palestinians (Sawt el-Amel: The Laborer's Voice, 2006). In 2011, the average monthly salary of Ashkenazi Jews was 33 percent above the average, whereas the monthly salary for urban Palestinian citizens was the exact opposite: 33 percent below the average (Oligarchy in the Holy Land, 3 December 2013).

The Palestinian struggle for their own capitalist state was controlled for decades by Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which are bourgeois, secular, 'leftist' Pan-Arab nationalists but they came to a dead end after years of conflict with the Israeli state. In the 1990s Fatah collaborated with the Israeli government which would lead to the rise of Hamas in Gaza. Essentially the Palestinian Authority controlled by Fatah could not meet the basic economic needs of the Palestinian people, and this led to the success of Hamas in the Gazan elections of 2006.

Hamas

Hamas, also a bourgeois nationalist organization, was established in 1987, and proposes an Islamist capitalist Palestinian state based on a 1947 Palestine. Hamas is an abbreviation for 'Islamic resistance movement' but also means 'force and bravery' and has its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Hamas are not only anti-Zionist but also anti-Semitic, and are trying to bridge the divide that separated Palestinian nationalism and Islamism, a twin track policy of a national liberation struggle and a jihad which aims 'to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine' (Covenant of the Hamas, 1988). Hamas are wealthy because they have rich backers from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states such as Qatar.

The Palestinian working class are organized in the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) which is a Fatah organization that has not had any elections since 1981. The rise of the

Federation of Independent and Democratic Trade Unions & Workers' Committees in Palestine, representing workers in independent, democratically-elected unions and workers' committees across the West Bank and Gaza has threatened the Fatah PGFTU. After a protest outside the Palestinian Legislative Council in Gaza in 2005, the PGFTU asked the Palestinian security services to investigate the Independent Workers' Committees Federation and the Democracy and Workers' Rights Center.

The split in the Palestinian bourgeoisie between Fatah and Hamas suits the Israeli state but in April 2014 Israel became very angry at the reconciliation deal agreed between Fatah and Hamas, and threatened to withhold tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. Was the offensive against Gaza last year an Israeli attempt to sabotage the deal between Hamas and Fatah, to isolate Hamas and punish Fatah for the rapprochement? But even Fatah entered the conflict in July 2014 with missiles launched against Israel by Fatah in the West Bank. Amin Maqboul, Secretary-General of Fatah's Revolutionary Council said Palestinians were united against the Israeli assault: 'We all know that the main Israeli goal has been to break up the national unity reconciliation. We will respond by strengthening our unity and reconciliation' (Palestine Pulse, 10 July 2014). Israel's anger was evident when it said 'The moderate Palestinian leadership has shown its true colours. It sides with the terrorists, not with Israel' (Arutz Sheva, 16 July 2014).

After the war last summer, in September 2014 Fatah and Hamas reached an agreement that would turn over the civil administration of Gaza immediately to officials of a Palestinian unity government which would attempt to ease the long blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt and open the way to reconstruction of Gaza. Jibril Rajoub, a senior official in Fatah announced 'Fatah and Hamas have reached a comprehensive agreement for the unity government to return to the Gaza Strip' (Al-Arabiya, 25 September 2014).

Nationalism divides

Both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism hold back the growth of class consciousness among the working class in Israel and Palestine but something extraordinary occurred in the summer of 2011 during the social justice protests in Israel inspired by the 'Arab Spring.' In Israel there was an increasing public awareness of the minority ownership of the economy developing. For instance,  in 2009 Israel’s central bank stated in its annual report that 'some twenty business groups, nearly all of family nature and structured in a pronounced pyramid form, continue to control a large proportion of public firms (some 25 per cent of firms listed for trading) and about half of market share' (Renewal: A journal of social democracy, January 2012).

The summer 2011 social justice protests that erupted helped unite the Jewish and Palestinian working class in Israel.  Jewish working class activists signed a covenant of cooperation with the Palestinian activists and they chanted mixed Hebrew and Arabic renditions of slogans from Tahrir Square. Arab writer Odeh Bisharat addressed a meeting of 300,000 people and announced that the struggle for social justice has always been the struggle of the Arab community, and the people shouted 'Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies' (The New Significance, 17 August 2011). For a brief time that summer the Israeli and Palestinian working class saw itself as a class.

Emma Goldman claimed the origin of the Arab-Israeli war stemmed from the fact that 'the Arab feudal lords had sold the land to the Jews without the knowledge of the Arab people.'

Goldman concluded that 'the land should belong to those who till the soil', in other words, the Jewish and Palestinian working class regardless of religion and national identity in a socialist society of common ownership and democratic control.

Steve Clayton

Peterloo: a Class Skirmish (1969)

From the May 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

At its May Day rally in Manchester this year the Labour party commemorates the 150th anniversary of the massacre of Peterloo. The Socialist Party of Great Britain denounces this as blatant hypocrisy. Labour has always been opposed to Socialism and the interests of the working people but this miserable attempt to present themselves as the champions of the underdog — at the same time that they are viciously attacking workers and their living conditions — is dishonest even by their unprincipled standards.

For all that, Peterloo is an incident which deserves to remembered — especially by those who claim that the British working class has no 'revolutionary' tradition. In the first half of the 19th century, working-class unrest tended to reflect the state of the harvest. So 1817, with a heavy grain crop and the price of wheat falling from 111s. 6d. per quarter to 75s. found the Home Secretary writing

Our situation and prosperity at home are improving. The materials of disaffection to work upon are less abundant and less susceptible than at the corresponding period last year.

To which Lord Exmouth replied that this was not only the factor in keeping the workers in their place:

We owe our present peaceful and happy prospects to your firmness and prompt exertions in keeping down the democrats.

The wheat harvest for 1818 was much poorer, however, and by July 20,000 workers were on strike in Manchester (out of a population which in 1801 had been estimated at something over 70,000). For the most part the workers' demands were entirely economic, for improved wages and working conditions, but groups of radicals tried to point out that any solution to their hardships would need to be far more fundamental than this.

Universal suffrage, annual parliaments, and repeal of the Corn Laws were the reforms which these elements campaigned for, but for a long time their ideas found a hostile reception. For example, John Bagguley — an agitator who was active in the Manchester area — was beaten up in August 1818 by a crowd of strikers in Manchester and was also shouted down when he tried to speak at a meeting of weavers in nearby Stockport.

But gradually, partly as a result of their experiences in the struggle to improve their conditions and partly in response to the arguments of the reformers, political ideas started to spread among the working class. As the stipendary magistrate for Manchester wrote:

I do not by any means think that the system of turning out in the different trades is connected with this idea [parliamentary reform], or that the sentiment itself has taken root in the minds of the mass of the population, yet I am disposed to think that this idea gains ground  . . . 

This, then, was the background to the huge gathering, 50,000 to 60,000 strong, which assembled in St Peter's Fields in Manchester on August 16, 1819 to listen to Henry Hunt, a leading radical. The banners they carried called for 'Parliaments Annual', 'Suffrage Universal' and harked back to the French Revolution ('Liberty and Fraternity'). But the general lack of political clarity was also well illustrated when a band played God Save the King before the meeting started.

Although the crowd was well-behaved and unarmed the magistrates decided to arrest Hunt and sent the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to do this. This bunch of scared and incompetent territorials came charging onto the field, knocking down a woman and killing her baby on the way, but — after arresting Hunt — they found themselves stranded among the densely packed throng. Seeing this, the magistrates claimed that the workers were "attacking the Yeomanry" (a complete lie) and gave the order for the troops of Hussars who were being held in reserve to disperse the crowd with their sabres. Eleven people died, either cut down or trampled to death, and over 400 were wounded. As the Prince Regent put it, the magistrates and the army were to be thanked for their "prompt, decisive, and efficient measures for the preservation of public tranquillity."

But it was The Times, writing four days after Peterloo, which made the most penetrating comment on the massacre:

The more attentively we have considered the relations subsisting between the upper and labouring classes throughout some of the manufacturing districts, the more painful and unfavourable is the construction which we are forced to put upon the events of last Monday  . . . The two great divisions of society there, are — the masters, who have reduced the rate of wages; and the workmen, who complain of their masters having done so. Turn the subject as we please, 'to this complexion it must come at last'.

In other words, Peterloo was just one particularly brutal battle in the class war of capitalism — which still persists today. And there should be few workers in Manchester or anywhere else with illusions as to which side of the barricades the Labour party is fighting on.

Manchester Branch,

Socialist Party of Gt. Britain

Are Socialists Sadists? (2015)

From the January 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is two hundred years since the Marquis de Sade died – we examine his political ideas.

On 2 December 2nd, 1814 Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, the Marquis de Sade, died in an insane asylum. The words ‘sadism’ and ‘sadist’ are derived from his name. De Sade was incarcerated for about 32 years of his life (including ten years in the Bastille), often without access to the courts. During the French Revolution he was an elected delegate to the National Convention. He was given the task of reviewing sanitation in the hospitals. These were terrible places but thanks to de Sade, individual beds were given to each and every patient, whereas formerly one was obliged to share, sleeping alongside the dying and the dead in one bed. De Sade forced the hospital authorities to transform the clinics and hospitals into places fit for patients. He was also given the task of overseeing the renaming of the streets of Paris, abolishing the Christian names, renaming them after republican heroes, for example, Rue Spartacus.

He began to challenge the efforts by the new masters of France to sabotage democratic measures. But democracy was to be overtaken swiftly by The Terror. Unlike the English Jacobins (of the London Corresponding Society etc), the French Jacobins were not the representatives of the still weak and relatively new working class. They represented the petite-bourgeoisie. Only 6 percent of those passing beneath the guillotine during the Jacobin regime were aristocrats. The rest were minor clergy and workers, 80 percent of victims being manual labourers. The nascent workers’ movement was silenced by Robespierre, and not later.

As regards prison and the death penalty, de Sade was opposed to every form of punishment: ‘It is far simpler to hang men than to find out why we condemn them.’ Again and again he spoke for the release of those brought before the tribunal, and never once would he allow himself to vote for the death penalty. Finally, having stormed out of the tribunal, he wrote to his friend Gaufridy: ‘They wanted me to put through a bestial and bloody resolution, which I couldn't do.’ Then toward the end of the year 1793 they came for Citizen de Sade himself. He was pencilled in to be guillotined but avoided that fate by the good fortune of having been transferred to another prison. When Napoleon Bonaparte became military dictator de Sade’s temporary liberty ended and without any trial he was thrown into political prison once more, before being sent to an asylum.

De Sade held no illusions about the natural goodness of man, but he believed that with complete economic and sexual equality human conditions could be greatly bettered. He went far beyond the ‘advanced’ social thinkers of his time and even of the present day. One of his earlier biographers Geoffrey Gorer, who wrote The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis De Sade, pointed out that Sade was in complete opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his ‘complete and continual denial of the right to property,’ and for viewing the struggle in late 18th century French society as being not between ‘the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another’, but rather all of these ‘more or less united against the proletariat.’ Gorer argued, ‘he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist.’

Socialists say that society is divided into two antagonistic classes, the haves and the have-nots. This point is so fundamental for de Sade that he stresses it in every book. His definition of class can hardly be improved: ‘Don't think that I mean by the people the caste called the tiers-etat [bourgeoisie in the limited sense]; no, I mean by the people ... those who can only get a living by their labour and sweat ’. In his Aline et Valcour the good king Zamé begins his description of his visit to Europe by saying:

‘Everywhere I could reduce men into two classes both equally pitiable; in the one the rich who was the slave of his pleasures; in the other the unhappy victims of fortune; and I never found in the former the desire to be better or in the latter the possibility of becoming so, as though both classes were working for their common misery..; I saw the rich continually increasing the chains of the poor, while doubling his own luxury, while the poor, insulted and despised by the other, did not even receive the encouragement necessary to bear his burden. I demanded equality and was told it was utopian; but I soon saw those who denied its possibility were those who would lose by it...’

This is the beginning of a treatise on the class-war by the extremely savage Bishop of Grenoble who declaims ‘That is the [lower] class that I would abandon to perpetual chains and humiliation ... all others ought to join together against this abject class ... to fasten chains upon them, since they in their turn will be enchained if they relax.’

On theft, de Sade wrote that the oath taken by the nation with respect to the law of property is ridiculous: ‘How can you expect the man who has nothing to honour a law which protects the man who has everything? It is his duty, surely, to attempt to redress the balance!’ Property is itself theft, he says. The thief proposes a law to punish theft against himself, the original thief, and expects those with no other recourse than theft to respect such a law! Laws against theft are therefore absurd.’

Gorer, in his book, explains: ‘This distinction of classes is founded on property; and with unaccustomed epigrammatic terseness De Sade defined property as 'a crime committed by the rich against the poor ... theft is only punished because it attacks the right of property; but that right is in itself a theft, so that the law punishes theft because it attacks theft.’

On leadership, de Sade had this to say: ‘you can only govern men by deceiving them; one must be hypocritical to deceive them; the enlightened man will never let himself be led, therefore it is necessary to deprive him of enlightenment to lead him as we want ...’ Elsewhere, he says ‘Politics, which teach men to deceive their equals without being deceived themselves, that science born of falseness and ambition, which the statesman calls a virtue, the social man a duty, and the honest man a vice ...’

Religion is summed up by his view 'When the strong wished to enslave the weak he persuaded him that a god had sanctified the chains with which he loaded him, and the latter, stupefied by misery, believed all he was told.' Blasphemy can only exist if God exists. If there is no God, then blasphemy and all other ‘religious crimes’ are likewise non-existent. So how can you have laws against them? If one, on the other hand, believes in a God, can he really believe his God to be so petty as to take offence at being calumnied? Such a God isn't worthy of honour’.

De Sade also condemned war, which he said sent the wrong message to those abroad whom we would wish likewise to follow our example and liberate themselves. It is not our job to make war on them, but to show them through our peaceful example what a free republic can and ought to be. He claimed war is simply public and authorised murder, in which hired men slaughter one another in the interests of tyrants: 'The sword is the weapon of him who is in the wrong, the commonest resource of ignorance and stupidity.'

As mentioned, de Sade was no supporter of capital punishment. He wrote: ‘The state publicly honours those proficient in murder and encourages them. Yet it punishes the man who disposes of his enemy for a personal reason!’ As for the death penalty, he writes: ‘Either murder is a crime, or it is not. If it is not, why punish it? If it is, then by what perverse logic do you punish it by the same crime?’ It also is tantamount to bad arithmetic, since ‘now two people are dead instead of one!’

De Sade thought the greatest causes of misery were four things; private property, class distinctions, religion and family life. In the future societies he wrote of these institutions being abolished or transformed. In one section of Aline and Valcour, a brutal African kingdom is contrasted with the Pacific island utopian paradise of Tarnoé. He describes an imaginary island where all priests were banished, there were no temples and no vested interest in religion. There were also no professional lawyers and discussion of theology or law was punished as one of the gravest anti-social crimes. There was also no money.

Wherever you look in the world today you will find a parasitical minority suffering an embarrassment of riches while the toiling masses endure real and unnecessary pain as very much part of their everyday lives. The Marquis de Sade would find many examples of this obscenity in today’s class divided society. De Sade may not have been a socialist as we would now define one, but a man of his times, though he perhaps ought be remembered far more for raising important social questions than raising erections through his masturbatory sexual fantasies.

ALJO

Non-reformist reformist (1996)

Book Review from the December 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Economics of the Madhouse by Chris Harman (Bookmarks, £3.50).

This is a well-rounded and generally well-written criticism of the modern capitalist economy and the economists who are paid to defend it. It deals with exploitation, economic crises, globalisation and many other issues of interest in a manner socialists are likely to generally agree with. As might be expected from the leading economic theoretician of the SWP, there are the usual nods in the direction of the Permanent Arms Economy as an explanation for the post-war boom and towards the allegedly socialist nature of the Russian Bolshevik coup d'etat, but these are only fleeting references and therefore only appear as minor irritants.

Harman's criticism of contemporary reformism echoes much of ours, in particular his claim that today's Labour Party does not offer unlimited beneficent reforms of the system so much as "reformism without reforms". Above all, Harman makes plain that far from the Labour Party having changed the market economy, it is the market economy that has changed Labour. Now Labour doesn't even pretend to be the party of the working class and offers little if anything distinct from the Conservatives.

Given Harman's eloquent description of the failure of capitalism across the planet, readers could be forgiven for thinking he is an advocate of common ownership and production solely for use as the solution to the problems created by the market. Far from it, Harman is actually more graphic than most SWP'ers in his claim that the answer to the "economics of the madhouse" is, er . . .  more economics of the madhouse. Viz:

"The day after the socialist revolution, as the day before, the great mass of people would go to work in factories and offices, and would be paid in money for what they did . . . It will in fact take many decades for people to learn to control consciously very many of the mass of productive processes that take place in a modern society, and in the interim they will have little choice but to put up with the old market mechanisms" (pp.103-4).

This serves to blow Harman's criticisms of the Labour reformists out of the water because the SWP is here shown to be reconciled to the insanity of the market just as much as they are. The explanation offered for this—that the working class would not know how to operate and organise production without the capitalist class and their system to guide them—is simply bizarre, un-Marxist nonsense. The working class already operates capitalism from top to bottom and long ago, as Engels pointed out, capitalism reduced the bulk of the owning class to the status of economic parasites, tearing off their share coupons and gambling on the stock exchange without taking any real part in the processes of production and distribution. If Harman claims that the introduction of production for use must be held back for "decades" because of the inability of the mass of the population to operate society, he is duty bound to tell us which functions the capitalists are able to perform that the rest of us can't. He is duty bound to, but, given the SWP's reticence to debate with socialists and their evident confusion on this topic, we somehow imagine that he wont.

DAP