The Welsh Nationalist Party and the Workers (1953)

From the October 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Welsh Nationalist Party claims to stand in the interest of the workers in Wales. It is not concerned with the fact that because of the international nature of Capitalism, workers are exploited everywhere and therefore the attack against exploitation must be on a broad front recognising no national barriers.

The W.N.P. naturally cannot possibly possess this world outlook being a parochial organisation not recognising exploitation as being synonymous with Capitalism.

Its members base their policy on the importance of the National State, demanding National Status for Wales arguing that with its achievement the workers' troubles will end.

They conveniently forget (at least they never mention) that Wales was as much oppressed (i.e. the people) when she was governed by the Princes of Wales of “Welsh blood” as she has been ever since the statute of Ruddlian: that she has been oppressed in common with the workers of other parts of the British Isles from the inception of Capitalism is not so much history but a tale of yesterday and today. If the Nationalists get their way it will be the tale for tomorrow as well. 

In early mediaeval Welsh there were two classes—the Free and the Unfree, the Princes (Tycoysogion) knights and gentry (Boneddwyr) and the slaves (Caethion). The Nationalists completely ignore the progression of history commencing with the gens and developing into the nation, and the fact that the development of World Capitalism tends eventually to break down national barriers. "The society that organises production anew on the basis of free and equal association of producers will put the whole state machine where it will then belong: in the museum of the antiquities, side by side with the spinning wheel and bronze axe" (Engels: "Origin of the Family and the State").

The Nationalists, flying in the face of scientific analysis of society, base their appeal on two planks—the Cultural and the Economic. They have a certain following for their cultural policy among certain University "Intellectuals" and religious leaders whose minds dwell on the delights of the Mediaeval past and the "simple grandeur" of rural life. They are enthusiastic about the fostering of the ancient Welsh language and literature (The writer is pleased to include himself in the 40 per cent. who retain command over the Welsh tongue, and enjoys reading Welsh classical literature but what this has to do with combating Capitalism is difficult to see.)

It is when we come to the economic policy that we realise that this party of "Patriots" is just another party of Capitalism. A reading of its publications in both English and Welsh has failed to produce anything new apart from somewhat peculiar suggestions for the better administration of Capitalism.

Completely ignoring the fact that the "freedom" of the workers in self-governing states such as Finland, Denmark, New Zealand and Eire is simply freedom to remain an exploited, wage earning class, the Welsh Nationalists proudly present their pamphlet "Can Wales afford Self Government?" The first reaction of a Socialist born and bred in Wales and knowing something about the past and present of the country, is that the question is irrelevant. One could afford to buy a thousand aspirin tablets with which to poison one self but that is no argument for taking them.

The question that Socialists in Wales put to the Nationalists is—if Wales succeeds in obtaining Home Rule (i.e. Dominion Status though there is a wing of the Nationalist movement out for Republicanism) what will be the political outlook of the Welsh Government? Will industry be carried on for profit? Will monetary considerations rule the field of planning and production? The answer contained in the above mentioned pamphlet is clear—all the machinery of Capitalism will be in operation; nothing will have changed basically.

Welsh and other readers should not be carried away by cleverly worded statements (intended to woo the large industrial army of Glamorganshire miners) suggesting sympathy with "Socialism" whereas all they mean is nationalisation.

The choicest section is the part "proving" the possibility of setting up home rule. Eire is given as an example. In Eire, the firm of Rowntrees came to the rescue by building a factory in Dublin exploiting 600 workers. Exploitation, under these circumstances, is not exploitation because the Irish now have "Home Rule"!

As to the question "where's the money to come from?" the section dealing with the floating of Ireland's first National Loan takes some beating: " . . . the Irish Government courageously determined to float its first National Loan . . . the Loan was immediately over-subscribed. Among the biggest subscribers were  . . . Church of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, and Guinness, Ltd." (so drink up, begorrah your troubles are over!)

The Irish Free State Government, in 1927, found itself having to float a second National Loan amounting to £7 million; £4 million of which was taken up by Irish and English Capitalists and £3 million in New York "the whole of the New York issue was oversubscribed within two hours" (our italics). It is natural that the Capitalists of U.S.A. should take out a stake in a paying proposition.

The Welsh "patriots" therefore have no compunction in pawning the freedom of the new National State to outside Capitalist interests right from its very inception.

What security do they offer for such loans? They mention the great resources of wealth beneath Welsh soil, "only waiting for timely stimulus and support," together with the skill and industry of Welsh workers. They say that "income derived from Wales by companies with headquarters in London would be taxed." What a revelation! The "foreign" Capitalists are to be allowed to exploit the Welsh workers first, and then are to be taxed. The Welsh wage slave will have the satisfaction of knowing that "his" government has rented his labour power to outside interests in order to receive the wherewithall to keep him alive!

We agree that as in the case of Eire the future Welsh Government need not worry about finance; it will be sufficient to advertise that the Welsh workers are up for sale; that they are available to any Capitalist concern that cares to come and exploit them—as they are at the present time.

Is there a case for Welsh Nationalism? From their own Capitalist point of view there might be—it might be more profitable to operate Capitalism from  Cardiff than from London.

From the point of view of the Welsh workers, the position would remain broadly the same – he would remain the vehicle creating surplus value. He could—if he has a mind to—stagger to the mine or steel mill in the grey dawn singing triumphantly the words of the Welsh National Anthem and consider himself as having achieved his emancipation. On the other hand he could get down to the fundamentals of Socialism and throw his exploiters out whether they scream Nationalism, Patriotism, or any other brand of moonshine—in Welsh or English.

The land of Wales could raise its voice in a mighty chorus which would reverberate through the hills and valleys and beyond. “Workers of all lands, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains, you have a world to gain.”

This is the real message of freedom: these words spell freedom in any language.

W. Brain

Down on market (1997)

From the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Market System Must Go! Why Reformism Doesn't Work. The Socialist Party, 1997

For those intending to advance their study of socialist politics beyond our more introductory material, this pamphlet is a must. It develops a comprehensive analysis of reformist theory and practice in an understandable and easy-to-read manner.

Twelve chapters long in all, the earlier sections focus on the historical background to reformism, the rise of anti-reformist organisations such as the Socialist Party and how reformist politics has developed in practice to the present day in all its various guises, from the Conservative Party through to the far left. The later chapters discuss issues of particular concern to modern reformers—taxation, the welfare state, economic crises and unemployment, income inequality and inflation.

The aim of the pamphlet is to provide a thorough critique of the inadequacy and failures of reformist politics. Most political practice across the world is still predicated on the basis that capitalism can be humanised through benign government intervention. This pamphlet demonstrates why it can't and why modern-dat reformers are to all intents and purposes wasting their time, chasing a chimera when they could be doing something really constructive and really likely to succeed—constructing a mass movement for democratic socialist revolution. An understanding of why capitalism cannot be reformed to run in the interests of the working class is an essential pre-requisite to this most important of tasks.

Karl Marx and the abolition of money (1980)

"The Man with the Moneybag and his Flatterers"
Peter Bruegel the Elder (1568) 

From the April 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

At one time the Socialist Party of Great Britain was almost alone in saying that socialism by its very nature had to be a moneyless society and that this had also been Marx's view. Our views were rejected not only, as was to be expected, by the Labour Party and the so-called Communist Party but also by the various Trotskyist sects which, right up until the late 1960s attempted to argue that it was not Marx's view that socialism had to involve the disappearance of money.

The publication, for the first time in English, in 1973 of a complete version of the pages and pages of notes Marx had scribbled down in 1857-8, known as the Grundrisse, settled this question once and for all. It completely vindicated our position, even though the other writings of Marx on money and socialism had long been there to demonstrate that he regarded the two as incompatible. The Grundrisse, we hasten to add, must not be over-rated and should be regarded as no more than unrevised private notes made by Marx, but nevertheless as notes which do allow us to follow the train of thought which led him to formulate the views expressed in his published works.

Marx published three works on economics in his life-time: The Poverty of Philosophy (1847); A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and the first volume of Capital (1867). In them he described money as a "social relation". By this he did not simply mean that money was a material link between isolated producers of commodities, relating them to each other, that is, socially, through the products of their labour. Money was indeed such a link but, in Marx's view. it was more than this: it was a material form taken by the relations between the producers, a sort of material reflection of the basic social relations of production.

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where Marx does not deal with developed capitalism but only with simple commodity production, these relations were those between small-scale independent craftsmen working on their own and exchanging their products with each other. In Capital these relations are those between a class of producers operating an already socialised productive system and a minority class monopolising the means of production and appropriating for themselves, as a section only of society, the social product.

Clearly then, as a material form taken by the social relations between producers and non-producers under capitalism, money must disappear with those relations. When they are abolished, then so is money. This is a fundamental — and elementary — proposition of Marxian economics.

One of the ideas current in Marx's day for improving the lot of the working class was to substitute for metallic and interest-bearing money a paper "labour-time money". The basic idea was to express the prices of commodities in amounts of labour-time incorporated in them, so undermining the basis for any non-labour incomes. Today we would regard this as just another currency-crank idea hardly worth considering, but in Marx's day it had considerable influence in certain working class circles, even being regarded as a sort of "socialist" money. Marx dealt with this question in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy where he ridiculed the very idea of a "socialist money":

"Louis Blanc transforms the 'money of the society', which simply means internal, national money, into socialist money, which means nothing at all  . . . " (1971 Lawrence and Wishart edition, footnote, p. 167).

Marx also discussed this idea in the Grundrisse notebooks in connection with a book by Darimon, a now obscure follower of Proudhon. The Proudhonists' scheme was basically a proposal to improve the lot of the working class by monetary reform while retaining production for sale. After pointing out that the Proudhonists, in saying that their aim was to find a money which wouldn't cause crises by alternatively appreciating and depreciating ( which was to put things back to front anyway), were in effect trying to prevent prices rising and falling, Marx went on:

" . . . the problem would have to reduce itself to: how to overcome the rise and fall of prices. And how? By doing away with exchange value. But this problem arises: exchange corresponds to the bourgeois organization of society. Hence one last problem: to revolutionize bourgeois society economically. It would then have been self-evident from the outset that the evil of bourgeois society is not to be remedied by ‘transforming’ the banks or by founding a rational ‘money system'" (Pelican edition, p. 134).

So, Marx was in favour of abolishing prices and doing away with exchange value as the only way of preventing monetary crisis. And he also knew that the abolition of bourgeois society (capitalism) would necessarily involve the disappearance of money, prices and value. In fact in a later passage he says so in such explicit terms that no one, after reading ti, should be able to seriously contend otherwise:

"The very necessity of first transforming individual products or activities into exchange value, into money, so that they obtain and demonstrate their social power in this objective form, proves two things: (1) That individuals now produce only for society and in society; (2) that production is not directly social, is not ‘the offspring of association’, which distributes labour internally. Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate; but social production is not subsumed under individuals, manageable by them as their common wealth. There can therefore be nothing more erroneous and absurd than to postulate the control by the united individuals of their total production, on the basis of exchange value, of money, as was done above in the case of the time-chit bank. The private exchange of all products of labour, all activities and all wealth stands in antithesis not only to a distribution based on a natural or political super-and subordination of individuals to one another . . . but also to free exchange among individuals who are associated on the basis of common appropriation and control of the means of production. " (Pelican edition, pp. 158-9.)

The existence of money, in other words, shows that production is already social but that it is not under social control. When, with the establishment of "common appropriation and control of the means of production" (socialism), production comes under the direct and conscious control of society then money quite simply disappears.

Adam Buick

Marx on Money

Marx's Capital is a treasury of literary allusions. The quotation below is from Chapter 3 "Money" (part 3) Everyman's Library (page 112)

As the circulation of commodities extends, the power of money increases, of money which is an absolutely social form of wealth, ever ready for use. Columbus, in a letter from Jamaica penned in 1503, says "Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever owns it is lord of all he wants. With gold it is even possible to open for souls a way into paradise!" Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, whether a commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable. Circulation is the great retort into which everything is thrown, and out of which everything is recovered as crystallised money. Not even the bones of the saints are able to withstand this alchemy; and still less able to withstand it are more delicate things, sacrosanct things which are outside the commercial traffic of men.

Henry III, most Christian king of France, robbed monasteries of their relics in order to turn these into money. We know what part the despoiling of the temple of Delphi by the Phocians played in Greek history. Among the ancients, the god of commodities had his dwelling in the temple. Temples were "sacred banks". The Phocians, preeminently a trading people, looked upon money as the transmuted form of all things. It was, therefore, quite in order that the virgins who, at the feast of the goddess of love, gave themselves to strangers, should offer up to the goddess the pieces of money they received.

Just as all the qualitative differences between commodities are effaced in money, so money on its side, a radical leveller, effaces all distinctions.

"Gold! Yellow, glittering, precious gold! . . .
Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant."

Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, sc iii. 

Letter: If Robots Take Over (2015)

Letter to the Editors from the November 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

In your October edition you published an article entitled ‘Robots of the World - you have nothing to lose but your blockchains’.

Although it was highly amusing it only superficially dealt with a problem in economics that intrigues me. At the moment automation (robots) are merely advanced tools (constant capital) where the profit is made by the labour manufacturing the programming and fabrication (variable capital). What happens when the robots become ‘self-programming’ and able to build themselves? Does the ‘organic composition of capital’ become such that the variable part is so negligible that profits plunge? Will profit levels be held up by the monopolistic ownership of these robots and the increased productivity they represent? Surely the capitalists not within that particular industry would object on free market grounds?

Andrew Westley, Cambridge

Reply: The answer is that, in the fully automated production system that you are asking about where robots would do everything, building themselves from scratch, supplying their own power and maintaining themselves, as there would be no human labour input there would be no value produced and so no prices, no wages and no profits either.

Such an economy is only a theoretical construct; in fact the theoretical limit to capitalism, as Marx pointed out in the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in the Grundrisse. This is the only place where Marx uses the word ‘collapse’ in relation to capitalism which he said would happen at the point where productivity was so high that the prices of units of commodity would be virtually zero and so would have been given away free. Obviously capitalism could not function on that basis.

But this point is a (very) long way off and in practice will never be reached, if only because political action would have put an end to capitalism, and its production for sale on a market with a view to profit, long before.

Mechanization, automation, robotization are all manifestations of the same trend under capitalism where, under the lash of competition, capitalist firms are driven to constantly strive to reduce the cost of production of what they are producing for sale, i.e. to increase productivity. But productivity does not proceed at the rate that some people sometimes mistakenly assume that it does because they take into account only the last stage of production.

What has to be taken into account is the labour that has gone into the production of a commodity from start to finish. So robots introduced at just one stage of the whole process will only have an impact at that stage. Which is why the increase in productivity in the economy as a whole has been at a rate of only about 2 percent a year, a rate that the capitalist economy can absorb.

Editors

Long live the (electronic) revolution! (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have always been aware that if we want to influence the ways in which people think and act we must be able to talk to them. Communication is inseparable from politics. For thousands of years this involved oratory and conversational skills. Even into the last decades of the twentieth century, members of the Socialist Party have been expected to try to develop the ability to deliver talks either to groups of fellow workers at indoor meetings and/or in the cities from outdoor platforms. But one of the reasons that we now find it more difficult to attract workers to our indoor meetings is the fact that they consider the idea old-fashioned. And there are so many modern counter-attractions, such as TV.

Admittedly, these were not the only means of communication we had. Printed matter (which had been used for propaganda effectively from the mid seventeenth century) including handbills, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, was most important for putting forward the detailed case for a socialist revolution, once the initial talking was finished. Publishing our own journal and pamphlets was  considered essential by the founding members of the Party. It is still very important.

Mass communication

For the great majority of working class people in Britain, access to means of communication remained unchanged until the last decade of the twentieth century. They got their information, carefully edited, from the BBC and, latterly, the commercial broadcasters on radio and television; and they/we read slight  variations in the constant support of capitalist values and social structures from daily, evening and Sunday papers.

Telephone communication was just as limited. Even in the late 70s and early 80s the few users of mobile phones needed to carry a heavy suitcase full of electronic equipment in order to communicate  with a limited range of similar users, mainly corporate, without dependence upon telephone land lines. Monitoring all or any of these channels of communication was not only straightforward but fairly simple for governments uneasy or suspicious about what their subjects were talking about. The American listening stations in Britain at Goonhilly and Fylingdales were able to intercept and process all the messages both in Britain and on the Continent, to the great advantage of American military and business organisations.

The IT revolution

The switch to digital instead of analogue handling of signals, and the application of computing power to telecommunications constituted a technological revolution. The recording, processing and transmission of information was standardised and universalised, largely owing to the selfless generosity of many enthusiastic experts in the field who took no payment for their inventions. The microminiaturisation of circuits and transistors developed at an unprecedented rate, and is still continuing, although not quite so fast. This made not only personal and portable computers possible and increasingly affordable, but it made mobile telephones as small and light as they are likely to become, if we want to continue to hold them in our hands.

For communication purposes computers have, in the main, linked into existing, landline, telephone services (although radio links are becoming popular). Mobile phones grew out of the popularity of walkie-talkie and citizen’s band radio systems. Instead of needing the power of such radio transmitters and receivers, mobile phones were much more modest transceivers, depending upon a forest of aerials deployed across the land and connected to stations which routed and boosted signals to and from them, the whole lot being capable of connecting to the land-line telephone network as well. And this is the way  in which mobile phones and computer mail systems are starting to interact.

Although there are many large areas of the world where there are still no mobile phone systems and infrastructures, these are being colonised steadily because such phones obviate the need for much more expensive land-lines in sparsely populated or undeveloped areas. Millions have therefore been sold throughout the world.

There is an essential difference for users between the mobile and the land-line telephone – a call to a  mobile phone is a call to an individual person, rather than to a building or an organisation, and this alters the nature of the relationship or the type of message that is being sent. The facility to send brief text messages which wait to be accessed by the recipients has resulted in a snowstorm of texting in which individuals keep in contact at low expense, sometimes every few minutes. For organisational purposes, therefore, they are becoming invaluable. Protest demonstrations have been organised and co-ordinated with their aid, just as any two people are able to locate and find each other. On the other hand, advertisers have not been slow to recognise and employ this opportunity to send messages to hundreds or thousands of individuals.

The internet

In Britain and most other countries, communication by computer has been strongly encouraged by the decision of service providers to charge for messages to anywhere in the world at local call rates.  Although email systems will transmit highly complex information such as colour pictures, which take a disproportionate amount of time, the bulk of email traffic is plain text. This is treated as a simple system of numbers (the ASCII code) and is therefore extremely fast and economical. Not only brief conversational messages but also whole books can be transferred from one computer to another. They can then be printed out, if necessary, and as many times as necessary. Moreover, such emails can be despatched to many addresses at once, as we have found and utilised in the World Socialist Movement. In  consequence, we can now communicate with our comrades in Australasia or the Americas or Europe or Africa with virtually the same immediacy as we can with other socialists in Britain.

World-wide impact

Quick though socialists and many other organisations were to take advantage of the World Wide Web, industry and commerce were far quicker. Communication inside and between businesses has provided  a boost sufficiently great to have helped spur growth and delay another recession. It has also opened up an entirely new field for advertising and the sale of information.

Among the many areas affected in companies’ operations, one of the most significant has been the  facility to use cheap overseas labour without needing to move the workers. In the Indian subcontinent, for example, an increasing amount of clerical and telephone answering work is being done by English- speaking workers accepting far lower wages than capital needs to pay in the USA or Britain.

Another example of a qualitative difference occurring because of the quantitative difference of speed of communication is that factories in China now produce tailor-made wrought iron (mild steel, these days) gates and fences and garden furniture, based on drawings and dimensions sent by email, and ship   them to Britain for a fraction of the price they would cost to make here. Similar endeavours are being made by American firms to use labour in Mexico and South American countries rather than pay the higher domestic rates for the jobs. These and related developments are bringing increasing numbers of workers into a world working class, with English (American) as the lingua franca. This makes it possible for us not only to communicate with each other but to begin to organise together.

Towards democracy

One of the important facts about this burgeoning global electronic traffic is that no governmental or supra-governmental authority can prevent it or even regulate it to any considerable extent (as the struggle to prosecute paedophile rings indicates) without crippling legitimate commerce and information services. And the development of the World Wide Web means that when one electronic pathway is blocked another will be found for a message to get through. Even the eavesdropping efforts by the American government become helpless as the volume of mobile phone texting becomes a torrent of  billions. Known organisations and known individuals can always be targeted of course, but the great majority of people’s chatter is of no interest to those in power.

There is a great deal to learn in using electronic communication so that it serves the socialist movement’s democratic methods and objective. As we have already learnt to our cost, it is easy for   people to be abusive, tediously verbose, obscurely illiterate and seriously undemocratic with email. These faults, among others, at present vitiate the potential of the medium. But we are learning and this writer, for one, believes that it is essential that we do; and that we impress this upon all those workers who communicate with us. Oxford University would not have founded a Chair of Electronic Democracy if there were not a strong establishment belief that this is the medium of major communication and decision-making for the future. For the socialist movement to be left out of it because we are a hundred years old would be to agree to die of old age. As governments faced with falling turnouts at elections by disillusioned voters realise, this offers their greatest hope of renewed political interest and participation.

Such developments would direct the attention of socialists towards the propagation of socialist ideas via the internet, where an increasing proportion of the world’s thinking working class is going for its information and discussion.

As the numbers of participants grows greater for a socialist revolutionary change in the world’s dominant social system, it will be possible to chart and display its increasing strength. It will be possible to set up a worldwide proliferation of sites and forums in local languages and dialects so that workers will be able to assemble physically, if they consider it safe, in their own geographical areas. Above all, it will be possible to have world-wide discussion of the nature of socialist society; the means of achieving it in different parts of the world; the assistance needed by some areas from others; and the steps needed to establish the new social order in different parts of the world, bearing in mind the legacy left to us by this destructive and increasingly paranoid social order we know as capitalism. Speed the day!

Ron Cook

Greasy Pole: The Great - Are They Any Good? (2004)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Interposing themselves among the various layers of hierarchy and the ravages of capitalist society there is a peculiar human stratum which goes under the name of the Great and the Good. Their function is largely self-defined; in their own estimation they serve, they instruct, they resolve. Many - but not all- of them were fashioned in expensive schools, followed by years of devoted study in prestigious universities, to prepare them for membership of exclusive clubs and intimidating professional societies. Every so often they descend to our level to tell us what we are doing wrong and urge us to trust them to put it right. They assume that their very eminence will persuade us to heed their advice.

The boundaries of the Great and the Good are murky, difficult to set. It is probably easier to say who is not one of them than who is. They are unlikely to be found battling their way to work in a bus queue or a sardine tin tube train. Typically, among their ranks are newspaper editors, expired politicians, media personalities, university big-wigs, ex-civil service mandarins and lawyers, especially those who have graduated onto the Bench. They are often on call to newspapers or TV programmes to cobble together some empty pontificating on a current event. Their names are among the first to be thought of when it is necessary to populate some quango or official enquiry charged with blanketting some nasty reality relating to property society. So they infest organisations like the Parole Board, the Press Complaints Council, hospital boards of management. Some of them might find themselves sitting as a governor of the BBC. (When the chairmanship at the BBC fell vacant after the precipitous departure of Gavin Davies an ambitious queue of the Great and the Good formed, hopeful for the job, which yields a pay off of £81,320 a year for a four-day week).

Ryder and Radley

At this point we introduce Lord Ryder of Wensum, who is plainly among the Great and the Good because he is a governor of the BBC and  its vice-chairman, acting chairman until Davies’ successor is appointed. The Wensum bit of Ryder’s name is a river which provided a natural defence to the unwalled side of the city of Norwich. When Ryder was raised to the peerage he took the title of Wensum because he comes from that part of the country; it is where his family reaped the kind of profits to send him to a public school to begin the education necessary for someone destined to be among the Great and the Good. In fact he went to one of the more modern, less prestigious, public schools - Radley, which was established as recently as 1847 and which may have tried to assuage the shame of not being on the same level as Eton or Harrow by imposing a notably abrasive regime on its unfortunate scholars. One who went there described at as an “arriviste” school where “+I was regularly withdrawn from everyday life for months on end, as if abducted by aliens, and brought here instead. At the time, I blamed the parents”. After participating in Radley’s compulsory Rugby football, its cold baths and punishing long runs in the early morning darkness, Ryder must have found relief in one of the more famous of Cambridge colleges where he could unspectacularly graduate in history.

After that there was an appropriately seamless progress into journalism (at the Daily Telegraph of course) and life as a farmer. But it seemed the urge to give all this up in order to serve the rest of us unfortunates was strong enough to persuade Ryder to opt for a career in Tory politics. Like any new seeker after the higher reaches of the greasy pole, he had to prove his motivation by trying his luck at some hopeless seat. He took two batterings at the impregnable Labour stronghold of Gateshead East in the general elections of 1974, until in 1983 he was ushered into the comfort of Mid Norfolk - which was not only solidly Tory but his home area as well. This agreeable ending was made even happier when, soon after arriving at Westminster, Ryder was singled out for promotion - well, his wife was private secretary to Margaret Thatcher, who was at their wedding - holding some minor jobs before moving to Economic Secretary to the Treasury in 1989. In 1990 he disappointed Thatcher, who had done so much for his career, by adroitly switching sides in the Tory leadership struggle to support John Major, who in his turn rewarded him with the job of Chief Whip.

Bastards and Sleaze

But Ryder’s luck was out for that was not the best time to be a Tory Whip, what with John Major’s  battle with the Euro-sceptic “bastards”, including the unlamented Iain Duncan Smith. (Another of the rebels, Teresa Gorman, complained in her book Bastards about how ruthless the Tory Whips were with them). And that was not the end of the discipline problems, as the party’s MPs seemed to be queuing up to discredit Major’s unwise call to get Back to Basics with a succession of exotic embroilments and underhand deals which have collectively gone down in history as Tory Sleaze. Nothing he had endured at Radley had prepared Ryder for this and in 1997 he decided that enough was enough. He left active politics, became a director of Ipswich Town Football Club (which proved that the Great and the Good did not lose the common touch) and founded and became chairman of two local private radio stations. As he did this he may have congratulated himself on his timing for in the 1997 election his 1983 majority of 15,515 shrivelled to just 1336. In a traditional show of gratitude for Ryder’s devoted labours in lubricating the process of capitalism’s deceptions Major elevated him into a Life Peer, with an appropriate gong - the OBE - to go with it. >From here it was a short, predictable step for him to become a governor of the BBC and, in January 2002, the Corporation’s vice chairman.

It was from that vantage point that Ryder made his grovelling apology to the government over the Andrew Gilligan affair. “On behalf of the BBC,” he snivelled, he had “No hesitation in apologising unreservedly for our errors”. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell - who have yet to apologise for their “errors” over the 45 minutes Weapons of Mass Destruction distortion - were delighted at Ryder’s fulsome toadying. They overlooked the fact that Ryder was not speaking “on behalf of” the workers at the BBC, who staged an immediate mass protest, nor for the thousands who were outraged by the government’s cynicism and Hutton’s readiness to brush it all aside.    

Weirdo and Watches

So what kind of politician, journalist, farmer, Life Peer, BBC governor, is the Great and Good Lord Ryder of Wensum? A fellow Tory MP - not one, it must be said, famous for being discreetly considerate - described him as weird, quiet and secretive, wearing his watch upside down because the time of day was not a matter for public disclosure (whatever that means). Edwina Currie, perhaps making comparison to John Major, thought him “skinny and youthful-looking+hiding behind owlish glasses, drinking Diet Coke+” He did have one fervent admirer though, at least for a while, in the odious, fascistic Alan Clark, who said he was “+such fun. So intelligent, and has the right views on practically every topic” (although Clark did not make it clear whether these “topics” included Nazi Germany). But as Clark became increasingly bitter about being out of Parliament (ignoring the fact that it was by his own decision to stand down) Ryder ceased to be a subject for his admiration. “I am ‘put out’ by my friends ignoring me,” whined the tediously egocentric diarist of Saltwood Castle; “Especially wounded by Richard. I did think that he was a friend, and I a confidant of his”. Clark’s final opinion, contemptuously approving his wife’s waspish appraisal, was that Ryder was “+just a little accountant+on the way out he scuttled away through a side door”.

But if Ryder was an accountant he was clearly one who could do his sums, as he proved in 1990 when he calculatedly deserted Margaret Thatcher in the hope that he would be better off supporting Major. Thatcher wailed at his treachery:

    It was a personal, as well as a political blow to learn that

    Richard, who had come with me to No. 10 all those years ago

    as my political secretary and whom I had moved up the ladder

    as quickly as I decently could, was deserting at the first whiff

    of grapeshot.

With his kind of credentials, Ryder fits comfortably in the ranks of the Great and the Good. His grovelling apology about “errors” at the BBC and everything about his amputated career in politics implied that the fault lies with the rest of us, for our scepticism when we are confronted with the likes of him and their pathetic defence of capitalism. We might ask, what gives him the right to behave in that way? What gave Thatcher and Major the right to foster him in what they hoped would be his faultless journey up the greasy pole? Such “rights” spring from the basic class structure of capitalism with its minority privileges and will endure with the system. Lord Ryder of Wensum is living witness to the cruel cynicism inherent in that system as well as the confusion among those who speak loudest in its defence.  

Ivan

The global profit system (2011)

From the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in.” So said John D Rockefeller founder of Standard Oil. 

Rockefeller's wealth was gained through the exploitation of worker labour power to turn a free resource, oil, into a commodity for sale on the market. That in a nutshell is how he kept those dividend payments rolling in. What applied then just as surely applies now.

Standard Oil’s rapacious business methods laid the foundations for today’s oil conglomerates. Throughout its existence Standard Oil was the target of disgruntled politicians and newspapers. Rockefeller’s PR people and lawyers were as busy then as their modern day counterparts. In 1880 the New York World wrote that it was “the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country” (John D. Rockefeller: Anointed With Oil, p.60). A decade later Rockefeller controlled 88 percent of the United States’ refined oil. In 1911 the Supreme Court found Standard Oil in breach of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Its trading practices were ruled illegal and it was ordered to be broken up into 34 new companies. Rockefeller still held a 25 percent stake in Standard Oil. This was transferred proportionately into shares in the new companies. Although Rockefeller’s direct control of the oil market was somewhat diminished, his personal fortune in 1920, which was estimated at $900,000,000, translated into plenty of influence. And a great deal of personal pleasure.

Another capitalist who was to derive plenty of pleasure from oil was William Knox Darcy. He was the son of an English solicitor who emigrated to Australia where he began to speculate in land. He became a partner in a syndicate in 1883 that uncovered a large deposit of gold at Mt Morgan. Darcy returned to England with a considerable fortune in his knapsack. His thirst for pleasure still unquenched he cast his eye east to Iran.

In 1901 Darcy negotiated a contract that gave him the rights to drill for mineral resources over a significantly large area of Iran. The contract was signed by the landowner, the Shahanshah, king of kings. Darcy handed over £20,000 cash. The rest of the deal involved £20,000 in stock and a 16 percent share in the net profits if any transpired. In 1908 oil on a significant scale was discovered. Darcy never once set foot on the Iranian soil that would give him and a small elite considerable pleasure in the years to come. Out of this deal the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed. In 1935 its name was changed to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC); its new owner was the British government.

At the core of all conflict under capitalism are markets and profits. Iranian instability haunted the owners of AIOC. That paltry 16 percent share stuck in the throats of Iranians. As was AIOC’s refusal to allow the Iranian government to check their books to see if that legendary British fair play was being practised. In 1951 the pro-AIOC Prime minister was overthrown. The Iranian parliament nationalised the oil fields. AIOC was ousted from Iran and it squealed its way through boycotts and high courts. In 1953 operation Ajax was initiated. The CIA and British government conspired with the King of Kings and the Iranian military to effect a coup. However AIOC had to forego its earlier monopoly and make do with only a 40 percent share of the spoils. American oil companies received 40 percent and the French 20 percent. The fountain of pleasure was re-activated.

In 1954 AIOC changed its name to the British Petroleum Company. Expansion from their base in the Middle East to Alaska followed in 1959. Adding substantially to the profits and the dividend cheques was their oil strike in the North Sea in 1965. Thatcher sold off the British government’s holding in BP, but not their interest in its fervent pursuit of profit. When the Kuwait Investment Authority, essentially the Kuwait government, saw an opportunity to gain control of BP through market manoeuvres, the Thatcher government didn’t hesitate to block their attempts; despite the free market rhetoric of its members.        

BP continued to grow through the capital generated from its exploitation of natural resources excavated by human labour power. Along the way those profits allowed BP to swallow up several of the offspring of Standard Oil. ExxonMobil and Chevron snapped up the rest of its most profitable siblings, and the trio came to form the backbone of the ‘Seven Sisters’ who in 1973 controlled 85 percent of the world's oil reserves.                    

BP nowadays ranks as the fourth largest company in the world measured by its 2009 revenues of $239 billion. It has acquired 22,400 service stations worldwide, and pumps 3.8 million gallons of oil in to the market place every day. Its profits, and thus its power, are culled from throughout the world. A source of pleasure for a few, but one of deep discontent to many.

The costs of doing business can often seem strange to the uninitiated. The Guardian (12 April 1976) reported that BP handed over £500,000 to a “slush fund which dispensed money to the ruling Italian political parties in return for favours over oil taxes and prices”. BP’s own documents showed that this type of payment was “calculated as a percentage of the money the company could expect to make as a result of favourable legislation”. Profits are all about maths. Is doing a thing one way more profitable than doing it another? That is the logic of capitalism, and consequently the logic of what follows.

In September 1999 a subsidiary of BP in Alaska paid a fine of $22 million for the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes from 1993-1995 on the Alaska North Slope. In August 2006 BP were forced to shut down their operations as over one million litres of oil had been spilt over the North Slope. The Guardian (1 July 2007) reported that “a US congressional committee has uncovered evidence of ‘draconian’ cost cuts at BP”, and demanded documents “suggesting that managers considered turning off the flow of anti-corrosion chemicals to save money”.

Maintenance and safety cuts were also linked to an explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery resulting in 15 deaths and injuries to 180 people. Refineries based in Texas City and Toledo U.S accounted for 97 percent of all flagrant safety violations (829 of 851). The Centre for Public Integrity reported on 16 May last year that “most of BP’s citations were classified as ‘egregious and wilful’ by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and reflect alleged violations of a rule designed to prevent catastrophic events at refineries”.

In April 2010 the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11 people and creating an oil slick that covered at least 2,500 square miles. BP, Halliburton and Transocean, the three companies that expected to carve up the profits have ended up blaming each other for the disaster. This is a common occurrence when thieves fall out. BP’s chief executive at the time has since left the company pocketing a £2 million severance deal, £100,000 a year as a payoff from a Russian joint venture with TNK-BP and a £600,000 per year pension. But the news isn’t all good though, along with Lord Browne of Madingley he’s been cited in a multi-million dollar lawsuit linked to the bribery of government officials in Kazakhstan.

The Guardian (2 February) reported that BP is under investigation in the US over its “alleged manipulation of the gas market”, and “in a separate case in 2006, BP paid $300m to settle charges that it had manipulated the propane market in the US”. Another report in the same issue that would have made Rockefeller proud of one of his heirs is that “the administrator of BP's $20bn (£12.3bn) Gulf spill compensation fund was accused last night by Mississippi's attorney general, Jim Hood, of sweeping deficiencies and violations of law”.

In South America BP has been equally busy pursuing dividend payments. They stood accused in the European Parliament in October 1996 of colluding with the Columbian army in gross human rights violations and of wilful destruction of the environment. Evidence supplied by a report commissioned by Colombia's President Samper’s human rights adviser alleged that “ BP passed photographs and videos of local protesters to the army, which human rights groups say led to killings, disappearances, torture and beatings” (corporatewatch.org). Likewise, a group of Colombian farmers won a multimillion pound settlement from BP after they were “ accused of benefiting from a regime of terror carried out by Colombian government paramilitaries to protect a 450-mile pipeline” (Independent, 22 July 2006).

Africa hasn’t escaped BP’s grasp either. In Southern Sudan BP have been linked to a civil war that it’s alleged has the central goal of depopulating the oil regions and the protection of pipelines. The people of the Niger Delta have been suffering from the oil cartel’s calculated exploitation of the land for the past 40 years. Its 606 oilfields supply 40 percent of all the crude that the US imports. Pollution from oil spills is endemic and dwarfs every other such disaster. As the Guardian reports “more oil is spilled from the Delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico”.

Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International said “There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law… It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice” (30 May 2010).

Many people believe that companies like BP are the problem. Well-meaning people like Bassey see court rulings, legislation and even the break-up of companies as a solution. So did well-meaning people during the reign of Standard Oil. Nothing changed then except some names. The problem is the global profit system. The, dog-eat-dog, unquenchable compulsion to acquire earnings and dividends. Pollution, corruption and death are the symptoms of a disease. The disease is capitalism. Only major surgery can cure the disease.

When will the naive finally realise that the problems faced by people and the environment cannot somehow, magically, be solved by methods that have failed abysmally for decades? How long do we, the overwhelming majority, sit on our hands while a tiny minority derive their pleasure at our expense?

Andy Matthews

Voice From the Back: Time on their hands (2015)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time on their hands
'Have Half a Million Dollars? Here’s a Massive Roger Dubuis Pocket Watch. Roger Dubuis is a brand that's never shy. If you're a fan, you probably use adjectives like bold and pioneering to describe the ornately skeletonised watches that come from the Geneva-based manufacturer. If you're not a fan, florid might seem a less generous description. Whatever your taste though, there's no denying that the new Excalibur Spider Pocket Time Instrument is flat-out insane' (bloomberg.com, 5 October). There are billions of reasons why this is mad. Here are just 600 million of them, the number, in India alone, of people who defecate in the open. Workers of the world wake up. Pull the chain on this system of obscene wealth and abject poverty.

Hajj Hell
Estimates vary as to how many paid the ultimate price and lost their lives in the rush to submit. The feudalistic theocracy of Saudi Arabia said 769 died in the crush, the Associated Press counted at least 1,453 and Iran over 4,700. Whatever the exact number, the history of the hajj, past, present and future, is tragic. Who is to blame? Mohammed? No, even though, unlike Jesus, there is convincing evidence he lived, we cannot really blame a man long dead. The moronic mullahs who failed to give advance warning of the impending deaths? No, because they cannot see the future any more than eBible Fellowship leader Chris McCann who stated the world would pass away on 7 October. But, according to one report, a class element is involved: the two waves of pilgrims converged on a narrow road 'which had been partly closed to allow a VIP Saudi prince to jump the cue [sic] causing people to suffocate or be trampled to death' (dissidentvoice.org, 7 October).

Stephen Hawking boldly goes....socialist?
'If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality' (huffingtonpost.com, 10 October). Socialists, preferring the first option, are not ashamed to appropriate Healey’s First Law of Holes to remind fellow members of the working class to stop digging. A world of free access and production for use not profit is ours for the taking. Make it so!

Moore nonsense
Meaningful change cannot come about through leaders, chasing reforms or minority action. Michael Moore disagrees: ’it doesn't take a lot; just a few people have got to do something, not a lot of people. No change has ever occurred with the masses doing it. Fewer than 25 percent supported the American Revolution in the Colonies, right? Jesus has 12 guys that fished! ' (cbsnews.com, 2 October). But only the masses can do it! Meanwhile, in the words of William Morris, ‘our business... is the making of socialists, i.e., convincing people that socialism is good for them and is possible. When we have enough people of that way of thinking, they will find out what action is necessary for putting their principles into practice. Until we have that mass of opinion, action for a general change that will benefit the whole people is impossible.'

$mith & We$$on
Moore is in favour of more gun controls. The manufactures are too, as such talk improves sales. 'Renewed calls for tougher gun control laws sent gun stocks surging on Monday as investors expected an increase in gun sales. The value of Smith & Wesson’s shares went up by 7.29% and Sturm, Ruger & Co increased by 2.75%. It was another good day for gun stock investors. Overall this year, the value of Smith & Wesson’s shares has increased by more than 80% and that of Sturm, Ruger increased by more than 60% – making them some of the best-performing stocks of 2015' (Guardian, 5 October).

Clueless capitalist
'Lord Sugar says today's poor have never had it so good, with mobile phones, computers and televisions making a mockery of claims of deprivation' (Daily Telegraph, 4 October). Just 85 capitalists have accumulated as much wealth between them as half the world's total population combined. Yet the 99 percent suffer poverty because they, unlike the capitalists, do not have direct access to the means of production and distribution.

Why I Joined the Socialist Party of Canada (1965)

From the 1965 - Number 2 issue of The Western Socialist

While walking that damp and dreary spring evening I came to a shop which, in my mind, sold odd things. At first I was interested in the things I could see in the window, then I looked beyond. After the fancy of what I saw beyond was gone did I suddenly realize there were people in the shop and I wondered what were they doing there.

The next thing I knew a young man came to the door and said, "We are having a socialist meeting. Come in, for you are welcome."

"Good," I said, "for I am also a socialist."

I sat down and (listened to a general discussion that was going on. Finally, the meeting was called to order, and the Chairman said, "This meeting is on behalf of the Socialist Party of Canada." I wondered to myself, "I have never heard of the Socialist Party of Canada."

I listened to what was said and agreed with much of it, but when he said, "Under socialism you do not need money," I thought he was mad.

At long last, he was finished. He said, "We will now have a question and discussion period, as this is part of the Socialist Party of Canada policy."

Asked I, "Mr. Speaker, what will people do without money. What incentive will they have to work?"

He replied, "Today, goods are produced for the profit motive, not for use. They have a use value, but the motivation is profit and not use. Under socialism, goods will be produced for the first time in history for the use and comfort of all mankind." I agreed and could see part of what he said, but as far as I was concerned you still must have money as an incentive. So, anyway, I bought a Western Socialist.

After reading it all, but only understanding a part of what I read, I came to the conclusion they were fairly sound. I had given up on politics as I had been to all types of political meetings and was just fed up with what I heard. My exact promise to myself was: "I am finished with politics forever."

I went back to that shop with the curious things in it and talked about the things I had read in the Western Socialist. We agreed and disagreed. The only conclusion we reached was that we agreed to disagree.

So back I went to my newly purchased reading matter. I found the more I read the more I understood. Finally, I realized they were, oh, so right, in all they wrote and said. I got mad and tore up the literature because it is hard to know the truth. Yes, facing up to reality in life as it really is is a very hard thing to do. Well, after much discussion, reading, thinking and so on. I realized the facts and the facts are these.

Socialist philosophy is not the idea of any one or more people. It has arisen from the problems which confront mankind today and are happening every day, such as poverty in the midst of plenty. Example, paying the farmers not to produce; annihilation of the human race and, whether or not people accept it, we are wage-slaves. The only means we have to live is to sell our mental and physical labour power.

Socialism offers the solution to these problems. But this is still not the reason why I joined the Socialist Party of Canada. Here is the reason.

People, today, judge a man by his wealth and it matters not how he got it, as long as he has it. Now before people can have an understanding of a person for what he is and not what he has, they must have socialism.

Today, the working class are so wrapped up in their own little world, struggling to eke out an existence, they have no time to really think about much else in life, struggling to buy a car, trying to save a little money to have a small amount of what they believe to be security... There is no security under capitalism. There never has been nor will be, but under socialism, where each will give according to his ability and take according to his need, all the goods society can produce will be available for the benefit of man, his comfort and pleasure. He will then have free access to all his material needs and will then have time to look for human relationship fulfilment, a world where men and women alike can be honest, sincere and be what they are, not like today where they are subjected to the will of the people who own the means of production and wealth.

I quote from one of long ago. His name is William Shakespeare. "He who owns the means by which I live owns my very life."

Join with us for freedom — for socialism.

Ronald Yurkoski, 

Toronto

Education serving capitalism (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

At every level of formal learning we are taught to conform—without mass indoctrination the profit system could not exist.

Tony Blair knows the value of education—it was the only word he used when listing his three priorities for running the profit system. Education is an integral part of any social system. In one that is dominated by commodity relationships and values, education both reflects and contributes to those relationships and values. Those who wish and work to replace capitalism with socialism need first to understand how education sustains the one and how it can help to bring about the other.

There is a conventional mythology surrounding the noble ideals of education. Schools are said to be places where young minds are nurtured, where boys and girls are prepared to become responsible citizens. Sir Sydney Caine writes that universities at their best are "the 'soul' of the country and when they have been independent of government and inspired by some vital and independent philosophy." The reality is, of course, much different. Schools, colleges and universities are not independent of society—they are an essential feature of it.

Feudal society required little of the peasants by way of education. The Industrial Revolution demanded more—workers who could make, tend and repair machines, and some who could keep records and books. The schools taught the virtue of attendance, the children were to know their place and sit still in it—a suitable preparation for working life in the factory or office. In the 20th century the process was continued—mass education was fashioned into an increasingly refined training and selection mechanism for the labour force.

For the employer class the education of workers is a cost that must be borne as economically as possible. In a book called The Education Dilemma, edited by a member of the World Bank, we are treated to the following remarkably frank admission (boast?):

"It is true that schools have 'inputs' and 'outputs' and that one of their nominal purposes is to take human 'raw material' (i.e. children) and convert it into something more valuable (i.e. employable adults)."

The cost of education is a particular problem for governments of Third World countries, most of whom are saddled with huge debt repayments to international banks and with the costs of choosing to put domestic guns before butter. One answer they have come up with is to use what is called non-formal basic education as an inexpensive alternative to universal primary education. This is a rural-based, vocationally oriented form of education relying heavily on instructional technology (useful if you can't afford to pay teachers). One contributor to The Education Dilemma offers the advice that, since television seems to work no better than radio and is much more expensive, it should almost never be used for instruction in low income countries.

This leads us to the question of whether the increasing use of more costly forms of instructional technology in the economically advanced countries is a good thing or not. From the point of view of school and university administrators and the governments and corporations who are their paymasters, instructional technology is a good investment. The recent worldwide growth in distance education is an example. Apparently, national and multinational corporations like distance education because it can link employees via electronic means for training, and they can save on the costs of transporting employees across the country.

The rhetoric about the university is that it is a community of scholars. While some of the medieval universities were no doubt founded on this ideal, today the label "academic capitalism" seems more apposite. Academic capitalism denotes market behaviour on the part of universities and faculties. There has been a shift from state block grants to grants and contracts targeted on commercially useable results. Centres within universities that form government-industry-university partnerships are encouraged. Faculties are obliged to look for commercial research funding—projects that are applied rather than basic, that are tied to the needs of national or multinational corporations.

A few years ago George Ritzer wrote a thought-provoking book on The McDonaldization of Society. The basic principles of the ubiquitous McDonald chain of fast-food restaurants are efficiency, quantified and calculated product, predictability, and the substitution (as far as possible) of non-human for human technology. Ritzer shows how these principles are exemplified in education. Schools and universities are required to be cost-effective; league tables give evidence of which institutions get the best exam results. Exams themselves are increasingly boiled down to multiple-choice questions, the answers to which are machine graded. The best-selling textbooks are "customised" and contain easily-digested McNuggets of information.

The subjects taught are prone to the same commercial pressures. Economics—aptly named the dismal science—focuses its theories, concepts and examples on the world of buying, selling and exchanging property, including intellectual property. If alternatives to the status quo are considered (which they rarely are) they equate socialism with nationalisation and communism with state capitalism. In a University of the Third Age economics group the speaker expounded on multinational corporations: their names, the industries and countries involved, the technologies they used, and so on. In view of their failure to meet basic human needs, I raised the question of whether they should be replaced by a system of common ownership and free access. My question was ruled out of order.

Other subjects are also heavily influenced by monetary calculation and property relationships. The comparatively new field of conflict resolution is monopolised by texts and teaching on "deterrence" to war, leadership policies, business strategies—not a word on the conflict between capitalism and what could be its practical alternative if enough people were given the opportunity to know and understand it. Leisure studies gives undue weight to the provision of leisure by commercial companies and government bodies—the idea that we can make our own leisure, individually or collectively, is largely discounted.

The inherent inequality between teacher and pupil has led some critics of capitalism—and indeed some socialists—to question the value of "schooling". In New from Nowhere William Morris expresses his objection to the way children are taught in capitalism by predicting that in socialism there will be no schools offering "a niggardly dole of not very accurate information; something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art of living whether he liked it or not, and was hungry for it or not". No blanket rejection of education was implied, but the critique of authoritarian schooling as simply preparation for employment led to a movement for "deschooling". The concern has been that hierarchical and autocratic teacher-pupil relationships concentrate power in the hands of teachers and lead children to acquire attitudes of docility and submission to authority.

What can we say about education in socialist society? It is easier to foresee what will no longer take place than what will positively develop. With no employment, schooling will lose its function as preparation for employment. No more McDonaldisation of education, no more economics (though economy history, as part of history, may well survive). The knowledge and skills needed to run a society which inherits the best from the past and rejects the worst will be circulated and developed among adults, and the ability to think creatively and critically transmitted from generation to generation. There will surely be different approaches to—even controversies about—what task.

Stan Parker

The blank ballot (2015)

Book Review from the November 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'How Voters Feel', by Stephen Coleman. Cambridge University Press. Paperback at £18.99

Like every other social process within the current alienated form of society, voting has become thoroughly fetishised into a hollow shell, compared to its potential. By examining the subjective feelings around voting Stephen Coleman opens up the question of how valuable that process could once again become, were it to be returned from its current status of begrudged duty into the realm of exciting, engaging action.

How Voters Feel does not seek to address the question of economic democracy or the unbridled power of transnational corporations, though Coleman does make in passing the point that:

‘Having no votes in the election of officials running the International Monetary Fund or World Bank, let alone private transnational corporations that are increasingly allowed free reign, voters understandably feel estranged from many of the most important sources of power over their lives.’

Nor does it set out to posit what function ‘representative democracy’ may or may not have in undoing the effective economic dictatorship over resources and power which currently excludes the majority of the population from any real control, and therefore engenders our demoralisation. Clearly, the parties which currently stand before the bulk of the electorate every few years are resoundingly united in seeking to manage that same economic dictatorship, as a cardinal matter of policy.

The book’s aim is to explore the experience of voting and to consider how it might be resuscitated as a potential force for change, through the cultivation of a more democratic sensibility. Such a project is especially timely given the continuing disaffection during recent years, particularly of younger people, from the parliamentary system and voting in elections (other than those in the field of entertainment, with telephone voting buoyant and enthusiastic, despite being charged for, in television shows such as The X Factor or Celebrity Big Brother).

Modern capitalism has long loved to sing of its own democratic credentials as supposedly evidenced by that magical moment of secrecy inside a wooden booth once every few years. Important as the idea of voting remains to any idea of democracy, it is nevertheless instructive to recognise how feeble a claim that is. True social democracy would take much more account of far more views, ideas, inputs and wishes than this tokenistic selection of one or other management team a couple of times per decade.

The early chapters of Coleman’s book recount the history of modern representative democracy in Britain, the USA and elsewhere, from the viewpoint of the gradually enfranchised electorate. He explains, fascinatingly, how universal suffrage was initially perceived on all sides as a possible or even likely harbinger of major social change, and specifically of state intervention to try to ameliorate conditions for the impoverished majority. The century-long journey from aspiration to grim resignation on the part of the newly enfranchised majority, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, is excellently set out here.

The middle chapters (4-7) present a wealth of empirical evidence from original research consisting of sixty interviews with both voters and non-voters. A number of themes emerge from this. Voting has, in the modern period, become a private, secret and almost intimate activity, in contrast to the more public processes of previous periods. It is no coincidence that the cover of the book shows a photograph of American voters in Idaho, with their backs to us, in a neat row of cubicles looking amusingly as if they are engaging in that other universal yet ‘private’ activity of using a urinal or, in the case of the women, entering a toilet cubicle.

Amongst those interviewed, Coleman identifies the ‘dutiful voters’ who feel obliged to cast votes without any genuine expectations of a positive outcome, and the ‘committed abstainers’ who decline to vote and yet say they would resist bitterly any move to deprive them of their right to vote. He describes both of these groups as having given up on cultivating a vibrant relationship with their representatives. By his then also adding the observation how important it is for representatives to embody the feelings of those they represent, we seem to be invited to ponder how best to bolster and repair this system of specifically representative democracy.

Might it be even more useful to interpret these failings as signifying the need to reappraise that concept of democracy? Both the ‘dutiful voters’ and the ‘committed abstainers’ have indeed a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with representative democracy, in that the former place excessive weight on that relationship, despite its failure, whilst the latter are incontrovertibly suspicious of the representational process, whilst holding out for its ideal. However, one might equally interpret this, especially in the latter case, as a healthy disregard for the idea of representation itself as compared with the hope of  voting becoming less vicarious and part of something more participative, such as delegation and the idea of voting for ideas, or at least for delegates as cyphers for specific policies or actions.

There were also some respondents who on principle would go to vote but then either ‘spoil’ their ballot paper or leave it blank. This is in fact a long, noble and meaningful practice by those who simply wish to reject ‘what’s on offer’ whilst registering the importance on principle of the vote itself, and in that regard this practice makes perfect sense. It is an option which was written about in the national press at the time of the 2015 general election in Britain, and may well be increasing. It is somewhat frustrating therefore that this practice is not given more attention in  these pages than just one paragraph, which comments wryly that ‘To speak of casting a blank ballot paper as a ‘useful’ act is intriguing. It signifies absence by presence; that the voter counts and yet cannot be counted ...’

Perhaps the most fascinating – and significant – section of the book is in chapter 8 which deals, amongst other areas, with the ways in which working-class children are socially conditioned into humility, and sets the challenge of how this might be reversed, to recreate a democratic sensibility comprising confidence both in self and in the prospect of change. Coleman explores many of the complex mechanisms through which ‘children internalise the range of possibilities open to them in life.’ There is, however, more inspection of the ‘how’ than the ‘why’ of this socialisation for subservience, and as a result the proscriptive parts of the chapter may be seen as somewhat optimistic:

‘If schools are to perform a useful role in preparing young people to play their part in democracy, this must entail conferring resources of hope upon those who have been routinely and systematically persuaded to think of themselves as naturally or inevitably lacking voice or efficacy.’

Having worked in many schools and been made painfully aware of their specific raison d’être, I am less than sanguine about their potential role in spearheading this necessary surge in democratic sensibility. On the other hand, the enormity of the task of overcoming vast socially and psychologically conditioned subservience is even less plausibly seen as depending on the efforts of activism at the fringes of the current systems of universal education.

In all this as in so much else, it is the class division of present-day society which most strikingly both explains why meaningful and confident civic engagement by the economically weak majority is not encouraged by the education system, and offers a practical motivational form through which this might start to be redressed.

Does the book succeed at what it sets out to do? Absolutely. It is a challenging and at times specialised and complex, yet rewarding read. There are some key questions which it would have been clearly outside the remit of this book to probe. For example, from the point of view of those working to encourage speedy social revolution, is it desirable or an impedance to work to encourage engagement with the specifically parliamentarian and representative model of democracy?

Clifford Slapper