Should Socialists vote for Labour candidates. (1928)

From the September 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

At its formation the Communist Party of Great Britain decided by a small majority to seek entrance to the Labour Party. But while willing to sacrifice their independence, they nevertheless denounced the leaders of that Party and ran candidates against MacDonald at Woolwich, and Morgan Jones at Caerphilly. Later they were ordered by those who pay the piper and call the tune to advocate the policy of the “united front." They expressly pointed out that this did not mean unconditional support of the Labour Party, but only a willingness to co-operate in any action against the employing class. At the 1922 Congress of the Communist International, the following statement was issued :—

The tactics of the United Front should by no means imply the forming of electoral combinations of leaders for the pursuit of certain parliamentary aims. The tactics of the United From is the call for the united struggle of Communists and of all other workers, either belonging to other parties and groups, or belonging to no party whatever, for the defence of the elementary and vital interests of the working-class against the bourgeoisie. (Fourth Congress Thesis on Tactics, page 10).

In actual practice, although the Communists have all along strenuously denied that the Labour Party has been engaged in “the defence of the elementary and vital interests of the working-class," they have given them full and unconditional support at election times.

Now Moscow has ordered another volte face, and the Communists are busy trying to prove that the United Front never existed, or alternatively, that it is not inconsistent with opposing Labour candidates.

At the Linlithgow bye-election they first put up a Communist candidate against the Labour candidate (E. Shinwell) and then withdrew him on the plea of shortness of time and told the workers not to vote at all. Their manifesto says:—“We, therefore urge the workers not to waste time and energy in voting for any candidate in the present election."—(Sunday Worker, 25th March.)

A few weeks later, at the Hanley bye-election, the Communist, J. R. Campbell, was speaking in the constituency, billed as the "man who brought down the Labour Government.". After denouncing the Labour candidate at Hanley, Campbell told them to vote for him!—(Daily Telegraph, 19th April, 1928.)

In the Labour Monthly (April, 1928) the Communist Editor, R. Palme Dutt, tries to explain away this confusion, and actually has the temerity to quote with approval the views of Marx on the need to run independent working-class candidates. At Aberdeen the Communists did indeed run their own candidate—but on a programme of reforms!

With the views expressed by Marx on this subject in the Address to the Communist League (1850) we heartily agree. They are in line with our own attitude and directly opposed to that of the Communist party in the past seven years.

Beside the bourgeois democratic candidates there shall be put up everywhere working-class candidates, who, as far as possible, shall be members of the League, and for whose success all must work with every possible means. Even in constituencies where there is no prospect of our candidate being elected, the workers must nevertheless put up candidates in order to maintain their independence, to steel their forces, and to bring their revolutionary attitude and party views before the public. They must not allow themselves to be diverted from this work by the stock argument that to split the vote of the democrats means assisting the reactionary parties. All such talk is but calculated to cheat the proletariat. The advance which the Proletarian Party will make through its independent political attitude is infinitely more important than the disadvantage of having a few more reactionaries in the national representation!!

Now contrast with Marx’s definite and clear-cut attitude the muddled Communist record. At the 1923 election quite a number of Communists were running as official Labour Candidates. Mr. W. Paul went to the poll with his election address graced by a message to the electors from Ramsay Macdonald. The Communists worked and voted for J. H. Thomas and Clynes, and the rest of the Labour defenders of Capitalism and boasted of it. In particular compare Marx’s advice to ignore the “stock argument ” about splitting the democratic vote, with the following words written by Mr. Harry Pollitt after the 1923 election. He said that the Communists, if they had used the information in their possession, could have prevented the election of Mr. Frank Hodges. Instead they supported him. "We did not expose Mr. Hodges during the Election because we did not desire to split the workers’ vote."— (Workers' Weekly, December 21st, 1923.)

As against this tortuous and ineffective Communist policy we commend to Palme Dutt and his fellow Communists the passage he quotes from Marx.

Edgar Hardcastle

Socialism and the free market (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look forward to a society where buying and selling have no place, to a truly social world where each contributes such work as they are able and all may take freely from the store of wealth created. But capitalism still has many apologists who assert that a socialist system would not work; often they are pie-eyed over the virtues of the market place, where freedom, equality of opportunity and property are supposed to reign supreme. In reality there is nothing equal about the major transaction that most of us have to endure throughout our lives. On the labour market the capitalist confronts the worker and after an average working lifetime of this “equal” transaction, the boss still owns the factory, the office, the shop and the profit made on the goods; while it is a lucky worker who manages to retain a house, a few sticks of furniture and a car through retirement and up to death.

The drive for profits and the capture of markets, which sets people against people, factory against factory and nation against nation, is the force that excludes a majority of the world’s population from the potential abundance of wealth that the modern industrial system is capable of producing. Endless wars and endless famines, with millions of guns and no bread, have been normal someplace in the world throughout this century. Socialists look with horror on this direct effect of the capitalist market and do what they can to make the revolution in consciousness that is needed before a system of free access can be introduced.

Yet there are some who see clearly what capitalism is and what it does, but who say “yes, give us a lot more of that! Let the free market be supreme. Give full and unfettered capitalism a chance!”

Communication among people of different political persuasion is never easy and this is the extreme case. It’s like the rhyme about the convicts:

Two men look through prison bars,
One sees mud, the other sees stars.

Chicken or egg?

Just what is so special about the capitalist market that it makes some people become starry-eyed at the wonders performed when buyers and sellers squabble over the price of a commodity? Because the market is an open place its apologists can see the crafty entrepreneurs shake hands on a price and imagine that something final and necessary is determined in this price formation. By contrast, what takes place in production, in the factory, is hidden and often secret; yet it is to production that you must look to discover the secret of profit making. For the prices realised in the market are determined by what took place earlier, in the closed confines of the shopfloor. Put at its simplest, the value of the bundle of goods produced by a workforce must greatly exceed the value of the bundle of goods they can buy with their wages. The surplus of these two values is the source of capitalist profit to be realised through a price.

At this the free marketeers present us with a chicken-and-egg argument. “To be sure”, they say, ‘‘prices reflect productive efficiency (what you would call levels of exploitation of the workforce) but prices also function as the final measure of productive efficiency. A socialist society without prices would lack any means of evaluating alternative methods for producing the same article. It would be a society where sensible choices about the most economic methods for production could not be made. Therefore a socialist society would be an irrational society”.

This argument often comes dressed up in a mathematical form as the von Mises supreme objection to socialism. Yet on examination it is easy to show that it is not an argument at all — just a series of assertions, comprising:

1. prices allow sensible choices to be made;
2. choices made without prices would be non-sensible;
3. socialist production would be non- sensible or irrational;
4. capitalist production is the only rational system.

The slide from no prices, to the non- sensible, to the irrational is an amusing ideological subterfuge. For, of course, any production system not using capitalism’s criterion must be non-sensible by that same criterion; it would not be a different society otherwise. So the von Mises argument has to assume what it needs to prove.

Overproduction everywhere

The thing which strikes socialists as being funny is how anyone can assume that the price system is rational in any super-social sense. When American grain growers face a world glut of wheat and a famine in Africa or Asia, it is rational for them to burn their surplus and maintain prices and profits. It would also be rational for them to allow the price of grain to fall to what production conditions dictate — providing they can persuade their government to subsidise production to the extent of the lost profit. What would not be rational for capitalist grain-growers is to allow the free distribution of grain wherever it is needed. Such free distribution of unlimited production is precisely what would be rational about a socialist society.

On another level it is absurd to imagine that only prices allow sensible choices to be made over alternative production processes. The most famous illustration of this absurdity is the public inquiry into the Cow Green reservoir in Cumbria over a decade ago.

Further water supplies for north east coast industries could have been taken from rivers or reservoir sites (pumped storage or catchment). Official choice fell on a catchment reservoir at the Cow Green site—the economically sensible choice. At the inquiry water authority officials and environmentalists clashed in mutual incomprehension, for the site of Cow Green was an ecological relic from the Ice Ages. It was a basin with powdery slopes of sugar-limestone covered with inter-glacial flora in unique combinations. Despite vociferous protest the sugar-limestone site was flooded. A society where economic efficiency and price-effectiveness reign supreme must discount scientific interest, beauty and uniqueness of habitat, because none of these last factors will bear an economic quantification,

Making use of it

The myopia of capitalist decision-making impoverishes the full natural and human complexities involved over alternative production processes. By contrast a socialist society would make its production choices on the bases of usefulness, desirability and the needs of the population. Productive efficiency in units of direct output can be weighed and ranged alongside usefulness, desirability, needs, beauty and scientific interest. The factors that will govern production in a socialist society are commensurable factors; and it is the similarities between material, aesthetic and scientific needs which will allow socialist society to compare them directly and make sensible choices about alternative production processes, based on overall needs. In a capitalist society the “sensible”choice is made by cost-evaluation, economic efficiency predictions and profitability; such choices seem obviously rational because this society grants those factors the highest place anyway.

If anyone doubts the wisdom of allowing non-economic factors full play in production decisions they need only consider the subsequent history of Cow Green reservoir. Capitalism went into a slump and industry had little need of the extra water. Any other decision than the economic one actually taken would have been more sensible. As an amenity the reservoir is useless; the fishing is neglected and those who use the new road to Cow Green go only to see the waterfall of Cauldron Snout, now despoiled by the huge concrete dam above it.

Reductio ad absurdum

So just what do capitalist costs and prices represent? The explanations put forward by economists are versions of an abstinence theory, where the cost of any goods produced from invested capital is equal to the cost of what could best have been produced otherwise. Now this is useless, both as an explanation of costs and as a means of making a choice over alternative production processes. Most environmentalists object very strongly to paying 30 per cent of their electricity bills (by conventional accounting) for the funding of nuclear-powered electricity generating, when nuclear installations provide only 8 per cent of the electricity. They say that 30 per cent of their bills would be better used to fund the 30 per cent of electricity which could be generated from wind, wave, solar and geothermal power. But apologists for the nuclear power investment programme, while agreeing that their baby is over-capitalised compared to its net electricity contribution, still argue that when fossil fuels run out the contribution of nuclear power will exceed its capitalisation by as much as it now falls short of it. Thus, both environmentalists and fissionists use the same theory of costs to arrive at “sensible” yet contradictory conclusions.

In brief, costs cannot be calculated without regard for the social system they are related to. No major nation may give up nuclear generating without cost to its independence in providing armed forces with weapons-grade plutonium. Such considerations apply, in a different way, to the whole of capitalist production. For all goods must realise sufficient surplus value to enable a government to tax profits and provide the armed forces which ultimately will be used to secure the markets where the profits may be realised. In addition the capitalist system has built into it an incredible set of socially necessary costs, including the entire range of fiscal activities that ensure the circulation of commodities over the globe; to a socialist, treasuries, mints, banks, underwriters and vast armies of cashiers, ticket issuers/collectors and accountants, constitute just one great big unproductive drain down which capitalism pours the suprabundant energies of the working class.

The free society

Free market advocates may object to some of the examples used above because they are culled from the real capitalist world and not from some imaginary state where the government does not levy taxes, where cartels are not formed, where state investment does not exist and where laissez faire is triumphant. Yet the market is not and never can be “free”, for the simple reason that the capitalist class is divided itself; each part of the class tries to enforce the trading conditions it prefers and the whole class only unites against the working class, or when threatened by another national capitalism. The peculiarity of the position held by the free marketeers is that they accuse socialists of “copping-out” and having no world to defend; yet they themselves do not defend capitalism as it is, but only as it might be, in their auctioneering dreams.

Socialist society is not a dream, but something for which the development of capitalism has prepared production. Remove the vast unproductive apparatus referred to above and you can see what a flood of labour power and resources would be available for useful production in a socialist society. Socialist freedom means the ability to accommodate all the many and varied styles of living, production systems, special and overall concerns that grab people in their interactions with the social and physical environment. Without the drag of private property and the market an abundant future is secure anyway.

B. K. McNeeney

Notes on production for use (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

An example of the way in which the class relations of capitalist production are in conflict with the development of the forces of production is the division of the world into approximately 150 rival nations. Across the world, each national frontier is a dividing line behind which a ruling class strives to accumulate capital. It is rightly said that capitalism is not essentially a system of production but a system of capital accumulation. Every capitalist hope is production, profit, capital accumulation, but because all this hinges on market capacity, which is limited, a good deal of the time it is no profit, no capital accumulation, no production; and this is an obvious constraint on the development of the productive forces.

Another factor which prevents the full use of the world as a single productive unit results from national economic divisions. Each national capitalist class has to attempt to balance its books as a national enterprise, so the pattern of trade, imports, exports and therefore the order of world production is constrained by the problem that governments face about the balance of payments.

A further factor is economic vulnerability in the face of precarious markets. Even though a particular capitalist country may enjoy advantageous conditions for the production of a particular commodity, it is very dangerous to rely too much on a narrow production field. For example the price of sugar fell from 42 US cents a lb in October 1980 to 13.5 cents a lb in September 1981. In these circumstances, any national ruling class which relied heavily on the sale of sugar would have to consider hedging their bets with diversification.

Also there are political, military and strategic factors. At the moment the American government is trying to prevent the building of the natural gas pipe line from Siberia to Western Europe. They feel that in the face of these trade links between state capitalist Russia and Western Europe, their own political influence will weaken. One of the penalties they are threatening to impose on Western European capitalism is the withholding of technical expertise. Such attempts at the national monopoly of techniques through secrecy and the patent laws, particularly where these techniques also have military uses, is a further example of how the division of the world into rival capitalist nations prevents the full use of the world productive forces for human use.

Paradoxically, the possibilities of organising the world as a single productive unit have been given historically by the spread of capitalism and the development of trade and a world division of labour. But all the present political, economic and war mongering chaos is now part of a redundant system which forms an unnecessary barrier against the organisation of the world in line with human need. To continue with it is madness. By establishing the world as a commonly held resource operated with co-operation all these absurd national divisions can be swept aside.

The material advantages that production for use would gain by developing the world as a single productive unit are many, and it is important to remember that production for use will be required to organise itself under the pressure of necessity. A great deal has been made of the way in which socialism would make its social decisions and there is no doubt that those determining the direction of social policy would be the result of a universal democratic procedure in which everyone would participate. The development of the means of world communication allow this to be a technically easy, and therefore practical, procedure which can be organised along with the widest distribution of relevant information.

But it should not be assumed that with socialism, humanity will enjoy unlimited options about what it might choose to do. At any point in history, the options open to society are given by the actual circumstances of development, and this social framework of options will also exist with socialism. However socialism, by sweeping aside the economic shackles of capitalism, will widen the possibilities of social action with the objective of satisfying human need. It is also self evident that since we now suffer a shortage of wealth in relation to human need, production for use will be required by necessity to increase production as quickly as possible.

The organisation of production for use then is bound to aim at the most rapid increase in the production of wealth and the expansion of necessary services. This is particularly the case with food production and medical care. Also, in line with this, production for use would have an interest in using resources in the most speedy and efficient way. With food production, the advantages of organising the world as a single productive unit is that it is possible to organise a more intensive growth of crops in those places where they grow easiest and best.

If this necessarily involves the specialised use of a particular region there is no reason why, in the interests of maximum output, this should be considered undesirable. Most of the objections to monoculture arise from the economic insecurities of capitalist trade, and the vulnerability of national economies which are too specialised in their production. But with production for use, this is not a consideration. Particularly with food, specialised area production does have the advantage of maximum output in relation to inputs of social labour. It also allows for the concentration of production equipment, storage facilities and ancillary factors.

With the formulation of a world plan, each part of world production can be kept in balance, especially the question of relating local production for local needs to area specialisation, with a wider distribution. Although we might speak of local production, in fact, with the complex elaboration of all the interdependent parts of the modern division of labour, no single item of wealth can be isolated from total world production. It is impossible to produce any food anywhere without calling on the products of different parts of the division of labour, be it fertillisers, tractors, or even hand tools. Quality seed production is a specialised area of agriculture. There would be no point in producing tractor engines if this was not in balance with the production of tyres for the vehicle. Engines and tyres involve different parts of total world production and the production of all these factors has to be kept in balance.

Not all social decisions will be given automatically by necessity, and some issues would undoubtedly raise controversy. For example, some people like to drink coffee, which is not produced in the areas where it is mainly consumed, but strictly from the point of view of calorie production from existing land resources it is a nutritional waste. Recovering from capitalism’s chronic calorie shortage, does production for use go on producing 6 million tons of coffee on land resources which almost immediately could be used for, say, the production of cereals or soya beans? The anti-smoking lobby would delight in citing the current production of 5 million tons of tobacco on very useful soil, as a similar example.

Production for use would have to consider what most productive steps could be taken in the short term alongside longer term projects. With food production, the most easily cultivated and fertile soil has already been taken up, but there is no doubt that these resources could be exploited far more intensely. This could be achieved in two ways, each of which takes a different time period. The speediest way is with an increase in the numbers of people working the land, using simple tools and equipment. The other way is to go in for more mechanisation, which takes longer because it first requires an expansion of manufacturing and all that this necessarily involves.

The most immediate advantage that production for use will enjoy will be a vast increase in the numbers of people available for the production of useful wealth. With the redundancy of all the useless functions of capitalism and with the elimination of the waste of unemployment, the numbers of productive people would increase enormously. Many of these could begin work on food production immediately. In the longer term there are extensive land areas which production for use could bring into food production, but they require a considerable input of social labour before they can be brought under cultivation. Typical examples are the semi-arid zones of Africa and Australia. These zones require some re-structuring of the soil components to give them the necessary plant nutrients. Most importantly they require irrigation schemes which can only be brought into operation after the completion of extensive engineering projects. The time required for the completion of such projects may be measured in years rather than months.

Most agriculturalists agree that the key to increasing world food supplies is with increased cereal production such as rice, wheat and barley, and the rich oil seeds such as soy beans, sunflower seeds, ground nuts, rape seed and olives. An increase in the supply of these foods correspondingly widens the options on the production of other food forms, such as animal protein. The semi-arid land areas are at present barely used, yet they have an enormous potential for the production of cereals and oil seeds. Production for use, simultaneous with the short term steps that it could take to increase food supplies, could commence the longer term projects of bringing such potential resources into use.

The size of productive units must be considered in relation to the development of the means of communication. Feudal production was mainly confined to the manor. Mercantilism opened up primitive world markets. With the canal, railway and shipping systems of the industrial revolution it was possible to speak of a world division of labour. Further developments such as air transport and giant sea carriers, and above all electronic technology, mean now that there can be very few finished products which do not embody additions of labour from all goods over the world. The result of this is not only an ability to move goods around the world; the development also has its impact on consciousness. Production for use will be the historical outcome of these developments.

The co-ordination of the world division of labour for production for use can be achieved by modern information and communication systems without the need for centralised control. A complete monitoring of world production is now technically possible at any level throughout the entire system. With a shared and equal interest between all people in world production, control can be maintained by a system of decentralised co-operation.

The only remaining barriers against this completed system of integrated world production are the class relations of capitalism, the profit motive, and the political division of the world into rival capitalist nations.

Pieter Lawrence

Disunited nations (1997)

Book Review from the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ethnicity and Power in the Contemporary World by K. Rupesinghe & V. Tishkov (eds), United Nations Publications.

Intra-national conflicts, such as those in the former Yugoslavia and USSR recently, have often been described in the media as the "boiling over" of “ethnic tension". Yet we see little, if any, analysis as to what this "ethnicity" actually is and what really caused these conflicts. The value of this book is that it raises these issues and questions the over-simplistic, "cultural" or "ethnicity’’-based answers. As Assefa puts it. in a a chapter about the Horn of Africa:

“It is true that the region's ethnic groups have their own prejudices and stereotypes about each other. But these attitudes hove not normally turned into conflict at the peoplc-to-people level unless maniuplated and organized by political leaders." (P. 39)

Studies of states in the former USSR and Yugoslavia point to economic backwardness as another more fundamental cause of these conflicts. A substantial part of this survey is, unsurpisingly, concerned with creating new laws and mechanisms that the writers hope will help end such civil wars. While these plans seem to fly in the face of what they show to be the real causes of the problem, the United Nations remain a useful information source for socialists, if not a particularly successful global peacekeper.

Dan Greenwood

Class down under (1997)

Book Review from the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class and Class Conflict in Australia, edited by Rick Kuhn and Tom O'Lincoln, Longman, Melbourne, 1996.

This is a collection of chapters written by a dozen "left" Australian intellectuals and is edited by two of them. The editors describe the "immediate goal" of the book as “to demonstrate the power of class analysis in explaining and criticising contemporary Australian society". They speak for all the contributors in claiming to draw on the Marxist traditions of the old and new left. They reject Stalinism, but a chapter on labour leadership and reference in another chapter to the challenge of building "alternative leaderships" suggest a leaning towards Trotskyism.

The contributors to this book parade the usual reformist lines with which we have unfortunately become too familiar. Points are made that don't sound too bad in themselves, but still leave us with capitalism and its problems and no nearer socialism: "the experience of oppression shapes the self- understanding of very large numbers of people", “the continuing relevance of class analysis to the struggles of today". At best such statements pave the way for delivering a socialist message: at worst they disguise a diversion from, and an alternative to. that message.

Two chapters in particular deserve attention. One is on intellectuals and the new social movements, the other on class analysis and the left in Australian history. Burgmann and Milner are in the uneasy position of being self-styled professional intellectuals who really don’t think much of intellectuals. They tell us they are products of the Sixties, they were "into" politics, yet "we were substantially mistaken".

After three decades of misguided reformism and single-issue activism-anti-war campaigns, homosexual liberation movements, first and second wave feminism, and so on-they admit that “the new social movements have clearly not challenged the fundamentally class-divided nature of societies such as ours". They are forced to concede that "capitalism today is much more consistently capitalist in its social relations than thirty years ago . . .  this regenerative process has been significantly facilitated by the interventions of the radical intelligentsia".

Co-editor Kuhn is no pushover for capitalist propaganda. He knows, for instance, that the Accord (the Australian version of a prices and incomes policy) was simply “an attempt to solve capital’s problems at the expense of the working class". Yet he seems to have learned nothing about how reforms frustrate the efforts to achieve the goal he professes to support, that is, “the workers’ struggle for their own emancipation”. Then applauds early Australian “socialist" analyses which advocated nationalisation. He believes that in the 1990s "it was possible to get a wider hearing for genuine socialist ideas" and he quotes as examples Socialist Review and Reconstruction.

We certainly agree with Kuhn in wanting a wider hearing for genuine socialist ideas. But the journals he names have hindered rather than helped that aim. If you doubt that last point just have a look at Unfinished Business: 20 Years of Socialist Review. Verso. 1991). It’s full of statements like "the (French) Socialist Party has clearly given up on socialism” and "state socialism” in the Soviet Union has been a disaster". It never seems to occur to these intellectuals that such people and parties that call themselves socialist and support reforms of capitalism aren’t socialist at all. and that genuine socialism hasn't been tried anywhere because there simply haven’t been enough socialists to make the change.

Stan Parker

How many members have you got? (1974)

From the September 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is probably the one question asked most frequently of the Socialist Party. It is usually put with that air of pathetic finality indicating the questioner’s fond belief that this settles the matter and closes the discussion.

The answer is always truthful. Unlike the CP and other parties, the Socialist Party has never tried to cook the books or made any secret of it. Indeed, it has never made a secret of anything. All its proceedings and deliberations are in public; under the constant supervision of the members, and therefore — the working class. The answer, published at every Annual Conference, is less than 1,000. Yes! one thousand.

This answer usually convulses the average Labour Party supporters (including the “lefties”). Holding his shaking sides, he rolls about in uncontrollable mirth and gasps, between hoots of hysterical laughter: “What! One thousand! (or 800 — or 925.5) — in seventy years? !” This is followed by “It doesn’t work,” or “There you are then,” or some similar earth-shattering observation.

Funnily enough, when the inescapable logic of this superficial approach is put to him, he usually quickly renounces his previously-expressed view. It must be realized, by any thinking worker, that if the main criterion of the validity of a policy is the number of supporters it attracts, then the Tories over the past twenty years are the most “right”, with the largest vote.

Now our Labour man is in a cleft stick, for not only can he not concede that the Tories (or Hitler) were “right” because they had a majority; but the number of supporters ebb and flow. New parties arise, which win votes away from old ones. In fact, if this were the only idea that motivated any left-winger, it would be almost impossible to vote at all — so difficult is it today to know which Party will gain the most votes. (This also shows that electors do not automatically vote for majorities.)

It is therefore evident that the strictures on the Socialist Party for being numerically small are really a back-handed way of attacking its Socialist principles. Apart from that, the “criticism” betrays a woeful ignorance of social evolution.

Why do political parties change? If the party with the largest membership is always right, there can never be any change — but there always is. The answer is to be found in the Socialist conception, or view, of history.

New parties arise from new ideas. New ideas arise from new economic, and therefore new social conditions. The rise of trade unions is an example. As soon as the methods of production crammed workers together in thousands, their organization was inevitable; as was the organization of Labour parties to press their case in Parliament. Another example is the changed attitude to black people when they become wage-slaves instead of chattel-slaves.

The founding of an independent Socialist Party is itself the result of advancing capitalism. As Geo. Plekhanov says in In Defence of Materialism: “The psychology of society adapts itself to its economy”. There can be little doubt that Plekhanov was absolutely definite that Socialism required first a change in working-class “psychology”, or outlook:

In essence, this is the very psychological process which the proletariat of Europe is now going through; its psychology is already adapting itself to the new future relations of production.

(Ibid.)

The new idea, arising out of the new conditions, rarely if ever seizes a majority (or even a large number) immediately. By its very nature, it only reaches a small handful at the outset. This applies not only to politics but to all thought. The deeper, more fundamental the proposition — the longer it takes to spread.

The left-wing reformist, measuring the growth of the Socialist Party’s membership with a Labour Party yardstick, is bewildered. Not realizing that the whole method of the Labour Party is to get quick votes — at any price — he compares, say, the Labour Party campaigning for old-age pensions (which gets immediate mass support) with the Socialist Party which doesn’t even mention pensions.

Not appreciating the difference between Socialism and social reform, he cannot understand that the very fact that some temporary reform demand shoots into the sky with the flash of a rocket (merely to drop sadly back to earth in a feeble puff of smoke, like the erstwhile CND campaign) betrays its ephemeral, superficial nature. Socialism is not “around the corner”, but at the end of a long straight road. The process of educating workers to adjust correctly to changing capitalism attracts and trains the pioneers of the new society — the Socialists.

Though the actual number on roll is small, the ideas this handful represents are so immensely powerful as to be ultimately invincible. They are in line with social evolution — the future. Every member of the Party is proud to be among those in the very forefront of the organized struggle for Socialism. They know that one Socialist counts for more than thousands of Left confusionists.

Millions waste time and energy on futile reforms, hundreds concentrate on what matters — Socialism. One practical step YOU can take is to join the Socialist Party and work actively for it. But do realize that admission to membership depends on your knowledge of the Party’s case. This keeps the Party temporarily small, but also keeps it right.

You too can become part of that mighty atom the Socialist Party: the tiny forerunner of that countless army which will eventually decide the destiny of humanity.

Horatio.

Anti-strike record (1997)

Book Review from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

British Trade Unions 1945-1995. by Chris Wrigley (Manchester University Press. £12.99)

This textbook, aimed at students, is essentially a collection of extracts from trade union, government and Labour and Conservative party documents of the time.

After the war and up until at least the end of the 1960s there was more or less full employment in Britain. This seller's market for labour power put the unions in a good bargaining position, but under the Attlee post-war Labour government the unions' leaders chose not to take advantage of this. In fact strikes were illegal under this government which is supposed to have done so much for the working class.

When after 1951 workers, especially at shopfloor level, began to exploit the situation, governments threw their weight behind employers by adopting "pay pauses" and "wage restraint”. At the same time the media launched a campaign against shop stewards as well as in the film I'm All Right Jack with Peter Sellers playing the villain's role.

In the 60s and 70s the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments were just as bad as the Macmillan and Heath Tory governments. Wilson imposed a legally-binding wage freeze in 1966 and planned to bring in anti-strike legislation as outlined in In Place of Strife. Heath brought in the notorious Industrial Relations Act under which 5 dockers were sent to jail (and released in the face of mass demonstrations).

Then came Thatcher. Eight separate pieces of anti-strike legislation were introduced over the period 1980-1995—which the present Labour government has no intention of repealing—but this was kicking the unions when they were already down: by 1979 the postwar boom was over and. with unemployment at over one million and rising, the seller's market for labour power had disappeared.

All this is documented in this book but outside of any theoretical framework. There is no understanding that, while employers generally welcome unions as stable and more or less representative partners with whom to negotiate over the price and conditions of the sale of labour power, because wage-labour is the source of their profits they don't want things to go too far and that it is the government's role to help ensure that this does not happen.

Adam Buick

English republic (1997)

Book Review from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Inventing a Republic: The political culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649-1653. by Sean Kelsey. (Manchester University Press, 1997)

The defenders of the status quo will always try and kid us that nothing much ever changes. Britain, it is said, has never undergone drastic change and has for example an unbroken history of monarchy. Yet the facts of history are otherwise. Over a century before the French revolution. England underwent a bloody civil war which ended with the execution of the king. This revolution removed bureaucratic impediments to the development of capitalism and from 1649 to 1660 England was a republic.

This book is a defence of the "Rump" parliament of 1649-1653 against charges that it was inefficient and corrupt. The Rump was dissolved by Oliver Cromwell, claims Kelsey, "largely in order to prevent the successful transition to an electorally mandated free state in which the commander-in-chief of the armed forces would remain little more than an important employee of the state, albeit the most important one." That may have been so. but there were other factors at work. At Putney, in 1647, Cromwell corrected the Levellers who demanded votes for soldiers, saying that they had not fought for that, but for the limitation of the royal prerogative, the right to parliamentary government and "freedom of trading to get money to get estates by". That being so, it would have made an interesting start to an investigation, but Kelsey does not pursue it. For a more balanced and realistic explanation of the causes and consequences of the English civil war readers are referred to the writings of Christopher Hill.

Lew Higgins

Obituaries: F. Kraske & Betty King (1946)

F. Kraske at the SPGB's first Annual Conference.

Obituaries from the January 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Death of Comrade Kraske

Comrade F. Kraske, one of the small but enthusiastic band of workers who founded the Socialist Party of Great Britain in June, 1904, has passed out of the struggle at the age of 81. He died of cerebral hemorrhage on October 10th at Cheltenham. To the last he was bound up with the working-class movement, to which he had given the whole of his adult life. When failing health, during the war years, kept him out of activity, his interest did not flag; he looked to his son to keep him fully posted about the Party's doings, and always demanded a full report of what happened at conferences and similar party meetings. He was a Socialist and a good comrade in the fullest sense.

He lived to witness the first attack made by the Party on the central citadel of power in this country, and this had a very intimate appeal to him, because he was one of the party candidates in the Battersea borough election of November, 1906.

Kraske was a member of the Battersea Branch of the Social Democratic Federation, at the time he participated in the movement to induce that party to shed its social reform policy along with other rubbish. When the efforts of the group, of which he was an associate, failed to induce the members of that party to rid themselves of the leadership caucus, he came out of the Social Democratic Federation and took an active part in the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Kraske was a short, sturdy, man who looked younger than his years. He was always active in helping on the work of the party and, until a few years ago, he was to be seen at nearly every party meeting. A few winters before the war the party organised museum lectures at which members conducted parties around different museums. Old though he was, he attended these lectures. When asked why he came to them, he replied: "I am always ready to improve my knowledge.” That was his attitude to life; an increase of knowledge was to him an aid in the work of ending the system that exploited the workers.

When such a one as Kraske makes the final parting, we can do little more than express our sorrow and record his achievement. To the present writer it is the breaking of another link with a bright and fruitful past in which we clung to our hopes with the passion of youth; it is the passing out of a sturdy, honest and steadfast worker for Socialism, one of those people who really matter in a world of sordid ambitions, petty tricks, and the exploitation of man by man.

We therefore make this tribute to our late comrade so that his name may always figure on the roll of the fighters for the uplifting of humanity.

Mrs. Kraske, who was also one of the founders of the party, is still with us and, we hope, will long remain so. To her and members of the family we send our sincere sympathy.

____________________________

We have also received the sad news that Mrs Betty King, another of the early band who formed the party, died in November. She was not well known to the younger members of the party, but across the years she has given hospitality at her Stockport home to numerous members whose party work took them to the Manchester area.

To the members of her family we also send our sincere sympathy.

Gilmac.

“Common Ownership”: Ourselves v. The Labour Party (1932)

From the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a meeting in the provinces addressed recently by a member of the S.P.G.B. someone in the audience protested against the statement that the S.P.G.B. was the only party that stood for Socialism; and produced a membership card of the Labour Party, wherein occurred the statement that the party stood for “common ownership.” The above difficulty is typical of the state of mind of many workers who support the Labour Party under the impression that they are thereby helping to emancipate the members of their class.

In the first place it is necessary to bear in mind that the membership of the local Labour Parties is small compared with that of the total membership of the Labour Party. The bulk of the membership consists of affiliated Trade Unionists (who may be anything, politically, from Tories to Anarchists). They form the basis for the power of the leaders of the party, who adjust their electoral programmes to the varied ideas of those who pay the piper.) Thus we find in Labour Party programmes a mishmash in which the views of Liberal industrial capitalists and the Trade Union bosses predominate. In these programmes the idea of common ownership finds no place, although the words are used in their object. Common ownership would deprive the capitalists of their property rights, i.e., of their power to exact rent, interest, and profit from the labour of the workers. Common ownership involves a social revolution, the abolition of the mode of living of the ruling class in present-day society. It will be resisted by this class by every means in its power, being directly opposed to its interests.

Let us see how much resistance is offered to the programme of the Labour Party. Details of this were dealt with in last month’s issue of the Socialist Standard (” The Labour Party Conference ”).—Even when the Labour Party uses the phrase “common ownership” it is used as if it were synonymous with “public ownership.” “Labour and the Nation,” calls for the "public ownership of the coal, transport and power industries” (p. 47). No intelligent capitalist opposes such measures, in principle.

As the Liberal Industrial Report published in 1928 has it: —

Public concerns of one kind or another . . .  already cover so vast a field that the supposed choice between Individualism and Socialism is largely an obsolete issue. An examination of the existing types of Public Concerns shows that the Socialist would gain nothing by assimilating to a single theoretical model a diversity developed by experience to meet actual situations. On the other hand, it would be quite impossible to scrap the elaborate legislation enacted by Governments of every political complexion and hand over our public utilities and railways system to the operation of uncontrolled Individualism. There is, therefore, no question of principle at stake, but only one of degree of expediency. and of method.

(“ Britain's Industrial Future,” page 456.)

 The Socialist is not concerned, as is suggested above, with any "theoretical model.” We have no cut-and-dried straight-jacket into which we wish to thrust industries. We know that the precise; form assumed by the organisation of industry after the revolution will depend as always upon experience and changing conditions. Hence we offer no ready-made plans.

People who are prepared to tolerate and support capitalist ownership (whether private or “public”) are full of plans. They have to be. The problems created by capitalism are so numerous that those engaged in its administration spend their time necessarily in endeavouring to solve them and in finding ways and means of reconciling the antagonistic interests involved. Socialists, on the other hand, recognise that the most fundamental antagonism of all, that between the workers and the capitalists as classes, can find no solution within any form of capitalist ownership. What can it matter to the workers whether they are exploited by a joint-stock company, a public utility corporation set up by a Labour Government, or by a Government Department? During the strike of 1926 drivers and conductors of the London General Omnibus Co. came out along with similar grades in the employ of the London County Council Tramways.

They were members of the same union, members of the same class, with the same interest, hostile to that of the employing class no matter by what the organisation might be, through which the interests of the Capitalists were represented. Only common ownership of the means of living as proposed by the Socialist Party of Great Britain can abolish this conflict of interests, and it is the business of Socialists to make this plain to the workers.

The Labour Party, however, found no difficulty in accepting office with Liberal support, just as it found it easy to win seats in Parliament by means of Liberal programmes. The most advanced proposals of the Labour Party only involve the buying out of groups of capitalists. How can the workers, who have nothing, buy out those who have everything ?

The Labour Party propose to convert shareholders into Government bondholders, enjoying interest guaranteed by the Government. This will leave the working class non-owners in the same position as they are now. .The capitalist class as a whole, being politically organised, would continue to use the State as its executive power; and would also use the Labour Party, as it has already done, to confuse the workers by accepting official responsibility for the administration of capitalism.

Lacking definite Socialist principles the Labour Party can only repeat the disappointments and failures to which it has hitherto led those workers who have placed their trust in it, breaking up into fragments whenever faced by a crisis that demands definite action in the interest of the workers. Having been built up on the "principle" that it was necessary to gain the support of the Liberal section of the capitalists for "reforms," it can act only as the tool or catspaw of that section.

There is no substitute for the conscious political organisation of the working-class aiming at the common ownership of the means of life. That involves constant opposition to all sections of the master-class, which is represented in this country only by the S.P.G.B.

Eric Boden

For Carter and Ford—Read Capitalism (continued) (1976)

From the November 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Arch-reactionary Barry Goldwater, who was for all-out war in Vietnam in 1964 when Johnson was still regarded as a “dove”, is supporting Ford. This is taken as an indication of how far to the “right” Republican sentiments have moved. The lines of demarcation between so-called “liberal” and “conservative” are entirely imaginary. Those who fondly regard themselves as liberal regard Carter as a liberal, and the conservatives think he is one of them. The balancing trick of appearing to be all things to all men is the essence of the capitalist politician.

All the polls indicate that people vote on the candidate’s personality rather than his policies. They want to know how steady his finger would be on the button. . . .
(Sunday Times 22nd August 1976)

Since differences in their policies need to be searched for with a large magnifying glass, “personality” becomes the only means of telling t’other from the which. There is no conception as yet in the minds of the American working class, of a world without “the button”. This lack of any penetration beyond the reformist spectrum is something they share with their fellow sufferers throughout the world.

Running Walter

Carter’s running mate, Senator Walter Mondale, is reported as saying:

in the whole range of human problems I’ve dealt with in my 12 years in the Senate — hunger, housing, labour, Indian education, migrant workers, children, ageing — I keep getting back to one thing; the strength of the family.

A nice piece of side-stepping, but what about the problems? The choice of running mate is a shabby bit of expediency aimed at “balancing the ticket” (vote-catching). Mondale is rated a liberal, and this has focussed attention on spending. Are people opposed to spending as such or only to wasteful government spending? Do people want less government or better government? “The opinion polls show total ideological confusion”. (Guardian, 17th July 1976.) The opinion pollsters ask only a limited range of questions, designed to sound out what is popularly expected of capitalism. Workers are not asked to consider and discuss the nature and extent of waste under capitalism, or the desirability of a world run democratically, without government.

In 1967 Mondale made a speech supporting Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Four years later, he told an interviewer that it was

a painful speech . . .  I think the worst mistake I’ve made in public life is to be a slow learner on Vietnam. This has been the most tragic mistake this country has ever made . . .  and I share part of that blame, and the record is there, I’m not proud of it.

(Guardian, 17th July 1976)

Mondale supports capitalism but pukes at its most brutal outcome. Here is no condemnation of war, but a slow learner realizing a tragic mistake. Any capitalist politician in power, who refused to endorse a war involving “national interests” would be forced out. The Labour Party in Britain has spawned many “slow learners” about war, who have rallied to the flag when the time came.

The Black vote

Carter is wooing the votes of America’s black workers with promises to put “more than one” black in the cabinet. There are the traditional “black jobs” in the echelons of administration, and black Congressmen, but there has yet to be a black man in the government. The Democratic convention of 1964 in Atlantic City, which nominated Johnson, had an all-white segregationist delegation from Mississippi. This year a new image is being put over. Andrew Young, an influential black Congressman, is working to get Carter the black vote. If it were a solution of problems for people to be the same colour as those in power, then white workers would have had all their problems solved long ago. So would the black workers living under black dictatorships in Africa. Incidentally, it is fear of Russian “infiltration” in Africa that prompts Ford to send Kissinger to put pressure on the South African government to help bring about majority rule in Rhodesia. Kissinger is obviously thick-skinned enough to ignore America’s own brutal record of racism. America has its own style of apartheid and ghetto living. Though not backed by legislation, the effect is the same.

Issue

Senator Moss of Utah, who is chairman of the Senate Committee investigating alleged fraud and abuse in the Medicaid programme for the poor, sent out a team of snoopers who made more than two hundred visits during four months in eight cities. (Investigating fraud is a form of waste peculiar to capitalism.) They found that patients usually get substandard care whether they need attention or not. Cases were reported of patients in need of care going untreated and X-rays being taken without film in the machines. In Los Angeles a woman who handed in a mixture of a soapy water was told her “urine sample” was normal.

Medicaid was started in 1965 to provide medical facilities for 20,000,000 poor Americans. Eligibility varies from place to place. In New York, you need a family of four and an income of less than $5,000 a year. Some doctors are making more than $100,000 out of fiddles. More than half the delegates at the Republican convention were in the $30,000 income bracket.

Ford and Carter and (if capitalism remains) those who succeed them, will be promoting more reforms to sort out the mess produced by past reforms in the vain attempt to reduce the running expenses of capitalism. The poor and their problems will still be here.

Issue — What Issue?

The governor of California, Edmund (Jerry) Brown Junior, who was a rival candidate to Carter for the nomination, is to give Carter all the help he can. Governor Brown, a former Jesuit Seminarian, says that Catholic misgivings about Carter are “overblown and inaccurate”. Asked if he would run again in 1980 Brown said:

I’m not even sure I’ll run for Governor again. I may even retire to the monastery to figure out what this is all about.

As both Carter and Ford are bible-belters, God is put in a difficult position rather like that of wartime, with both sides praying for victory. In his “infinite wisdom”, he has the consolation of knowing it will make no difference either way. Farcical though the whole thing is, it is too tragic to be funny.

As Socialists, we often observe when an election takes place in the UK that the “manifestos” of all parties other than the SPGB are so closely similar that if the names were blanked out they would be virtually indistinguishable. Although we have been dealing with the American Presidential election, capitalism and its absurdities are so similar all over the world, we could change the names and be dealing with almost any other country.

How much longer we will have to live in the suffocating atmosphere produced by a politically ignorant working class is the real question of our times. Socialists, however, have good grounds for optimism. Nothing demonstrates the bankruptcy of our opponents better than an election, and we have the only workable answer to their system of chaos and misery.

Socialism will be a classless world community, democratically administered without leaders, Presidents, or governments. Production will be geared to meeting human need, on the basis of free access. The privileged private or state property institutions of capitalism will make way for communal interest and cooperation. Money, wages and profits will be no more. Thus, every “issue” being bandied about during the Presidential election campaign will disappear, never to be seen again.

Harry Baldwin

For Carter and Ford—Read Capitalism (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before commenting upon some of the things being presented as issues in the American Presidential election, it is important to clarify a few basic questions which will never be asked by the contending parties. For Ford and Carter the objective is power, but why such power exists and whether its continuation serves the welfare of the majority of society are other matters.

Why the need for the Presidency? What is the Presidency? It is a particular form of political power structure, resting upon a private property foundation. The military, legislative and coercive superstructure is based upon the dominance of one class and the subjugation of another. The President is the head of State. The ultimate political authority over the armed forces. The number one national leader in a hierarchy of wealth and privilege. He is the top Political Executive of the capitalist class as a whole. The state represents the interests of the national capital. The Presidency is a political cloak for the operations of big business capitalism. Politics in general and government activity in particular, provides the capitalist class with the shield of anonymity. The capitalist is removed from direct responsibility for his system. The state can be regarded as above the fray.

The turmoil of capitalism, economic crisis, unemployment, poverty, bad housing and wars can thus be blamed on the ineptitude of the President or erroneous government policies. When dissatisfaction boils over, the President and the government can be changed, posing no threat to the system. The falsehood that capitalism can work without creating social problems is kept going by the appearance of making a fresh start. A new President? A new government? Now things will change! Socialists reject these assumptions which are promoted by the mass media and accepted by the majority of the working class. We reject the political trickery of capitalism because we see behind the façade of “a fresh start” the ownership of the means of production by a profit-motivated minority, whose commercial operations engulf the entire world. No solutions to basic problems can result from changing leaders, since they are products of the system, who advocate its continuation and therefore necessarily serve its ends.

To make judgements and form opinions on the basis of personality—the alleged attributes of Carter against those of Ford—is totally futile and irrelevant. To think in terms of “liberal” versus “conservative” is really not to think at all, but to swallow the cut-and-dried concepts of the pundits. Capitalism sets the limits within which they can move.

Issue

Two US officers killed in Korea. The north claims previous weeks of provocations. Ford sends in the fleet. Demonstrates military power. Show of force is good for prestige in this mad society.

It turns out that 41,000 us troops have been in Korea since 1953 when the war “ended”. Korea is mineral-rich and strategically important in relation to both China and Japan. The Guardian headline of 23 August read: “Korean flare-up stops rot in metal prices”. The prospect of a new war in Korea could add one hundred pounds a tonne to the price of copper and three hundred pounds to a tonne of tin.

Is Ford saving face by showing no weakness with the election coming, or can we expect renewed warfare in Korea when the election is over? Certainly, war sometime, somewhere, while capitalism lasts.

Carter Foreign Policy

Asked about his lack of experience in international affairs, Carter said:

I’ve been a student of foreign policy, and I understand it. There’s no mystery about it—its simply a matter of decency, judgement, common-sense, and intelligence.

He has been briefed by dozens of “experts” (we are left to wonder who briefed the experts.) He would insist that Russia refrain from irresponsible intervention in other countries such as Angola, or he would consider an economic embargo of Russia, including the “total with-holding of trade”. This, no doubt, in his common-sense and intelligent judgement, would be the “decent” thing to do. And if the Russian capitalist class took counter-measures that led to a major war, we assume it would be a “decent” war! Carter like Ford would increase the US defence (read war) budget, but not by so much. He would negotiate with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons and insist on overall parity. With a firepower capable of wiping out all life on earth several times over, talk of “reduction” is meaningless. He would withdraw us troops from Asia—except those necessary to fulfil us commitments to Japan and, yes, Korea.

Under Ford and Kissinger, last year America sold more than eleven thousand million dollars’ worth of war-making hardware around the world. Carter wants a ceiling on the yearly amount sold, and a case-by- case review to see whether sales further American objectives.

The Guardian, 23rd August, ventures the comment that if elected Carter “would be forced to bend to the realities of congressional opinion and of other nation’s needs and demands.” In other words, capitalism would run him while he went through the motions of running capitalism.

Carter in New York

In his nomination speech, Carter said:

It’s now a time for healing. We want to have faith again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again.

This platitudinous drivel can mean anything or nothing. “Healing” is taken to mean recovery from Watergate; Bad-guy, Republican Nixon, let everybody down. Inference? The American workers should rally to good-guy Carter. “Faith again”? Faith in Nixon made Watergate possible. Faith and leadership mean continuing jingoism and ignorance. “Proud again”? The working class have nothing to be proud of in the performance of the ruling class. It is implied that Watergate shamed America. This is of no concern to workers. A far greater shame is continuing poverty and millions unemployed in the world’s richest country. “Truth again”? Truth has never been the strong point of capitalist politicians. The last Democrat President was Johnson. He told so many lies, particularly about Vietnam, that they coined the phrase “credulity gap” to cover the distance between what was really happening and the White House handouts.

On TV Carter (briefly) spoke the truth. His first words were:

Hello, I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President.

A sad reflection on working-class awareness, rivalled only by Gerald Ford running for President.

Harry Baldwin

To be continued

Making of a candidate (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) is widely credited with having democratised American politics. Reforms initiated about this time led to party conventions taking over as the vehicle for the selection of presidential candidates. Each state sends delegates, mostly pledged to vote for a particular candidate although some are uncommitted. In fact this was not as successful as had been hoped. Control of state delegates fell into the hands of party bosses, the most notorious of whom were those who ran Tammany Hall, the headquarters of the Democrats in New York. This put into a key position another class of professional politicians who expected and received patronage from political hopefuls whose path to power they smoothed. A major reason for the advance of the primary system was that it struck a blow at these state bosses.

The primary system varies from state to state, with a number still mandating their delegates through a party caucus. Others hold closed primaries where the voter is required to register as a member of the party before voting. Some have open primaries where the voter selects the primary ballot for and then can choose candidates from that list only. In a few, however, the names of all candidates from all parties are printed on the ballot and the voter can cross party lines. This gives the process the trappings of democracy. However the graft, corruption and scandals of the heyday of the party bosses are still remembered.

Very little has been heard this year of Republican primaries, as Ronald Reagan has finally decided to stand for re-election. Not since 1912, when William Howard Taft dispensed patronage ad lib to beat off a challenge from Theodore Roosevelt, only to be beaten out of sight when Roosevelt stood as a third party candidate, has an incumbent president had any real difficulty in securing the nomination of his party. While recent opinion polls have shown Gary Hart running ahead of Reagan, these are still early days. Comparison with the British election last June shows what a difficult task the Democratic hopefuls face this year. It has even been suggested that this is the reason that Edward Kennedy has opted out this time. While the upturn in the American economy is extremely modest it is a weapon that Reagan will use for all he is worth. Although in earlier times relative unknowns arriving at the convention with little support sometimes were chosen as compromise candidates when deadlock between the main contenders could not be resolved, this again hasn’t happened for some time. Now that they no longer follow an isolationist policy, American capitalists are much more concerned with their image abroad. They do not want a repeat of the Teapot Dome scandal which finished Warren Gamaliel Harding, the last of the old-style compromise candidates to reach the White House. Their recent "bad luck” with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew is still fresh in their memory.

The Democrats’ choice to face the president in November thus appears to boil down to three, one of whom is already looking like an outsider. He is the demagogue Jesse Jackson, who draws attention to the disadvantages which negro workers suffer even in comparison with their oppressed white fellow wage slaves. Jackson claims that the election of a black president can fundamentally alter this situation. This is dangerous nonsense. The special problems of the negroes arise from their being an easily distinguished minority within the oppressed class of the capitalist system. Ignorant workers pick on them as scapegoats for the evils they experience which are in fact an integral part of the system itself. Jackson in directing his appeal to such a degree to negro prejudices, however understandable these may be, risks inflaming these passions, thus doing the class a considerable disservice. The votes he has collected thus far have come almost entirely from black areas and his appeal seems too narrow to give him a real chance. He might just acquire some bargaining power if it is a close call in the San Francisco convention this summer.

Walter Mondale is the candidate most favoured by party workers and those city bosses still with influence, such as those who control the famous Cook County in Chicago. This in itself is no guarantee of selection. The darlings of the faithful are not necessarily the best winners of uncommitted votes. One of the reasons for the existence of the more open type of primary is to gain some indication of the winning potential of the candidates. The system is not fool proof in this respect, as was shown by the candidacy of the backwoodsman Barry Goldwater for the Republicans in 1964. However it would be incorrect to class Mondale as the Democrats’ 1984 equivalent of Goldwater. Mondale's association with the Carter administration has led to insinuations that he is a “yesterday's man”, and he has made no real attempt to dissociate himself from the former president. While the Democrats have never claimed to be a socialist party, since the era of Franklin Roosevelt they have performed many of the functions the Labour Party carries out in Britain. Like Labour, the Democratic Party has relied to a large extent for its vote on the less well off sections of the working class, and most American cities vote Democrat just as they usually vote Labour here. Mondale realises the need to hold on to this traditional support. As The Times reports (22 March 1984):

Mr Mondale won the Illinois primary the old fashioned way by piling up a big margin in white working class areas of Chicago, and then performing better than expected in the suburbs and down state. He also won a majority of the Hispanic vote and held on to those blacks who were not mesmerized by Mr Jackson’s vision of a "rainbow coalition”.

Mondale has also widespread support inside the trade unions. It is of little importance whether in achieving this working class support he has acted as a conscious deceiver or as an honest but rather ignorant individual. Either way it is the stuff of which presidents are made.

Gary Hart burst onto the scene a few weeks ago, apparently from nowhere, promising sweeping new' deals both inside the Democratic Party and in the USA at large. When this “new" approach is examined much of the cosmetic glitter fades. The Times (10 March 1984) had a feature article on “What Makes The Maverick Hart Tick". In this we read:

   Arguing that "the pragmatism of the new deal has become doctrine”. Mr Hart says the US must find a way to move from the economy of the past to the economy of the future, an economy not only expanding but which can meet the challenges of increased international competition and rapid technological change.
  He is an advocate of an "industrial policy" in which the Government would take the lead in bringing business and labour together to work out the nation's industrial strategy.

and later:

   He believes that the burgeoning cost of social entitlement programmes, such as Medicare and Medicaid, must be restrained, not simply through cuts but by putting more emphasis on preventive medicine and home care.
   On most economic issues Mr Hart has tried to emphasize the need to examine how government money is spent rather than how much. He believes the economic debate between Republicans and Democrats has become bogged down between those who favour fiscal generosity and those on the side of frugality.

This is just a sample of what Professor Samuel Beer of Harvard calls Hart’s "ideological mishmash". This is the confused groping of the politically ignorant, distinguished only by the inevitable concern for capitalism’s welfare. Hart fails to distinguish the old from the new in politics. Indeed we have now reached the stage when there are no new options for capitalism to try, only regurgitations of old, and Hart scarcely seems the best equipped to find the least sickly mixture. No wonder Hart’s star is now emitting a much dimmer light.

Nevertheless, barring real surprises, either Hart or Mondale will win through to oppose Reagan in the autumn. Certain Reagan is far from invincible. His track record on welfare, the US term for social services, is callous even by capitalist standards. The soup kitchen and the church mission, both of which many though had gone for good, have made a big comeback in the wake of the cuts imposed by the Reagan government. But could the Democrats take advantage of this? It would scarcely suffice merely to promise redress, as everyone knows that increased "public expenditure” (actually taxation on the capitalists) would be required. In the present climate few dare to advocate this. Still fewer will advocate a serious reduction in the US arms arsenal. No wonder voting in American elections is so low, particularly in deprived inner city areas. While many have fallen prey to apathy and despair a sizeable number are through with voting for capitalist parties, period.

E. C. Edge

Support the Status Quo! (1993)

From the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

No, we haven't gone barmy and been converted to the money system. Nor have we sold out to the forces of the status quo. We just want to show you how it is possible to support capitalism and prevent the growth of socialism without perhaps consciously intending to do so.

It may be helpful to propose a number of maxims to follow (for readers not into irony: not to follow):

1. Limit your vision.
Ignore the structural causes of social and individual problems. Pretend, for example, that psychological disturbance has nothing to do with the social forces that shape personality development. By doing so you can help those force's to continue unabated. Intervene only at the individual level. It's fine to help homeless people on a case-by-case basis. But don't enquire into the policy decisions and economic arrangements that brought about their predicament. That would only serve to invite drastic changes. Treat each example of corporate wrongdoing (illegal dumping of toxic wastes, for example) as an isolated incident and not the fault of the system. In that way you can help to keep the system intact.

2. Adapt.
The best way to keep the status quo intact is to make sure that individuals adjust themselves to serve its needs. Such adaptation was once enforced by crude, authoritarian methods of "re-education". Today this is hardly necessary. A wealth of advice is available on how to become successful, or at least to cope. How to get a job, what to wear, how not to become a victim - all such advice proceeds from the premise that you should adjust yourself to conditions as you find them. Adaptation means you must solve your problems within the institutions and according to the rules that already exist. To fit in is to fortify the structures into which you are being fitted.

3. Think about yourself.
The more you limit your concerns to yourself, the more you help to sustain the larger system. This does not apply only to material well-being. Even therapeutic and spiritual enterprises are useful for preserving the status quo. In encouraging you to attend to your own needs, they effectively direct attention away from social structures. Look after yourself and let the rest of the world go on its way — what better strategy is there for perpetuating existing structures? Exceptionally, personal growth could be a route to change your ideas about society. But the human potential movement generally doesn't go that far. so you need not either.

4. Be "realistic".
You don't have to defend capitalism. You can even nod in sympathetic agreement with socialists who condemn it. But you must accompany this nodding with a shrug. Phrases such as "like it or not" and "that's the way the wicked world is" should be employed liberally to emphasise that nothing can be done about the larger picture. Such protestations of powerlessness are actually very powerful, of course, since they make sure that things are left exactly as they are. Every person who takes such a stance is another person rescued from socialist activism.

5. Label Socialists "Idealistic".
When you come across people who refuse to resign themselves to the way things are or to believe that we are helpless to make fundamental changes, immediately label them "idealistic" or "utopian". Don't be concerned about the vaguely complimentary connotations of having ideals. An idealist is someone who doesn't understand "the world as it is" ("world" - "our society"; "as it is" "as it will always be"). This label calls attention to socialists' faulty understanding of "human nature" and helps to ensure that they are not taken seriously. By contrast, those who are "pragmatic" know that we must always work within the confines of what we are given.

6. Rationalize. 
You can make it more difficult for socialist critics of capitalism — and salve your own conscience at the same time — by claiming that your real reason for acting as you do is to "change the system from within". You can join any of the political parties that offer reforms (which means all of them except the Socialist Party) and you won’t actually have to take part in making fundamental change. Even if this really were your goal, you would be permitted to work only for insignificant reforms that never come close to challenging the structures themselves. A variation on this theme is that you are going to support a reformist party for only a short time, waiting for the socialist movement to grow before you consider joining it (if every one does this, socialism will be postponed for ever). If you are audacious enough, you can even rationalize your reformism as the most efficient way to change the system. The more people who accept this reasoning and follow your example, the more secure capitalism will be.

Stan Parker