The Anti-Socialists at Tottenham. (1909)

Party News from the January 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tottenham—where the I.L.P. have long since ceased from troubling and the S.D.P.  are at rest—has been honoured. The Anti-Socialist Union decreed that our time had come. Tottenham was to be saved from us, and we of the S.P.G.B. were to be finally and definitely put to rout. Well, we heard of the coming conflict, and trembling—with joy awaited the day of battle. Did we prepare to meet them by attacking their meetings, singing and shouting "Red Flags." etc., and generally behaving as hooligans to prevent them getting a hearing? No, such inwardly tactics would have implied a lack of confidence in our own propaganda, and is at all times an insult to the intelligence of the people. Knowing the work we have accomplished in Tottenham, and that no real argument can he brought against Socialism as propagated by the Socialist Party, we at all our meetings advertised the ruining of the Anti-Socialists, and advised our hearers to attend their meetings, listen courteously to what was to he said against Socialism, and judge for themselves. At long last they came—they saw and were conquered! Down upon Tottenham swooped the legions of the Anti Socialist League. Three or four specially prepared gramophonic orators, each guaranteed to we able to emit “Daily Expressions” about Socialism for at least ten minutes headed each attack.

Two such attacks on Sunday evenings fizzled out immediately our ordinary meeting commenced; then a Saturday evening appearance was tried, but again they packed up their traps and stole silently away, leaving large and enthusiastic audiences listening to our speaker. Despite reports to the contrary in the Daily Express, there was no organised opposition, no fighting, there was no I.L.P., either, to applaud or assist them at those meetings—only laughter and jeers at the ignorance of the Anti-Socialists. With their armoury of absurdities they courted disaster and were defeated—and disgraced. Complaining that they had been denied a hearing, they were offered a platform with a guarantee of a peaceful hearing, but refused. They funked the debate they challenged us to. They referred us to their head office, who refuse to take up the challenge, and now, exeunt the Anti-Socialist Union. It is to be placed on record that a "Tottenham Labour League” has been brought into existence by a few local politicians seeking notoriety, “to fight the Socialists of Great Britain/' and taking up the cry of the unemployed in the interests of the master class, have successfully wrecked what little organisation the unemployed had. In this they were assisted by men who still claim membership in the I.L.P. and S.D.P. The President of this precious “Labour" League is Councillor A. E. Harvey, I.L.P. Its Vice-Presidents include several well-known local Liberals. Their actions are being watched by the local branch of the S.P.G.B., and should that league live much longer it may be the subject of a future note.

Alex Anderson

Editorial: Our New Year Message. (1920)

Editorial from the January 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the commencement of another year it may be expected that we should send out to our fellow workers the Customary New Year message. It is, however, one of the penalties of advancing years in the life of a journal that it becomes increasingly difficult to find anything fresh to say upon the recurrence of such a monotonous event as the birth of another year, or to put pen to paper upon such an unsuspicious occasion without dropping into platitudes. But to-day “ye gods” are kind—ye gods for the moment being those very honourable and proper personages, the Prime Ministers of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

These gentlemen have issued a New Year’s Message to “Our Fellow Citizens of the British Empire," and as luck would have it, their opening sentence fills the aching void for this year, at all events—provides a sort of text for a New Year sermon.

Says their bigbugships: “The war, in shaking the very foundations of ordered civilisation, has driven all thoughtful men to examine the bases of national and international life.” Well, let us assist in that examination.

Ye gods, as might be expected, find that the “hope of a 'brotherhood of humanity’ reposes on the deeper spiritual fact of the 'Eternal Fatherhood of God,’” and declare that “In the recognition of the fact of that Fatherhood and of the Divine purpose of the world, which are central to the message of Christianity, we shall discover the ultimate foundation for the reconstruction of an ordered and harmonious life for all men.” That is their message—now for ours.

If anything has become clear “both through the arbitrament of war and through the tests of rebuilding a life of peace” (as the Premiers say), it is that all the goodwill and spirit of brotherhood in the world go down before the force of economic interests. It must necessarily be so. Take the case of two men struggling for one job. Does the spirit of brotherhood dictate that one should stand aside for the other? Then what of the men’s children? No, the divergent interests of the two men dictate that they fight it out to the very last gasp. To fail to do so is death, and not very heroic death either.

The “real foundation for the ordered development of the world’s life,” therefore, is the unification of their material interests. Not while one class lives on the toil of another class can there be harmony; not while the wealth produced is the subject of a struggle between those who produce it and those who do not can there be peace. The only way is to make the interest of all the same. How can it be done?

The reason of the conflict of interests in the society of to-day is that the people are on two different economic planes. One section own the means of life, the other section own only the means of operating those means of life—their labour-power. It is dear, then, that those who do not own the means of living must either wrest those means of living from the owners or sell their labour-power to those owners for the means of subsistence. This means of subsistence is part of the product of their labour.

There must, then, always be, in the first place, a struggle over the division of this product of the workers’ toil—this struggle is the wages struggle. And in the second place there must be a struggle for freedom on the part of the enslaved workers.

The ground is clear enough now. Harmony can only be established by destroying the private ownership of the means of living. This is the Socialist remedy.

The "ultimate foundation for the reconstruction of an ordered and harmonious life for all men" we declare, in contradiction to ye gods the Six Premiers, lies in making the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth the property of the community, and using them to produce wealth for the use of the community, instead of for sale. 

That is our New Year message. To that consummation, which will open a way to a harmonious life for all men and women by harmonising the economic interests of all men and women, we urge all members of our class to devote their attention in the new year that has come upon us. So shall we find emancipation and happiness in years to come.

About Books (1953)

Book Reviews from the January 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spartacus was the leader of the third, and greatest, slave revolt against Rome (about 73 B.C.). A Thracian by birth and a gladiator, he rallied an army of slaves and, over a period of years, by adroit generalship, he defeated army after army of Roman soldiers sent against him, until the revolt was finally suppressed with great cruelty.

It was almost inevitable that a writer like Mr. Howard Fast, who selects the subjects for his novels from the struggles of exploited peoples against their oppressors, should eventually write a book about this revolt. His latest book, “Spartacus,” published by The Bodley Head (13/6) may not be such a gripping story as some of his earlier writings, but it is splendid reading and is to be recommended.

This story is not a chronological history of the slave rebellion. It is more in the nature of a symposium, the story being told through the mouths of a variety of characters each of whom views the revolt from a different angle. Licinius Crassus, the Roman general who led the army that eventually defeated the slaves; Lentulus Gracchus, a shrewd, successful Roman politician; Lentulus Batiatus, who kept the school for gladiators at Capua from which Spartacus escaped; Marcus Tullius Cicero, who later became the famous Roman philosopher, writer, politician, orator and consul; David, a fictitious Jewish rebel slave who in the book was closely associated with Spartacus from beginning to end of the revolt; these are some of the characters who tell the story and discuss the problems of chattel slave society.

A number of these problems have their parallel in present day capitalism, as, no doubt, Mr. Fast intends us to realise. Instance, unless the slaves could destroy the chattel slave system there was nowhere for them to go and nothing for them to do but to struggle until they were either killed or driven back into slavery. So it is with wage workers. Unless they abolish capitalism, struggle how they may, they will remain an exploited class.

The author gives a clear analysis of the Roman republic. It was a world in which the majority had nothing whilst a few had almost everything. Those who owned so much, needed protection from the slaves who produced it for them. The Roman soldiers, in the main, were peasants who had been driven from their land in order that slave plantations could be developed. The slave plantation had turned them into landless paupers. They had no more to defend than the rebel slaves whom they were sent to fight against. Those who owned nothing, who possessed no slaves, had to march their feet off, live in filth and squalor, wallow in blood and die fighting the slaves, in order that the slave owners could live in comfort and luxury. Had the Roman soldier but realised it, he had more to gain from a slave victory than from a slave defeat.

The job of the Roman politician was to be an illusionist, to convince the landless Romans that they had power, that they were the strength and glory of Rome, that they were free and that their freedom was precious, that they controlled their civilisation by their vote, to make them feel proud and superior because they were not slaves. Then, no matter how they stank, how hungry they were or where they slept, they felt proud and ready to defend the society that kept them in that condition against those who were their companions in misery—the slaves.

The horrors of crucifixion and gladiatorial combat, the depraved morality of the Roman leisure class, the comradeship within the many-tongued slave army and the hopes and fears of the slave leaders are splendidly dealt with in this book. It is well worth reading.

In an introductory note the author tells that, with the help of friends, he had to publish this book himself in America. Owing to the political temper of the times no commercial publisher would undertake the publication and distribution of such a book in the U.S.A.

Penguin Books are publishing a new series on the development of English society. It is to comprise eight “Pelican” books with the following titles:

1. Roman Britain.
2. The Beginnings of English Society (From the Anglo-Saxon Invasion).
3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages.
4. England in the Late Middle Ages.
5. Tudor England.
6. England in the Seventeenth Century.
7. England in the Eighteenth Century.
8. England in the Nineteenth Century.

All except the first of this series have been published. Each book is by a separate author and each author is a specialist in the period about which he, or she, writes.

The authors have had a free hand with their work, with the consequence that each has put his own emphasis on different aspects of social development, but, in general, the series is good.

Certain chapters in these books are complete essays in themselves and very useful essays, too. Instance the chapter “John Wesley and the Road to Salvation,” in “England in the Eighteenth Century,” by J. H. Plumb.

The influence of Wesley’s early life and his parents is dealt with. When, after 1738, he started to preach his Methodism and to build the organisation of Methodist chapels he was helped by the fact that the newly developed industry in this country was creating a number of new towns which had no churches. The tie-up between the Anglican church organisation and the state was such that the Anglican church ignored the new towns and so Wesley had a clear field. He had a violent dislike for radicalism and preached that the people should have no share in government. For him, the way to reform the evils of society was to transform the will of the individual. He preached thrift, abstinence, hard work and concentration. It was the Puritanism of the previous century shorn of its political radicalism. To an embryo capitalist class, striving by thrift and frugality to accumulate greater capital this teaching had a great appeal.

Wesley was intensely superstitious. He believed in witches and the possession by devils. His teaching called for no exercise of the intellect and appealed to his uneducated working class audiences. The owners of the workshops and factories that were growing up all over England, following the inventions of Savery and Newcomen, Arkwright and Hargreaves, the Darby’s of Coalbrookdale and others, were demanding more and more child labour. Poverty stricken workers had need of the few pence that their children could earn. Wesley taught that play was unworthy of a Christian child, that a child’s sole education need be only a knowledge of the Bible and the Catechism, that for the sake of its everlasting life a child should be at work. So, a Methodist could regard his overworked children with complacency. Methodism flourished through discipline and toil in the ugliness of suburbs and the industrial villages of England.

But the Methodist teaching destroyed its own objective. Wesley himself wrote, at the age of 84. that, through diligence and frugality many of his disciples were increasing their wealth and, as their wealth increased so did their pride, their anger and their desires of the flesh. Although the form of Methodism remained, the spirit was vanishing.

This Pelican History of England is, in total, very useful. There is another Pelican book entitled “Pre-historic Britain” which, although not one of this series, is a useful addition to it as a prelude to the series proper.

W. Waters

The Savage Eye (1960)

Film Review from the January 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE SAVAGE EYE, at present showing at the Curzon, is something of an emotional block-buster. Staggering out into the neon lighting, the dazed cinema-goer finds himself asking, “Is life really as dreadful as this, are people usually so hopeless and despairing?” or worse still, "Am I one of them?”.

Certainly the eye is savage enough giving a conducted tour of present-day society as seen by a bitter, disillusioned and dejected divorcee. Finding herself in a spiritual vacuum, she wanders about the city, draws her alimony cheque regularly, and spends much of her boredom increasing her disgust at the behaviour of human beings. Sourly she views the world at large from the pavement, and a singularly depressing view it is. Bad debts at the dog tracks, screams for blood at wrestling matches, vicious brawls in pubs. Men looking for women, women looking for men. and fat ladies pedalling wildly on stationary bicycles in a beauty parlour. Candid shots of gaping mouths, sagging waists and false smiles. Yet beneath their phony, gilt-edged pretensions, people struggling for recognition, love and affection. Even in one of the most pitiful and truly horrific scenes of the film struggling for their health at a faith healing ceremony ("Dear God, it's her liver. Move along friend and pray awhile.”) During all of this she conducts a cynical and at times slightly pretentious dialogue with a resonant manly voice that identifies itself as “Your inner self, your angel,” and the unhappy wanderer is finally persuaded to face reality and come to terms with the people she despises so much.

The film shows you nothing new. People are seen doing the things you know that they do, living the life that you know they live. But it does make clear the fact that society is made up of people, and that people within modern society need more than new flats, health insurance and hair driers to make them feel that life is worth living. They need to belong, to feel that they are doing something considered worthwhile to the community, to give and to receive. In a society such as ours it is quite obvious that these needs are for the greater part unrealised. Our world is dominated by fear, hatred and confusion, where cash, profit and ‘‘What's in it for me?” are so often the criteria for doing anything. When half the population do not even have their basic requirements of food, clothing and shelter met, much less their emotional needs, how can they find personal satisfaction and harmony in their every-day lives? To retain a sense of ordinary humane values requires a conscious effort. Divorced from emotional security at home, in spite of vast housing estates and modern gadgets: alienated from pride at work, for all the new machinery: still there is little sense of achievement and pleasure.

This is all shown clearly, but the film offers no solution to the problems. Surely to reorganise society on a basis of common humanity and the social considerations of the well-being of all human beings is not such a difficult task. While Socialists may feel that The Savage Eye does not look far enough, it is none the less well worth seeing for it does extend an invitation to its audience to (misquoting the faith healer) “Move along friend and think a while."

John Higgins

A grown-up attitude (1985)

From the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the last Labour Party conference Neil Kinnock made an impassioned appeal to Labour members to sink their differences and rally round his leadership. He asked them to win power for Labour so that they could end the blight and waste of unemployment and make the world a safer place to live in. Kinnock argued that these social evils flowed from the policies of the Thatcher government, thus implying two things: firstly, that unemployment is the result of government policies; and secondly that a change in government will remedy the situation

Poverty and unemployment have indeed increased in the last four years or so. Where the writer lives—Scotland—there are now three-quarters of a million people living below or on the "official'' poverty line and a further quarter of a million working in low paid jobs which place them on or below this line. The poor live on incomes that give a married couple with two youngsters only £59.20 a week, or £8.46 a day. a payment which in real terms is only 25 per cent above Rowntree's official poverty line of 1936, which he considered "the minimum in which physical efficiency could be maintained". These appalling figures apply equally to other parts of Britain. Recent estimates of poverty, using only a slightly more generous estimate than that of the DHSS. put the number of British people in poverty at fifteen million. Once in poverty a whole series of forms of deprivation follow: bad health, poor housing and educational facilities, and so on. Poverty has no respect for age; it hits the young and the old the hardest. One Glasgow pensioner puts its impact in vivid terms: "Eighty-two years old and hardly a stick of furniture to call my own. I can't afford to heat my house and eat as well".

The cause of poverty is not to be found in the policies of the Thatcher government, but in capitalism itself. It is a society of glaring contradictions in which people starve in the face of a mountain of food, where people are homeless and at the same time building workers are made unemployed; where more is spent on amassing weapons of annihilation than on health. Capitalism is blind to need; it exists only to accumulate wealth for the tiny proportion of the population who own the resources of society. Because it is based on the anarchy of the market, from time to time it stumbles into crisis. This, of course, occurs on a world-scale and not just in Britain. We at present are living through such a world depression, in which workers have been thrown out of jobs not because they have produced too little, but paradoxically because they have produced "too much". The trouble with Kinnock and Thatcher is that they assume that governments can do something about it. Slumps, they claim, can be ended through changes in government policy. For Kinnock it is increased government expenditure; for Thatcher it is decreasing public expenditure.

Both are doomed to failure. In the 1970s government expenditure increased four times yet unemployment rose from half-a-million to two million. Faced with such problems. Denis Healey, the Labour Chancellor, imposed the first round of spending cuts in the social services. The Thatcher government has carried on where Labour left off in the belief that cutting public expenditure and reducing taxation would stimulate investment in industry. What both miss is the fact that slumps are natural features of capitalism. As an economic system capitalism has been characterised by booms and slumps throughout its historical development. Only when business confidence is restored by the prospects of renewed profitability will investment recommence and unemployment fall as output increases. Claims that Labour or Tory can get Britain working are fatuous and also encourage people to believe in simplistic notions of good and bad governments.


At the moment the very mention of the word "Thatcherism" is enough to make a left winger foam at the mouth, to seethe with anger and indignation. The reaction is quite understandable. Thatcher and her crowd, in their exhortations to the unemployed to get on their bikes and find work, and their comparisons of striking miners with international terrorists, are callous and calculating. The trouble is that their rhetoric and complacency amid a multitude of personal disasters distract people from examining the system they represent and fix attention on personalities. Not so long ago the personification of evil was Edward Heath. Since then he has become a good guy, although not as good as Kinnock.

Although we cannot compare the government performances of Thatcher and Kinnock, comparison can be made between former Labour governments and the present Tory one. In the area of trade unionism the left argues that present Tory policy is designed to shackle and weaken organised labour. We would agree with this verdict, but is the Labour Party any better? During the so-called winter of discontent James Callaghan, Labour Prime Minister,

said in the Commons (January 1979) that "everyone has the right to cross a picket line and I hope they will do so". Remember also it was Labour back in the 1960s through Barbara Castle's white paper In Place of Strife — who tried to impose upon the trade unions measures not dissimilar to present Tory policy — for example secret ballots, cooling off periods, and so on. Moreover Labour s treatment of strikers is no more sympathetic than that of Thatcher. During the last Labour government the vicious Special Patrol Group was used on pickets at Grunwick; troops were used to break the firemen's strike; and the public sector workers opposed to Labour's "social contract" (read contrick) were vilified and hounded

Thatcher is also accused of running down the social services and of creating more inequality by making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Indeed inequality has increased, but again has Labour done better? Under the last Labour government there were cutbacks on spending in health, education and housing. The Child Poverty Action Group reckoned that children were worse off under Labour than they had been under the Heath government of 1970-74. It was during the Wilson/Callaghan government that the Fight the Cuts demos began. What inflamed much of the protest was that while the working class was bearing the brunt of the economic crisis the rich were seeing their incomes increase. During the Heath government the proportion of wealth owned by the top 1 per cent fell from 30 per cent to 22.5 per cent; under Labour it climbed to 23.5 per cent in 1975. 24.9 per cent in 1976, and so on upwards. The original reason for Labour coming into being was to redistribute wealth and this they have failed miserably to do.

The past experience of Labour gives us nothing to cheer about and neither do we believe that things will be much different if Kinnock gets elected. Blind faith in leaders has got the working class nowhere. In the 1950s the darling of the left was Nye Bevan, who led the fight within the Labour Party for unilateral nuclear disarmament — that is until he became the shadow foreign minister and asked members not to send him naked to the conference tables of the world. In other words, without the bargaining counter of the nuclear bomb. More recently, another former pacifist—Michael Foot— outdid the Tories in his jingoism during the Falklands War. He, along with Tony Benn, was a member of the Labour Cabinet which introduced Polaris behind the backs of their own MPs. How can we believe that Kinnock will prove different, particularly when surrounded by such well-known "socialists'' as Hattersley and Kaufman?

There is no doubt that the Labour leadership is once again ready to give full support to British capitalism. This does not surprise us; since Labour has no idea what socialism is. it has no notion of how to achieve socialism. Both the Tories and Labour are out to run capitalism. They may disagree as to the best way to run the system but they have the same objective. But capitalism has shown itself to be incapable of operating in the interests of the working class. Kinnock or Thatcher represent the politics of the nursery. Why not join the grown-ups in the struggle for socialism?

Bill Knox

Editorial: Alright for some (1985)

Editorial from the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is not the exclusive brain child of Home Secretary Leon Brittan to increase the deposit an electoral candidate must lodge against securing a defined proportion of the vote. The idea has been around for a long time, as inflation has reduced the significance of the £150 deposit as a deterrent against frivolous and eccentric candidates; its implementation would concentrate the contest into the hands of the few big parties with a chance of being elected. The predictable protests from the smaller parties, such as the Ecology Party, may have forced second thoughts on the government; such opposition has succeeded whenever the idea of putting up the deposit has been floated in recent years. Although of course Leon Brittan does pride himself on being an unusual Home Secretary . . .

The Ecology Party is not among those classified as frivolous; that is reserved for the likes of the Raving Loony Monster Party, or Screaming Lord Sutch (who seems to win more applause as a daft parliamentary candidate than he ever did as a singer) or Commander Bill Boakes with his mixture of traffic, public hygiene and race neurosis. The opposition to the increase argues that it will not prevent such devaluation of the elections; it will simply confine the frivolous candidates to those who can afford it.

The argument for the higher deposit rests on the assumption that Screaming Lord Sutch is playing games when he stands for parliament while parties like Labour and Conservative are giving the matter a proper gravity.

But this is to confuse minority opinion with frivolity. What of the bigger parties? How do we describe an organisation like the Conservative Party, which has a long history of presiding over intense human misery and deprivation yet still claims to stand for a Better Britain? Are we expected to take seriously a political party which tells us that mounting unemployment and ever harsher impoverishment for the working class is really prosperity? Should we laugh or cry when Tory speakers assure us that the terror and pain and murder of war is really the height of glory and human achievement? It is surely frivolous for the Conservatives, after their appalling record of repression of the mass of the people, to persist in asking for working class votes?

Then what of the Labour Party? They tell us now that unemployment is avoidable, that it exists in Britain today by Thatcher's own personal design and that they have the cure for it. Yet they know that during their last term of power the figures of people out of work doubled; they know also that they began the financial fumbling with state expenditure restrictions which they now castigate as the road to longer dole queues, as if spending cuts were the Tories' exclusive policy. Is not this toying with the truth frivolous? The Labour Party now makes great play with the Tories' warring relationship with the unions, implying that they have the secret of a better, more productive way of handling industrial disputes. In this they ignore the history of their own governments, going back to the 1920s and 1930s. during which they were constantly in conflict with the workers over their policy of lowering living standards for the useful, productive class in society while protecting the privileges of the parasitic minority. Are the Labour Party to be taken seriously, when they now ask for the votes of trade unionists on the appeal that they will give them a better deal?

In this sorry mess, it is easy for the Liberal/SDP Alliance to denounce the Tories and the Labour Party as the Old Gang, implying that a New Gang under Steel and Owen would not have the same problems. But the Alliance produces no policy which is basically new or different from those of the Old Gang; it simply rehashes what the other capitalist parties have to offer, relabels it and promotes it through different salespeople. Is not this a frivolous waste of time? The same can be said for organisations like the Ecology Party, who attempt to analyse some of the problems of capitalism but offer remedies for them which leave the basic cause untouched. No worker should regard appeals to vote for reformism under yet another name as anything other than a sour joke.

In contrast, the candidates which the Socialist Party of Great Britain puts forward at elections are in deadly earnest. Socialists aim at capturing the seats of power, to dispossess the capitalist class and transform the basis of society from one of class ownership of the means of life into one of communal ownership. Very few votes are registered for that proposition, against the name of a socialist candidate. We have never approached anywhere near saving our deposit, so Brittan's proposal may be cripplingly expensive to us. But the lack of support for the ideas of socialism is not a measure of their validity; what socialists have to say is desperately urgent.

We argue that capitalism is essentially a social system which cannot meet the needs of the people. It must repress us with wars, poverty. famine, disease, ignorance, frustration . . . The parties which ask for our votes on the grounds that they can eliminate these problems while keeping capitalism in existence are claiming to be able to do the impossible; they are the ones who must not be taken seriously.

Only a social revolution can get rid of the ailments which afflict human society today. That revolution cannot be masterminded by leaders; it must be carried through by a politically conscious, participating working class, worldwide. This is at present a minority viewpoint but it is anything but eccentric or frivolous. It is the very stuff of social progress to a free, co-operative, abundant world.

Cooking the Books: The First Lost Decade Since the 1860s (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a speech in Liverpool on 5 December Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, described the current decade as ‘the first lost decade since the 1860s’ (See here). At that time, he stated, ‘Karl Marx was scribbling in the British Library, warning of a spectre haunting Europe: the spectre of communism.’ Not quite, as Marx wrote about that much earlier, in 1848, when he was living in Brussels. But he would have been in the British Museum taking notes for his major work, Capital, that was to be published in 1867.

Before that, in 1864, Marx drafted the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association that had been set in September of that year. In it, he noted a statement Gladstone had made in his budget speech to the House of Commons in April 1863:

‘Dazzled by the “Progress of the Nation” statistics dancing before his eyes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in wild ecstasy: “From 1842 to 1852, the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent; in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing to be almost incredible! ... This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,” adds Mr. Gladstone, “is entirely confined to classes of property!”’

Later, critics were to accuse Marx of distorting what Gladstone had said. The controversy is described by Engels in his Preface to the fourth German edition of Capital in 1890.  Basically what happened was that Gladstone had exercised the right of MPs to alter Hansard if they had said something they didn’t mean and had deleted the part about the increase in wealth and power being ‘entirely confined to classes of property’, even though this is what the newspapers the following day had reported him as having said.

Carney’s speech was accompanied by a graph (chart 6 on page 5) which showed that in the ten years up to 1864 real wages fell. So Gladstone’s initial statement had been correct. The increase in wealth during that period was ‘entirely confined to classes of property’. Just as it has been during the current ‘lost decade.’ Carney quoted some figures which showed that, as then, the richer got richer:

‘In recent decades, as global inequality has fallen markedly, it has edged ever higher in most advanced economies. In Anglo-Saxon countries, the income share of the top 1% has risen notably since 1980. Today, in the US, the richest 1% of households receive  20% of all income. Such high income inequalities are dwarfed by staggering wealth inequalities. The proportion of the wealth held by the richest 1% of Americans increased from 25% in 1990 to 40% in 2012. Globally, the share of wealth held by the richest 1% in the world rose from one-third in 2000 to one-half in 2010.The picture in the UK is complex but in general suggests relatively stable but high levels of overall inequality, with sharper disparities emerging in recent times for the top 1%.’

Plus ça change.

Editorial: Russia Never Was Socialist (2017)

Editorial from the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution where the focus will be on the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917. The historic rivalry between the Western Powers and the world's first so-called "Communist" state has been presented as a struggle between Western ‘liberal democracy’ versus Soviet ‘totalitarian Communism’. Many believed that the fall of ‘Communism’ would usher in an era of global peace. However, despite the arrival of Western-style representative democracy in Russia, relations between Russia and the West appear to be descending into a new ‘Cold War’.

In spite of what its leaders claimed, the Soviet Union was never a ‘Communist’ state, as real communism (or socialism) involves the abolition of the state and the establishment of a global classless, moneyless society where the means of production are held in common. This was clearly not the case here, where the state owned the means of living and employed a class of wage workers. At the time of the revolution, social and economic conditions in Russia were not ripe for socialism, as it was predominantly an agrarian economy based on peasant labour. Also the working class in Russia and elsewhere did not have the political consciousness required for establishing socialism. So, in these conditions, only a form of capitalism could emerge.

Like other capitalist countries, the Soviet Union needed to compete in global markets, secure trade routes and sources of raw materials. This inevitably led to rivalry with major capitalist powers, like France and Britain. Many in the Western ruling classes were horrified by Bolshevism and feared that their ideas would spread among their workers, especially in the context of the social and political unrest that erupted in the aftermath of the First World War. They also feared that Bolshevism could inspire the growing independence movements in their overseas colonies. Nonetheless, nation states do not go to war to uphold a belief system, they do so to advance their material interests. British and French support for the White Army during the Russian Civil War was as much about preventing the Bolsheviks from defaulting on Russia's foreign loans.

After the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the main powers, competing to control resources and trade routes. This led them into a military rivalry, which became known as the Cold War, and resulted in standoffs like the Cuban Missile Crisis. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties, many believed that the Cold War had ended. In the new Russia, former state bureaucrats enriched themselves by coveting former state enterprises. However, Russia has since grown stronger and is attempting to reassert itself globally and reclaim its influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This has led it to fight a war against Georgia and more recently to annex the Crimea and support the government forces in the Syrian Civil War. By expanding its influence, Russia is challenging the dominance of the Western Powers, and the latter have responded by enlarging the Nato alliance and surrounding Russia with military bases. This time, however, the pretence that the struggle is ideological has been dropped. It can now be seen for what it always was: economic and geopolitical.

What causes famine? (1989)

From the December 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

One popular explanation of the cause of famines sees them as being due simply to not enough food being available. People starve because there's no food for them. What could be more simple? And if there's no food available that's because of some natural disaster—some so-called Act of God which we can’t do anything about— like flooding in Bangladesh or a drought in Ethiopia.

This simplistic view has been challenged and effectively refuted by Professor Amartya Sen in his book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation that appeared in 1982. Sen showed that in most recent famines the food was available: what wasn’t available were "access rights" to it, whether money or the ability to directly grow food, on the part of those who starved.

Professor Sen returned to this theme in a radio broadcast on BBC3 on 21 March. After referring to his early experience when a schoolboy of the Bengal famine of 1943, one of the worst famines that has taken place in recent times, which he showed to have been falsely attributed by the authorities to not enough food being available. Professor Sen stated his basic case:

In every society the amount of food a person can own and consume depends on a set of rules governing his legal entitlement given by ownership, and possibilities of production and exchange. If food were to be distributed equally, the aggregate food availability would indeed determine how much food each person could get. But obviously this does not happen in any actual society. To decide whether a person will m fact be able to acquire enough food, we have to see what he owns, what he can produce with what he owns, what he can get in exchange. and so on. Starvation will result if a person is not able to establish ownership over an adequate amount of food through these means. Starvation is a social outcome reflecting an entitlement failure. Availability of food is only one influence among many affecting that outcome.

Turning to the 1974 famine in Bangladesh, he explained that what happened was that a flood destroyed the jobs of many millions of rural labourers who would normally have earned money planting and transplanting rice. With no jobs they had no income and so no money to buy food, despite 1974 being a record year for food availability over the period 1971- 75. As Sen put it, "what killed the Bangladeshi rural labourers was not any physical lack of food, but the failure of the social system to give them adequate entitlement to the food that was there”.

A similar situation had occurred in Ethiopia in 1973 except that it affected peasant farmers working their own land rather than rural wage workers. Here there was indeed a drought that did adversely affect crop production, but it wasn't this that caused people to starve, at least not directly as in the popular “not enough food" explanation for famines.

Because they had less of their particular food crop to sell, the peasants in the Wollo province, which was the centre of the famine, suffered a reduction in their income and were therefore unable to buy food to replace that which they were unable to grow themselves. It was this collapse of their income, not the failure of their crop as such, that led to the famine. Professor Sen again: “Had there been only a fall in food output in Wollo, without a simultaneous decline in the local population's economic fortune, food would certainly have moved into Wollo under the pull of the market”.

Nor could the famine be attributed to a lack of transport facilities, another reason sometimes advanced as a cause of famines, since the main North-South road from Addis Abba to Asmara runs through the worst hit area of Wollo. There was a movement of food along this road—out of Wollo. This happened, as it did in the notorious Irish famines of the 1840's, because purchasing power in the area had fallen more than output, so that market forces led to the "surplus” (to market requirements) being exported to areas where people did have the money to pay for it.

So, famines are features of a society in which entitlement to food is not direct but by means of money. Professor Sen sees the solution as lying in establishing mechanisms which would ensure that every person has enough money to always be in a position to buy enough food to stop them starving. He thereby ignores the obvious solution: establish a society in which people would have free and direct access to food as of right, a moneyless, socialist society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the world's resources. In such a society nobody would ever starve because food would be being produced for its natural purpose of feeding people.

Adam Buick

Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Reformism (2009)

From the June 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx wrote a book 150 years ago that shows why money exists today and how we can get along fine with out it tomorrow

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1859, only consists of two chapters (apart from its famous Preface). Marx had intended it to be the first instalment in a massively ambitious project that was to include six separate “books” addressing, respectively, the topics of capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, international trade, and the world market. The first book on the topic of capital was to have included four “sections” dealing with: capital in general, competition, credit, and share capital.

In other words, the two chapters of Contribution (“The Commodity” and “Money, or Simple Circulation”) are just the first “instalment” of the first section of the first book – to have been followed promptly by a second instalment that would move on to introduce capital, its circuit, etc.

Things did not exact proceed according to the original plan, needless to say. Not only did Marx fail to complete the six books, he did not even publish the additional chapters on capital for the first section of Book one. This has led to scholarly debates over the degree to which the content of the three volumes of Capital – of which Marx only oversaw publication of the first volume – correspond to the six books he had first envisaged.

Even taken on its own, however, Marx’s two-chapter book presents us with much of the knowledge we require in our effort to dispel the reformist illusions still so widespread today. The problem with reformism, as we can learn from Contribution, is not that it is overly pragmatic and insufficiently idealistic, but that it is thoroughly impractical and utopian, based as it is upon a surprising ignorance of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism as a society of commodity production.

Proudhon undone

Marx viewed Contribution as a work with an important “polemical” aspect. Yet any reader expecting the stirring rhetoric or vivid imagery of the sort found in The Communist Manifesto is sure to be disappointed. Instead of “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism,” the first line of Contribution is: “At first sight the wealth of bourgeois society appears as an immense heap of commodities; and the individual commodity as its essential determinate being.” It is a wonderfully succinct sentence that explains why Marx must begin with the analysis of the commodity, but not likely to appear on many t-shirts or bumper stickers.

The “exceedingly serious and scientific air” of Contribution, as he described the book to his friend Engels around the time of its publication, was not the result of some erudite pose Marx struck, but because his analysis of the commodity and money deals with some of the most abstract elements of capitalist society. Marx told his friend that he hoped the scholarly style would oblige reviewers of the book to refrain from the usual “tendentious vituperation” “take [his] views on capitalism rather seriously.” Unfortunately, as he would later complain to Ferdinand Lasalle, his views were neither attacked nor criticized in Germany, but “utterly ignored,” which he thought was “bound to have a serious effect on sales.” 

Yet Marx’s primary interest was not the reaction from the scholarly world, or even the badly needed book royalties, but the influence that Contribution would have on the socialist movement in Europe. He hoped the ideas in the book would help to wipe out the reformist fantasies that still clung to the movement; for the mid-nineteenth century, much like today, was an age when all sorts of self-styled “revolutionaries” were peddling commodity-production sludge in shiny new buckets labelled “Socialism.”

Marx was particularly eager to expose the pseudo-socialist ideas of Jean Pierre Proudhon, then fashionable in France. Marx described “Proudhonist socialism,” in a February 1859 letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, as the wish to “retain private production while organizing the exchange of private products, to have commodities but not money,” insisting that “communism must above all rid itself of this ‘false brother.’” Marx even told Engels, in July of that year, that if he were to review Contribution the first point to emphasize would be that the book “extirpates Proudhonism root and branch.”

The way Marx uproots Proudhonism in Contribution, however, is not through a narrow polemic aimed at that ideological tendency alone, but rather by means of a scientific analysis of the commodity and money, which reveals their inseparability and how both forms characterize capitalism as one particular historical mode of production. So his analysis serves us equally well today in our own efforts to expose the fallacy of reformism in whatever shapes it may take.

The uncommon commodity

The term “commodity” is nearly synonymous with “product” these days, perhaps because we are so accustomed to the capitalist market economy. Yet Marx uses the term commodity in Contribution to refer specifically to products of labour that are produced for exchange, rather than to directly satisfy the material needs of the producers. As such, the commodity has both a use-value, as a thing that satisfies some human want, as well as an exchange-value, as something that brings to its owner money or another commodity of equal worth.

Use-value pertains to the properties of any product of labour as a physical thing. So use-value is not the aspect which specifically characterizes the commodity.  From the taste of wheat,” Marx writes, “it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist.” In any society, there is a need to produce useful things in order to satisfy human needs and sustain the society as a whole, but only under capitalism does the vast bulk of this material wealth take the form of commodities, as Marx points out in the first line of Contribution quoted earlier.

In short, use-value presents no great mystery, and is not even an actual economic form, so Marx sets it aside to concentrate on the aspect of the commodity that does characterize the commodity as such: exchange-value. The key question initially is: What determines the exchange-value of a commodity?

This is a question that had been posed already by Adam Smith – and later by David Ricardo – and Marx agrees with their fundamental answer, known as the “labour theory of value,” which states that the level at which a commodity will be exchanged depends upon the amount of labour expended for its production.

This theory is vital to an understanding of how capitalism functions as a commodity-production society. It shows that something – although not the conscious decisions of human beings – guides commodity exchange. Adam Smith famously used the expression “invisible hand” to depict this hidden force, but it seems more appropriate to speak of the invisible hands of the workers who labour to produce each commodity.

In Contribution, Marx develops the labour theory of value, arriving at a far clearer understanding of the labour “objectified” within the commodity to constitute its value, which he defines using such expressions as “uniform homogenous simple labour” or “abstract general labour”; and he also emphasizes that this labour is expended “under the generally prevailing conditions of production” in a given society. In short, we can say that the abstract time-time socially necessary to produce a given commodity constitutes its value and fundamentally determines the level at which the commodity is exchanged.

The issue for Marx, however, is not merely how commodity exchange is carried out. He also ponders why labour under capitalism must take this materialized or objectified form (as the “substance” of value). And Marx begins to answers this question by introducing examples of production relations where labour does not take that form and products of labour do not assume the commodity form.

Marx notes, for instance, the example of medieval society, where “services and dues in kind” were performed directly to satisfy particular needs (albeit those of the feudal landlords), so that we are dealing with the “distinct labour of the individual in its original [concrete] form.” Another example he gives, which corresponds in some important respects to socialism, is the “communal labour in its spontaneously evolved form as we find it among all civilized nations at the dawn of their history.” In this case, the labour of each individual in the society is expended directly as one part of the overall labour, rather than the individuals each producing their own private products that are then exchanged as commodities.

Under commodity production, in contrast, the starting point is the labour “privately” expended by the various individuals who produce commodities for the market. Instead of the social relations between these individuals being clear from the outset, as in those two examples Marx raises, the producers are carrying out production in accordance with their own private aims and will. It is only when their commodities are exchanged that the producers first enter a social relation with one another.

This is why, under such social production, relations between human beings within production necessarily present themselves as relations between things (money and commodities). “Only the conventions of everyday life,” Marx writes in Contribution, “make it appear commonplace and ordinary that social relations of production should assume the shape of things, so that the relations into which people enter in the course of their work appear as relations of things to one and another and of things to people.”

People are so used to the relations of commodity production that they find it difficult to imagine social relations of production that are not mediated by the exchange of commodities and money, which is one reason that reformist ideas manage to seem so pragmatic.

Demystifying money

Marx’s analysis in chapter one of Contribution shows us that it is only under specific social relations of production, where the starting point of production is privately expended labour, that products of labour will take the commodity form and that the labour expended will take the form of value. In other words, these are socially specific economic forms – not the reflection of some eternal state of human affairs.

And the same is true of the money form. Marx points out that money in fact “represents a social relation of production” and that the “all of the illusions of the Monetary System arise from the failure” to perceive this fact. Money only possesses its strange, magical power within certain social production relations.

Marx reveals the source of that power in Contribution by reducing the money form to the simplest form of value, where one commodity expresses its own value using the use-value of a different commodity. In that simplest form, “the use-value of one commodity is brought into relation with the use-values of other commodities” so that the exchange-value of the commodity “manifests itself in the use-values of other commodities.” This is no different than the value of a commodity being expressed in the use-value of the commodity gold. Instead of gold intrinsically having a power as money, Marx shows that the power stems from a specific relation in which gold (or some other commodity) becomes the physical embodiment of value, so as to give tangible form to the intangible element of value. 

Marx further demystifies money by explaining how it is that a particular commodity is excluded from other commodities to become money. He explains this emergence of a single commodity – as the “universal equivalent” (money) – as resulting from a contradiction confronting commodities in the exchange process, where “only by being realized as exchange-values can they be realized as use-values” and vice-versa. The way out of this “vicious circle” is the exclusion of one particular commodity as the universal equivalent, so that a commodity owner can first exchange a commodity for that special commodity, which can be used to purchase whatever commodity is desired.

But it is not as if the commodity producers gather and debate which commodity should be chosen as that universal equivalent. “Money is not the result of deliberation or of agreement,” Marx argues, “but has come into being spontaneously in the course of exchange.” In any area of commodity exchange, historically speaking, there were always some commodities more frequently exchanged than others, such as fur, hides, rice, or cattle, to mention a few examples. By being exchanged for so many other different commodities, such “special” commodities would already bring those other commodities into a relation with each other, where their values could be expressed in the special commodity and they could also compare their values relative to each other via that commodity.

All sorts of commodities have played that role as “universal equivalent,” but ideally, Marx says, the function would require a commodity with the physical qualities of “unlimited divisibility, homogeneity of its parts and uniform quality of all [its] units.” These happen to be qualities that characterize precious metals, which accounts for why gold and silver eventually come to exclusively play the role of the money-commodity. “Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver,” is the witty way Marx explained this point in Capital.

It would require many more paragraphs to adequately explain these aspects of Marx’s essential theory of money presented in Contribution – not to mention his explanation of the functions in money in chapter two – but the main point here is just to convey some idea of how well he grasps the profoundly social and historical nature of money and its inseparable connection to commodity production.

Reformists have trouble understanding that commodities and money only exist under specific relations of production, and this also accounts for their inability to imagine fundamentally different social relations where there is no need or room for those economic forms to exist.

Michael Schauerte

Pathfinders: A Seasoning of Goodwill (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rather than festive, people are getting restive. In the western world post-Brexit and Trump - and doesn't that sound like a comedy duo, like Cannon and Ball or Hinge and Bracket? - liberals have lately sensed a gut-wrenching lurch towards lunacy.

But look on the bright side. People are talking about politics again because it's not boring anymore. Even kids in school are doing it. Ok, they're talking about it in a bad way, because they're appalled by the bare-faced dishonesty of it all, but at least they're engaged.

So now is when we should be stepping up our own efforts to popularise the socialist revolution. And we should do it in a way that acknowledges, in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump, that whatever intellectual debate is taking place on the surface it is the deep and visceral fears underneath that we really need to address.

Crime in socialism is a big fear we should discuss, and the breakdown of social order. But even deeper than that is the fear of famine.

Why famine? To take the UK as a local example, with apologies to overseas readers, a non-socialist will certainly ask why, in a world where money and trade have just been abolished, foreign farmers will agree to donate food, and foreign drivers transport it to ports, and foreign sailors ship it across to us, using vast amounts of polluting marine diesel also donated for our benefit? And if they don’t do all that, then given the high density of population in these islands, won't we face immediate famine?

Well, let's find out, using some basic assumptions and back-of-the-envelope calculations.

A little enquiry among farming types will turn up an oft-cited piece of country wisdom, which is that you can feed a family of four on an acre of land, more or less, give or take. How big is an acre? Well, not very big, in fact just 220 by 22 yards. If you allow 4 people per acre, this gives you 988 people per square kilometre. So if you find the maximum cultivable or productive area of a given country, and multiply that by 988, you can get an approximation of the maximum sustainable population (MSP) of that country.

The maximum cultivable area of the UK - meaning land good for annual crops like wheat or permanent crops like fruit trees - is just 23 percent of total land area, or around 56,600km². This might not sound like much, however when you times this by 988, you get an MSP of 55,924,752. This is rather more impressive, though still shy of the current UK population estimate of 65 million.

However we have not included pasture land, currently used for dairy and beef cattle, sheep and goats. The main thing wrong with this land, from an arable point of view, is that it's not flat enough for tractors and combine harvesters. Given that pastured beef consumes around 20 times the energy it produces (grain-fed beef is around 40:1, see here), it could make sense to convert this pasture to intensive allotments which would yield on average 20 times more food. If you include this land, the total farmable land area goes from 23 percent to 75 percent.

Even this does not include woodland, which constitutes 11 percent of the remainder, and which could in theory be turned to good account using well-established 'wild farming' techniques like permaculture and forest gardens. Most of what's left is lakes (ok for fishing), parks, golf courses and mountains. Urban development, cities, roads, buildings etc only account for about 4 percent.

So if push came to shove, the tiny islands of Britain could convert 86 percent of their land to agriculture. On a land area of 241,590km2 this gives a theoretical MSP of 238,631,640.

But that's nearer the population of the USA than of Britain! So now it's time to question the assumptions. First, could an acre really feed 4 people, year in, year out? Farmers in Britain with smallholdings say they can be generally self-sufficient on vegetables using around an acre, but there is a limit to what you can grow in the British climate, and soil quality, light, drainage and other variables will also affect yield. And you also need to let land lie fallow or else exhaust it or drench it in polluting nitrate fertilizers, so it would be wise to slash that figure in half.

But even so, and even allowing some meat farming so people can still enjoy the odd burger or sausage butty, it's hard to see how there's any obvious danger of famine. Rather than being a basket case, socialist Britain might even be a net exporter.

Currently the UK produces about 75 percent of its food and imports the rest. But it imports things you can't easily grow here, mostly Mediterranean fruit and veg, coffee, rubber and wine, and exports things the world enjoys, mainly whisky. Imports come from around 28 countries, and the government view is that the more sources you have the better, since your supply is less likely to be interrupted.

But this may not hold when socialism is first established, because global priorities may be more concerned with feeding starving people elsewhere than providing Brits with their morning orange juice and cappuccinos. And though it may be cheaper in capitalism to ship tomatoes from Spain than grow them in UK greenhouses, the same economics may not hold in a non-market moneyless economy. In short, though socialism will be global, it will be smart for people to produce as much as possible locally without relying on fleets of container ships.

And what if, despite all this, people in these islands can't meet their food needs, as many will fear? Here's the thing about famine – it is largely a capitalist phenomenon, not just economically but also demographically. If in socialism a place can't support a population, there is nothing to stop the population moving somewhere else. A similar MSP calculation gives Ireland a potential to feed 2.5 times its current population, while the USA could feed its people 5 times over on arable land alone, without considering the much vaster cattle regions. The same story is true pretty much everywhere – go check it and see. People don't take up much space at all. It's capitalism – and the rich - that engulf resources and create misery. So next time someone looks fearful about socialism, have patience, and work through the figures with them. They'll soon realise that a socialist diet will be a lot better than just boiled spuds seasoned with goodwill.

PJS

Ghost of Christmas past (1981)

A Short Story from the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

During an ambitious interlude, brief but puzzling, in my dreamy mid-twenties I got a job at the famous factory on the arterial road which ran out through the industrial estates of the western suburbs. The architect, now long forgotten, had designed the place with reference to an Aztec temple but I presumed any irony in this was unintentional. A job at the factory was a matter for some envy locally for pay and conditions there were better than average; cheap and efficient canteens, overalls for the factory workers, lavatories of gleaming white tiles with endlessly dispensing Initial towel cabinets.

For a long time the company was consistently successful — consistently profitable — and in no small measure was this due to their skill in persuading everyone who entered the temple that they were part of a big, happy, cooperative family. The work force was divided into several layers, each distinguished by the scope of its privileges. Lowest of all were the hourly paid, who sulked around the place dredging swarf from the oily sumps of machines, trundling grimy trolleys of scrap metal to unknown destinations or renewing exhausted Initial towels. Above them — but not by much — were the weekly paid staff who watched over the screeching machines protected by fantasies about their gardens, car, or next holiday; or who in the office typed invoices or went through lowly clerical jobs like checking credit ratings.

And then there were - at the summit of ambition for most of the employees - the monthly staff who were usually supervisors in administration. They had several privileges, one of them being to eat in a separate dining-room with linen-covered tables and pert waitresses instead of queueing up at the works canteen where the same food was sold at a lower price. Another privilege was the annual invitation to the Christmas Dinner.

This great event, two or three days before Christmas, started early in the evening with the gathering in the factory bar of suited men and sateencd women at a table as long as a cricket pitch, laid out in a parade ground of glasses brimming with sherry, gin and cocktails. Although exuberance was not exactly discouraged, in the monthly staff it was expected to be muted. But there were a few who had decided that their career would prosper better through a reputation for loud candour and they were often quite drunk by the time the assembly was ushered into the company ballroom for dinner.

There they sat down to a menu which never varied. Grapefruit segments. Prawn cocktail. Turkey. Christmas pudding. Mince pies. Cheese. Coffee. Champagne. Port wine. At each table a self-appointed parent beckoned a wine waiter and, with a surreptitious pressure of crackling paper into palm, urged that the diners at that table be “looked after”, under the impression that they alone were capable of such cunning bribery. The waiter pocketed the tip and if he was seen again that evening it was only faintly, in the dim shadows on the far side of the room.

As the last fragment of cheese was finger-dabbed from plate to mouth the catering manager called for silence and the Managing Director rose to speak. It was part of the company’s family Christmas tradition that the MD would now give everyone a present like announcing an improvement in the pension scheme or a shorter working week - although on the occasion I heard him tell the monthly staff about a worsening of their conditions there was no diminution in the fervour of their applause. The MD always sat down amid some tension because it was now time to reveal the identity of the person selected to make the reply and then to propose a toast to the company.

This was a closely kept secret; even the chosen person knew nothing of it until that very morning, which allowed little time to prepare a speech and have it approved by the directors. Not that anyone ever complained, since it was more or less a promise of eventual promotion to the higher ranks of management. The more ambitious monthly staff all considered themselves best qualified to receive this mark of preferment and they went through agonies of suspense on the day waiting for the telephone summons, eventually crumpling their speech into the waste paper basket and composing instead some nasty jokes about their rivals.

After the reply it was all over. Last goblets were drained, disappointments plastered over, hands pressed, backs slapped then out into the night glowing in the lights of the huge tree set up at the temple entrance. For a short time loud banter and seasonal greetings rang out in the frosty air, then there was the revving of sulphurous engines and the Anglias and Morris 1 10s shuddered onto the arterial road, carrying sour cargoes back to the wall to wall neuroses of suburbia.

All that was a long time ago and it will not happen again. The company recently announced that the factory is to be closed. They blamed the world-wide recession, foreign imports, high interest rates. All those monthly staff will be transferring their frustrations to the dole queue where, they once insisted over lunch in their chic dining-room, only the idle or feckless are to be found. “I am incensed” bellowed the local MP when he heard about the closure. “It throws a shadow over this Christmas and next Christmas could be even bleaker” said one of the redundant workers. For him, and for the others, the company is no longer a big, happy family; now it means fear and misery amid the bright lights and the tinsel of the -what was it again — Festive Season.

The realities of capitalist society are harsh and insistent and there is no gentle way in which to face them.

So Merry Christmas folks OK?

And, uh, Happy, er, New Year.

Ivan

The Catholic Church, Capitalism and Socialism (2016)

From the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum,or ‘Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour’ of 15 May 1891 can be seen as the social manifesto of the Roman Catholic Church. Its popularity as a social document has diminished probably even more than the atrophying authority of the Church itself, but while, effectively, other Papal pronouncements remain as Church policy only because their renunciation would bring into serious question the authority of their Papal authors, Rerum Novarum still reflects the acknowledged social doctrine of the Church.

Leo begins by denouncing on moral grounds the chasm between rich and poor – which, paradoxically, is an inevitable feature of the class society which he steadfastly supports, capitalism wherein originates the 'enormous fortunes of some individuals and the abject poverty of the masses.'

The Pope spells out his vision of what would be morally and economically correct for the working class in a society where the Church’s moral guidance would underpin capitalism: The wages of the working man – 'a woman by nature is fitted for home-work' – should not be regulated by free contract only and 'ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-conducted wage earner… if a workman’s wages is sufficient to comfortably support himself, his wife and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift; and he will not fail, by reducing expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income… The Law should support ownership.' This in various ways is repeated and emphasised not only in this Encyclical but in succeeding Encyclicals by later Popes. Wealth, property. ownership, these are all ‘natural rights’ enthusiastically endorsed by the Church.

The Church, in the person of Leo and his successors, affirms that society should not be classless: 'It is impossible to reduce human society to one dead level… It is a great mistake to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class and that the wealthy and the working-men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict… Capital cannot do without Labour nor Labour without Capital.' The Pope here is obviously taking a swipe at socialism but does not say why he thinks socialists would want to either reduce or elevate human beings to one 'dead level' nor does he tell us how Capital could dig a field.

In his On the Reconstruction of the Social Order (May 1931, Pope Pius XI re-affirms and endorses the attitude to the social question put forward by Leo XIII. Especially does Pius leave no doubt as to the attitude of the Church in relation to socialism/communism. He again encourages Catholic workers to organise in Catholic trade unions and finds it unfortunate that these sectarian organisations have not attracted the numbers that what he calls the Socialist and Communist unions – by which he means non-sectarian – attract.

Pius trenchantly defends the right of private property; by this he does not mean one’s habitation or items of personal value. He means capital, effectively the minority ownership of the entire means of life of the whole of society. Still, the Pope laments 'There are those who falsely and unjustly accuse the Supreme Pontiff [himself] and the Church of upholding the wealthier classes against the proletariat.'

Pius on behalf of the Catholic Church answers those who think they can reconcile religion with the concept of a society based on common ownership and the production of goods and services solely for use. Indeed, the one truth we could find in all this Papal nonsense is Pius’s assertion that ‘No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a Socialist properly so- called.’