Proper Gander: Peering At The Peers (2017)

The Proper Gander column from the April 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The House of Lords isn’t just a holding bay for octogenarian Caucasian aristocrats before they pop their clogs. As BBC2’s documentary series Meet The Lords shows us, it’s a weirder and more interesting institution than its fuddy-duddy reputation suggests. Despite the House of Lords’ important role in the state, and therefore capitalism, we don’t usually see all that much of it on the telly. There’s an occasional glimpse on the news, when we get someone like Paddy Ashdown (now The Right Honourable The Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon) or Melvyn Bragg (aka Baron Bragg of Wigton in the County of Cumbria) standing next to those tightly upholstered red benches talking cobblers and looking older than we remember. The producers of Meet The Lords have been allowed to film the wider goings-on in the House, including the debates, corridor chats, rituals and mealtimes. However, the price of this unprecedented access is that the series isn’t going to show us anything the state doesn’t want us to see. An undercover expose with hidden cameras and smuggled-out documents would be much more revealing, but there’s as much chance of that being made as there is a new series of Eldorado.

The image that the programme wants to present is that the House of Lords is home to wily mavericks keen to hold the House of Commons in check and who are crazy enough to go out for a curry to celebrate winning a vote. The show focuses less on the doddery old traditionalists we tend to assume make up most of the Upper House and more on livelier Lords and Ladies. Baron Bird, having gone from working in the House of Lords kitchen when he was much younger to sitting in the House itself, via setting up The Big Issue magazine, is certainly more grounded and relatable than many of his peers in the Peerage. He, at least, seems sincere in wanting to use his position to help out plebs like us. Baroness King wants to give the same impression, and says that the House of Lords is vital in tidying up the ‘chaos’ which comes from the House of Commons. This includes a proposed benefits cap for adopted children, which she fights against because she has three adopted children herself. Another peer acting on self-interest is Lord Borwick, a big-shot property developer involved with amendments to planning laws which will make it easier for him to build houses. Even if they succeed with making reforms which have some small benefit to workers, it’s still part of a system structured to defend the interests of the elite. The reforms have to fit in with what’s economically viable, meaning whatever measures keep as much wealth as possible in the hands of the capitalist class. So, both the Houses of Commons and Lords share a goal, however much the programme emphasises a ‘war of wills’ between them.

The two Houses certainly differ in culture, though. The House of Lords seems much more laid-back, albeit in a starchy sort of way. Rivalries between peers of different political parties aren’t expressed with the shouty point-scoring common in the House of Commons. Instead, they’re politely discussed over dinner, with the seating arrangements deliberately random to encourage different people to meet at each sitting. The odd procedures carried on in parliament underline how it’s an archaic, bizarre institution. Clerks wearing gowns unchanged since the 18th Century pass messages wrapped in ribbon between the Houses of Lords and Commons, while phrases in Norman French are still used in official declarations when laws are passed. ‘The most ludicrous part of our constitutional set-up’, according to The Electoral Reform Society’s chief executive Katie Ghose (quoted in Morning Star, 4th – 5th March 2017) is the hereditary peer ‘by-election’. The House of Lords Act 1999 led to most hereditary peers losing an automatic right to sit in the Upper House. When one of the remaining 92 dies or retires, the others elect a replacement from a tiny pool of aristocrats with an inherited title. Ironically, these hereditary peers are the only people elected into the House of Lords, not that this represents democracy in any meaningful sense to anyone outside the bubble.

The vast majority of the 800 members of the Upper House are life peers, appointed by the Queen and named as such because they’re there for the rest of their life. So, if you’ve ever wondered where David Blunkett, Norman Tebbit, John Prescott, Betty Boothroyd, Nigel Lawson, Tessa Jowell and Floella Benjamin ended up, then it’s in ‘the best day care centre for the elderly in London’, as one member calls it. Also skulking about in there is Neil Kinnock (now Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty in the County of Gwent), who at his inauguration speech presumably didn’t repeat his quote from Tribune (19th November 1976): ‘The House of Lords must go - not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished’. Now, he’s acquired a taste for ermine and collects his £300 expenses each day.

All the above are ‘Lords Temporal’, which sounds like something from Doctor Who. The remaining 26 are Church of England Bishops, collectively ‘Lords Spiritual’, which sounds like something from Game Of Thrones.

Meet The Lords is an interesting insight into those who, literally, lord it over us. The colourful characters and the strange rituals it focuses on, though, are really just window-dressing on a stodgy, elitist institution which props up our divided society.

Mike Foster

More Trouble in Africa (1959)

From the April 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was set up in 1953, it was known to be against the wishes of most of the African population in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. They did not want to be taken out of the control of the British Colonial Office to be handed over to domination by the white settlers, whose attitude, as shown particularly in Southern Rhodesia, is much like that of the South African Government. Opponents of Federation, including the British Labour Party, foresaw that tension would increase and were not surprised by the recent disturbances in which a number of Africans were killed by Government forces. Among the Africans the idea of early independence for Nyasaland has been given a powerful stimulus, associated by some of them with more ambitious ideas of a wider nationalism, taking in all Africa.

Are they right ? Will “independence” make them better off and happier? Their African leaders tell them there is no doubt about the matter. And it is quite obvious that most Africans would prefer to put up with a lot of inconvenience, even hardship, to escape living under a government which operates or tolerates a colour bar against them. Africans are only behaving like other people, for history is full of examples of resentment of, and revolt against, the imposition on subject groups, of racial, national, religious and language barriers. And because it has happened so often we have plenty of information about its consequences: nobody need plead ignorance. What then has national independence done for the mass of the population, whether we take the European nationalist movements of last century, such as the Italian struggle against Austria or the Balkan countries’ struggles .against Turkey, or the quite recent new States set up in former Colonies? Without going into detail we can say that national independence is good for local politicians, lawyers, army officers, manufacturers and business men; it opens up careers and money-making opportunities for them, as also for local holders of government civilian posts who may have found their advancement hindered while a foreign administration had control! Sometimes the achievement of national independence helps to speed up industrial development where this has been deliberately limited by the governing Power and may make it rather easier for workers to form trade unions.

What has the winning of independence done for the progress of humanity? The accumulation of experience has served to fill many of those who once hoped much from it, with disappointment and doubt. Mr. Hannen Swaffer, who spent many years supporting Labour Party demands for “freedom" for the colonics, writes:—

“. . . at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, under my window, British people were gathering to offer thanks on the anniversary of Ghana’s obtaining freedom from British rule. Yet, in Ghana, its native rulers were oppressing the Opposition leaders—and its dictatorial Premier had boasted that he would work for a United Black Africa. Is full freedom for immature peoples really the remedy for economic injustice?”
- (People, 8th March. 1959.)

Mr. Swaffer might have added that on the political side we have recently seen military dictatorship set up in the Sudan and Pakistan, two areas formerly British-administered, and that from the standpoint of what he calls “ economic injustice,” independence has not brought anything worthwhile to the ex-colonial workers. The early beliefs of Swaffer and the Labour Party, that national independence for the colonies would solve the economic problems of the workers, were well meant, but quite unfounded. They did not understand what is the nature of nationalism and national independence. Nationalism is not just the friendly association of people who speak the same language, share the same culture and live in the same place. In the world in which we live, where military force dominates, national independence means setting up a “sovereign state”; a government which, with the use of armed force can impose its property laws on its nationals individually and on its workers as a class, while at the same time using its forces to strengthen its position against other nations. The creation of a new capitalist group able to hold its own in a competitive capitalist world is the real aim of those who profit by nationalist movements; the encouragement of national and linguistic sentiments is merely the means to an end.

This is little appreciated by those who think that what mankind needs is a set of “good” ideas and ideals, and that national independence is one of these. Holding such a conception they are shocked and puzzled when they see liberated countries falling to dictatorship, and see some Africans now preaching anti-white racialism.

So although the liberal-minded Capricorn African Society, looking at what has already happened, can say that “Nationalism is not enough,” their founder, Mr. David Stirling still believes that “ African nationalism is of itself a splendid and dynamic force to be encouraged ” (Manchester Guardian, March 5th, 1959). And Father Trevor Huddleston, who worked so hard for Africans against the policies of the South African government, still holds to his belief that nationalism “on the part of the great peoples of Africa” is “not only natural, but entirely’ right.” (He does not notice that the nationalism of all groups, including the white South Africans, appears to to them to be equally “natural” and “ right”) He backs his belief with the distorting half-truth that “over much of Africa wealth was white and poverty was black.” (Manchester Guardian. March 9th, 1959.) This is the kind of misleading political slogan on which all nationalisms thrive; misleading because when independence has been achieved the African masses will still be poor, though the number of rich Africans, rich through the exploitation of the poor, will be somewhat larger. The subject economic position of the African workers will not have been removed.

It is here that we see the gulf between Socialists and the well-meaning reformers like Father Huddleston and the Capricorn Society. For us it is a question of changing the basis of the social system as the only way to change the condition of the exploited masses, the only way to abolish riches and poverty. For the idealists it is a matter of “changing men’s hearts,” as if that could prevail against the class structure of the capitalist social system. True to his misguided notions Father Huddleston calls upon white settlers and the British government and people to choose “the path of faith ” and reject “the path of fear.”

But these idealists are not the only people who have views on Africa. A Tory peer. Lord Brand, has recently revisited South Africa, and in an article in The Times (March 9th. 1959), foretells the inevitable failure of Apartheid. But he is not relying on good intentions, or sentiment or faith, but on something more substantial. He finds that it is an economic impossibility for the mining, industrial and commercial companies, farmers, employers of domestic service, etc., to survive if cut off from their African labour force. Though the supporters of the South African government will not face up to realities, the fact is that “white and black must live together for endless centuries. They must either in the end learn to live harmoniously and at peace, or they must physically destroy each other.” Lord Brand sees that far, but no farther.

As Socialists we can say that his approach shows more understanding of the problem than does that of any of the good intentioned idealists already referred to. Lord Brand, though he never names it, is a supporter of capitalism: he believes it to be the only possible social system. He sees that capitalism has its own needs and economic laws and that, however obstinate the Apartheid supporters may be, they cannot put the clock back and make capitalism fit their out-of-date beliefs. But if the Afrikaners in South Africa cannot twist capitalism back to suit their prejudices, neither can Huddleston and the other would-be reformers make capitalism into the rational and benevolent social system of their dreams. “Liberated” Black Africa will be Black Capitalist Africa and the African workers will still be exploited, as are the white workers elsewhere. The only way out of this impasse is that the Black workers and all other workers join together for the Socialist objective of overthrowing capitalism and establishing Socialism, in Africa and all other lands. But this will involve the abolition of national frontiers and the disappearance of racial prejudices. The world will then be a place for all its inhabitants to live in and travel in, freely and without hindrance or prejudice. The Blacks will be emancipated because all workers will be emancipated from capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Rubber Bullets (1960)

From the April 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Indian police are experimenting with rubber bullets instead of lead ones. These do far less damage and are just as effective in controlling crowds. The investigation was prompted by the large number of deaths through shooting by the police during agitations in various parts of the country, which it is understood has aroused some adverse comment.
  Ballistics experts are now working on the problem at the Ishapore Gun and Shell Factory near Calcutta.

Rubber Developments, Vol. 12, No. 4.

The Missing Link (1960)

Book Review from the April 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Adventures With the Missing Link By Raymond Dart (Hamish Hamilton)

This book can be confidently recommended to readers of the Socialist Standard and all those interested in human evolution. Couched in a readable narrative style, partly because the story is largely autobiographical, it recounts thirty years' research in South Africa.

It starts with the accidental discovery in 1924, of an ape-like skull, more human than any living ape or ape fossil known. Professor Dart considered his discovery fundamental—a real missing link between ape and man—and he named it Southern Ape. As is usual, this conflicted with established ideas, and twenty years elapsed before confirmation came from fresh finds in another South African mine.

Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book are Dart’s theoretical conclusions. Basing his views on knowledge of the terrain he has proved that Australopethecus killed his prey with bone weapons made into knives and clubs, antelope jaw bones, and giraffe leg bones. Skulls of powerful and large animals were smashed in by deadly blows, sometimes from the front, and no ape can do this. Also, quite unlike apes, on occasions they killed and ate each other.

He therefore presents a powerful case for the Bone culture age of Ape Man, thus filling in many of the gaps previously existing in known human history.

The story of human descent will probably never be really complete—certainly never complete enough to convince those who can’t do without a Creator—but Professor Dart’s contribution has permanently enriched it.

A powerful book.

Horatio.

Lib-Labs or Lab-Libs (1960)

From the April 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the “left” of the Labour Party are a bunch of wordy, windy warriors who claim to be “convinced and dedicated Socialists.” They are the “Tribune tribe.”

You would, of course, be justified if you thought that “convinced and dedicated Socialists" meant men and women concerned with explaining to their fellow workers their class position in society. That this system with its class robbery, exploitation of wage-labour, and all that goes with them, gives rise to the predominant problems of today; and that the only solution is a society based on the holding in common, of all the world's wealth, by all the people of the earth— that is social equality. In one word, Socialism.

But how wrong you would be. For nothing is further from the truth. These windy wights are concerned with everything, but Socialism. Although they claim to be Socialists, their very words and actions give the lie to their claim. Any issue of Tribune will bear this out, but the issue of February 26th is a case in point.

Apart from the current squabble on clause 4 of the Labour Party's constitution—as if public ownership ever had anything to do with Socialism—one article in particular bears out the statements made above.

This article, by Mr. David Boulton, “who came into politics through the Liberal Party, but has since joined the Labour Party. . .” is in essence a plea for the two parties—Liberal and Labour —to get together. However, in the course of his article he makes some revealing statements which show how non-Socialist he and his party are. The following are two examples:

  The Liberal Party, like Labour, is less a compact body of like-minded political activists than a coalition of a number of different bodies of opinion with a startling deficiency of common denominators. Within its framework are the single-taxers, the extreme laissez-faire school, the unilateral free-traders, the incurable “lost causers” and "I’m-for-the-under- dog”-ers, “conservatism-without-tears,” preachers and the genuine radicals.
  The Labour and Liberal Parties each pay lip-service to the idea of redressing, in some way, the absurd ill-balance of national wealth in which the vast bulk of industrial property is held by a tiny proportion of the population.

There you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth. Having delivered himself of these home truths, our ex-Liberal cum-Labourite then considers that “Liberal Socialism and social Liberalism”—read Labour and Liberal Parties —have much to learn from each other.

One would have doubted this as they have both been at the game for a long time, but Mr. Boulton is nothing if not naive. He goes on to make the most astonishing statement about the aforesaid parties. He says: “Both work toward a society in which wage slavery will be abolished. . . ."

Where and when Mr. Boulton? We have been in existence for 56 years just for this very purpose, and it is the first time that we have heard that this is what the Labour and Liberal parties stand for.

Jon Keys

Editorial: The Colossal Waste of Capitalism (1962)

Editorial from the April 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The colossal waste of capitalism.”

A phrase that for all its truth has become a cliche of the Socialist case. Words we use so often that they cease to have an impact.

We talk of the ludicrous waste of buying and selling: of the criminal waste of capitalist war and preparations for war: of the useless waste of potentially productive hands lost in clipping tickets, totting up accounts, filling in forms. But only now and again does the utter lunacy of the whole system pull us up short and make us see it as though for the first time. We are again struck with wonder at the way the human race can go on tolerating a world so out of keeping with its real needs and interests.

A recent issue of the Daily Mail told us that the launching into space of Colonel Glenn cost the staggering sum of £150 million. A few days later, a Sunday Times article stated that Britain had so far spent £700 million on rocket missiles with virtually nothing to show for it. Even greater sums must be being spent by Russia on similar ventures, yet Mr. Khrushchev has just let it be known that he hopes every Russian will be able to have an egg a day by 1980.

We have become so bemused by governments talking in astronomical figures that they lose their significance. It is only by a conscious effort that we manage to bring them back to their basic terms of houses, oil refineries, washing machines, boots and shoes, bread and butter.

In these days when families roam the streets of London looking for a night’s lodging, the £150 million spent on the Glenn circus could have built 30,000 houses (we mean houses and not the chicken coops which currently pass for them). For the same sum, five times as many homes could have been provided with good furniture to make them a pleasure to live in. Or perhaps a quarter of a million cars could have been built, or three million refrigerators, or 10 million vacuum cleaners, or a decent pair of shoes made for every adult in the country.

During the coming year, the British Government is planning to spend no less than £1,700 million on what it likes to call “defence." The United States will spend eleven times as much much and no doubt the Russians will be doing the same. Every country in the world reserves up to one-tenth of its national wealth for preparing for war. Some of the weapons they make are obsolete before they leave the factories, others even before they leave the drawing board. Many more are scrapped after only a few months service.

Probably no one will ever know the full amount that this country has spent on its atomic programme, and the expenditure of other countries is equally shrouded in secrecy. That the sums are vast is certain.

These are the millions, the hundreds of millions, the thousands of millions of pounds, dollars, roubles, francs, marks, yen. and all the other currencies one can think of, that capitalism wastes each year. And this only in misdirected production — we leave out of the reckoning all the other ways in which human labour and resources are uselessly frittered away.

Translate all this vast total of wasted wealth and labour into the worthwhile things of life and the means of producing them — into houses and brick factories, electricity and power stations, foodstuffs and agricultural machinery, clothes and textile mills, coal and oil, roads, railways, and ships.

Stop and think of this the next time you hear some glib capitalist politician talking of the millions that are going to be spent on a new rocket, a bigger tank or faster aeroplane, another atomic test. You will then have the real measure of that Socialist cliché—and of its overwhelming truth—the "colossal waste of capitalism."

Material World: Feeding the World (2017)

The Material World Column from the April 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In response to the looming food crisis the Socialist Party is asked how we would go about dealing with the doubling of food production to feed a future global population of 10 billion which the UN predicts will be necessary by 2050. Many press us to promote vegetarian diets and organic agriculture methods as the key and become disgruntled when we do not make it party policy and commit ourselves to such a view. However, it cannot be for the few socialists that there currently are to usurp the democracy of those who have the task of implementing socialism around the planet, by decreeing what is an acceptable solution to a social problem and what is not.

In the world today we can produce sufficient for all to eat heartily and healthily but many people still go hungry. The problem is not in production of enough food or in the choice of what our farms produce but in the distribution of food. That is a political and not a technical issue. Our argument is that if you project present-day capitalist society into the future then there could well be widespread starvation and all the scientific or ecological proposals will merely mitigate the suffering to come. The workers who grow and harvest a cornucopia of crops live in a constant crisis of poverty, malnutrition and homelessness.

When the time comes, socialist communities will heed the recommendations of the experts in the field. These, too, will be free from the constraints of capitalism to offer informed opinion. We are well acquainted with the arguments for organic farming but, for the time being, farming is a business and like all businesses, the goal is to maximise profits.

Cereals such as corn, rice and wheat – usually grown with huge amounts of chemical fertiliser – account for half of the calories consumed by humanity. In agriculture, more than 100 million tonnes of chemical fertiliser is used globally every year, applied to about 60 percent of all agricultural crops. Synthetic fertilisers boost yields, but they contain or generate chemicals – ammonia, nitrates, methane and carbon dioxide, among others – that contribute to global warming, a report in the journal Nature Plants has explained. Nitrate-rich run-off from industrial-scale agriculture also damages lakes, rivers and coastal waters around the world, in some cases creating so-called 'dead zones'.

'A key part of this challenge is resolving the major conflict embedded in an agri-food system whose primary purpose is to make money, not to provide sustainable global food security,' the study said. The study's senior author, Peter Horton, chief research advisor to the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, explained: 'Profits for farmers and retailers rely on highly productive crops – which require lots of relatively cheap fertilizer. However the environmental impact of this fertilizer is not costed within the system and so there are currently no real incentives to fix things. Feeding seven billion people fairly and sustainably is therefore not only a question of technology but also one of political economy.'

Even the assumption that food production must double by 2050 to feed the world’s growing population may well be inaccurate, according to some research. A study in Bioscience suggests production likely would need to increase between 25 percent and 70 percent to meet 2050 food demand. An analysis by Mitch Hunter, a doctoral student in agronomy in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, says that production needs to keep increasing, but not as fast as many have claimed. Despite increased discussion of sustainability in agriculture, the suggestion that we need to drastically increase food production is seldom challenged in agricultural circles.

According to Hunter, 'in the coming decades, agriculture will be called upon to both feed people and ensure a healthy environment . . . Right now, the narrative in agriculture is really out of balance, with compelling goals for food production but no clear sense of the progress we need to make on the environment. To double food production, we would have to increase global agricultural output faster than we ever have before, and we are at a point in the developed world where we already are pushing our farming systems to the max. We don’t know how to double yields in these systems, especially without multiplying our environmental impacts'.

The difficulty of feeding the world's population isn't growing the food. It is the economic system we all live under. Within the 'no money, no food' capitalist view, hunger prevails in a world of abundance. In socialism, where the wealth will be shared by all but owned by none, the producers would not be trying to make an independent living for themselves but would be carrying out a particular function on behalf of the community where the aim of production would be to satisfy needs on a sustainable basis. This does not have to be a ‘one size fits all’ solution since socialism need not be exactly the same everywhere and at all times, though plainly its basic principles will not vary.

ALJO

The Passing Show: Aggrieved (1963)

The Passing Show Column from the April 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Aggrieved

Much controversy followed the BBC’s recent broadcast of a filmed interview with General de Gaulle’s arch-enemy, M. Bidault, who is a former French Premier and Foreign Secretary. Bidault leads the OAS, the organization of the Algerian settlers who were aggrieved by the decision of French capitalism to abandon the French landed interests in Algeria and make terms instead with developing Algerian capitalism. The OAS blames this decision on De Gaulle, although the French capitalist state could hardly in the last resort have decided otherwise. Bidault’s group have already killed many opponents both in Algeria and France, and several attempts have been made on the life of De Gaulle.

Indiscriminate Assassination

The BBC’s Director-General defended the BBC’s action on the grounds that, if the position were reversed, the French TV service might well have done the same. The Conservative MP, Gilbert Longden. retorted that

the BBC themselves describe Bidault as “the man most closely associated with the OAS.” Does their Director-General really believe that “a former British Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary” would be the leader of an organisation which sought to attain its political ends by the indiscriminate assassination and disablement of scores of innocent men, women and children?

The pronouncements of MPs never cease to amaze. Has Mr. Longden really forgotten that every living “former British Prime Minister” and every living “former British Foreign Secretary" supported the British capitalist class to the hilt in the Second World War? Has Mr. Longden really forgotten that in that war the British Government not only "sought to attain its political ends” (the removal of the German threat to British markets and profits) "by the indiscriminate assassination and disablement of scores of innocent men, women and children it went much further: by bombing German. Italian and Japanese cities, the British Government (and its allies) indiscriminately assassinated and disabled not scores but thousands and hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children. Ghastly though its outrages may be, the OAS is merely an apprentice in assassination and disablement compared with the British Governments of the two world wars. Mr. Longden himself supported the British Government in the last war: why does he now pretend to be shocked by the OAS?

You pays your money

From The Times, Tuesday, February 19th, 1963:

The National Economic Development Council are to press ahead with forceful recommendations for faster growth in the national economy. . . . By last night, after two days' discussion with the Chancellor in the chair, the N.E.D.C. was a more united body than it has ever been. . . . The council's March policy statements are thus likely to be on all those subjects where they can find basic agreement. A cornerstone of a coherent N.E.D.C. policy must be an incomes policy. And the council show some optimism about producing at least a framework which has the seal of the Government, management, and trade union members. This alone would be more than the country has had before.

From the Daily Herald, Tuesday. February 19th, 1963:

The Government’s long-term plans for economic recovery reached crisis point last night. The crisis emerged in Neddy—the National Economic Development Council —made up of Government Ministers, top industrialists and leading members of the Trades Union Congress. They are the experts on whom the Government have been relying to produce a united drive for expansion and a lasting solution to unemployment But after a two-day debate touching every aspect of the nation’s economy—all day Sunday and all day yesterday—the Neddy men have still not produced any signpost for the way ahead. . . . The fact is that it is becoming more and more difficult for the Neddy experts to reach agreement on positive action.

Apparently it is difficult for others besides the Neddy experts to reach agreement.

Alwyn Edgar

The Right to Strike (1964)

Editorial from the April 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent decision of the House of Lords in the case of Rookes v. Barnard has again brought the question of strikers and the law into the limelight. The effect of the decision is that where a trade union has signed a contract not to strike or to give notice before striking, anyone harmed by a breach of this contract can bring a civil action for damage against those responsible.

This interpretation of the Trade Disputes Act, 1906, will virtually ban unofficial wild-cat strikes though it will not affect official strikes such as the recent AEU strike in Port Talbot. However, since many of the strikes which take place today are unofficial this decision represents a considerable threat to the right to strike.

In Britain both employers and trade unions have been eager to keep the law out of industrial disputes. Even so there have in recent times been periods when official strikes were illegal. The war-time Order 1305 which was not withdrawn until August, 1951, outlawed strikes and—of course-lockouts. It is generally acknowledged that this hampered attempts to resist the Labour Government’s “wage freeze” and “wage restraint though it was pressure from the unions which led to the Order being withdrawn. Thus, for nearly the whole period of the last Labour Government even official strikes were illegal. This was strikingly illustrated when in 1951 Hartley Shawcross, the Labour Attorney General, tried unsuccessfully to convict the leaders of a dock strike.

Under Capitalism, workers depend on their wages for a living. They live by selling their labour-power. Like all sellers, workers seek the highest possible price. To this end trade unions were formed to bargain with the capitalists. This bargaining must go on as long as labour-power is bought and sold, as long as Capitalism lasts that is. The main weapon the trade unions have in these struggles over wages is the strike. This is a class weapon and its loss would seriously hamper the workers in their day-to-day struggles.

But trade union action, as Marx pointed out in Value, Price and Profit, has its limits. He wrote:

" . . . the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner their revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’ ”

Open Letter to the War Resisters' International (1966)

From the April 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 13th Triennial Conference of the War Resisters International, to be held in Rome from 7th to 13th this month, has on its Agenda the discussion of non-violence and politics, with a view to bridging the gap between advocates of non-violence who seek “a fractional society and a world without war” and ‘Individuals and groups engaged in political activities who are finding traditional politics based on physical coercion no more effective for solving present-day problems or even for maintaining order". The statement setting out the attitude of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is printed below. Copies have been sent to the Conference, at their invitation. 

The only way in which mankind can bring about a social change and build a fraternal society, free of war, is to establish Socialism. This will not come about as an expression of non-violence but as the conscious act of a Socialist working-class. The attitude of pacifism can be, and has been, adopted by people of all manner of opinions—for example, by members of the British Labour Party, by Christians and so on—all of whom support the capitalist social system which produces violence and which therefore makes pacifism an empty dream.

Giving effect to the proposal to bridge the gap between politics and pacifism can only mean the formation of yet another political party which supports capitalism while it aims to deal with one of capitalism’s manifestations, war. The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always regarded such organisations as a waste of time, and the history of reformism supports our case to the hilt. Any organisation which accepts the continuance of Capitalism, the cause of war in the modem world, is standing in the way of Socialist Parties like the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which seek to end Capitalism and with it war.

Modern war arises from the conflicting economic interests of the various national capitalist groups, including Russia and China, and the other countries falsely claimed to be Socialist.

It is a basic condition of Capitalism that there is a class struggle between the owning, exploiting class and the wage and salary earners by whose labour wealth is produced, and that that wealth takes the form of commodities, produced for sale and profit. This condition produces the competitive nature of Capitalist society which, within a country, in addition to the class struggle, sets one firm against another and which, in the world at large, sets one government against another over the capture of markets for exports, over access to raw materials such as oil and rubber, over the control of trade routes such as the Suez Canal and over the occupation of strategic points such as Cyprus and Singapore.

In another aspect, these disputes take the form of intricate manoeuvres in the political, diplomatic and military fields over the control of spheres of influence. For a long time the ruling class of the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. have disputed over the control of Europe and the Middle East. To some extent, their differences over the Far East have been composed because of the rise of the potential threat from China.

The important fact is that these disputes are inseparable from Capitalism and that they go on all the time. That is why governments maintain armed forces, both to protect the privileged position of the propertied class internally and against other capitalist groups internationally. That is why the long history of international organisations and conferences for disarmament and peace is a history of failure.

This is the basic explanation of the world wars of Capitalism, of the minor wars which have been going on all the time and of the periodic world wars, and of the continual state of tension in which Capitalism lives. The inevitable result of all this is that violence is part of our lives as long as we live under Capitalism.

In these conditions it is futile to make a moral stand against violence in itself. Many pacifists have proved their sincerity and courage, but this does not alter the fact that their views are out of touch with reality. The only way in which war and social violence can be removed from our lives is to remove Capitalism—including State Capitalism in Russia, China, etc.—and replace it with Socialism. This is not, as pacifists argue, a question of propagating ideas of non-violence. It requires that a socialist working-class democratically gain control of the machinery of government for the purpose of abolishing Capitalism and establishing Socialism.

Socialism will be a social system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

Wealth will be produced solely for use and not for the profit of a minority. This will remove the basic cause of war and will therefore remove the apparatus of war—the armed forces and their weapons—and the atmosphere of violence which oppresses humanity today.

To establish Socialism the working-class of the world must first understand and want it. They must, in other words, free themselves from ideas which at present keep Capitalism in being—including ideas like pacifism—and consciously choose the new society in which men can truly live in brotherhood and build a world for human beings.

Divided They Fell? (1968)

Book Review from the April 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

History of the International 1914-1943 by Julius Braunthal. Nelson 126s.

“On issue after issue”, wrote Jack Cohen in reviewing this book in the Morning Star on 18 January, “essential facts and background information and analysis are completely omitted”. He instanced the policy of the German Communist Party up to 1933 (denouncing the Social Democrats as “social fascists”, while helping the fascists to undermine democracy), the Spanish Civil War (murdering thousands of anarchists and trotskyists), the German Soviet Pact (agreeing with Hitler to carve up Poland) and the attitude of the British Communist Party to the war (supporting it for a few days, then opposing it till June 1941, then supporting it again). Of course the so-called Communists do not want people looking at their record of opportunism in the service of Russian state capitalism.

The Communist International was set up in 1919 and to it affiliated those who mistakenly thought that as capitalism was collapsing and that the working class should therefore stage an immediate armed rising. Braunthal says, and this is fair enough, that it was by its Fourth World Congress in 1922 that the Comintern had become a tool of the new rulers of Russia. Its rival was styled the Labour and Socialist International whose members, throughout this period, pursued a more consistent, if futile, policy. They saw their role as not to prepare the workers to take power for Socialism, but to protect the workers within capitalism by supporting reforms and parliamentary democracy. Consistency, to put it mildly, was not something that the Comintern could claim for its policies. At one time they called for armed risings, at another for a “national front” to include all save pro-German fascists.

Braunthal argues that the European Labour movement was so weakened by the split, started by Lenin and perpetuated by the Comintern, that it was unable effectively to resist fascism. But would a united front of self-styled workers’ and democratic parties have stopped fascism? This begs the question by assuming that the Communists were democrats, whereas up till 1935 they were denouncing democracy as useless. Only in the period 1935-9 did they pretend to support democracy and even then, when they shared power in Spain they used it to suppress, torture and murder working class opponents. Why, too, should they be regarded as part of the reformist workers’ movement? Surely they had more in common with the fascists — their contempt for democracy and advocacy of dictatorship, their worship of leaders, their special attacks on financiers, their opportunism and demagogy? How could such people be reliable allies in the defence of democracy and working class interests? As the French Social Democrat, Lucien Laurat, put it: the real social fascists were the Communists.

Braunthal, himself a Social Democrat, is using the Communists as scapegoats for the failure of the Social Democrats’ “lesser evil” policy for resisting fascism: Hindenburg and Dollfuss were not as bad as Hitler and so on. This policy only encouraged fascism. For fascism flourished on discontent and discontent flourishes under capitalism, even in a democratic state. So in rejecting uncompromising struggle against capitalism for a mere struggle to defend democracy (important as democracy is), the Social Democrats were preserving the conditions that cause mass dissatisfaction with democracy. In preserving capitalism, especially since the governments they joined or kept in office failed miserably (as they had to) to make capitalism work for the mass of the people, they too contributed to the growth of fascism.

Braunthal often goes too far in trying to blame the Communists for the suppression of democracy. This is a pity as it means that the wealth of information in his book can not be relied on. He says, for instance, that the Bolsheviks first tried to seize power in July 1917, whereas in fact they were then trying to restrain workers from launching an uprising they thought premature. He claims the 1924 Labour government “fell victim to an episode in the Communist propaganda campaign”. But the Campbell case was only the occasion, and by no means the cause, for the fall. In any event, the British Communist Party gave its unconditional support to all Labour candidates in both the 1923 and 1924 elections. Braunthal makes no mention of this as he argues that up to 1935 the Communists were consistently opposed to Social Democratic parties (save for a brief period in 1922). We who consistently opposed both Social Democrats and Communists know better. But for Braunthal to admit that from 1923 to 1927 the Communists backed the Social Democrats would weaken his basic thesis.

Jack Cohen called this book a whitewash operation. We must agree. Nevertheless it is still worth reading if only to get the Social Democratic view of this period in working class history.

Adam Buick

Party News (1969)

Party News from the April 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the recent Northern Ireland election, Belfast branch of the World Socialist Party distributed more than 12,000 election statements urging those who wanted Socialism to vote for none of the candidates but to show on their ballot paper that they were socialists.

The election result was a victory for no change, but it is worth recording the peculiar attitude of the Communist Party of Northern Ireland. This time they put up no candidates “so as not to add to the confused situation” (we expect socialists elsewhere who have to spend so much time clearing up the confusion spread by the ‘Communists’ hope this is to be the new party line). They called for a “united opposition” to include “all anti-Unionist forces”. General Secretary Hugh Moore mentioned by name the Nationalist (known traditionally as 'Green Tories'), Northern Ireland Labour, Republican Labour, National Democrat, and Liberal parties as candidates for “a progressive alliance of the Left, Labour and democratic forces.” (Morning Star, February 22, 1969).

This would appear to be a return to the ultra-opportunist ‘popular front' line of the late 30s with the Communists voluntarily abdicating their self-appointed role as the ‘workers’ vanguard’ in order to trail behind the most conservative anti-Fascist or anti-Unionist or anti-Tory politicians or party. Will this policy spread to Britain also?

The Permissive Society (1971)

From the April 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a list of the most misleading phrases, those used to denote and characterise eras of social history would surely be near the top. The Naughty Nineties; the Roaring Twenties; the Age of Elegance; the Golden Days of this and that. Because, for the majority of people, the times thus described are nothing of the kind. The only one which rings true is The Hungry Forties, and that falls short of adequacy for a nineteenth-century decade of horrible starvation.

The present age is, of course, that of the Permissive Society. Like the other phrases, it suggests an infection of us all — abandon, indulgence, Rabelaisian laughter everywhere: the triumph of the libido. The truth, however, is that to most people it means only the goings-on they read about in the newspapers. The nude, the freaked-out and the orgiastic are a province touching slightly, if at all, the pattern of life in suburbs, villages, and Council estates. Few, really, of Greater London’s millions feel the breeze of the Swinging City. Indeed, how can it be otherwise? Permissiveness is there, but restraint on participation in it is imposed not by morality but by income. No man can be a sybarite on twenty pounds a week.

The participants in the Permissive Society, then, are the young and the better-off. For the latter, that is no change. “It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, the poor what gets the blame’’ is a handed-down line in a bawdy comic song where the joke is a rueful reference to the way things always are in class-divided society; who has not detected, in condemnations of permissiveness, annoyance because the pleasure is not now considered a private privilege of the rich? One may see how it was in Victorian England by reading, for example, the Radical novels of G. W. M. Reynolds where part of the attack on the upper class was continual reference to their debauchery. But it is only ten years since the prosecuting Counsel in the Lady Chatterley case asked the jury if they would wish their servants to read such a book. This vein of criticism of permissiveness reminds one of the old joke about the titled lady on her wedding night asking her husband if the working class enjoyed such raptures and responding to the affirmative with: “Well, you must try to have them stopped. It’s much too good for them.”

Perhaps something similar comes into the perturbation over the permissiveness of the young. It is natural enough for adults with low wages to be resentful of adolescents getting as much as they, able to buy seeming luxuries that a lifetime’s labour never knew — and, apparently, rebutting all the constraints and disciplines which were held to be moral because they were essential. Nor is there any doubt that adolescent life has altered in the last fifteen years. The discovery of the young as a huge consumer group, and the socio-economic pattern-changes which have made one generation’s work-life dissimilar to — and therefore uninfluential over — the next’s, have done that.

Thus, books and films which were “not suitable” for young people are now open to them. The non-conformity in dress and hair-styles has been the display of freedom from older influences. The true significance of the Beatles and Rolling Stones in their emergence ten years ago was rejection in clothes, hair and demeanour as well as in musical form and content of the established, taken-for-granted roles for young males in contemporary society. Moreover, the extensions of secondary and higher education, as parts of general adaptations in capitalism, have meant that young people are in this movement at the same time as they are still in school. This in itself has given fuel to the older generations’ resentment: here are youngsters, never earned a penny yet but behaving with adult licence — as if adulthood were certifiable only by going to work.

The commonest condemnation of "permissive” behaviour among the young is, curiously enough, an uninformed one. In this age, it is said, they bed together instead of waiting for marriage. Practically every week there is still some clergyman in the newspapers drawing attention to the illegitimacy figures and telling how many girls are in the family way when they marry at his church. Anyone who has studied family records — a genealogist, for example — can put right this delusion that it’s modern times. The parish churches’ own registers of baptisms, the only records of births before the State took over in 1837, are universally studded with what they called “baseborn” children. Stratford-on-Avon has an entry for the birth of William Shakespeare’s child, five months after his marriage. Whatever may be different for the young, that has always gone on.

To all this has to be added a small flow of openings-up of forbidden frontiers. Nudity on the stage and in films; the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality; the interlarding of TV plays and sketches with what used to be called “barrack-room language”; the recurrent arguments over pot and pornography, with the possibility that either or both may become legal in not too many years. If most people see little or nothing of these things at first hand, their existence as topics is probably enough to shock and to promote the conviction that we live in a society which has changed because its norms have broken down.

And that is just what has not happened. The norm of capitalist society is production for sale and profit, with all human activity either directed or inescapably conditioned by it. The permissive society is, above everything else, a commercial phase: an everybody’s-doing-it sales concept like high-speed gas or the cult of the white-enamel kitchen. The truth is seen in fact when aspects of permissiveness are used by respectable sounding firms whose executives probably go to church on Sundays and personally deplore the laxity of the young. The Electricity Boards, using one of the most provocative girl-pictures extant for advertising; the petrol ads with the girl and the phallic pump; all the incitements to buy which indicate instant sexual intercourse as reward for doing so.

Much of it is obvious enough. The paperback-book industry has had the jackpot rung for it by permissiveness. The theatre has thriven from it — even Shakespeare appears to have a fresh round now with nude Juliets and more literal interpretations of the bawdy bits. The cinema, which was near dying in the ’fifties, has had a new lease of life by becoming the vehicle for whatever wouldn’t do for family entertainment on TV. General Booth built a new Christian sect to popularity with the maxim “Why should the Devil have the best tunes?” A hundred years later, commerce has reconsidered the point and found randiness better than music.

But is there not at any rate a by-product in that people can nevertheless feel more free and be happier in their personal relationships, because barriers of convention are broken down? If there is, it is only marginal. Margaret Powell, in one of her books about servant life, remarks that one reason why working people felt guilty over sex was the conviction that something which was enjoyable and had not to be purchased must be wrong. The whole point of the commerce in permissiveness is to see that people do purchase it, as far as that can be made possible; and it is hard to see that improving the quality of life. As with the Beatle upsurge, emblems and even feelings of unconventionality are quickly appropriated for sale in the market. What happened to the Flower People? Their style and regalia made a dress-shop vogue, their most lasting effect is the floral shirts on Marks-and-Spencers’ counters.

Permissiveness is an awful word, if you think about it for only a moment. It means, literally, what is allowed. It assumes a society in which dispensations are made by “them”, areas of apparent licence permitted under watchful eyes: the complementary assumption has to be that the permission may be withdrawn at any time. That is, indeed, how most people see it. The common expression by someone who has, say, read a boldly-written book is: “Wonder it was allowed to be printed.” And the assumption is well-founded. The recent attacks on International Times and Oz show this clearly enough; neither publication is specially admirable, but both went beyond the permission for permissiveness. In some ways, Victorian society was more permissive than ours. Certainly no generation before the present one has been so pried and spied upon, its every movement noted and filed to underline the restrictive power of commerce and the State.

The things implied in the idea of a thoroughly permissive society are desirable. It is desirable that people should be free, both psychologically and socially, to find the fullest satisfactions; that responsibility and harmony should be the guides to conduct instead of moral sanctions and legal prohibitions. What has to be appreciated is that these states of affairs are dependent for realisation on the organisation of society as a whole. On one hand, it is not possible to create them within a society whose inherent tendencies are antithetical to freedom and responsibility. On the other, personal freedom is dependent on solid social conditions as much as on attitudes of mind.

Sexual freedom, for instance — since the permissive society is about that more than anything else. For all the emancipated talk, the exercise of freedom in this area of life really does demand a different bricks-and-mortar environment from the one most people get under the capitalist system. The minimum requirements are privacy, hot water, warmth and not being tired, and one can add more desirabilia like a comfortable bed and nice surroundings. Given the perfect partner and the most liberal frame of mind, one cannot do justice to lovemaking in a cold room where the neighbours hear every word and every creak of the bedspring and there is only the kitchen sink to wash in.

Thus, the road to freedom must be paved by a revolution in the way people live materially. And that is not all. There are the questions of the status of women in society; of racial and social barriers; of the continual money worries from which no working person is free, that impede expression and fulfilment in every sphere; and of the commodity-making and marketing of every human need. It has been the aim of drop-outs and reformers alike to meet these problems either personally or socially. That it cannot be done is evidenced not by argument, but by a look at things today. The answer can only be a transformation of society, changing the basis and the purpose on which it is organised.

Socialists have sympathy with all those who want the liberations a permissive society promises. The sympathy must be specially strong for the young people grasping this illusion of freedom to find themselves caught in the commercial bondage of capitalism after all. What they — we, all of us — need is a free society in which mankind can, for the first time, find fulfilment.

Robert Barltrop

English County Council Elections (2017)

Party News from the April 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is standing a number of candidates in the South East in these elections, which take place on 4 May. In Kent (Folkestone), East Sussex (Lewes) and Surrey (Guildford).

Most of the work (street stalls, leafleting) will take place in April. If you would like to help contact us by letter (52 Clapham High St, SW4 7UN), phone (0207 6223811), or email (spgb@worldsocialism.org) and we will put you in touch with the local branch.

A Tenth of Marx's 'Grundrisse' (1972)

Book Review from the April 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx’s Grundrisse, by David McLellan. Macmillan. £2.50.

In 1923 some previously unknown manuscripts by Marx from the period 1857-8 were discovered, but were not published until 1939-41. These thousand pages of hand-written notes are known as the Grundrisse Der Kritik Der Politischen Oekonomie (the Basic Principles of the Critique of Political Economy) or simply as Marx’s Grundrisse. They have not yet been translated in full into English despite this book which is really a bit of a take-on. It only includes 100 of the 1,000 of Marx’s pages, as well as 30 more which have been available in English translations since 1904. And some of McLellan’s summaries are tendentious in that they advance his view that Marx always was more of a humanist philosopher than a socialist economist.

Nevertheless some of the selected passages are interesting in that Marx spells out in some detail how capitalism prepares the basis for Socialism and what Socialism will mean. His views can be summarised as follows.

Capitalism, as it develops, brings about a number of connected changes in the character of production:

• First, it increases productivity so that a smaller and smaller amount of labour-time is needed to produce the same amount of real wealth.
• Second, it increases the stock of fixed means of production (plant and machinery) which comes to play a much larger and more important role in production than direct human labour (which still remains essential though).
• Third, it reduces the amount of time society has to devote to producing the necessities of life so increasing the potential amount of free time.
• Fourth, wealth comes to be produced, not by individuals working on their own, but by the social workforce as a whole utilizing science and technology so that it is no longer possible to measure the individual worker’s specific contribution to production.

These developments, said Marx, make it possible for society to use science to reduce the working day, make work interesting and attractive and increase the free time of every member of the workforce, and also to abandon the exchange of products in accordance with their labour-time values.

But, his argument goes on, capitalism cannot do this because it is based on the exploitation of the workforce by the theft of their surplus labour (or potential free time) and it cannot distribute products other than through the price mechanism because they must be converted into money in order to realise as profit the surplus labour embodied in them and to recover the capital invested in their production.

These passages came as a relevation to the pseudo-Marxist Left who, misled by the Russian revolution, had imagined that Marx shared their view that "socialism” was merely nationalisation and planning, with or without democracy, and who had even twisted other passages from Marx to make it appear that he too thought that money, wages, prices and so on would continue to exist at least in the "first phase” of "socialism”. The passages caused Herbert Marcuse (who must be given the credit for first publicizing them in the English-speaking world) to declare that the Left had not been utopian enough!

But they came as no surprise to us. We had long realised, and argued in the face of fierce opposition and jibes of “utopian” from the Left, that Marx had always expected Socialism to involve the abolition of production for sale and a great change in conditions of work.

Adam Buick