Lead kindly light (1965)

From the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Occasionally the Labour Party dares to refer to itself as Socialist. But what do they mean? A clue may perhaps be gained from A Faith To Fight For by Eric Deakins.

Deakins has a very simple view of society and politics. Societies are based on Ideals, and the art of politics consists in maintaining or changing the Ideal basis of society. Present day society, capitalism, is based on Immoral Ideals: Socialism is a society based on Moral Ideals. It has an ethical basis: it is

   A form of society based on the ideals of individual fulfilment, brotherhood, co-operation, tolerance, justice, charity, equality and service to the community.

The long-term aim of the Labour Party, says Mr. Deakins, is to realise these ideals. To do this it must appeal to the individual's Moral Conscience. Prompted by their consciences, individuals will come to realise that capitalism is immoral and will take steps to reconstruct society on a Moral basis. Mr. Deakins is, perhaps, not unaware that in order to gain power the Labour Party has pursued an opportunistic policy of fighting on a programme calculated to appeal to the individual’s Self-Interest rather than to his Moral Conscience.

Mr. Deakins' own personal Moral Conscience seems too reasonably well informed (though it is incorrect on the date of the Taff Vale judgement — 1901 not 1904) and has dictated to him a complete political programme including among other things: land nationalisation, reform of the the Lords, nationalisation of cotton, aircraft and shipbuilding, abolition of public schools, comprehensive schools, opposition to the Common Market and many other policies so well loved by the Labour Left-winger.

Mr. Deakins devotes a couple of pages to a criticism of the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

  The S.P.G.B., in its role as self-appointed custodian of the Socialist conscience. insists that Socialism will only come about when the workers recognise that it is in their economic interest to create a Socialist society. There are two grave dangers in this thesis: one being that it is wrong to direct a Socialist appeal to individual conscience, the other being that it ignores the implications of the term “workers.” To appeal to self-interest is to deny the ethical basis of Socialism, and so render its attainment impossible.

Let us clear up two simple points straight away. The Socialist Party does not appeal to individual self-interest but to the class interest of the working class. We say that Socialism is in the interests of the working class and that it is up to them to establish it. Second, Mr. Deakins implies that we are materialists in the "'parsons' sense, to the detriment of so-called spiritual values. This is so much nonsense. Socialism will create the conditions for all-round individual development, both practically and intellectually. Mr. Deakins should consult our pamphlet Art, Labour and Socialism by William Morris.

It is, however, true that we do not appeal to morality, that we deny that Socialism has any ethical basis. Socialism is a system of society and systems of society are not based on ideals, “good" or “bad.” A superficial look at history might suggest, for instance, that feudalism was based on Honour and capitalism on Selfishness. In fact, systems of society are based on the relations men enter into in producing wealth. In properly societies, that is societies in which access to the means of production is not free, these relations are class relations. The section of the community having control over access to the means of production are enabled to live off the  surplus labour of the producing class.

Such systems of exploitation would be unable to survive if the various means of social control did not back up the dominance of the privileged class. The state, as the centre of social control, is the most important of these means. The other means of influencing men’s behaviour and attitudes such as religion, morality, literature, art and so on, similarly operate to preserve the system. Thus Mr. Deakins is looking at things upside-down: ideals are not the bases of social systems, rather are they a part of the social superstructure.

When the mode of production changes enough to shift the centre of industrial control, a process is set is motion which sooner or later brings about a change in the entire social superstructure. A new class, brought to prominence by the economic change, organises itself politically to win control of the state. At the same time, new ideas appear in religion, morality and the like, reflecting the interests of the rising class. Eventually the institutions and ideas of the previous dominant class are swept away.

This is how social change comes about and there is no reason to suppose that the change from capitalism to socialism will be any different. The development of large-scale industry has socialized production and brought into prominence a propertyless working class quite capable of running the productive system without the owning class. To complete the change which this development calls for is the task of the working class. If this class is to triumph it must become conscious of itself and organise to capture political power. The task of Socialists is to help such understanding come about by appealing, not to morality or conscience, but to the interests of the working class as a class. Socialism, is thus a class issue, not a moral issue.

The emancipation of the working class involves also the emancipation of all mankind. The working class can free itself only by ushering in Socialism, a self-controlling world community in which production will be carried on purely and simply to satisfy the needs of the community.

The nonconformist conscience helped the capitalist class to power, but a refurbished and secularized version of it is of no use to the working class. Socialism cannot be instituted by a series of measures based on the dictates of conscience. It demands a change in the real basis of society, a social revolution.

Adam Buick

Churchill's birthday (1965)

From the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here, it was obvious, was what they call a great man. Propped up, glassy eyed, at the window, flapping his hand at the crowd outside. Oozing in his senility, like the old Disraeli with his corsets and lacquered hair. Famous visitors came and went. An enormous cake was carried in, with sacks full of cards and telegrams. The flashlights popped and the television cameras whirred. Winston Churchill was ninety years old.

Most people were agreed that this was a remarkable achievement. Perhaps it was, in a way. An impressive feature of the many newspaper reminiscences of the old man in his hey day was the amount of hard liquor which he has put down. One article said that when he was Prime Minister, he drank champagne and brandy with every meal and sipped at tumblers of whisky and soda all through the day. A man of lesser constitution would almost certainly have been killed by such a deluge of alcohol.

Churchill’s consumption of drink is typical of the gusto with which he has lived his life, and it is this gusto which has been the subject of much recent hypocrisy. First, the business of those ninety years. It is too obvious that to be born into a family like the Churchills gives a person a built in advantage in their prospects of longevity because, everything else being equal, they are going to get the best of everything. The best food. A secure and comfortable home. The best education and, if they want it, an interesting job.

It is a different matter for the people who were cheering so enthusiastically outside Churchill’s window on his birthday and it is worthwhile to take a look at how they live. Their lives may be summed up in one word poverty, although it is a different kind from the poverty their parents knew, in the days when Churchill was a young man. They are, first of all, the people who make the wealth of the world. They design the factories where it is made, they plan its production and they work on the benches and assembly lines where the wealth comes rolling off. They transport the wealth all over the world. Some of them sit in offices, adding up how much profit their employers have made and how much they can hope to make in the future. Without these people, capitalist society would collapse.

But that is not likely to happen. Because not only do those people make the world’s wealth but they do their best to make sure that their employers get the profit which comes from production. Almost all of them are fervent protectors of property rights and readily join up, and if necessary die, to protect the property of one set of employers against the intrusions of another. Patiently, willingly, they trudge through their meagre lives bearing the burden of a parasite class which lives off their labours. They keep this class in luxury, so that one of its members can be a burbling old man at a window—yet rich beyond any dreams of the people outside.

These producing, organising, protecting, patient people are the working class and it is sadly typical of them that they should be so enthusiastic about the birthday of a man who has never entirely hidden his contempt for them.

It is no exaggeration to say that working class life is itself a health hazard. Inferior, constricted housing and sub-standard food is a health hazard. So are typical working conditions—the remorseless assembly line, the endless flow of paper across a harrassed desk. So is the essential insecurity of employment—the fact that a worker’s livelihood depends upon his holding down a job. The strains of working class existence are very real, but they are unknown to a Churchill. Randolph Churchill, in an illuminating passage in his autobiography, shows what a Churchill conceives as poverty by claiming that his family was "poor but honest’’—although they could afford to send him to Eton.

There is a lot of evidence to show that illness or lack of it —is not entirely a matter of chance but one of social background. The Registrar General’s Decennial 1958 Supplement pointed out that the places in this country where the average person stood the greatest chance of an early death were Salford, Liverpool, Manchester and Wigan. It is no coincidence that these are areas of dense population and that the death rates are largely caused by the high incidence of bronchitis. A few years after, in September 1963. Dr. Ian Richardson, of the school of social medicine at Aberdeen, said that among the people of North East Scotland chronic bronchitis was four times more prevalent in what he called the “lower” social classes than in the “ upper.”

What this means is that if we are born rich we have a better chance of staying healthy and living longer than if we are born poor. Churchill, ninety years old, was born rich.

Next, the business of the great man. It is a long time since the Second World War started, but there is no need for distance to lend enchantment to the part which Churchill is supposed to have played in the Allied victory. In the organs of capitalist opinion no praise is too lavish, no phrase too extravagant, to describe his period as wartime Prime Minister. Only a few small voices are to be heard trying to balance this picture, to point out the misjudgments which Churchill made and those of the men in whom he put his confidence. The late Lord Cherwell was one of these men and he made many mistakes. He was hopelessly wrong in his estimate of the effect of the allied bomber offensive. A recent book The Battle of the V. Weapons reveals that there was plenty of evidence that the Germans were preparing to launch rockets against this country, but Cherwell refused to believe it until it was too late. Yet Cherwell stayed in Churchill's favour, and was still there after the war.

Such evidence puts Churchill into perspective as a less than infallible man. who came into the Premiership with the customary history of mistakes. His name has always been linked with the massive, bloody muddle of Gallipoli. Randolph Churchill tells how a schoolmate refused to be his chum because his father had been killed at the Dardanelles, for which he blamed Winston Churchill. The periods which Churchill spent in posts like Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary were not outstanding for their brilliance he did the jobs in much the same way, and with much the same futility, as any other politician.

For only one thing did he stand out. Between the wars he became the spokesman of the group which saw German capitalism as the greater threat to the established European powers. To stifle this threat Churchill was prepared to do a deal with any other country—even the Soviet Union, which he so quickly turned against after the war. An unforeseen twist to events between the wars might have made Churchill wrong, but in fact he tuned out to be right: Germany was a bigger threat than Russia. This was what gave him the job of Prime Minister at the crucial time, and subsequently loaded him with the myth that he beat German capitalism almost on his own.

The Allied victory did not end Churchill’s miscalculations and indiscretions. In 1945, British capitalism needed a political party which was prepared to push through a big programme of nationalisation, a State health scheme and the like. It needed a continuation of government control over things like building and direction of labour. It needed a party with an image of freshness, one which might repair the morale of a war weary working class by giving the impression of a determination to get on with the job of rebuilding Britain.

The Labour Party seemed to fill these needs pretty well and so they rode to power. Against this impressive tide of events, Churchill offered only an appeal to working class sentiment and his attempt to frighten everyone with his ruinously unwise "Gestapo” speech. When the votes were counted, the great man theory had once more been put in its place. The British working class had faithfully decided that the needs of British capitalism should take precedence over the ambitions of one man.

As the newspapers were anxious to point out, the 1945 election result did not mean that the voters had lost their respect for Churchill. Everywhere he went he was feted. They all loved his funny bowler, his cigar, his V sign. With his jaw clamped, he epitomised the outraged nostalgia of every patriotic slum dweller for the days when the map was covered in pink and a British gunboat was enough to put any number of natives in their place. Good Old Winnie, they cried, in an ecstasy of admiration.

What did they have to thank Churchill for? Did they thank him for always being so militant in defence of the interests of the British ruling class? Did they thank him for urging them on to the battlefields of the world—on to the dusty fly blown slopes at Gallipoli, or into the icy death of an Artic convoy ? Did they thank him for the slaughter of Dresden? For managing the British Gazette during the General Strike ? For always, in fact, fighting the working class tooth and nail whenever they tried to stand out for their own interests ?

A sardonic opinion, perhaps, bred by years of hammering against the solid brick wall of working class ignorance, is that the workers actually enjoy absorbing punishment. Treat them mean, a Tory minister once said, and keep them keen. Churchill has never treated the working class other than meanly; he has never disguised his contempt for them, be has never relaxed in his demands that they should accept whatever burdens and terrors capitalism has imposed on than. And the workers have kept keen. Now Churchill has reached ninety, and presumably has not much longer to live, they are actually grateful to him for all that be has done to them.

Could gratitude, or devotion, or plain damned stupidity, go farther than that ?

Ivan

Our Parliamentary Fund (1965)

Party News from the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The response to the appeal for funds was excellent, the final total received amounting to £800. In the event, the actual expenses were less than were estimated, partly due to the fact that the members working in the two constituencies of Woodside (Glasgow) and Bromley (Kent) did some of the work which we normally expect to pay for e.g. producing and sticking up posters. Consequently, the total expenditure came to £600, including the forfeiture of two deposits of £150 each. Thus, we have a useful balance of £200 as a starter for our next participation. A report on the campaign will appear in the “Socialist Standard” shortly, but, in the meantime, the Executive Committee warmly thanks all those supporters and members who, by their contributions, ensured that we were free from money worries during the campaign, a factor especially heartening to those who were doing the pleasurable but hard work in the field.

Phyllis Howard, Party Funds Organiser.

50 Years Ago: Strike to Stop War (1965)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has for long been the habit of Labourites and others in this country, and those occupying a similar position abroad, to boast that they held in their hands the instrument which would make it impossible for the ruling class of Europe to carry on a great war. This instrument was the General Strike. We all know how persistently it was stated that the organised workers of the various countries would, immediately on the outbreak of war, paralyse the war-mongers by “downing tools”! Yet where is there to be found a single instance in the whole vast war-stricken expanse, of this “heroic” policy coming to fruition?

If any attempt was made in Germany to put the policy of the general strike into operation, that attempt, in its utter failure to even so much as become an item of news, is as destructive to the theory as would be the failure to make the effort. But with regard to the advocates of the general strike as an anti-war measure in this country we are not in the dark. Mr. Keir Hardie, for example, one of the more prominent of those at home who have toyed with the idea, has written to the Press denying that he has told the workers not to enlist, adding "I know too well what is at stake.” It is not out of this frame of mind that anti-war strikes are developed.

In this direction, as in many others, events here proved the truth of what we have consistently contended, namely, that the political conquest is the essential preliminary to any action involving the defeat of the present controllers of the political machinery. No wild words or frenzied ravings about “taking and holding" on the one hand, or “general striking” on the other can replace political control.

From the Socialist Standard, January, 1915. 

Obituary: Angus McPhail (1965)

Obituary from the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with regret that we have to record that our comrade Angus McPhail died on December 3rd after a short illness.

T. Mulheron, a close friend and comrade for many years writes:

“He was a supporter and member of the Socialist Party for more than forty years. From the era of Moses Baritz and Adolph Kohn, many Socialists from Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, U.S.A., New Zealand, Australia and Europe were grateful for the hospitality and generosity of Beech McPhail and his wife, Jessie.

Apart from his life-long adherence to our movement, his two largest contributions were: (1) From the outbreak of the war in September 1939, until it’s end, and indeed afterwards, he was a courageous and eloquent advocate of a large number of young members at C.O. Tribunals. (2) In the early years he organised a speakers class in Glasgow, which produced a relatively large number of Party speakers.

“Beech” McPhail was always uncompromising, sometimes harsh, yet despite financial circumstances which would have permitted weaker types to forget the interests of the working class, maintained the interests of the latter. To use an old cliché, McPhail, like Cromwell (an unfair criticism to McPhail), can be painted with his warts. To those of us who have known him—he will never be forgotten.

He was cremated privately from the David Elder Cottage Hospital in Glasgow, according to his family's wishes, and his ashes deposited on Loch Awe where he, and many other comrades spent many happy hours fishing, talking and drinking, and serene moments of a feeling of entire removal from the sordid realities of world capitalism.

To his wife Jessie, and his family, we extend our deepest regrets and sympathy at his passing.”

News In Review: Pay Rise (1965)

The News in Review column from the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pay Rise

History repeals itself.

One of the first acts of the 1945 Labour government, while admonishing us all to tighten our belts, was to agree to increase the pay of Members of Parliament.

One of the first acts of the 1964 Labour government was . . .

Perhaps it is true that some M.P.s have a hard time trying to do their job on the old pay; rising prices have hit them just as they have hit everyone else. But every M.P. belongs to a party which has promised to halt rising prices, and most of them belong to the two parties which have failed miserably to fulfill that promise. Have the M.P.s, then, only themselves to blame for their plight ?

Apart from that, many members do not have a hard time. Several Tory ex-Ministers have recently taken lucrative jobs on the boards of big companies, and on the same day as the increases in pay were announced a Labour member was involved in a traffic case which happened while he was driving his Rolls Royce.

The M.P.'s case is in fact no stronger than that of the dockers and a great deal less pressing than that of nurses, busmen and railwaymen.

But these people, just like the rest of the working class, are not in the fortunate situation of being able to argue their case with themselves, and of being able to vote themselves a rise in pay.

They have to struggle for their rises—with their employers, through arbitration, sometimes before a Court of Inquiry into the conditions of their industry. The arguments used against them rarely question their claim as such; they usually attack it on the grounds of increased production costs, and its effects upon the employers’ profit margins.

If in the end a rise is granted it often comes grudgingly, with associated promises from the workers to relax demarcation rules, or to step up productivity, or to forego any further claims for some years.

All of this is looked upon with approval by the Members of Parliament, all of whom support wage restraint in one shape or another. But apparently all the arguments they have used, about what they called the national interest and other claptrap, do not apply when they sit in judgement on themselves.

There is one argument the M.P.s could not have used to support their claim and that is that there is a shortage of men for the job. Although the M.P. is supposed to be badly paid, there are always at least two men for every vacancy. If that condition held good in industry at large, employers would no longer be bothered by the problem of wage claims.

Perhaps the only consistent case the M.P.s could make out was that they have always done a good job, have always served their masters faithfully, have always trooped into the right lobby at the right time and generally have always done everything they could to keep capitalism comfortable for the people who own it and live off it and who pay out the rises.


Payment deferred

One of the more humiliating aspects of an old age pensioner’s life is the cloud of hypocrisy which covers every discussion of their plight.

In the last election, all the capitalist parties bid for votes on a promise of an increase in pensions in the near future. It was only when the M.P.s had been returned, pledged to do something about the pensioners’ difficulties, that we saw what the promises were worth.

From the fuss which was kicked up about the rise, it almost seemed as if pensions were to go up by several pounds a week. In fact, the increase will be twelve shillings and sixpence.

Even more, this meagre increase will not be payable until next April which means that the pensioners have to face— and some of them perhaps not survive— the winter on the present scale of payment.

Nobody will begrudge the pensioners anything they can get. But it is sickening that the Labour Party should talk about abolishing poverty when all they are doing is handing out so mean an increase, which cannot hope to stave off even the extremes of an old person’s destitution.

And it is equally sickening that Labour M.P.s should be in revolt over the delay in paying the bigger pensions. The government’s reasons for the delay are consistent enough; they are, after all in power to run capitalism without any old nonsense about humane considerations.

In this, the Labour M.P.s support their government. They support it in its power at Westminster, and they support it in its administration of capitalism.

For the pensioners, this is just too bad. The roots of their troubles do not lie in the size of their pension. That has gone up several times over the pre-war figure, without having any effect on the pensioners’ situation.

Old people are in desperate straits because they are retired members of the working class. Once they depended on their wage for a living but now they are too old to be of any use to an employer.

But to leave them without any sort of an income would create an enormous social problem. So the old people receive a derisory sum — just enough to keep them in some sort of living condition. They may not have a very comfortable home, and they may not be able to afford adequate food or heating. But they survive—just.

In human terms, this is deplorable, but it is an inevitable result of capitalism’s social structure. And where do the Labour Party stand on that ?

They may want to alter one or two of the system’s superficial features. They may feel strongly enough about some of them to stage a short and feeble revolt against their leaders.

But on the only issue that matters—the abolition of capitalism—they are one united, determined party. Capitalism, with its restrictions and anomalies, will continue. No back bencher will ever revolt over that.


Same again

One of the persistent fallacies which help to keep capitalism ticking over is the notion that things are better, or anyway different, abroad.

The British worker, chafing under his own burdens, looks enviously upon what he imagines to be the gaiety, or the freedom, or the affluence of his counterpart in other countries. Workers abroad harbour the same sort of misconceptions about life over here.

Sometimes they put their theories to the test, by emigrating. Then they discover that basically workers lives are the same in every country in the world.

In France, which is so often misconceived as a country of gay and ardent wine swiggers, the workers’ lives are subject to the same sort of restrictions as in this country. The French government recently announced their new economic and social plan which will try, among other things, to hold wages increases to three per cent for the next five years.

In Holland, popularly thought of as a land of simple, sunny peasants, the government, like other governments elsewhere, are wrestling with a housing problem. Their latest palliative is a familiar one — a system of subsidies. The Dutch Minister of Housing recently said that he hopes to end the housing shortage by 1970, which is about the year that British Housing Ministers will mention when they are promising to solve our housing difficulties.

In Australia, where everyone is supposed to be a tough, bronzed individualist, the government is imposing their first-ever peace time military conscription. Against the opposition to this, the Australian government pleads that the situation in South Fast Asia demands that tough-guy Australians forego some of their individualism.

All over the world the disputes and the problems of capitalism take their toll. All over the world useful, creative human beings are exploited and degraded into varying degrees and types of poverty and suppression. Capitalism is international and so are its evils.

International, too, is capitalisms hypocrisy. This month sees the opening of International Cooperation Year, sponsored by Prince Phillip, Mr. Wilson. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Mr. Grimond, and supported by £10,000 from the Foreign Office.

The Year will dabble its foolish fingers in all manner of futile projects. The one thing it will not sponsor will be the international cooperation of the working class to abolish the social system which causes all their problems.

Britain in Deep Water (1957)

From the March 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

All within a few days, Ken Jones was dropped from the Welsh Rugby Union XV, and Sir Anthony Eden resigned the Prime Ministership of Great Britain; that should be sensation enough for one week. Jones, they said, was out of form and Eden was ill. If the former’s disappointment was a symptom of the unhappy plight of Welsh Rugby, then the latter’s retirement was as surely indicative of the decline of British power in the world, steepened by recent events and the failure of the Eden administration to deal with them successfully. This article will discuss aspects of the recent crisis and, perhaps rather riskily, engage in some speculation about it 

Hostile to Britain

While Eden was an acutely sick man no illness has been diplomatically more opportune for, as his enemies in the newspapers put it, his policy was in ruins. Apart from other matters, the venture to seize the Suez Canal was a complete failure. Militarily, this operation could hardly have gone amiss—something else must have been responsible for the failure and the apparent lack of any clear-cut British intention. With hardly a doubt, this was the policy of the United States, which opposed the Anglo-French operation because the Americans are themselves determined to control the Middle East and the copious oilfields to be found there. This policy is no recent development; in the Evening Standard (5th October, 1953), Lord Hailsham, who is known to be sensitive on the point wrote that; " . . . since the middle of the war the policy of the American Government in the Mediterranean has been almost always hostile to British interests." A few weeks ago we heard of Mr. Dulles’ preference for being a Doughboy alone in the Middle East, rather than with British and French troops alongside. Even taking into account his later modification, it does seem that he let an outsize cat out of his Bag and was in fact stating the authentic State Department attitude towards Middle Eastern affairs. '

Whatever the truth, it is a fact that Great Britain has now almost entirely lost out in the Middle East and United States influence in the areas is strong to the point of being dominant. The latest blast of U.S. foreign policy—the Eisenhower doctrine, with its promise of military and economic intervention—has set the seal on the situation. It may be remarked that, whilst on the face of it the doctrine is aimed against Russian ambitions, there is a certain amount of evidence that this is not quite so. An open attack by Russia, which is needed to bring the doctrine into operation, is most unlikely. On the other hand, recent statements by American politicians have sounded like an invitation to the Kremlin to move in by other means. On May 1st, 1956, Mr. Christian Herter said at the Chicago Institute of Foreign Relations: “We should offer to co-ordinate our aid with whatever assistance the Soviet Union is willing to provide. If the Soviet Union proposed to build a steel mill, we should not feel bound to offer to build the same mill on more favourable conditions. We should, on the contrary, be willing to work out both with the Soviets and with the recipient country a programme to which both the Soviets and ourselves can each contribute.” (Weekly Review, 4/1/57.).

Nobody need be surprised at the prospect of a Russo-American line up in the Middle East; the exigencies of. Capitalism have been known to throw together stranger bedfellows.

Indian Ambitions

We should also not disregard the ambitions of the rising Indian Capitalist class in this struggle. Mr. Nehru has lately been coming and going from side to side of the Iron Curtain, although only recently he was suspected by Americans of being too sympathetic to Russian interests. It is an interesting thought that he may have been carrying messages between Washington and Moscow. What is more certain is that India promises to become a powerful factor in the troubles of the Middle East and to play her part in replacing the defeated British power. This would indeed be a bitter irony to the Foreign Office, that the departing Britishers should be replaced by two countries—India and the U.S.A.—who were once under London's colonial thumb!

Serious though the defeat in the Middle East is for the British Capitalists, it is only the latest of the reverses which their policy has suffered since the end of the war. Apart from Egypt, there are the Far East, Australia and the Caribbean—all areas where the words of Whitehall lack their former power. The U.S. State Department has undoubtedly been the cause of much of this decline—and their preoccupation with the curtailment of British international power has often been pursued under the guise of some high-flown discussion, on human rights and liberties. In the Manchester Guardian of 25th. November, 1953, Mr. A. J. P. Taylor, wrote that “The (Atlantic) Charter was . . .  a by product of the Atlantic meeting (of Churchill and Roosevelt). The real purpose . . .  was to co-ordinate supplies and naval strategy. But the Americans had been alarmed by Keynes's prophecy that ‘the post-war world economic structure could only be one of closed economies. They wished to tie Great Britain down to a liberal economic system, not to make a declaration of principles against Hitler.” Other meetings of the war leaders, such as the Yalta conference, confirmed the American desire to break the imperial preference tie-up which the United Kingdom had built and to nose her out of her colonies. The reverse in the Middle East may be very nearly the last straw for British Capitalists, jeopardising as it has their supplies of vital oil. (The Economist of 10th November, 1956, estimated that 70 per cent. of this country’s oil supply was cut off by the blockage of the Suez Canal).

A Conspiracy?

This reliance for an essential fuel upon the facilities of so unstable an area as the Middle East is rather strange. Opinion in some technical quarters has it that no real effort is being made in Britain to find substitutes for oil, and there is a certain amount of evidence to fortify it. Apparently obstruction seems to have hindered at least one attempt to produce a substitute for petrol. The Manchester Guardian of 11th February, 1957, reported on the results of efforts in this field by a Yorkshire firm of manufacturing chemists. The manager of the firm said that ”. . .  the Government stopped one ingredient so we formulated another. . . . When we approached the suppliers . . . we were told they had given an undertaking to the Board of Trade that they would not let it go . . .  we . . . now have had to write off the idea.”

A move to offset the encroachments of the U.S. Capitalist class is to be seen in the projected European Common market. If the State Department smiles upon such schemes, it can only be because they regard them as turning the attention of European countries away from the markets which America wishes to exploit and as bringing pressure upon Great Britain to weaken her imperial preference system. Anyway, the last laugh must be with Washington—the control they now have upon Europe's oil supplies puts any such economic organisation under their thumb. We have seen what this means to European industry in the activities of the Texas Railroad Commission.

The threatened loss of their oil and enforced dependence upon United States mercies seems to have thrown British ruling circles into something akin to a panic. To add to their difficulties, the national unity which is usual at such times of crisis has been conspicuously absent. Such powerful organs of opinion as the Manchester Guardian, Observer and Economist, strongly opposed the Suez war and demanded Eden's head in compensation. This indicates a serious division in British Capitalist thinking—possibly a revolt by industrial interests against the favoured oilmen. It is under such circumstances that a Churchill, or a Lloyd George can, by reason of his political acumen, assume the rôle of a great unifier and on the strength of this come to power. Sure enough, we have lately seen a considerable improvement in the standing of the perspicacious Mr. Aneurin Bevan, so that even the Tory papers who were once screaming for his blood now champion his cause against that of Mr. Gaitskell.

Crumbling Visions

The conflict in Egypt and the confusion which it has thrown up are nothing new to us; they are an accepted part of the Capitalist social system. The unpalatable fact is that it is the working class, in these bad times as well as in the supposedly good, who are on the dirty end of the stick. The petrol shortage has exposed some redundancy in the car and other industries and so hundreds of workers are seeing their vision of lifelong prosperity dissolve in the reality of the queue at the Labour Exchange. If it is any consolation, other visions are crumbling too. Great Britain's Middle East policy of playing off and on and propping up puppet rulers, native armies and corrupt governments, has collapsed and the United States is picking up the pieces. A perilous, strenuous time for British Capitalism and those who try to organise it. Perhaps, after all, Sir Anthony was on to a good thing when he threw in the towel and caught the first boat for the Pacific.

Knife and Ivan.

Obituary: Karla Rab, 1940-2017 (2018)

Obituary from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karla Rab died on September 15th at age 77 in her Somerville, Massachusetts home.

A fifth-generation socialist, she learned ‘by osmosis’ that the most worthwhile cause to struggle for is to wake up the working class to its enlightened self-interest — the immediate abolition of capital’s anachronistic employment system.

She imbibed the influence of a socialist family upbringing from her earliest years, and went on to make it her vocation on joining the World Socialist Party founded in 1916 by her grandfather Isaac Rab and others. She was a practical visionary who took an active organizing role in party activities; after some re-organization c. 2000, she performed her role as Postal Corresponding Secretary with gusto. In 2010, fulfilling a promise she had given Rab to 'do something' with his voluminous correspondence, she published Role-Modeling Socialist Behavior: The Life and Letters of Isaac Rab, a multi-faceted undertaking at once a biography, a history and a memoir. Her natural editorial talents were appreciated by all her collaborators.

Everything of any value, she knew, starts with the human imagination, independently of reality, as long as you plug it back into the real world. Karla grew up immersed in a culture of optimism. She knew she really could make the world a better place, not just in a moral sense but as an actual historical reality.

And there was a way to achieve this goal. All you had to do was get everyone to understand that the world humans have evolved, the terrible mess we have made of human society, has a tangible and specific cause. While we have improved some aspects of our existence, we have done so at the expense of our better nature, and the 'progress' we imagine is inherent in our civilization is a process of tying society in knots. Humans have gotten themselves into a progressively knottier condition, and the end results are beginning to look pretty grim.

Karla learned as a child that the way to cut the Gordian knot is to re-imagine a society that once again returned to a need-oriented model of human nature in which people everywhere understand the stake they have in each other’s well-being. This is something we all know how to do, but which ever since agriculture was introduced we have been educating each other to forget. But it takes only a little self-enlightenment to break this momentum.

Since there can be no limits to how this reawakening takes place, our destiny as humans is to do this re-thinking of ourselves on a global scale. We all have it in us to retrace our steps and 'get back to the garden.' It is emotionally and intuitively easy, if you just listen to yourself and keep the courage of your convictions.

Like her grandfather, she was an incurable optimist who believed humanity still has a future. Pessimism is merely the long shadow of ignorance. The choice is clear.

R. E.

Reality (2012)

Book Review from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Policing the Crisis. Class War. 44 pages. £1.

This is a pamphlet published this May Day by the anarchist group known for the photographic series 'hospitalised coppers' and pictures of the “Working Class Fights Back” at the 1990 Poll Tax Riot.

The section 'Police Crimes Against the Working Class Movement' is a historical survey of the police and the working class in Britain.  Minority class property is why the police exist; the police force is part of the executive arm of the capitalist state, and as such, the enemy of the working class, even if that’s from where its members are recruited.

The pamphlet reproduces Dave Douglass’s 1986 Come and Wet This Truncheon which details police 'crimes' against the striking miners, their families and communities during the year-long strike. This makes sobering reading. If read in conjunction with The Secret War Against the Miners by Seamus Milne which details MI5 and Special Branch operations against them, it is quite clear the state is used by the capitalist class against the working class to further its own economic interests.

Like Bakunin, Class War accepts Marx's class analysis and his economic theories about capitalism. Class War describes how “force is necessary by capitalism to move the developing situations towards a new balance of class relationships more favourable to them. It is never death or pain free”.

As capitalism has become more 'unfettered' since the 1980s, the capitalist state has relied more on its enforcers to ensure the new economic relationships are ‘accepted’, and significantly, although statistics claim crime is going down, the prison population has doubled in size in the last thirty years. Today we have austerity economics imposed on us and dissent is ruthlessly dealt with; the police threaten to shoot protesting students; last summer's social breakdown in the inner cities has resulted in obviously political sentences for ‘rioters’; and the concept of ‘pre-crime’ is now used to prevent any dissent against the bourgeois consensus of the Royal Wedding, Jubilee and the Olympics.

Class War are heirs to Bakunin with their emphasis on the 'propaganda of the deed': direct action philosophy, and opposition to taking part in capitalist elections (although Ian Bone, anarchist publisher of Class War, was involved in Bristol local elections in 2003, and Class War plan to stand a candidate for Mayor of Hackney in 2014).

As socialists we reject Bakunin's love of conspiracy, insurrection and his cult of violence. Marx once described 'anarchy' as the ultimate aim of the proletarian movement when classes will be abolished and the power of the state disappears. He can even be said to have anticipated that other historical anarchist Kropotkin in aiming at an anarchist communism which is a stateless, moneyless, wageless society and not a worker's state.

Steve Clayton

Greasy Pole: What’s ‘Appropriate’ Then? (2018)

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is some time now since we could expect to be warmed and comforted by those big, declaratory Monday morning newspaper photographs of Prime Minister Theresa May, pondering on the most hopeful date to call the next election and how meanwhile she might wrestle with the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox (remember him?), Gavin Williamson . . . She was obediently tailed by her husband James May and in accord with their respective backgrounds they were then emerging from some parish church not far from the Chiltern Hills. Mr May was smiling, which could have been motivated by the fact that he is a top executive of one of the biggest and most powerful financial institutions which controls assets worth trillions of dollars, including shares in Amazon and the popular coffee house Starbucks, which have both been listed by Theresa May in her sights for action (or whatever it is) against the keenest of tax avoiders. A lot has happened since then to undermine the political standing of the Prime Minister and her partner. For example there has been the exposure of the relationship between so many of their followers and assistants which has been such as to justify the term ‘inappropriate behaviour’ which means the opposite of something suitable and proper. It is called sexual abuse. 

Misconduct

But on that day, making their way from that local manufactory of delusion, Mrs May and her husband gave no hint that they were in fear of any particular crisis awaiting them in Westminster and beyond. Which probably made it more difficult for them to confront their raw feelings about what their supporters in Parliament and beyond had been up to. There was the brutal reality about the sexual misconduct of a clutch of Honourable Members towards party members and supporters, even as the facts were beginning to emerge. Much of it was revealed in what rapidly became known as the Spreadsheet of Shame – a survey which named 36 particular performers on that score. The events – the abuses – revealed in that document included ’handsy behaviour’ or of a former Member suggesting to his secretary that she might enjoy it to ‘feel’ how long his penis was or another planning to encourage a staff member to get drunk to assist his unwanted sexual advances.

Climbing

Notably prominent – to his own discomfort –  in all of this has been Mark Garnier the Conservative MP for Wyre Forest Worcestershire, whose local opponents are likely to be undermined by the very existence of the thousands who regularly support him. Garnier attended a couple of expensive local schools after which he became a junior clerk in an investment bank in London. This led to a partnership in a firm of hedge fund managers. In his politics he has contested Wyre Forest four times as a Tory. On his first attempt there he lost to an independent candidate but after that in 2010, 2015 and 2017 he won and his present majority is in the region of 13,000. Political climbing runs in the family; a cousin of his did a spell as Solicitor General and he himself was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for International Trade from July 2016 until being sacked in January 2018 – an event which was greeted by a local councillor who ‘. . . would just like to congratulate Theresa May on making a very sensible decision . . .  definitely the right move by the Prime Minister’. At that time Garnier was operating in a style which involved him asking his secretary, one Caroline Edmondson, to buy him some sex toys in a Soho shop while he publicly lauded her as a ‘sugar-tits’. The official government line on Garnier’s sacking was that it was to make way for new blood while he was also in breach of the ministerial code – except that this was contradicted soon afterwards when he was cleared by an official enquiry. Not surprisingly Garnier blurted out that he was bitterly disappointed at being punished for behaviour which he was assessed as not responsible for. It did not seem to occur to him that this was typical of the ruthless, unpredictable technique in the world of capitalist ’justice’. Then there was Damian Green who was until recently one of Theresa May’s special favourites as her First Secretary of State – effectively Deputy Prime Minister – until she had to ‘ask’ him to resign because he was so deeply involved in activities which once encouraged his then future wife to comment that ‘He’s got a very strong sex drive, he’s just not all that discriminating’.

Inappropriate

The affair of the misbehaving MPs, the appointments, the disputes, the sackings, was in response to their ‘inappropriate’ behaviour – a fascinating word for use in survival, even success, in the political world. To begin with, it does have some effect in diminishing the gravity of some of the MP’s actions, for example when the focus was on Mark Garnier. But there are many examples of governmental policies and actions which are considered as ‘appropriate’ but which in their effects are of the cruellest, and most damaging. One of the more recent was a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which described the day to day effects of governmental policies which operate in response to the current problems of British capitalism. Helen Barnard who is head of analysis of the Rowntree Foundation, is quite clear about this: ‘Low-income households are facing a difficult 2018, with rising prices, frozen benefits and a wage squeeze all putting further pressure on household incomes’.

If Theresa May, as she drifted through the church door that day, had asked herself how effectively she could continue to play a role in this class divided society she might have felt the need to use that word ‘appropriate’. For this is typical of the crime against our very language, of how capitalism distorts every aspect of our lives. It is only the socialists who stand and work against this malignant chaos.

Ivan

New Publications (1942)

Book Reviews from the December 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Parliament, Traitors and Beer

"Vote—What For" (Freedom Press, 2d.), by E. Malatesta, is an adaptation from a work by that author. It is the familiar Anarchist attack on parliamentary methods and government presented in the form of a discussion between two workers, George and Jack, over a glass of beer. George, supporter of parliamentary methods and of the Labour Party, puts up a defence which is demolished by Jack, the Anarchist. The demolition' is rapid. Perhaps it is because the leaflet is only fifteen pages. The vote, says Jack, is a fraud: those elected further their own interests except at election times, when they make fulsome promises to the gullible workers. George, unshaken, replies that we should elect workers, and then we should not be fooled. In reply to this the Anarchist makes two points: one, a majority in Parliament would be a ‘"paradise,” but only for the "elected”: and two—but let Jack speak for himself: "The rich are always in power. Just imagine a poor worker, perhaps with an ill wife and four kids, and you [that is, hard-hearted George] tell him to risk his job and get thrown out of' his house to starve; just to give his vote to a candidate his master doesn't like." From which one gathers that Anarchist Jack's indignation is righteously aroused at the suggestion that the worker should exercise his vote because such action would bring in the bailiffs and impose starvation on an ill wife and four hungry kids and all. Does E. Malatesta (or his adaptor) mean this? It is difficult to say. Anarchist writings do not always mean what they seem to say. However, for tuppence, Freedom Press will enable the reader to judge for himself.

This leaflet, in typical Anarchist fashion, confuses the issue on the question of parliamentary methods. It would have the ingenuous believe that the effort to achieve Socialism through Parliament has failed. Ramsay MacDonald is instanced as a Socialist who was won over by the rich. "As soon as you send anyone to office they turn traitor," the Anarchist says. The answer to such childish nonsense is: (1) Ramsay MacDonald was not a Socialist, nor was the Labour Party which he led; (2) The Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929-31 were not returned on Socialist programmes by the votes of Socialist supporters; (3) The two Labour Governments did not fail to introduce Socialism because of the illusory character of the vote, but because they were elected on reformist programmes to carry on the administration of capitalism. They learned bitterly that they could not reform out of existence working class problems, and that capitalism can only function in the interests of the capitalists.

That the Anarchists persist in accepting the Labour Party as a Socialist party might be regarded as a measure of what they understand Socialism to stand for. (This leaflet describes the I.L.P. as revolutionary whilst another Anarchist pamphlet issued by Freedom Press, "New Life to the Land," by George Woodcock, describes the I.L.P. as semi-revolutionary.) To accept the Labour Party as Socialist and to imply it stands for Socialism exposes the Anarchist claim to stand for a classless society and the abolition of the wages system as a mere form of words. A leaflet which sacrifices logic to propaganda argument. Crude, flat—but perhaps the latter was due to the beer with which George and Jack started the argument.

The Take (or Sit) and Hold Theory

"Trade Unionism or Syndicalism?" by Tom Brown (Freedom Press, 3d.).  The author of this pamphlet makes out a case for the Syndicalist practice to replace existing trade union organisation and for the Syndicalist method of taking over the means of production from the capitalists. He discusses what he thinks is the weak spot in trade union organisation, the organising of workers on the basis of their craft, i.e., "according to the tools they use.” The result is that the workers in any one industry find themselves organised in several trade unions (engineering workers are organised in fifty unions). In his trade union branch, usually near where he lives and away from his work, the trade unionist finds his fellow branch members connected with any industry but that in which he himself works. The result is lack of interest. The author advocates workers organised on the basis of one union for each industry. Mr. Brown's criticisms show all the obvious advantages likely to be gained from organisation by industry. That is, however, not the whole story, as the advocates of the rival conception will maintain, and experience in industries where the industrial idea has been more or less fully applied does not show any startling improvement. Moreover—and this should be remembered by both schools—the border lines of an industry are not always clear and fixed. Hence, for example, the conflicting claims of those who would argue that the railways are a self-contained industry and those who retort that they are only part of the transport industry.

Socialists are, however, more concerned with the further aspect. Mr. Brown does not advocate the one union one industry form of industrial organisation for the workers as an end in itself but as a means also for presenting the class struggle along Syndicalist lines, as a means for wresting ownership and control of the factories from the capitalists. The author proposes the " Social General Strike," or the "General Lock-out of the Employing Class" as he would prefer to describe it, and the management and administration of factories and industries along Syndicalist lines by the workers, such industries to be organised on a federal basis. On page 10 he says: "Against this action we hear raised the Social Democratic wail, “If you do that the bosses will shoot and baton you!' We reply, if you don't, they will shoot and baton (and starve) you, but with much greater success, as the history of passive starvation strikes shows. But in order to beat the workers, they must first start knocking about their own property, as they discovered in the 1937 automobile stay-in-strike in the U.S.A. If Mr. Brown is saying that the capitalists would acquiesce in parting with the ownership of the factories rather than see them knocked about, the present war demonstrates the contrary. They accept the facts of quite a lot of " knocking about" even where the certain loss of ownership is not involved. In any case, the sit-down strikes in America, and those in France which he also quotes, were not strikes which had for their purpose the taking over of the factories concerned on Syndicalist lines. Another example is given, with approval, of French shop girls who engaged in a sit-down strike and locked out the customers. Surely they acted wrongly. Ought they not have served the customers and informed the employers that the proceeds were for the benefit of the workers? Commenting on the example of the French shop girls Mr. Brown almost gushes: "And the bloodshed, the vast sea of gore, predicted by the Socialist. NONE!" Might a Socialist humbly suggest that the capitalist state would apply such methods as were dictated by the extent of the menace.

Well written, in a superficially plausible style, the hollowness of the Syndicalist case as stated in this pamphlet is nevertheless almost self-apparent.

Russia To-day

"Soviet Russia in Maps" (edited by George Goodal, M.A., price 2/6, and published by George Phillip & Sons, Ltd.), is a useful addition to an existing library of books on Russia. It consists of thirty-two pages of maps with notes and commentaries illustrating main changes in Russian economics, social and political changes, over seven centuries; it includes figures and comparisons of industrial developments to date.

Harry Waite

Capitalism's Admirable Crichtons (1920)

From the August 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of J. M. Barrie’s immortal plays portrays the butler who by sheer force of superior mentality and ability assumed leadership over his aristocratic employers when shipwrecked on a desert island. The position is intended to be a more or less fanciful one, but in reality present day society teems with examples of the repression of great minds by the mediocre-minded few. Many of us in even our small circles can point to one or two acquaintances who can find no outlet for really brilliant intelligences, and who are forced by stress of economic circumstance to spend their lives in uncongenial work and uninspiring environment. History has many cases to show of genius which has been discovered too late, of great minds that have been starved of opportunity. Men and women who, even under adverse conditions, managed to leave something behind that humanity is the better for, have in countless cases died of want and hopeless despair. The painting that might fetch a small fortune at Christie’s to-day perhaps was sold by the artist for the price of a loaf of bread. The machine that may make a modern Croesus was invented by one whose life was one long struggle against penury and who died, as he had lived, in obscurity.

Many more must there be who have no opportunity of bringing into the light ideas that would stamp them as being more than ordinary men. Who could expect a man to come back, after a long day’s toil, to a miserable hovel, surrounded by those scenes and noises which are so great a part of the worker’s environment, and to sit down and compose beautiful music, or paint a masterpiece, or write a treatise that should make history ?

All that matters to-day is the ability to make a profit—if that be ability. Very few employers are more intelligent than some of their own machine-minders, but the fact that the machines belong to them and not to the minders is sufficient to obtain for them the comfort and luxury that the latter and their families are not even able to dream of. Even their vaunted “directive ability” is vested in managers and foremen. We had the case recently of an American millionaire who made a fortune while in the madhouse! He, like the rest of his class, could not help it. It requires practically no effort on their part. That is the irony of it all. If ability counted they would not be in the position they are in. The working class invent machinery, they work machinery, they pay their own meagre wages, and hand the surplus to the employers. There is not an operation from the loading of a trolley to the cashing of a cheque that is not performed by a member of the working class.

The position, however, never seems to strike the workers themselves. If a man is a good workman and boasts about it he will compare himself with his neighbour, but never with his employer. In the same way he is familiar with and deferential to names like Rothschild and Rockefeller, but of Faraday and Pasteur, who have benefited society almost as much as the first-named have harmed it, he has not the faintest notion.

It is true of capitalism more than of any other system of society that the good in men does not pay so much as the bad. It is more to the advantage of doctors to pander to the fanciful notions of old dowagers with well-lined purses than it is for them to devote their lives to endeavouring to cure some dread disease. It is useless for a man to invent something that would make workmen in a particularly dangerous occupation safer if it would mean adding to the employer’s establishment expenses.

Only under Socialism will every man find it to his advantage to give of his best, since it will be the community that will benefit and not the the pockets of the few. The machine that will run will not throw men out of work as at present, but will, as it should, reduce the hours of labour. Scientists will not experiment with poison gases and explosives, but will use their knowledge in protecting the human race and bringing health and strength to those that lack it. And what is more, the man in the street, the common worker, instead of being any longer the slave of toil, with only “a soul to be damned, a body to be kicked,” will become a responsible member of society with a right to all that the world has to offer and with no man to say him nay.

Stanley H. Steele

The Work of The Socialist Party (1921)

From the August 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

To the average working man the Socialist appears as a type of individual who suffers from a fever of discontent—full of complaints, always grumbling. We will show, however, that this view is but one of the many illusions which cloud certain working-class minds. The Socialist possesses ambitions of a particular kind, which do not allow time for morbid reflections. He recognises that “the battle's to the strong," and while, therefore, healthily dissatisfied with modem conditions of existence, nevertheless enjoys contentment of mind in the knowledge that he is working for the only thing worth while; i.e., the overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of Socialism.

The distinction the present scribe wishes to draw is that the Socialist is dissatisfied because he knows the cause of all the evils which afflict the working class, and that knowledge represents his dissatisfaction. On the other hand, the “discontents" are the grumblers and grousers—the unhealthy-minded—because they do not know. Lacking Socialist knowledge, they find themselves always in difficulties, always uncertain, and consequently not equipped to adapt themselves to, or battle with, the problems of every day existence.

Not that I would suggest, however, that the Socialist is able to entirely avoid the effects of the economic system; but generally speaking, he has a better chance because he is conscious of the cause.

Now there are many millions of discontents in the ranks of the working class. We meet them everywhere. Some of them call themselves Humanitarians, some Bolshevists, some Secularists, some Prohibitionists, some Home Rulers, and so on.

The Socialist, claiming that Socialism is the only hope of the workers, and that all else is illusion, is a wholesome distinction. And now to examine and explain the nature of the work of the Socialist Party.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain sets out in its Declaration of Principles that the emancipation of tbs working class must be the work of the working class itself. Special stress is laid on this—the subject matter of this article —because one of the greatest obstacles with which the workers are confronted is the idea, fostered by unscrupulous individuals and parties claiming to champion the cause of the working class, that leaders are necessary. So deep-rooted is this demoralising notion that we are called upon at our public meetings, when stating our claim to be the only Socialist party, to name some of our leaders. Our innocent reply that we have no leaders is met with the incredulous retort: “But you must have leaders!" The word “leaders" implies not only those who lead but those, who are led. Now only those require, or suffer themselves to be, led who cannot see the way for themselves, and naturally, those who cannot see the way for themselves will not be able to see whether they are being led in the right direction or the wrong. Labour leaders, therefore, are able to render to the capitalists the very valuable service of misleading the workers. This is why the ruling class bestow praises and titles upon labour leaders, and entreat the workers to follow their wise (!) leadership. The first work of the Socialist Party, therefore, is to spread abroad among the workers that political knowledge which alone can put them beyond the lure and treachery of leaders by showing them clearly the object they have to attain and the road they have to travel to attain it.

Now for a closer examination of the nature of that work. Firstly, applicants applying for membership in the Socialist Party of Great Britain have to affirm their acceptance and understanding of the Object and Principles of the party as contained on the application form. If the Party are not satisfied that the applicant sufficiently understands oar position, it is suggested that the application be deferred and that the would-be member should attend our meetings (ALL meetings of the S.P.G.B. are open to the public), read our literature, and get assistance with his or her difficulties from any member of our organisation. When the applicant has shown that his knowledge of the Socialist position is such as to fit him for membership of the S.P.G.B. his application is accepted.

It is now that the real Socialist work of the member begins. The unit of organisation is the branch, and it is inside the branch that an outlet is found for working-class abilities in the true sense of the word. There are the Rules to be read and understood. This done, the new member gets a more complete understanding of the nature of the activities of the branch and of the organisation as a whole—and this understanding can obviously only come about as the result of regular attendance at branch and party meetings.

Now a desire generally begins to manifest itself on the part of the new member to participate more directly in the work of the branch and of the party as a whole. It then becomes a question for the member to decide in what particular direction his abilities would be most useful. By close association with the branch and the party the member soon decides upon a choice of work. The principal branches of the party work (executed entirely by the voluntary labour of the members) consists of the following : Clerical work at Head Office; organisation of sale and distribution of party literature; work of the various sub-committees e.g., the Editorial Committee, whose duty it is to arrange for articles for the Party Organ, publication of leaflets, pamphlets, manifestoes, etc. Then there is the collection of cuttings from newspapers and periodicals of all kinds and from all sources, home and foreign, and their arrangement in suitable order for future reference (this record provides the organisation with facts which enables our speakers and writers to push home their attack upon the capitalist system and to criticise and expose its apologists and defenders); organisation of out door propaganda by area propaganda committees; study classes at the Head Office and in the Branches, where members congregate in order to equip themselves with the knowledge necessary to Socialist propagandists. Finally, there is the Executive Committee, elected at the Annual Conference, and whose duty it is to generally supervise and organise the work of the Party in every sphere.

In these principal spheres of activity various qualifications are needed, and to organise the abilities and resources of our class is the work which confronts the Socialist Party. I would here dwell upon the qualifications of the Socialist propagandist, one of the highest qualifications to which a Socialist can aspire. This entails unremitting labours, in order to acquire a sound knowledge of Marxian economics, history, sociology, trade unionism, and so on, to effectively defend the party’s position at all times and in all places from the attacks of our opponents; also in order to give a clear presentation of our case and a correct and vigorous criticism of current affairs in the world of politics and labour.

These are the main streams of activity of the Socialist Party and its band of Socialist workers. There are, of course, the various duties of the officials of the branches, who organise and carry on the work of the branches and their local activities.

The writer set out to explain the nature of the work of the Socialist Party. He has attempted briefly to do so. To-day, more than ever, the unorganised should ask themselves whether they are prepared and fitted to engage in the great historical mission of the working class—the emancipation of all mankind from the vile conditions of existence imposed upon them by the system of private ownership in means of living.

To those, therefore, who understand our Object and Principles we extend an earnest invitation to. come forward and assist in the efforts we are making to build up a vigorous and healthy Socialist organisation, bound together by a common understanding, with the tie of class-conscious solidarity, determined to wage uncompromising war on all who bar our way toward the goal of our ambition—the establishment cf the Socialist Co-operative Commonwealth, where poverty will give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.

“Rise like lions from your slumbers,
In unvanquishable numbers.
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep hath fall’n on you:
Ye are many, they are few.”

O. C. I.

The Mongol or the Hun (1939)

From the September 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Japanese Ministry of War acts in accordance with a certain policy which, if persisted in, must eventually lead to a clash between East and West; the capitalisms of the two hemispheres are heading for a conflict in which a thousand millions may be embroiled. We are within measurable distance of the time when “Asia for the Asiatics” will become more than a battle-cry; the slaves of the East are shortly to be pitted against the slaves of the West, and millions are likely to perish on both sides, utterly unconscious of the fact that the real issue involved is, which group of exploiters shall have predominance in Asia, the yellow or the white?

The Japanese Ministry of War is a clear-eyed power. This is how they size the situation up—the quotation is obtained from one of their publications which circulate amongst the military clique.

  “From the point of view of the masses which represent the majority of consumers in the entire world, it is desirable that products should be available on the most favourable conditions possible. From this point of view, a country so recently industrialised as Japan enjoys the great advantage of a lower standard of living, whereas countries such as England or the Netherlands are in an unfavourable position. The English and the Dutch favour a small controlling minority in industry and sell their goods at a high price to the coloured population of the colonies: this procedure is contrary to the interests of the masses and to a spirit of fairness. Economic conditions in our Empire, on the other hand, correspond perfectly with the interests of the masses all over the world so that we must, logically become predominant in economic competition. If English and Dutch competition should persist in their methods of unlawful competition, the Empire will eventually be obliged to use armed force so that a spirit of fairness may triumph."

The basis of the quarrel in the Far East is therefore a conflict between two different groups of exploiters; it is as a result of the fierceness of this competition that the dictatorship became more ruthless. In following this development we shall be able to perceive how state capitalism, Fascism and Nazi-ism evolve as a result of the struggle going on amongst the exploiters.

To quote again from the Ministry of War: —

   “We must consider that the commercial drive of England and other countries will be intensified in future. It is easy to predict that the Powers will fling themselves on to the Chinese market in order to offset the difficulties into which the Western world has been plunged. We must therefore reorganise and control the policies governing our foreign trade in the shape of national concentration; private interests must no longer be considered, and at the same time we must decide on counter policies which enable us to meet the crises by finding new markets and recovering our old market in China."

Now we will see what those counter-policies are. Enough has been written to show that the State decided to cease consideration of the interests of private capitalists: it was forced to do so. We will continue and endeavour to show by means of the next quotation how the ideology of a dictatorship is born.

   “It is desirable that the people should abandon their individualistic economic conceptions; instead, they should recognise the importance of a collective economy; they should work towards the creation of an economic system which will rapidly realise the Empire’s ideal. The State should rigidly control the entire national economy."

Here we have an explanation of the appearance of so-called “National Socialism" in not only Japan but Germany, Russia, Italy and, if we look closely, we shall find the same thing developing in the United States, France and even Great Britain.

We have arrived at that stage in capitalist development when the State is compelled to take charge in all advanced countries; the people now exist solely for the benefit of the State.

It is an indication of the fact that capitalism is moving towards its end, much in the same manner as Engels stated it would in his “Landmarks of Scientific Socialism."

What part will Russia play in the scrap that is pending, will she go with the East or with the West? Russia's foreign policy, like that of her rivals, is determined by conditions.

Lenin once stated that he was the logical successor of Peter the Great; Peter personified the spirit of the Russian people, as Lenin did. Bolshevism is simply pan-Slavism with a red shirt on.

“A burning thirst for conquest is as prevalent a passion in Russia as democratic ambition is in the free states of Western Europe. This passion is the unseen spring which, while it retains the Russians in the strictest discipline, unceasingly impels their united forces against all adjoining states.

"The national energy, which is as great as the national territory, rarely wastes itself in disputes about domestic grievances. For all internal evils, how great soever, the Russians hope to find a compensation, and more than a compensation, in the conquest of the world."

The above statement was made by a celebrated writer in, 1902, and it then expressed the current view of Russia's policy. In 1904, Arthur Diósy, Chairman of Council of the Japan Society in London, writing in his book, “The New Far East,” said: ” Russia first, and the rest nowhere?” ”That is the idea implanted in every Russian mind, the wish embedded in every Russian heart, but not in the manner of theoretical Chauvinism, that sentimental patriotism that makes the people of every great nation desire to see their’s placed first amongst the Powers; no, this Russian patriotism is more of the ardent, irresistible, Japanese type; it is more than a national feeling, because it is a religion.”

In 1920 the Bolshevik armies were held up by the Polish troops and smashed at the gates of Warsaw.

Russia has since modernised her industrial system and will soon be ready to resume her march to warm water ports and the open sea.

The foreign policy of a country is the outcome of her geographical position and her material interests: so long as the wages system prevails in the land of the Soviets, Russia will act internationally much on the same lines as she did in the days of Czardom.

Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Poland are well aware of her real intentions; the embrace of the bear that walks like a man is apt to be lasting; the above mentioned nations know by experience the fatal results of contact.

The quibbling going on about the Russian alliance is largely due to a desire on the part of Britain to avoid it, if possible; by Britain I mean the present Government: Stalin is demanding too high a price.

Russia would gain much if her rivals in Europe were engaged in slaughtering one another; she would then be free to act in the Far East.

Russia is playing a strong hand in the Chino- Japanese war.

The Chinese Communists are under the control of Moscow and carry out the instructions of the Soviet Government.

The policy is to eulogise the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, at every opportunity, but to disintegrate his party, the Kuomingtang.

At every place where they have influence this policy is energetically pursued: the leader is lauded to the skies but the Party to which he belongs is mercilessly attacked with the idea of undermining it. It is thought by the Communists that when Chiang dies, or retires, the Communist Party can replace the Kuomingtang: in this way Russia hopes to control to some extent the future destinies of China.

The foreign policy of Britain is largely determined by one word—India. Japan now threatens India and all observant minds know that the major conflicts of the future will be fought out on the shores of the Pacific.

Should Germany and Italy fight Britain and France, European capitalism would be very much weakened when it was over, whichever side won. Japan or Russia could then launch the East against the West with every hope of success.

The masses of India joined to those of China, armed by Russia, Japan, or others, could then soon make a rag-shop of Europe. This is what the ruling class of Britain, who take a long view, are beginning to perceive; they want to make terms with Italy and Germany, so that when the major clash comes, European capitalism will speak as one. It is essential that those forces amongst the ruling class making for a European coalition should be taken into consideration, otherwise the diplomacy of our masters cannot be understood.

Whatever they do or say, nothing can save their system; the wheel of the capitalist machine now whirls over the whole world, the markets get relatively narrower and the powers of production wider: war cannot avert the economic crisis or enable capitalism to run on an even keel.

The Japanese, Chinese, Hindoo, or Malay wage-slaves have the same troubles as ourselves: they look at life much the same as we do: they endure similar agonies when on the job and suffer in a similar way when unemployed.

They have imbibed the message of Socialism to some extent, but, like the working class of Britain, many are still made to move and act in capitalism’s interest because of the blinkers of nationalism.

It is our duty to do our best to get them to realise that we have no quarrel with them, that their oppressors and ours are of the same class.

The proletariat come into their own when they have the will to be free and the courage to extend the hands of fraternity.

Charles Lestor