Political Notes: Bad Timing (1981)

The Political Notes Column from the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bad Timing

How many more ex-Labour ministers can we expect to denounce the policies they supported when they were in office?

Tony Benn, as we all know, is about the most prominent in this: he makes no secret of the disenchantment which he says he suffered but claims that he was persuaded not to resign by his constituency party.

Now Benn is getting some competition, the latest being former Agriculture Minister John Silkin. Speaking to his constituency party in Deptford (Guardian 29/6/81), Silkin “ . . . declared himself opposed to voluntary as well as statutory incomes policies and accused Mr. Benn and Mr. Healey of remaining chained to discredited ideas.”

And as if that was not enough to prove his sudden enlightenment, Silkin “ . . . insisted that there was no evidence to show that inflation was caused by wages, least of all in a low wage economy like Britain's.”

Is the man, we may well ask, quite well? Of course he is frantically vying for attention with his more famous rivals in his seemingly doomed attempt to win Labour’s deputy leadership, but there must be limits to the lengths he will go.

The last Labour government, like all its predecessors—like the present Tory government and all its predecessors—was continually absorbed by its efforts to impose, by one means or another, what was called an incomes policy but which was actually a fight against wage rises. This battle to lower working class living standards was justified by Labour ministers on the grounds that higher wages caused inflation.

Of course that was—and is—nonsense but truth is always the first casualty in any government's war against working class interests. Is then Silkin’s abrupt concern for reality a case of bad timing? Or bad memory? Or just desperation at the prospect of failure in his attempt to lead the same party he now so fundamentally criticises.

We ought to be told.


Too Simple

Left wing, progressive, enlightened clergymen, with ready made instant remedies to all of capitalism’s woes are among the persistent targets for the barbs of right wing, reactionary Daily Telegraph satirist Peter Simple.

Of course Peter Simple is only joking, isn’t he? Only turning out word caricatures? Nobody like his Dr. Spacely-Trellis really exists, frothing out their compound of wet reformism and denatured religion, do they?

Well yea, actually they do and some of them emerged into the light of day with their tedious, predictable comments on the recent city riots. Like the Reverend Norwyn Denny (who, in spite of having a name like that, is not an invention of Peter Simple) leader of the Methodist Church in Merseyside.

Speaking in a debate in the recent Methodist Governing Conference, Denny blamed the riots onto the police, “this government”, the Home Secretary. The Conference responded by demanding a plan which, modestly, called for more policemen from “ethnic minorities”, better housing, less unemployment, a fight against racism . . . Need we go on?

There is a danger, in these troublous times, that normally peaceable but perceptive workers will feel like staging their own riot against soppy reformists who naggingly propound the same weary remedies whenever capitalism spews up some of its characteristic problems.

These remedies are usually phrased in terms dramatic enough to persuade their hapless targets that they have some relevance to the problems. In fact they evade the central point that social sores like racism, police harassment, urban decay and poverty are troubling us regardless of pious decisions from reformist conferences. They can be abolished, but only by getting rid of their cause—the capitalist social system.

But that seems too difficult a concept for people like Norwyn Denny to grasp. Or perhaps it is (no pun intended) too simple.


Sits Vac

When the last General Secretary of the Labour Party retired, it was said that there was a long queue of his colleagues at Transport House, all waiting to shake him warmly by the throat.

This gentle tale might be borne in mind by anyone thinking of applying for the job, when it comes up in a few months’ time. This is a bad time in Labour Party affairs to be trying to organise them from the top.

So any lefty-unemployed-manager type who is desperate enough to get off the dole queue to apply for Ron Hayward's job had better look pretty closely at the terms of reference.

Of job satisfaction there can be little. If the workers elect another Labour government (and helping that to happen will be a prime concern of the new General Secretary) Labour Party headquarters, will need to be extra busy as a factory of deception.

One priority will be to excuse policies which arc daily repressing the very people whose interests Labour claim to represent. Another will be to operate a sort of Orwellian memory hole in which inconvenient history becomes lost and a Ministry of Truth where they rewrite the dictionary so that poverty means abundance, war means peace, repressive, parasitic, conflict-ridden capitalism means free, cooperative, harmonious socialism.

If anyone can work their way through that without wanting to blow their brains out for very shame, the wage is enough above average to offer some consolation. Twenty thousand pounds a year is a fair amount of money but it comes with responsibility for one of capitalism’s dirtier jobs so it is probably considered well spent.

Those concerned with truth, or human welfare, or with abolishing capitalism and replacing it with the sane, secure world of socialism need not apply.


Chinese Take On

The illusion that the people of China enjoy a socialist society is gradually fading. The Chinese State Council has been introducing a series of reforms which seem not only to allow for a more efficient exploitation of the Chinese working class, but also to abandon general policies which encouraged ideas of equality.

For the past twenty years most Chinese workers have been on an eight-grade wage scale which offered a rate based on time, irrespective of output. So not only was there the sharp division between the wealthy bureaucratic capitalist class and the exploited working class, but there was also state-graded inequality of workers. But somehow there was seen to be a notion of egalitarianism in paying every worker the same wage (which, like all wages, would amount to less than the value of what the worker had produced) regardless of his output.

Now. the Chinese State Council, in an attempt to increase the exploitation of its working class—or to use its expression, “improve productivity”—has decided that millions of workers will not be paid by the day or week but by the amount of goods they produce. Reporting the new measures the Chinese Workers’ Daily actually complained that despite bonus schemes introduced after the Cultural Revolution “there is still a tendency towards egalitariansim” and that “we ( a bit of a giveaway as to who actually writes the Daily Worker!) throw a lot of money into bonuses without adequate results.” (our emphasis)

Letter: Questions (1981)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Questions

Dear Editors

I would like to know how the SPGB would solve the fighting in Northern Ireland with better results than the Tories have had; also how would you deal with the Scottish wish for independence when you come to power.

How many SPGB candidates are MPs and how long do you believe the capitalist system will exist. When the SPGB come to power will there be changes in working hours and leisure hours, and what would happen to charity organisations and fund raising appeals?

Davye Barton

Par, Cornwall

Reply:

The SPGB is basically different from the parties of capitalism, who seek power on promises to deal with problems like the Irish troubles; who cadge for votes on issues like Scottish independence and who in practice fail to solve those very problems. We stand for a social system which can only be established by the political action of workers who understand socialism and the need for a revolution to end capitalism. There is no room in a socialist party for policies of trying to reform capitalism. At present workers concern themselves with matters such as Scottish independence under the delusion that it is possible to run capitalism, with some alterations, in their interests. In fact it is not possible and all experience bears this out; by taking sides in these disputes workers are supporting one section of the ruling class against another.

No socialist candidate has ever been elected to parliament. In the last election 78 workers voted for the SPGB candidate in Islington South—a sad measure of working class understanding of socialism. We can’t set an actual time on it of course, but capitalism will last for as long as that lack of understanding persists.

There is today a distinction between work and leisure time because under capitalism the vast majority of people have to get their living through employment. The latter is measured in time because it is the process in which workers expend the labour power they have sold to employers by the hour, minute, day and so on. When socialism is established there will be no employers and employed; people will work freely and in co-operation to produce whatever society needs, and all will have free access to that wealth. Work, then, will be pleasurable, creative activity inseparable from leisure.

Socialism will be a moneyless society. The social scars of capitalism, such as poverty, which are sometimes very slightly soothed through charity, will no longer exist. There will therefore be no need for charities. 

Editors

50 Years Ago: Labour Government Fiasco (1981)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have just witnessed the inglorious exit of the second ‘Labour’ Government after more than two uneasy years of office—two years of deserted principles, political bargaining, and cowardice. During that time the cherished theories of the Labour Party have been tried, and every one found wanting, and abandoned. The Labour Party was to be a “high wage” party. More than four million workers have had their wages reduced since Mr. MacDonald became Prime Minister in June 1929. The Government confessed its inability to prevent the reductions, and indeed played an active part in some of them—notably those affecting its own employees. It was confident that unemployment could be reduced by means of its schemes of development. Yet we have seen unemployment mount to a record figure, 2,700,000; the percentage of insured workers on the register equalling the highest previous figure (23%), attained under Mr. Lloyd George’s government in 1921.

[From an editorial The Great Fiasco—Contemptible ‘Labour’ Government, published in the Socialist Standard, September 1931.]

From the stars to socialism (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the beginning god did not create the earth. What probably happened was that about 5-6,000 million years ago, all the mass and energy of the Universe was concentrated in a single great globe which exploded into a cloud of fundamental particles.

A few hundred million years later the temperature had dropped from hundreds of millions of degrees to below zero and gravity between particles merged them together. The cloud broke up into billions of units that became galaxies, all travelling outwards and becoming independently denser. The increased density resulted in concentrations which raised temperatures as stars formed.

The secondary condensations became planets and satellites which established themselves by gravitational attraction in families or planetary systems about their comparatively massive central stars. We shall concentrate our attention on the galaxy Milky Way, and the star we label the Sun. There, radiation pressure drew the large hydrogen envelopes away from the terrestrial planets, leaving their rocky cores exposed. Hundreds of millions of years later the planet Earth possessed an atmosphere of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, water vapour and carbon dioxide which combined to form hydrocarbons and their simpler formations. Ultra-violet rays from the Sun provided energy for the reactions that formed amino-acids, which themselves combined to form complex proteins which are the building blocks of living matter.

Finally, self-contained and self-reproducing bodies evolved, at first one-celled organisms. From these simple forms developed all plant and animal life. Homo Sapiens (humans), however, did not appear until sometime between 25 million and 1 million years ago, when there existed many forms intermediate between ape and human. By about 500,000 years ago an early species of human, the Heidelberg species, had appeared.

These people were in existence, in either Africa or Asia, at least 250,000 years ago and had reached Europe by about 150,000 years ago. This species was very similar to human beings today. Their brains were the same size as ours, though their bones were considerably heavier. In other words there was little biological evolution between that period and the modern day.

From roughly half-a-million years ago to about twelve thousand years ago, humankind was a food-gatherer, constituting a gathering economy, also termed paleolithic savagery. No class monopoly of the means of living existed then, and the period represented a good 98 per cent of human existence on the planet. Then, sometime between twenty and twelve thousand years ago human beings, most specifically in the Near East, actively and co-operatively increased their food supply by cultivating plants and breeding animals. This was a food-producing economy, also known as neolithic barbarism.

Then—about 8,000 years ago—came an economic revolution, particularly in the alluvial valleys of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus. Farmers produced a surplus, which supported an urban population of craftsmen, merchants, priests, officials and clerks. Class society was born. The next two thousand years saw the Bronze Age, so called because copper and bronze were the only metals used for tools and weapons. The social surplus, primarily created from subsistence agriculture, was concentrated in the hands of priests and officials.

Then followed the Early Iron Age which, thanks to a cheap method of producing wrought iron, popularised metal equipment at a time when the alphabet popularised writing, previously reserved to a few privileged clerks. Financial transactions w'ere aided by the circulation of coined money (about 800 BC). The social surplus, now derived from specialised farming, mainly supported a class of merchants, financiers and capitalist farmers. The next major economic revolution in history was feudalism, which tied to the soil the previously-nomadic cultivator, now a peasant, yet liberated the latter from chattel slavery. The guild system secured to the artisan, as well as to the merchant, not only freedom but economic status. Agriculture became more intensive and saw the arrival of water power; a population boom resulted. With the discovery of the New World and of seaways to India and the Far East, Atlantic Europe had opened a world market. Capitalism developed, sucking the peasantry from the rural economy into the industrialising cities, turning the wealth-producers into the wage-workers we are today.

From the time the Galaxy was formed to the emergence of life, to the appearance of intelligent life in the form of human beings, change was continuous. Our species crept out of their caves to challenge the threatening world and in a flash came to fly through the clouds in machines, communicate across the world in an instant, and travel to the Moon. Yet as long as we are bound as a majority to slave for a minority’s capital, we shall never realise our potential. We can have a decent, healthy, comfortable world, yet our very social organisation creates endless miseries and poverty and—final worry—a weapon that can destroy the planet.

Levar.

Message for school leavers (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do you feel about the school year which is just ending? “Stand up . . . Sit down. . . Do up your tie . . . Don’t run in the corridors . . . ". Did you find it daft to traipse into School Assembly to sing hymns to the skies and then file out into a history lesson to be told about how superstitious they were in the Middle Ages? Were you bored by having to learn the French for ‘My house is small' and ‘My pockets are empty’?

It is while you are at school that you are supposed to learn how to behave when you ‘grow up’. You are being prepared for a certain lifestyle which awaits you when you leave. If you can get a job when you leave school, your boss will want you to be obedient to him. He will expect you not to challenge what he says. At school they will try and teach you to obey a whole set of rules and not to dare question why the rules were made. They want to get you in the habit of obedience so that you will not be likely to start asking awkward questions later on in life.

At school you must wear the correct uniform, the same as all of the other pupils. In this way you are conditioned to see yourself as someone who is no different from all the other pupils. Together, you are just one large unit of people, you must look the same, behave the same and have the same general ideas as everyone else. They are trying to mould you into just another brick in the wall.

Outside of school the usual punishment for people who break the law is deprivation of liberty. You are put in prison. If you have no spare money but take food from a shop anyway, because you are hungry, you can be locked in a cell like an animal. Schools try to train us to accept the idea of being deprived of liberty for breaking rules, by punishing rule-breakers with ‘detentions’.

Almost the whole of school life is spent being made to do things you don’t really want to do. Eventually, if you are not strong-willed enough to resist, the process will grind you down. Then you will have been well prepared to spend the rest of your days swimming with the tide, and accepting all sorts of problems without any stroppy opposition, because — like the teachers say — “that’s just the way things are”.

At a first glance there are certain aspects of life which seem absurd or terrible, but which most people never make a fuss about. In order that these strange things can carry on without coming under attack, people have to be taught to look at the problems in a very distorted way, and most of the teaching is done in schools.

From time to time wars break out and we arc told we must go and slaughter millions of The Enemy, the French, the Germans, the Russians, whoever they happen to be. If Britain declared war on Russia tomorrow it would not be because British people had fallen out with Russian people. We do not know Russian people, most of us can’t even speak their language. In fact, wars are really fought over the arguments of a few wealthy and powerful people, but it us who have to bear the brunt of all the killing and destruction. Yet, most people are leaving school believing that in the event of a war it would be right to go and murder the enemy of ‘Britain’.

Again, we are living in a world where a small minority are able to enjoy great wealth while the majority of us are generally hard up. It is obvious that we could produce enough for everyone to have what he or she wants, but we are told we only get what we deserve. How did the very wealthy people get what they’ve got? If you start asking questions like this in school you will probably be sneered at as a “communist” and if you persist in asking unsuitable questions you may be branded a “disruptive element”.

This may have been your last year at school and finding someone to buy your abilities for a wage or salary might not be easy, as there are over 2½ million people looking for jobs. Thatcher can’t solve the unemployment problem, she doesn’t even seem particularly bothered. But neither could a Labour government. In fact, the last Labour government was thrown out of office in 1979 after the number of unemployed had risen to over 1½ million while it had power. The problem is that so long as we all agree to run Industry for a profit, then no boss will want to employ us in a time of ‘economic crisis’ if he can’t actually sell his goods to make a profit.

If the school has done its job properly you will ditch your uniform when you leave only to clothe yourself with another uniform: the invisible uniform of the School of Social Conformity. This uniform is handy because it can be worn quite comfortably over even the most bizarre of the latest rebel fashions, and will slip nicely over political badges like ‘I Didn’t Vote Tory’ and ‘Save the Whale’. The School of Social Conformity has many mottos including “Rich and Poor, Forward Together”, “Let’s Follow Leaders” and “Rely on Reforms”.

If you have refused to swallow the teachings of the school you may decide to simply disobey some of the present laws but this is not a solution to the problems you face and you run the risk of ending up behind bars. On the other hand you may decide, as Socialists have done, that the only way for us to get a society fit to live in, is to get a majority to change the whole set-up. You might be going back to school next September to be put on the anvil once again for the hammer to try and knock you into the right shape. How much you resist is up to you, and remember, they cannot stop you from thinking questioningly about anything they teach you. If you have got awkward questions, they cannot stop you finding out the answers for yourself.

Gary Jay

Computers under socialism (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism market forces hold production together in a haphazard and inhuman fashion. The complexity and uncertainty inherent in the profit system make methodical and rational organisation impossible. But in socialism the nature of the task of production changes: demand (or needs) become comparatively predictable and stable, but increases in volume. The multiplication in competing productive units and the vast financial, legal and governmental organisations fall away. We are left with the task of providing for many times present consumption of roughly the present variety of products—a task simplified to the extent that a rational approach is possible, but one still too complex for unassisted human management. What is required is a system of communication through the entire productive system, capable of sensing and reacting to needs, planning and monitoring production, reflecting, recording and analysing every event. It will co-ordinate but not control, recommend and comment but not dictate, being subordinate but complementary to human decision-making.

The latest advances in computer technology facilitate such a communication system. The incredible “number crunching” power of computers for scientific, engineering and design applications may or may not be important in socialism, but paradoxically it is in the area of commercial data processing that there are trends towards the sort of system we would need to set up.

The earliest commercial computers were employed almost exclusively in financial systems — the first commercial machine in the UK, the LEO I (1951), worked out the payroll for the Lyons tea shop chain. Each system was distinct and peculiar to the organisation for which it was set up. Each required forms to be filled in, punched onto cards or paper tape, processed to update a file in a specific format usually recorded on magnetic tape, and generated miles of computer print-out. The computer instructions for carrying out this processing were very “low level” that is, they were simply memoric codes for actual machine instructions and were therefore very long, detailed and complex, and required skilled programming.

As the application of computers extended into areas such as stock and production control, reservations and distribution (as well as into more sophisticated financial systems, particularly banking) radically different techniques were developed. Forms, punched cards and computer print-out gave way to video terminals, magnetic tape files to disc files, rigid serial organisation of data to random-access and database management systems, low-level languages to high-level English-type languages, detailed specific systems to general purpose “packaged” software.

Our minds have long since stopped boggling at such wonders as 64,000 bits (binary digits) on a memory chip or a processor capable of five million instructions each second or a magnetic disc holding 1,200 million bytes (letters or numbers) a spindle. The really significant advances are not in computer hardware but in software and in teleprocessing, which now make possible systems of computers distributed world-wide, capable of “talking” to one another over data networks linked by satellites. The latest software can take all the hard work out of programming and require the minimum of instructions in languages designed for non-technical people to use. “Friendly” interfaces with computers such as voice recognition and special synthesis and handwriting interpretation have been developed.

Many of these advances sit uneasily with the present economic system. There is much concern over the privacy and security of data crossing national boundaries. There are still commercial difficulties about the agreement to standardise procedures for access to public data networks. In a socialist society there would be no such problems this is one area of technology which could almost have evolved with socialism in mind.

Chris Marsh

Obituary: Sid Pettit (1981)

Obituary from the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Regretfully we have to report the death from cancer of our comrade Sid Pettit of West London branch, in late March. Sid had a quiet and unassuming manner and looked much younger than his 70-odd years He joined the Party shortly before the second world war, becoming a member of the then Kingston Branch. Although by trade a printer, Sid transferred to engineering during the war and remained in that occupation until his retirement.

In his later years he was a member of the Executive Committee, but he will probably be best remembered for the valuable help he gave with the production of letterpress printing at Head Office. Shown a printing machine of any sort, he never forgot his earlier training and skill. While others (including the writer) tried to emulate him, he set to work and got the job done. The machine which had been donated to the Party must have been a very early descendant of Caxton’s. Nevertheless Sid would motorcycle to Clapham on a Sunday afternoon and set to work, producing completed leaflets, handbills or circulars.

He will be missed by us all. We extend our sympathy to his family.

E. Guy

Marx, according to the Telegraph (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Earlier this year the Daily Telegraph carried an article by Robert Miller entitled "The Unacceptable Face of Marx". In this article Karl Marx was depicted as a racist, a sexist, a proto-Nazi and an advocate of revolutionary terror. Although the Socialist Party of Great Britain has no sacred texts and makes heroes of no-one, we do hold that Marx has made a significant contribution to humanity’s understanding of the world and we have always been prepared to defend him when his views have been distorted or unjustifiably belittled.
  We therefore wrote to the editor of the Daily Telegraph asking that, in the interests of fairness and objectivity, he publish a reply to Miller's article from the SPGB. This request was refused, on the grounds that our reply was sent too long after the appearance of the article. This is true; the article was published on April 19 and our reply was sent on July 20 but we wonder, from our experience of the press, whether had we been prompter, we would have been given space. We doubt it.
   At all events, we think it worthwhile to publish a slightly edited version of our letter to the Daily Telegraph so that our readers can judge for themselves how acceptable was Marx’s face.

#    #    #    # 

On April 19 the Daily Telegraph contained a "Personal View" of Karl Marx written by Robin Miller. It portrayed Marx as a racist: a proto-Hitler figure who wished to sec "reactionary peoples" such as the Slavs physically annihilated and who hated Jews to the extent of viewing capitalism and all tyranny as a Jewish conspiracy. It claims that he considered negroes as “degenerate human beings” and advocated the nationalisation of women. It ended by making Marx a supporter of revolutionary violence. We should like to set the record straight.

It is true that in 1848-49 Marx and (in particular) Engels did speak of “reactionary peoples” who were destined to disappear from the face of history. But all their comments and advice on “revolution” at this time refer not to the socialist revolution but to the bourgeois-democratic revolution which was then being attempted in Germany. Marx and Engels thought this should be supported as it would establish capitalism as the dominant European system and would quickly be followed by a workers’ revolution. As their model for this bourgeois revolution they took the French Revolution, especially the Jacobin phase after 1793 with its emphasis on revolutionary wars, terror and a strong centralised state. Their remarks on “reactionary people" applied to the people mainly Slavic speaking - who did not support the bourgeois revolution but who lined up behind, or allowed themselves to be used by, its opponents. Needless to say. they were to “disappear” not by being physically liquidated but by being absorbed and assimilated into the German nation-state.

Taken in its context this is the meaning of the statement about “reactionary' peoples" disappearing “from the face of the earth” which Robin Miller considers worthy of Hitler and which was not in fact made, as Mr Miller confidently asserts, by Marx but by Engels (in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 13 January 1849).

The “national question” is one of the issues on which socialists totally disagree with Marx, but we can understand why he regarded nationalism as a progressive force in nineteenth century Europe. He saw it as helping the development of capitalism at the expense of feudalism. What he failed to see was how powerful a reactionary and anti-socialist force nationalism was to become once it had helped capitalism to become the dominant world system. Looking back now we can see that it was a mistake for socialists to have encouraged it in its early stages.

Marx the anti-Semite is a more common criticism than Marx the Slav-hater but is equally baseless. Marx’s writings on the Jewish Question from which Miller quotes are a philosophical critique of the Jewish religion and in any event support the political emancipation of the Jews — the granting of the same civil rights to Jews as to Christians within capitalism. Modern socialists too are critical of the Jewish religion just as they are of every other religion, but this by no means makes them anti-Semites and supporters of fascism, any more than criticism of the Catholic religion makes us supporters of Ian Paisley.

The passage about “every tyrant backed by a Jew" comes not, as Miller implies, from the Jewish Question but from an unsigned article in the New York Herald Tribune of 4 January 1856, which was not written by Marx but has been wrongly attributed to him.

It is true that in his private letters Marx sometimes used a language quite unacceptable for a socialist and which we can only condemn. To call Lassalle a “Jewish nigger” is quite inexcusable (even if Marx was something of a “Jewish nigger” himself, being descended on both sides from long lines of rabbis and, for his dark skin, being nicknamed “the Moor").

His view of blacks is in fact far different from that portrayed by Miller. Marx did read Pierre Tremaux’s Origin and Transformation of Man and Other Animals (1865) and did say, quite mistakenly, that Trcmaux had taken "a very significant step beyond Darwin”. But this was not in support of Tremaux’s supposed argument that negroes were “degenerate human beings" (what Tremaux actually said was that modern negroes had degenerated from a higher race of negroes) but for his view of the influence of geological elements (especially the soil) on human development which Marx considered interesting for a materialist explanation of evolution.

As to Marx’s attitude to the emancipation of the slaves in America, he was an enthusiastic supporter of this and, from a retrospective socialist point of view, a too enthusiastic supporter of Abraham Lincoln and the North in the American Civil War. (The socialist attitude is that this was a war between two sections of the ruling class in America, in which the working class had no interest in taking sides and certainly not in killing one another.)

Marx’s support of Sir Henry Maine’s quoted statement about “the separation between the Aryan races and races of other stocks” is not particularly significant either. It merely reflects the confusion which existed at that time, in scientific circles, between language and “race”. There is no suggestion that those who speak Aryan languages (who include by the way the majority of the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent black people) were superior to those who speak non-Aryan languages.

Marx was quite opposed to racialism and always insisted that “the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex and race” (1880 preamble drafted by Marx to the programme of a French workers’ party). And if he was opposed to negroes, why did he not object to his daughter marrying Paul Lafargue who, as Mr Miller informs us, “had negro ancestry”.

Marx did indeed have an illegitimate son with his servant. But what has this to do with what Miller terms "extreme male chauvinism”? As to Miller’s claim that Marx advocated the nationalisation of women, the passage he quotes is not Marx’s view but a summary of the view of those Marx himself called “crude communists”, which he roundly condemned (sec the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in Marx’s Early Texts, ed. David McLellan, Oxford, 1971, p. 146).

Finally Marx’s reference to revolutionary terror, which, according to Miller, "makes him still one of the great enemies of civilisation”, is quite definitely not to be taken as the ultimate expression of his views. Indeed it reflects an early immature phase of his thought which, as all serious students of Marx know, is far removed from the attitude he adopted later when he had fully worked out his theory of society. The mature Marx was quite clear, as are socialists today, that where electoral machinery exists a class-conscious majority can use the vote to take over the state preparatory to a changeover from private ownership and commodity production (capitalism) to a system of common (not state) ownership and free access (socialism).

The real “enemies of civilisation” are those forces, from Lenin and the Bolsheviks onwards, who have created their own vulgar forgeries of Marx and in so doing have thickly obscured the important implications for social progress contained in his thought.

Howard Moss

The BBC: A Clumsy cover-up (1976)

From the December 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

A member of the Socialist Party wrote to the BBC about its persistent refusal to allow broadcasting facilities to us. The following reply on behalf of the Director General, dated 18th October, was sent to him.

  You are in fact suggesting that the BBC is biased against the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The answer to that charge is that this is one of a number of very small political organizations, with no members in Parliament and only a very modest number of parliamentary candidates in the field at any General Election. It may from time to time merit some mention on the air on its news value, or when we are doing a programmme about minority political organizations in general, but it is unrealistic to suppose that it will receive anything like the coverage given to the major parties, unless and until it begins to compete with them on an appropriate scale.
  I hope this will explain the position to you and can assure you that there is not, as you seem to suppose, any ‘ban’ on the SPGB being mentioned on the air. The test is purely one of news value.

Yours sincerely, 

Norman Longmate 

Secretariat

What does “from time to time” mean? It conveys, we think, that the SPGB might expect some coverage once a year, perhaps; if that is over-optimistic, once every two or three years. We should like the chance. The facts are as follows. Despite continual representations, the first mention of the SPGB in a BBC programme was made in 1958—fifty-four years after the foundation of the Socialist Party, and thirty-six years after the beginning of broadcasting. This was also the last occasion, and apart from election results the SPGB has not been mentioned on BBC radio or television again between 1958 and 1976. “From time to time” is quite untrue.

What are the programmes about minority organizations in which the SPGB “may merit some mention”? Such programmes have appeared, but we have never once been invited to take part or been mentioned in them. Our exclusion is all the more remarkable when it is from programmes dealing with Marxism. Without referring to correct and incorrect versions of Marxism, the position is that the SPGB has been in existence far longer than any other organizations which makes use of Marx. Yet radio and TV discussions of Marxism and “dissent” have allowed recently-sprung-up groups, some smaller than the SPGB and all lacking MPs, to make statements.

The apparent implication of “news value” is that the BBC prefers trivialities to serious interest and arranges programmes in that frame of mind. Otherwise, there are many respects in which the SPGB is thoroughly newsworthy. In 1974 the 70th anniversary of the Party’s foundation, and an exhibition of material from our archives, were notified to the BBC and the press but ignored by the BBC. (For comparison, in 1953 there was a radio programme on the 60th anniversary of the ILP, a “very small political organization” which has now ceased to exist as a party.)

The SPGB's analysis of Russia from 1917 onwards, our attitudes to the Welfare State and nationalization from the outset, our publication of a pamphlet on the race problem in 1948 might “merit some mention on the air”—but did not get it. Currently, the SPGB can claim to be unique in having over many years shown the fallacies in Keynesian economic doctrines. We have also, alone among commentators on society, consistently rejected the ideas of hereditary inequality allegedly proven by tests now found to have been fraudulent. Our record in countless matters is of a lone voice which turned out to be right, but still not “news value” for the BBC.

The statement that we cannot expect coverage because we are a minority is particularly interesting because it flatly controverts the views of official committees on broadcasting. The Beveridge Committee of 1949, after recommending a “Hyde Park of the air” (Para. 257) went on to state precisely what it had in mind—that opinions should not be kept off the air “either by simple calculation of the numbers who already hold such views or by fear of giving offence to particular groups of listeners. Minorities must have the chance by persuasion of turning themselves into majorities” (Para. 259; our italics). The letter on behalf of the Director General says in effect that he rejects this, and in the BBC run by him minorities shall not have the chance by persuasion of becoming majorities.

We would add that the BBC alone takes this attitude. Earlier this year London Broadcasting allowed our GLC election candidate radio facilities with the other parties. When two SPGB speakers went to LBC for an hour-long programme in September the interviewer asked if it were “really true” that an organization with our reputation and history had never been given “exposure”. And, of course, our companion parties abroad are able to broadcast regularly via the arrangements in their own countries.

It is therefore not surprising that members and supporters of the SPGB should draw conclusions. The BBC’s reply does more to confirm than to rebut them.

Robert Barltrop

Obituary: Cecil Overin (1981)

Obituary from the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are sad to record the passing of Paddington Branch's oldest member — Cecil 'Will' Overin. He was over 90. Joining the Party in 1923, he was one of those who founded the prevent Branch in 1926. His entire Party life revolved around Paddington Branch: he was one of its stalwarts, selling literature. supporting meetings, leafletting. He was not known by many at the centre, and regrettably as the years took their toll, by fewer and fewer of his comrades in the Branch. Meticulous in appearance, somewhat reserved but when one got to know him he was of good humour and fund of knowledge about the early days. Cecil Overin came from Yorkshire, and as a young man 70 years ago had been active with the old Socialist Labour Party.

His life bridged many generations of socialist activity. Not spectacular, unheralded, his was the sort of consistent and dependable work which is the very stuff of the Party. Without it we would not be.

L. S.

Labour Government: the Worst of Illusions! (1974)

From the April 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here we are on the roundabout again. The music’s started and the leader astride his cock-horse bellowing “Coats off!”; all the Miss Lefts holding their Mr. Rights’ hands in ministerial toy cars; the flashing lights and the promise of the Time of Our Lives.

The Labour fair comes every few years, and it’s always the same. It starts with offering the biggest prizes and the highest rides, it ends up broke creeping away in the dark. Then, of course, they will quarrel among themselves: the Bearded Lady wishing she’d never met the coconut-shy man, and the whole lot swearing they’ll have a new leader. But they have to make up in the end — it’s their living, after all. They hatch a new programme and get different music, and eventually the old pitch is won back. And because there are always people who have forgotten the last time or weren’t there, the show swings — for a day or two.

If you think it’s all fun and part of life, et cetera, it isn’t. We pay for this lousy charade. The entrance fee is the toil of our lives; the prize-packets are empty.

★

In The Observer on 3rd March, under the heading “Myths of the Election”, a Professor King proposed and praised the syllogism “I am working class, Labour is for the working class, therefore I am Labour”. The logic is fine; the premise is false. Certainly the Labour Party was built on the blind hope of working men and women that something better than the capitalist system offers could be obtained from the capitalist system. But for those who are not blind, it has done untold harm to the working class. First, by simply administering capitalism (whenever it gets the chance) determinedly to show it can do the same as the Tories. Second and more important, by its debasement of the word Socialism to a hucksters’ slogan — turning the true answer to working-class problems into a synonym for worthless reform and compromise.

The Labour Party is anti-working-class, but let the position be clearly understood. Intentions good or bad do not come into it: indeed, they are determined by capitalism. Some Labour politicians know what they are doing, others do not. Some begin with ideals, others with the desire for a parliamentary career. The forming factor, however, is that Labour sets out to be a governing party — that is, to take on running the capitalist system. Given that, all the failures and “regrettable necessities” follow. Because there is no way capitalism will run except its own way, and whoever tries to direct it is directed by it instead.

Nevertheless, it is impossible not to be appalled by the sheer charlatanism of the Labour Party, the mixture of cunning and stupidity which all its life has characterized it. The world is full of disillusioned former Labourites, slapped down — any time in sixty years — from their belief that some line existed that their party would draw. The prototypes still belong to the first ascent to office in the nineteen-twenties. The "radicals” and “wild men” of 1924 dressing-up to bow and scrape to royalty; the first Labour Housing Minister anxiously disclaiming “real socialism” to profess “real capitalism”. As illustrative as any was Valentine McEntee. Standing on his Saturday-night soap-box he’d twirl his moustache and proclaim that when Labour ruled there would be no House of Lords; and there he lies in the local cemetery — a Lord himself, deceased.

Have times changed? Not at all. It was the Labour Party which won power overwhelmingly in 1945 with the claim “We are socialists, and proud of it” — for one of its leaders, Herbert Morrison, to announce a year later: “The Labour Party does not intend to abolish the profit motive” (speech reported in The Observer, 28.10.46). It was Labour leaders Wilson and Crossman who preened themselves on having kept working-class living standards down:

The fact is that since 1945 the British trade unionist could have enjoyed a far higher wage packet . . . Instead of doing so, however, they exercised extreme wage restraint. This they justified by pointing out to the worker the benefits he enjoyed under the Welfare State — food prices kept artificially low by food subsidies; rents kept artificially low by housing subsidies; rent restriction; and, in addition, the Health Service.

(R. Crossman, Daily Mirror 15.11.55).

I believe that the unions have shown great restraint since the war. In a sellers’ market they could have made and exacted much bigger claims for their members than they have done.

(H. Wilson, House of Commons 25.7.57)

The pride in this cheap-skate achievement was well founded. Under a Labour “wage restraint” policy 1947-51 the cost of living rose 29 per cent., wages by only 22 per cent.

Labour has attracted the pacifist element. It is difficult to see why, except in terms of total misapprehension of the Labour Party’s position. Its record on war and war preparation is indistinguishable from that of the Tories. It has supported capitalism’s wars just as jingoistically, and its government elected in 1950 launched the biggest rearmament drive in history. Labour leaders explained that the working class must suffer in the interests of war preparation:

This new defence programme is going to mean sacrifices from all of us. It will mean postponing for a time a rise in our standard of living.

(E. Shinwell, Minister of Defence, in a broadcast, Feb. 1951)

Let those who profess to be united with us in their resistance to aggression recognize that this resistance involves high costs and great sacrifices for the people of this country.

(H. Wilson, speech, 10.12.50)

The last Labour government promised and gave practical help to the Americans in the Vietnam war. Servicemen were trained and British airfields in the East used as U.S. bases; napalm was manufactured, and British companies sent large consignments of military equipment.

Gaitskell made Labour’s stance clear in a speech to the Vienna Conference in June 1957:

Before 1914 the Socialist International was a pacifist, revolutionary organization. That is neither relevant nor practical today.

(Reynolds’ News 7.6.57)

★

What of the recent Election and the new Labour government? It is worth recalling what the last one did, on the same issues of industrial relations, prices and incomes, and the Common Market. In the attacks on the Torys’ Industrial Relations Act, it appears to have been forgotten that the Labour government’s actions in 1965-66 also stampeded the Left. George Brown’s plan for an Incomes Bill was described by Clive Jenkins as “fundamentally authoritarian and anti-trade union” (Tribune, 17.9.65). Thirty Labour M.P.s abstained from voting on the Prices and Incomes Act of 1966, and the trade-union leader Frank Cousins resigned from the Government.

In the Election Wilson made prices his central issue, promising “a real, a radical, a relevant attack on rising prices”. So it was instructive to see Shirley Williams, immediately on her appointment as Secretary for Prices and Consumer Protection, saying there was little she could do:

Her aim was not so much to reduce prices which was impossible but to moderate the rate of inflation which was expected to rise from 12 to 15 per cent later this year.

(Guardian 7th March; our emphasis)

Did Wilson and his colleagues know it was impossible to reduce prices, when they were asking to be elected? Of course they did. Yet they went mouthing their hypocritical nonsense, trading on the hopes of hard-pushed working people — and on the good name of Socialism.

As for the Common Market, to be in or out makes no difference to working-class fortunes. No doubt most Labour leaders know that too, and look only for whatever political capital is afforded either way. For the sake of this, did rank-and-file Labour members really swallow Enoch Powell’s support, which was not repudiated and apparently worked to help catch votes? In 1964 Wilson described the Powellite M.P. for Smethwick as a “parliamentarv leper” for his racialism. Should he not have said the same to Powell in 1974?

For the record, Wilson supported Britain’s joining the Market in 1960 (“the Six have created a virile, expanding, dynamic community”); opposed it in 1962 (“we are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river”); made it conditional in 1965 and 1966 (“we shall go in if the conditions are right”); became an enthusiast in 1967 (“really effective technological cooperation . . .  is possible only if we are in One Market”); and has now obtained election again by spreading an impression that Labour will get Britain out (and that it matters).

There is a literary phrase: “the willing suspension of disbelief”. That seems to be the condition for supporting Labour. Granted, they could do no better if the utmost probity were their rule — the capitalist system is intractable. But, on the evidence, there must be a willing suspension of disgust too. This is the party no Socialist would join or vote for.

Robert Barltrop

50 Years Ago: "Communists" & the Labour Party (1974)

The 50 Years Ago column from April 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The alleged “Communist” believes in his ability to capture the Labour Party and “lead” it. So he alternately condemns that Party’s present “leaders” and supports them at election times.

He endeavours to justify this attitude by referring to a phrase in the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, to wit — “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties”. In this he shows his lack of logic and historical knowledge.

In the first place the present-day “Communists” do form a separate party and the alleged “Labour” Party has opposed their admission into its ranks. Secondly the phrase quoted above is, in its practical application, “antiquated because”, in Engels' own words, “the political situation has been entirely changed and the progress of history has swept from off the earth” the working class parties referred to. (See Engels’ Preface 1888).

What was the political situation at the time Marx and Engels penned their historic document ? Briefly, the open political arena was confined to the representatives of the various sections of the master-class. The workers were not enfranchised and were reduced to a fight for political elbow room. Under such conditions it was practically impossible for the Communists to form an independent political party.

They stood for the conquest of political power by the workers as the means of achieving the social revolution, but the technical means of this conquest, i.e. the franchise, had yet to be acquired. Hence the Communists supported, in England, the Chartists and similar bodies on the Continent. This in itself is a significant fact which the workers would do well to bear in mind when latter-day “Communists” pretend to ridicule the franchise as a political weapon, what time they are not urging the workers to use it to put in office the traitors of the Labour Party.

Since that day the modern socialist tactics have been both a possibility and a necessity. Nothing now prevents a revolutionary party openly proclaiming its objective and calling upon the workers to organise for its establishment. While, on the other hand, every political party seeks the support of the workers only one party can represent their interests. That party is the Socialist Party.

[From an article “Socialist Tactics” by Eric Boden, in the Socialist Standard, April 1924.]

The Fragmenting Left (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism and nothing less is our aim. Our opponents, “left” though they may be, stand in the way of its achievement. They help to keep the workers confused by presenting as revolutionary and Socialist, their way-out schemes that are no more than reforms to patch up capitalism. We do not doubt their sincerity but are convinced that they, the left, do not understand the problems they are trying to solve. Under capitalism the propertyless wealth-producers and their families suffer poverty . . . whilst the non-producing owners of the means of production enjoy the affluence derived from surplus value created by the workers.

Capitalism involves private property, production for sale with a view to profit, wages, rent, interest and profit. Experience has amply endorsed the proposition that this form of society cannot be made to work in the interest of the wage-earners. The answer to working-class poverty is Socialism. This will involve the means of production being held in common, with democratic control thereof in the interest of society as a whole and production solely for use. There will be no more employers nor employees, no more buying and selling, and no more working for wages.

The Socialist Party came into existence for the sole purpose of winning a majority for Socialism. The case was reviewed in the editorial of this journal for June 1905 and summed up as follows:

  The formation of a new party was rendered imperative by the falling away of the SDF from the paths of political right-doing . . . Looking around them [some members of the SDF] in the political world they saw that organisations of the half-way house character were obtaining a larger measure of support, . . . they set themselves to the task of winning their own organisation to a similar position and to the adoption of a similar line of action.
   In this they were highly successful . . . The founders [of the Socialist Party] were fully alive to the fact that such spade work had to be performed . . .  It is easier to gain adherents to belief in a small palliative reform than to gain them to a new philosophy based upon an understanding of the material foundations of modem industrial slavery. But in the former case the adherents are not adherents for Socialism, in the latter case they are.

The Social Democratic Federation continued its service to political confusion after the formation of the SPGB. It eventually became the British Socialist Party and helped to found the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. During the first world war, Hyndman, the founder and father-figure, was expelled.

An earlier split from the SDF occurred in 1903, when the Socialist Labour Party was formed in Scotland. It was modelled on the SLP of America, a party that came to emphasize the economic side of the class struggle to the detriment of the political. The SLP were very active in the day-to-day struggle in their early years and many of the “Red Clydesiders” came from their ranks. In the SLP scheme of things, all workers engaged in a particular industry would belong to the union covering it, regardless of their trade or profession.

These unions would organize the workers for the task of seizing and holding the means of production by “locking the capitalist out”. The union would then act as the basic unit of organization in the new society. The SLP look upon existing unions as reactionary by virtue of their acceptance of capitalism, their undemocratic organization and leaders who function as “labour lieutenants” of the capitalist class. What they do not understand is that these factors indicate a lack of Socialist consciousness among workers. Nor do they recognise that capitalists play no part in production and are in fact already locked out.

For their emancipation, the working class must capture political power. The perfecting of trade union organization is a Utopian dream; unions are part of the workers’ defensive organization within capitalist society and they naturally have many of the ugly features of that society. The lesson that the SLP and many others have still to learn is that shop floor organization can only palliate, not remove, workers’ problems. Practically nothing has been seen of the SLP in Britain lately. There were a number of resignations, mainly in America during the late 1960's and groups formed to rescue “Industrial Unionism” from a moribund SLP.

The 1914 War shattered the Second International to which the “halfway house” parties had belonged. Nearly all proved to be patriotic, and their internationalism consisted in urging workers to slaughter each other on battlefields. The Bolsheviks had stood out against the war and bitterly criticized those who turned patriot. Yet they took power in Russia and were convinced that capitalism was about to fall. However, the working class stayed loyal to the system that exploits them. They had never given any sign of doing otherwise.

The ranks of the would-be leaders of the working class were split between the followers of the Moscow-dominated Third International and national Labour leaders. Whenever parties of either group got power the consequences for Socialism were grim. The development of state capitalism in Russia and the efforts of Labour to run capitalism were mistaken for Socialism and added further confusion to be overcome.

By the early ’thirties two minority Labour governments had come and gone. Part of the leadership went into the National Government that was set up to cope with the economic crisis and record unemployment. Another result was that the Independent Labour Party split from them and set out into the political wilderness, and have never returned. They had helped to set up the Labour Party and many of that party’s leaders and MPs were from the ILP. The disaffiliated ILP was no more Socialist than the Labour party it had left. With capitalism in crisis certain prominent ILPers were confidently expecting its collapse. The Chairman of the ILP, a certain Mr. Fenner Brockway, predicted “a bloodless revolution possibly within the next four years” (Manchester Guardian 25 April 1932). There was no collapse and no revolution, but many years later Lord Brockway joined the Labour contingent in the same House of Lords that they had once been so keen to abolish.

Meanwhile the men of Moscow had been making heavy weather. The theory of “Socialism in one country” replaced their earlier plea for world revolution. This swapping of illusions did not go down well in some quarters and a “left opposition” under Trotsky developed. Splits followed in other parties of the Third International. Both sides were addicted to a belief in the need for leadership and were agreed on many essentials. Their differences centred on the quality and personalities of the opposing leaders, Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky lost out and was banished. He eventually concluded that the Third International had ceased to be an instrument of revolution and declared the need for a fourth international. In his The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938) he states:

  The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”, they have begun to get somewhat rotten . . . The Historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership . . . It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of Transitional Demands. 

And commenting on the social-democrats’ maximum and minimum programmes: “no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need for such a bridge, since the word Socialism is only used for holiday speechifying” (Merit Edition pages 5 and 7).

Pity the poor worker seeking leadership. For over the years “the crisis of the revolutionary leadership” has multiplied and there are now several Fourth Internationals competing with each other to supply that service. At present the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (formerly Socialist Labour League), International Marxist Group and Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist) all claim to be the British section of the Fourth International. There are numerous other groups offering variations on a theme by Trotsky.

He was wrong, of course. The objective prerequisites for proletarian revolution have not ripened. For it is not leadership that the working class needs but Socialist understanding. With it, they will establish Socialism. Nor will this knowledge come by means of transitional demands, for they are nothing but reforms. They do not form a bridge but a diversion. For in order to get support for these demands, their merits must be propagated and shown to be superior not only to other reforms but also to the demand that capitalism be abolished.

Organizations so engaged give all attention to the immediate and not the final demand and, as Trotsky put it, only mention Socialism in their holiday speechifying. They do not even do that nowadays if the urgent call to action published in the Mayday 1973 issue of Workers Press (daily organ of WRP) is anything to go by. To replace the Tories they wanted "a Labour government which is pledged by the mass action of the working class to implement socialist policies.” Even though the Labour party has never been Socialist, they could easily promise any of the policies advocated by Workers Press. In particular, the “Socialist United States of Europe” is so much eye wash; the alternative to the Common Market (and all other markets) is production for use.

The Russo-Chinese split arising from the conflict of material interests between these two capitalist countries was cloaked by a propaganda barrage that would have us believe that it was over the interpretation of Lenin’s views on the conduct of revolution.

More importantly, they exposed the non-Socialist nature of society in those countries by their mutual recriminations. The Chinese claim that capitalism is being restored in Russia, whilst the formerly "Maoist”

Marxist-Leninist Organisation of Britain claim that the same is happening in China. Both claims are nonsense. Capitalism has been developing all the time the so-called Communist parties have governed there. Just as the workers cannot be led to Socialism, nor can they be led away.

The Maoist split from the CPGB did not result in a united party. A great many mutually hostile groups proclaiming Maoism as the answer to the workers’ woes have come into being. The shock of the Sino-Soviet split and the need to rethink has produced such gems as this: “Despite the continued use of Marxist terminology the line of the Soviet leadership should be seen as being no different from that churned out for years by the social democrats — socialism and peace in words — bourgeois dictatorship and imperialism in actions”. (Documents of Communist Federation of Britain [Marxist Leninist], p.6). Once it is seen that the “Marxism” of the Soviets is no different from that of the Social Democrats, it is then but a short step to seeing that the same applies to the “Marxism” of Mao Tse Tung.

These breakaway groups (Trotskyites and Maoists) have directed much of their fire at the CPGB.(They believe that this would-be appendage of the Labour Party has deviated from the path of revolution. Neither the breakaways nor the CPGB were ever on it!) The pamphlet Ultra Left in Britain was the CPGB’S answer. The groups were treated as though they were separate entities; yet their point of departure was the “Communist International”. The CPGB is part of the “old block” from which all these chips have come. Whilst it is true enough that capitalism generates the discontent that is expressed in political protest, the nature of its fragmentation owes much to the illusions peddled by the Bolsheviks and their followers.

The Socialist Party after seventy years of consistent effort to win the working class to Socialism is still opposed by those who find “it is easier to gain adherents to belief in a small palliative reform”. All those years of experience have shown that “the adherents are not adherents for Socialism”. Over the years the evidence confirming the correctness of the Socialist Party’s case has accumulated. Much of it concerns the rise and fall of parties of the Left. Capitalism has done much of the work for us. Only the Socialist Party can impart the knowledge to overcome political confusion.

Joe Carter

Language, Class and Nation (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the most remarkable things about human beings is their possession and use of language. Within a few shorts years, every person acquires a knowledge of their native language, including a vocabulary of thousands of words, enabling them to express original ideas and communicate to others on all sorts of topics. Language is also one of the most specifically human attributes, for no other animal possesses a communication system anywhere near as flexible and useful as human language. Animals such as bees and sticklebacks can convey a united range of information to each other but cannot, for example, refer to events in the past or future. The languages of the world, with their rich structures and histories, are a fascinating subject of study. But in the class divided society of capitalism, language is a basis for hostility, prejudice and discrimination.

Our impressions of other people are partly formed by the way they speak. Too often people are regarded as ignorant or unintelligent because they pronounce  the r in a word like cart, say they was, or use a double negative (as in I ain’t done nothing): they are condemned for speaking a “sub-standard” dialect. But from a linguistic point of view, there are no such things as sub-dialects, only non-standard ones which is very different. In the course of a language’s development, one particular form of it, usually that spoken in. a particularly powerful or important area, becomes the standard dialect. This means that it is taught in schools, used in literature, and then spread by radio and television. Becoming powerful and “successful” in such a society usually entails becoming proficient in the standard dialect, so that speakers of other dialects are looked down on as backward and uncultured. But prejudices of this kind are social, not linguistic, judgements. Every dialect of a language, standard or otherwise, is linguistically as good as any other; I ain’t done nothing conveys the same meaning as the standard I haven’t done anything. Speaking a non-standard dialect does not make a person stupid, untrustworthy, or whatever.

Prejudice against non-standard speakers is taken even further when it is said that they have no proper language at all. In particular, some psychologists have argued that black children in the United States have no grammar and speak merely by stringing a few words together. This type of misconception arises from a failure to realise that the children in question simply have a different grammar from standard English. For instance, when a black kid says they mine, is not simply putting two words together (in the way that young children may do).  Instead, this is his equivalent of standard they’re mine, both being reduced forms of they are mine (in standard speech, are is “contracted”, in non-standard it is deleted). The claim that black children have practically no language has been put forward as explaining why they do so badly in American schools, justifying a “compensatory education” designed to make the child fit into the school system. Obviously, this avoids the less comforting conclusion that the children do badly because of the appalling conditions they live in!

A slightly more sophisticated version of this verbal deprivation theory is associated with the name of Basil Bernstein. Bernstein draws a distinction between elaborated and restricted codes, the elaborated code being less tied to the specific “here and now” context than the restricted code. It is claimed that “middle-class” children have access to both codes, while manual working-class children have access to the restricted code only. Allegedly (and Bernstein is none too particular about citing actual data) a “middle-class” child will tend to describe the scene in a picture by saying Three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball, while a working-class child tends to describe the same picture by saying They’re playing football and he kicks it. From anecdotes like this, he leaps to the conclusion that, as the elaborated code is expected to be used in school, working class children’s lack of access to the elaborated code is the reason for their comparatively poor scholastic performance. Quite apart from the incorrect view of class, this is unacceptable. All children are able, outside the artificial experimental situations referred to by Bernstein, to use a range of styles, from formal to informal. All speakers of a language, whatever their social status, speak a language which is as flexible and creative as that of any other speaker.

It should also be stated that there is no such thing as a primitive language. No language which exists today, or for which past records are available, consists of just a few words and no true rules of grammar. Nor are there a people, however primitive their way of life, which does not possess a language which is perfectly adequate for all the uses to which its speakers put it. Even where a language lacks a particular concept because its speakers do not need it, they are not cognitively unable to handle it. For instance, some Australian aboriginal languages have no words for numbers higher than two (just words for a few and many), but when their speakers learn English they have no difficulty in mastering the English numerical system and counting as high as you like. There are no such things as backward races speaking primitive languages.

But different people do speak different languages. In a rational society, there would be no reason for this to cause problems, but in capitalism it is the cause of much misery. Nearly every country in the world has more than one language spoken within it (even excluding recent immigrants). Great Britain, for example, has English, Welsh and Gaelic, while Spain has Spanish, Catalan and Basque. Where one language is spoken by an overwhelming majority of the population, that is likely to be the country’s official language. Members of a linguistic minority may be discriminated against in various ways: no books or newspapers may be published in their language, it may not be the medium of teaching in schools, and so on. Speakers of a minority language will often need to learn the official language in order to “get on”. Resentment against such treatment may lead to the demand for political autonomy, as a means of converting a linguistic minority into a linguistic majority, for instance the aim of an independent Basque state. Let it be said that discrimination on the grounds of language is as odious as discrimination on grounds of race. Nevertheless, the call for independence as a means of ending linguistic oppression is not one that workers should support.

To start with, people do not live in blocks consisting of speakers of only one language (there is no part of Wales where no English is spoken), so that independence would create new linguistic minorities. The demand that speakers of each language should have their own nation also overlooks the consideration that the distinction between a language and a dialect is by no means clear-cut. The standard definition is that, unlike different languages, dialects of the same language are mutually intelligible, but this raises a number of problems. Intelligibility is a matter of degree, may go in one direction only, and is not transitive (which means. that dialects A and B may be mutually intelligible, and also B and C, but not A and C). Between Paris and Rome there is a chain of dialects, each intelligible with its neighbour, even though the end-points, standard French and Italian, are not mutually intelligible; on purely linguistic grounds, it is not possible to draw a sharp distinction between dialects of Italian and of French, or between those of Dutch and German. In practice, language and dialect are defined in cultural and political terms, and any attempt to define a nation or state in terms of language is circular. As one American linguist aptly put it, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”.

But above all, independence does not solve the economic problems of the speakers of a minority language. A separate Basque state would not free Basque workers from unemployment, insecurity and exploitation. These are caused by the economic set-up of society, not by the wrong placement of political frontiers. Capitalism is a world-wide society, and no part of it can escape from world trends and crises. Separatism, whether motivated on linguistic or other grounds, offers precisely nothing to the working class.

Socialism, too, will be a world society, but one without states or frontiers. The concept of linguistic minority will then have no meaning. A language with comparatively small numbers. of speakers will not be discriminated against, and there will be no problem about arranging education in that language, if its speakers so wish. Publishing material in that language will not be restricted by considerations of profit, but by the needs of its speakers. It is possible that an invented auxiliary language, such as Esperanto or Ido, will be used to facilitate communication between speakers of different languages. We look forward to a world in which learning another language will not be the drudge it so often is today, but an enjoyable adventure. All children could be brought up bilingual, and then travel to other parts of the globe to learn a language in its native environment. Becoming multilingual in this way would be the best way of becoming a true citizen of the world socialist community. Socialist society will mean the liberation of all mankind, without distinction of race, sex or language. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

Paul Bennett

The Socialist in Action – the Two “Possiblisms”. by P. M. Andre (1908)

From the November 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is only one Socialism, but there are at the same time two ways of conceiving its realisation: the scientific way – that of the international Socialism – and the “possiblist”. Quite a large number of French Socialists have for a long time been suffering from the latter. Scientific Socialism does not believe that the Social Revolution can be brought about by stages. It is waiting for the social change to take place through the seizure of political power by the working class, and it is with a view to that seizing by force that it is organising the proletariat into a class party. The efforts it makes are all those of recruiting, educating, and organising. To get the greatest number of workers, both hand and brain, to understand that, in the words of  Sieyès, “they are everything in the nation, and can be everything whenever they want to”, to show them that the inevitable necessity for socialising the means of production, to draw them towards Socialism by a propaganda they can understand, and suited to their respective spheres; to use, in order that this propaganda should be as effective as possible, every means at our disposal under capitalist rule, legal means being thereby understood; to repudiate any proceeding capable of doing harm to the recruiting and educating of the masses – such are the essential methods of international Socialism.

This method has for reformers the serious inconvenience of condemning Socialists to what certain busy people call “inaction”. To recruit, educate and organise is, it seems, to do nothing. We must, perforce, wait until the recruiting, educating and organising of the proletariat is far enough advanced for the revolutionary seizure of the “State” to be brought to a triumphant issue.

And those who, in imitation of [the] Roy [king] of France, are “afraid to wait”, are full of praise for a swifter method, that of “possibilism”. By virtue of this last they begin the revolution all at once. This beginning takes place in different ways: by peaceful penetration or by direct action. They pretend to “act according to one’s temperament” but in fact, try to realise, from this very moment, in the midst of capitalist rule, all the immediate possibilities of slices of socialism. On the one hand they are associated with bourgeois reformers, in order to make popular and vote for reforms which, if added together, end to end, all along the centuries, will accomplish the transformation of property “without a blow being struck”. On the other hand, not having enough patience to recruit, educate and organise their workmen comrades, they reckon solely on the “active minority” in order to reduce in succession the rights of the masters, and for the expropriation of capitalism, workshop by workshop and factory by factory.

Radical “possiblists” and Anarchist “possiblists” have each in turn made trial of their own method. Every one of their experiments has proved an admirable lesson in facts for the French proletariat. The attempt made in 1893 by the railway union showed that merely proclaiming “general strike” and voting for it at congress was not sufficient for this pretended possibility of freedom to be actually realised by the will of a bold minority. Bomb-rule à la Ravachol and Emile Henry ended in a complete fiasco. Millerand’s entry into the ministry proved that “peaceful penetration” in the Government laboratory changed the victor into a servant of the bourgeoisie. The recent manoeuvre of revolutionary syndicalism only succeeded in decoying into a military trap those whose eyes were blinded by direct action. Finally, even the supreme manifestation, by which the General Federation of Labour [CGT] wished to protest against the massacre of its troops, could not reach its full extent, because the active minority by itself alone would not be able to arrange for a general cessation of work, if only for the space of 24 hours. On the contrary, the 21st section of the Livre, because it is an educated and organised union, because it has not exhausted its adherents by ceaseless strikes, was able, inspite of the uncertainty of the movement, to save the honour of union organisation.

Thus, one after another, all the workings of “possibilism”: reformist and Governmental preparation, Anarchist preparation, far from being the beginnings of the Social Revolution, have provided capitalist Governments with an occasion for easy victories.

Victories of a day, doubtless, for if the hard lessons of experience discourage for a moment those amongst our people who “do not know how to wait”, the greatest number of militant workers derive from those lessons greater confidence in the old method of international Socialism. Don’t let us look for impossibilism under the pretext of possibilism. To fight by hundreds against thousands, with stones or wretched revolvers against sharpened swords and repeating rifles is useless heroism. Firing on proletarians in uniform, while exhorting them not to fire upon proletarians in work-a-day dress, is to put back the hour when the army will be on the side of the insurrection. To excite by vain threats public opinion against workmen’s organisations is to fetter the work of education which should go on before and at length make possible the Social Revolution. Let us get ready for the victory of the proletariat by preparing the forces indispensable for that victory: recruiting, educating and organising.

P. M. Andre

(Translated  for the Socialist Standard from Le Socialisme by Fritz)