Right minded lot (1984)

From the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

At this very moment there must be many young people, in universities and trade unions nurturing ambitions, and they had better realise that climbing to the top of the greasy pole is more than a simple matter of putting forward a reasoned, effective policy in the expectation that voters will respond. Voters — for the present, at any rate — don’t operate like that: they are more easily impressed by a seductive, instantly recognisable personality, packaged and presented. This means that aspiring occupants of Number Ten must spend some time identifying their supporters. They must ask themselves, for example, if their appeal is stronger with younger voters? Will family women and men crowd into the polling booths for them? Are they acceptable to foaming patriots or to what is known as ethnic minorities? There is a great deal of lucrative work here for opinion pollsters, speech writers, camera operators and other artists in deception. If they get it right the candidate identifies a sort of constituency of support, scattered among the entire electorate. Work can then begin on appeasing and enlarging this constituency.

This is by no means a recent trend in politics. In the twenties, Stanley Baldwin was at pains to present the image of a plain, simple man of goodwill, which presumably appealed to voters who thought of themselves in the same way. Here is a typically reticent self-portrait by Baldwin, in October 1923:

  I am not a man to play with a pledge . . . I am not a clever man. I know nothing of political tactics . . .

These modest words were in a speech in which Baldwin announced that he was about to go back on a pledge given by his predecessor, Bonar Law, not to impose protective import duties. He fought the next election on the issue, except that the result was a Labour government under Ramsay Macdonald, who would never have denied that he was a clever man.

Forty years later another plain and simple man who, like Baldwin, carefully cultivated a reassuring media manner (and who also distracted his audiences with clouds of pipe smoke) was in the business of playing with pledges while posing as a leader of unshakeable principle. Harold Wilson came to power after nurturing a constituency rather different from Baldwin’s. Some time before his victory in the 1964 election, he had outlined its boundaries to his henchman Richard Crossman. They were discussing Labour’s apparent failure to hold the votes of "young scientists, technologists and specialists’’:

  . . .  the only way to win them back is to make Labour the party of science. At present we are treating science as a gimmick . . . At our next conference we have got to take them seriously.

Labour’s argument was simple enough to have come from a Baldwin. The Tories had shamefully neglected the development of the latest productive technology; it was too modern a concept for them to grasp, as they tramped the grouse moors among the enfeebling mesh of the old boy network. So we had stop-go production, crisis, wage restraint. a lack of many of the good things in life. As a Labour government remedied this through investment in advanced technology productivity would soar and there would be prosperity and security for everyone — as well as an exalted place in history for Harold Wilson. It was all set out in their 1964 manifesto:

  If we are to get a dynamic and expanding economy, it is essential that new and effective ways are found for injecting modern technology into our industries.

What actually happened was that the realities of capitalism, which take no account of election promises, were too much for the Wilson government. Caught in the inevitable tangle of financial and economic crises, they were soon reduced to looking for excuses for their failure to organise the promised abundance through the white hot technological revolution. Poverty, slums, class conflict, wars, all remained; Wilson’s fine words became an historical embarrassment.

Since then — and in particular since their defeats in 1979 and 1983 — the Labour Party have been wondering what happened to the constituency of scientists and technologists which Wilson thought he had captured for a lifetime. One opinion is that a lot of the people known to psephologists, sociologists and market researchers as "skilled workers” have switched their votes to the Tories, on the grounds that they have some stake in capitalism which is worth defending and that this is best left to a Conservative government. If this is true, it may indicate a certain change in mood among working-class voters. This change is nothing too dramatic; the working class are not about to discard all the parties of capitalism and think in terms of a radical social revolution. But it could mean the replacement of the aggressive, expansive propaganda of Wilson’s white-hot technological revolution by defensive, retractive, in-turned preferences. In 1929. during that other slump. Baldwin appealed to the voters with the slogan of Safety First. In 1984, with over 3 million out of work, successful politicians may have stopped courting the constituency of youthful scientists and turned instead to that of the Right Minded People.

Of course this cultivation of a constituency is uncomplicated by any concern for political principles. The object is to garner votes, whatever the opinions and desires of the voters. This sordid, sterile business is described in Carol Thatcher’s Diary of an Election (a book of stupefying banality and irrelevance). Hoping for a best-seller, Carol faithfully accompanied Mum and Dad and Mark around the country during the last election. One morning, perhaps in an analytical mood, she took breakfast with Chris Lawson, the Conservative Party’s director of marketing, who instrueted her in the subtleties of marketing a discredited capitalist party:

 Target groups are, of course, the first-time voters, the young housewives, C1s, C2s, skilled technicians, and the older people — they’ve always been very strongly Conservative — but the other groups have moved with us too.

Not a word about political principle, or human interests. Like Carol Thatcher herself. Lawson’s words are insulated from the real world of suffering and repression, about which so much needs to be done so urgently. It seems inevitable that out of the Tory victory the constituency of Right Minded People should emerge, with a clutch of university-bred gurus to draw its theoretical geography — like Roger Scruton, Maurice Cowling and the deranged ex-lefty Paul Johnson. In the Sunday Times Magazine of 4 March 1984 Scruton mapped out his theories:

  I think of conservatism as growing out of the rootedness of a man's history. Man is a fragile being whose happiness depends on finding his home. Attempts to find long-term strategic solutions are doomed: one needs the family, and private property.

In other words, a Right Minded Person believes in patriotism, law and order, and keeping your place. What kind of challenge do these beliefs present?

To begin with, patriotism is a demonstrably one-way affair, which insists that the interests of the British capitalist class should be dominant but does not allow the same belief to patriots in, say, Russia and Argentina about the interests of their capitalist class because they are obviously Wrong Minded People. This prejudice extends into the field of economic rivalry. The recent embarrassing episode of Mark Thatcher (failed accountant, racing driver and rally competitor — would you buy a building from this man?) and the University of Oman was dismissed by the Prime Minister with the assertion that she “bats for Britain”. To all Right Minded People, this recourse to patriotism was enough to stifle all the criticism and to clear the matter up beyond further argument.

Similar mental juggling must be performed on the issue of Law and Order, which are accepted by all Right Minded People as essential in any civilised society. But there are varying definitions, and degrees, of law and order; in the case of the theft of the Falkland Islands, and their eventual ownership by the Coalite Group, the law can be refashioned to suit the interests of the owners and the wildest of disorder can be created to protect those interests. Right Minded People subdue any doubts about this in their confidence that nobody has anything to fear from the law provided they accept one or two minor restraints such as the class structure of capitalism and the privileged standing which this gives a small, parasitic minority.

This compliance can otherwise be called Knowing Your Place, which is strongly advocated by the Right Minded People. For example, people like miners, lorry drivers and car industry workers should work very hard indeed because that is their lot under capitalism and in any case it is good for the country that they should do so. But they think differently about the ruling class, whose indolence and uselessness is enviably glamorous and proves their inborn superiority. Workers who dare to strike are excoriated because strikes interrupt production. which is not good for the country, but it is quite acceptable for the capitalist class to shut coal mines and factories which are unprofitable because this is the sort of interruption of production which is. mysteriously. good for the country.

It should not be assumed that, because the constituency of the Right Minded People has come into its own under the Thatcher governments, it is always linked to the Tories. Of course Thatcher is a splendid model for it. with her voice, her hair-dos and dresses which even the Grantham Women’s Institute might find too conventional. In her infamous speech in 1978, about immigrants “swamping" the people in this country, she claimed that ". . . the British character has done so much for democracy, for law. and done so much throughout the world . . .". which must have struck just the right chord in the minds of the Right Minded People. But Labour leaders have also done a great deal to make a similar appeal to these political neurotics. They have crushed strikes, urged workers to break picket lines, set up the super-coercive Special Patrol Group, devotedly prosecuted British capitalism's wars, paid ardent respects to the royal and aristocratic figureheads of the ruling classes.

How do we free ourselves of this sordid hypocrisy, where do we find some optimism about human society? Socialists do not cultivate a constituency: we make no appeal for votes. We do not fashion a policy to fit ignorance and prejudice. The movement for a new society must be one of understanding and participation. It has no appeal for the Right Minded People but works to put people in their right mind.

Ivan

Socialism or Reformism? (1984)

From the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

When it comes down to it there is no real choice between reform and revolution. These are not two alternative ways of reaching the same goal. Certainly people can try to reform capitalism to make it work in the interest of all, but they can never succeed. All their efforts are wasted. The only way forward is social revolution, in the sense of rapidly abolishing present-day society by a political act and establishing a new and different society in its place.

The reason for this is clear. Capitalism is an economic system which operates according to economic laws which cannot be changed by human action, and which human beings have to accept and submit to in the same way as they do to natural forces like the weather and the tides. But there is a difference between the economic forces of capitalism and the tides in that the former only operate because humans chose to keep in being the system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit. If people decided to end this system, then these forces would cease to operate. But, as we have explained, there is no point in accepting to work within this system and then trying to stop these economic forces operating. It can't be done. As long as capitalism remains its economic laws will continue to function roughly like the tides.

Essentially we are talking about people being in charge of the production of the wealth they must have to survive. This is what socialism is about: subjecting production to conscious human control so that it can be directed to the single purpose of turning out goods and services to satisfy human needs. Why should this not be possible? After all, production for use — production to satisfy human needs — is the logical purpose of producing wealth.

Production to satisfy human needs is possible, but it requires a fundamental social change to make it a reality. Basically, all that is in and on the earth must become the common property of everyone. In other words, there must no longer be any territorial rights or any private property rights over any part of the globe. The farms, factories, mines and all other places where wealth is produced will not belong to anybody. This means that a section only of society would no longer stand between the rest of society and the means of production. Social classes would cease to exist and all men and women would stand in equal relationship to the means of production as free and equal members of a classless community.

Naturally, in order to use the commonly owned means of wealth production, people would have to organise themselves and devise procedures for allowing them to be put in motion. This brings us to the second basic feature of production: democratic control. A certain degree of democratic control exists in some capitalist countries today, but it is very limited and only applies to the operation of certain political institutions at local and national level. In a socialist society democratic control will extend to all aspects of social life, including — and in fact in particular — decisions about the production of wealth. This is what production is about: bringing the production and distribution of wealth under conscious human control which, in a classless community of free and equal men and women, can only be democratic control. Otherwise society would no longer be classless: access to. and control over, the means of production would then remain in the hands of the minority. This is why democracy and socialism are inseparable. There is no choice about the matter. An undemocratic socialism is a contradiction in terms. Socialism is democratic or it is not socialism.

The third feature of socialism is production for use, and in a sense follows from the other two. If the means of production are commonly owned and democratically controlled, there is only one end for which they can and will be used: to produce wealth to satisfy the needs, individual and collective, of the classless community. But another way, common ownership and democratic control is the only framework in which this natural, logical object of production satisfying human needs can be achieved.

When we say production for use we mean production solely for use. In socialism wealth no longer will be produced for sale; buying and selling and all that goes with it money, prices, wages, profits, banks, and so on — will have no place; they will, in fact, have no sense in socialism. Since the means of production will be commonly owned, it follows that what is produced will also be commonly owned — that is, by the classless community of free men and women who will have produced it. In these circumstances the question of selling what has been produced just would not — could not — arise. For how can what is commonly owned be sold to those who commonly own it?

The problem (if that is the right word) that will arise will be of a quite different nature. It will be how to distribute what has been produced among members of the community. Advocates of common ownership have argued about this from ancient times but until the end of the last century this argument was always — and inevitably — conducted in terms of sharing out a limited amount. The suggestions for doing this were many and various. Some suggested equal sharing, others a points system based on a hierarchy of needs; others wanted to link what people received to what they had contributed to production in terms of hours of work. Any of these systems would have been immensely more equal than what happens under capitalism, but nowadays we need no longer think in terms of having to share out fairly a limited amount. Since the turn of the century, we have left the Age of Scarcity and entered the Age of Abundance — potential abundance. that is. To the extent that scarcity survives today, as of course it very much does, this is an artificial scarcity maintained by the economic laws of capitalism, and particularly its basic principle of "No Profit, No Production".

On the basis of common ownership and democratic control, the artificial barrier to the production of abundance (that is, the profit motive) will be removed and we shall be able to produce an abundance of the basic things — food, clothing, shelter — which people need to enjoy life. Material wants and poverty can be banished for ever. Technologically speaking, there is no reason why any man, woman or child in any part of the world should starve or go without proper shelter. Socialism will allow this technological possibility to be realised, which will no doubt have to be one of the first priorities of socialism when it is established.

How to distribute this abundance of basic necessities? The answer is simple. Let people come and take what they need. Wealth could be produced in such abundance today that there is no need to ration access to it. The free access to consumer goods and services which was always the long-term aim of the nineteenth century socialists and communists can now be instituted with the establishment of socialism. Free access — which we can list as the fourth basic feature of socialism after common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use — means exactly what it says. People will be able to come to the places where the basic necessities of life will be stored and freely take away what they consider they need. They themselves will judge what they need; individuals will determine their own needs. In conditions of permanent abundance people will have no reason to take more than they need. To do so would be pointless. People won’t hoard basic necessities in a socialist society any more than they hoard the water which they draw freely from their taps today. They will simply take what they need from the stores as and when they need it. Ensuring that these stores are always stocked with what people need will be no problem given the technological possibility of producing in abundance. This will essentially be a question of stock control.

So common ownership, democratic control, production for use. free access; these are the essential features of the society which must replace capitalism if the problems facing people today are to be solved. Clearly it is not the sort of society that can be introduced gradually within capitalism. We either have common ownership or some sort of class ownership, private or state. We either have production for use or production for sale. In both cases the one excludes the other.

Certainly, claims have been made to introduce elements of “socialism” into capitalism as a way of gradually transforming society, but they have never worked. In the early days of the Labour Party nationalisation was seen as a step towards common ownership. In fact, nationalisation never even superseded private ownership. In Britain the private owners were merely transformed from shareholders into government bondholders and continued to receive a property income as interest on their bonds rather than dividends on their shares, and the nationalised industries have always been profit-seeking enterprises. In fact, it was a Labour government — under Harold Wilson in 1967 — which laid down that nationalised industries should seek to achieve the same rate of profit on their new investment projects as any equivalent private enterprise. Nationalisation, far from being a step towards socialism, has merely meant state capitalism. Similarly, “planning” was originally seen as an attempt to impose production for use instead of for profit. In practice however planning has either been a complete failure because capitalism is an anarchic, unplannable system, or else has been the planned exploitation of the wage and salary earning class in countries like Russia and China.

So once again we arrive at the same conclusion. Reformism cannot succeed in making capitalism work in the interest of the workers, the majority. Neither can it succeed in gradually transforming capitalism into socialism. The only way forward is social revolution — not in the sense of barricades, street battles and executions, but of a rapid change in the basis of society.

This is what socialists are working for, but it is not we who are going to establish socialism. We could not do it. No minority can. By its very nature as a democratic, responsible society, socialism can only be established by a majority who understand and want it. After all, how could a minority force people to establish a society based on voluntary co-operation and democratic decision-making?

This is why all the efforts of socialists are directed towards helping to spread the idea that there is an alternative to capitalism with its artificial scarcity, organised waste, wars and threats of war. insecurity and anxiety. Our role is to inform people about this and get people to want to change society and to organise to do this.

Adam Buick

Letters: Socialists against religion (1984)

Letters to the Editors from the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists against religion

Dear Editors.

In the January edition of your journal (p.9) you talk of religious indoctrination and "tedious and absurd fairy stories". Is this view on religion universally representative of the Socialist Party or is it simply the personal prejudice of one of its members? (Which is presumably acceptable to an elected editorial board.)

In the Declaration of Principles there is no mention of atheism or agnosticism as being a prerequisite for membership of the party. Does this mean that someone having a religious faith and also desiring to help solve the problems of the world can join the party? Or is it the ease that anyone who believes in supernatural powers; and who, in other words, rejects the rigid historical materialism of Engels (and to a lesser extent Marx) will be prevented from furthering the cause of socialism?

If the Socialist Party regards the fundamental message of Christianity and many other religions, namely, "love your neighbour", as being incompatible with their aims because it is not founded on materialistic and scientific argument, then I believe that this proviso should be included in the Declaration of Principles.

S P Hayhurst 

Swansea

Reply:

The Socialist Standard is the official journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and states the socialist attitude on current issues as well as theoretical matters. The piece in the January number put the socialist ease about religion, although of course the manner in which it was put would vary from member to member, so that the wording might not suit all socialists. Our opposition to religion is not a prejudice, it is not a judgement made before having any facts or evidence. We argue that religion is opposed to working class interests, hampers the spread of socialist consciousness and with all this has no scientific evidence to support it. On no grounds can it be justified.

While this is not explicitly stated in our Declaration of Principles, the policy is there by clear implication (as is the case with other issues, such as our opposition to racism and our support for trade unionism) in the materialistic interpretation of human history. This is an essential part of the socialist case; we therefore reject any applicant for membership who holds religious views, or who believes in the supernatural, because these attitudes are not compatible with a vital part of our case. Of course there are people who hold such views and who also have a genuine desire to do something about the problems of capitalism. Such people are sincere but also confused on matters which are vital to socialism and cannot therefore be accepted into our party. Ideas like "loving your neighbour" sound constructive but in themselves they are not useful; the words have been on the lips of many a Christian who saw no difficulty in supporting the wars of capitalism, in which neighbours were emphatically not to be loved. The case for socialism does not rest on such abstract idealism but on scientific materialism and that is why we are opposed to all religion and belief in a supernatural.

The End of Feudalism

Dear Editors.

In his excellent survey "England as Marx's Model" in your January 1984 issue, ALB rightly describes Marx's section on primitive accumulation in Volume 1 of Capital as “virtually a short history of the economic and social development of England from the middle of the sixteenth century”. In my view, however, it is far more than this since it is also here that Marx unerringly places the destruction of the English peasantry in Tudor England, linking this event dialectically with the termination of feudal social and economic arrangements.

This is in direct contradistinction to bourgeois historiography which continues to treat Tudor land enclosure as a movement localised both in time and space, i.e. as merely a reaction by landowners to an advance in wool prices and affecting only limited areas of England. Bourgeois economic historians continue to ascribe the disappearance of the English peasant to the activities of the Commissioners of Enclosure in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—an interpretation which effectively isolates the movement from its real roots in the revolution in the mode of production occurring two centuries earlier.

This is all the more remarkable since it is now fifty-seven years since the (non-Marxist) economic historian, Ms E. Davies, in a brilliant study of the Land-Tax Assessments, discovered to her own surprise that, by the time the Commissioners came round, the English peasant had been gone from time immemorial. Marx was thus confirmed.

The question arises, are (at least some) bourgeois scholars unconscious Marxists?

Joseph Beckman

Egerton

Visions

Dear Editors.

Most socialists are understandably reluctant to set out a detailed blueprint of the kind of society they ultimately envisage. But clearly both activists and sympathisers must have, without falling into utopianism, a realistic vision of the outlines of a socialist society. To help with research I am doing in this area, I'd like to hear from readers what their vision is.

James Parris

c/o Flat 1

6 Oakden Street

London SE11

The Guardian—An Important Correction (1984)

From the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Guardian is famous for its misprints, some of which are hilarious, but a mistake which has recently recurred in our regular announcement in the paper’s small ads columns is by no means funny.

The socialist case is, and always has been, that socialism can come about only through democratic action by a working class majority, throughout the world, but for some reason the Guardian's misprint operative keeps inserting the word “minority” for “majority”, regardless of the fact that to talk about democratic action by a minority is nonsense. More importantly, it is directly opposite to our case and to what we are trying to say in the ad.

We apologise for their mistake. We hope no worker has been put off by it. We also hope that no worker has read it and come to the conclusion that the SPGB is just another bunch of crazy, undemocratic elitists. The socialist revolution will be a majority, democratic act—the first social revolution in human history in the interests of the majority.

Priorities (1984)

From the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Torvill and Dean were cheered by MPs in the House of Commons last night. Winding up a debate on housing benefits, the Social Security Minister of State, Dr Rhodes Boyson said to cheers: "I do think even housing benefits are put into perspective on occasions like this". (Guardian, 15 February, 1984.)

Merde in France (2005)

From the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wednesday 16 November was a quiet day in France. Only 163 cars were burnt by urban rioters in the whole of France and the state of emergency was lifted in some places and re-imposed in others. The urban unrest of the last two weeks is fading away, leaving some dead – the guy attacked for trying to defend his area from arsonists; some injured – the disabled woman set on fire in a bus by thugs, the 18- month-old baby who received a rock on the head and a whole lot of mindless vandalism: cars burnt, schools burnt, buses burnt, kindergartens burnt, shops smashed and so on.

  

The death of the two young lads who were accidentally electrocuted when they ran into an electricity sub-station in Clichy-sous-bois north of Paris following an all too routine police identity check in the area was not in itself the trigger to these events. The trigger was the reaction of the Interior Minister, Sarkozy, (France’s answer to Blunkett, marital problems included) who called the unruly young people in the suburbs “riff-raff”, thus confirming a tendency towards the blanket stigmatization of the population who live there.

The equation suburbs = immigrants = delinquents, is, of course, the kind of brainless reasoning favoured by members of the National Front, and by some police officers, particularly those who “know” the immigrant population largely through their experience of the dirty Algerian war of independence. But the “immigrant” population in the suburbs have been there for three generations and as such they walk around with French identity papers.  Unfortunately for them, they have Arab names and/or black faces and thus face discrimination in employment.

  

Their problems are a concentration of those faced by French workers as a whole and have nothing to do with their level of “integration” into the French nation. After all, those Arabs who fought for the French during the Algerian war of independence (the so called “harkis”) have themselves vegetated in ghettoes, the victims of post-colonial benign neglect. Even these Arabs haven’t been allowed to integrate.

Can of worms

The background to this can of worms is not the state of the housing in the sink estates (“cités”) in the suburbs of the major towns in France. Some of the housing, admittedly not all, is of fairly good quality having been built in the mid-1970s. British sink estates are a lot worse. Nor is the problem that of the absence of public services, education, health care, public transport and all the rest. These public services are present in these areas to an extent which could only be dreamt of in an equivalent American or British ghetto. Let’s not get things mixed up. No, the main problem of these sink estates is precisely the social and ethnic homogeneity of these areas or the concentration of people with  profound social problems there. Family breakdown, sole parenting, low self-esteem, educational  difficulties, problems of employment co-exist with an often violent social environment where young people grow up surrounded by delinquent gangs.

To make matters worse, the French police force is mainly installed in the quiet small towns, the spatial deployment of the flics having stayed largely unchanged since the Vichy epoch. The police trade unions have resisted all attempts at redeployment. As a rule then the cops only come to thump people they don’t know in areas they get lost in. Calm “middle-class” areas have a plethora of police stations. Earlier experiments with community policing  (“police de proximité”) undertaken by the “socialist government” of Jospin succeeded in calming the suburbs but were abandoned by the super-cop Sarko on the ground that this allowed the proliferation of a parallel drug economy (true). In these terms, the more testosterone-propelled policing of the current administration is believed to be more effective (not true). As a result policing in the suburbs has taken on the “wham bang and thank you mam” style with lots of media attention.

Funds going to the associations in the suburbs have been cut and job-creation schemes suspended. This is guaranteed to worsen community relations with little payoff in terms of the fight against thugs whose activities do, after all, provide some cash-flow in these areas where youth unemployment often hits 45 percent – the highest rate in Europe. No wonder then that the government has decided to park the riot police (CRS) on a semi-permanent basis in these estates. Although country bumpkins with a well-deserved reputation for brutality, they do at least know how to react  when they get lost in an area they don’t know.

“Arab work”

  In strictly capitalist terms nothing can nor perhaps will be done to change this sorry state of affairs. The current population of the suburbs largely consists of the sons and daughters of black Africans and Arabs brought over in the 1960s and 1970s to do the shit jobs in the factories that the French didn’t want to do. (A reality which was brought home to me when I saw an entire train full of exhausted workers returning from a night shift at the Peugeot works in Poissy. They were all Arabs.) Whilst this earlier generation now subsists on microscopic pensions and social benefits, the new kids on the block are showing a distinct tendency towards underemployment and delinquency. When mass unemployment hit these areas in the 1980s what complacent sociology calls the “visible immigrants” found themselves trapped and underemployed in the suburbs as the earlier (“invisible”?) immigrants of Spanish, Italian, Polish or Portuguese origin had succeeded in getting the hell out. Integration after all is not so much a question of religion as it is a question of timing.

  Then came the trendy do-gooders who in  the mid-1980s launched the windy humanistic movement “Touche pas à mon pôte” (“don’t touch my mate”) with the help of heavy public subsidies from the Mitterrand government, “the Sphinx” having abandoned all pretence to defend working class interests sometime early in the 1980s. Ostensibly a worthy movement aimed at overcoming the problems faced by those French citizens who were unfortunate enough to have Arab or black parents, this current of thought succeeding in convincing gullible people that the real problem faced by people in the sink estates was the entrenched racism of the French and not simply shit jobs, unemployment and a brutal and ignorant police force: problems faced by workers everywhere.

Vomitorium 

The other side of the political rainbow has seen the development of a far-right extremist party, the National Front, from out of the moribund Poujadist organisation of the 1950s. Led by Jean Marie Le Pen, an ex-paratrooper involved in dirty business during the Algerian war of independence, this outfit provides a convenient bogey-man for lefties who have got lost in the banality of left/right capitalist politics. The party, generously staffed by disaffected former colonists from Algeria (the so-called “pieds noirs”), has heavily underlined the failure of integration of the French citizens of Arab origin many of whom, incredibly, still don’t know how to conjugate the subjunctive of the imperfect in French and this after so many grammar lessons. The party even has a radio station called, curiously, “Radio Courtoisie” (Right wing French thugs have always had impeccable manners) to beam out its Christian message of hatred and prejudice. Fortunately, only bored housewives and retired colonels listen to this drivel. Ordinary French workers have proved over and over again that they are not on the whole racist bigots, though they can be a bit xenophobic.  Nonetheless the party continues to garner votes in constituencies where it doesn’t even have a local branch or even any kind of grass-roots existence. For the party exists in fact, as a convenient way for workers to express their disaffection with the French political establishment which is all too clearly in cahoots with capitalist interests. It’s a kind of gigantic publicly-subsidized vomitorium into which people spew their bile with Le Pen’s ugly mug providing a convenient emetic. In doing this, however, French workers have clearly been playing with fire Now they’re getting burnt.

Urban pariahs

Thus doubly confirmed in their status as urban pariahs, many of the young people in the suburbs have continued to study quietly and find work despite an ill-adapted educational system, material difficulties, postcode discrimination, the useless condescension of the politicians and crap jobs. The educational priority areas (“zone éducation prioritaire”), modelled on the earlier British fiasco, have been starved of resources and have thus done little to erode the inequalities of an overtly elitist educational system. They receive a piddling 8 percent more than the mainstream schools, hardly enough to compensate for the learning difficulties encountered by people from poor backgrounds, not to mention those from non-French speaking backgrounds in a country where national arrogance places on premium on speaking proper.

Despite the difficulties there are some fine, dedicated teachers in these areas whose efforts have been

hampered by a sordid social environment and poor logistic support. In the final analysis then, 62 percent of French working-class people find their offspring back in the working-class background which they came from (the highest proportion in Europe) in a country which presents itself as secular and meritocratic. And that’s before we put the peculiar problems faced by the denizens of the ghetto into the balance.

So the real problem is the inability of people in these areas to escape from a highly stigmatizing spatial set-up. The association suburb = immigrants = delinquency is criminal stupidity. The Arab and black populations who live in areas in close proximity to mainstream French life do not riot. Nor did the Arabs who live in the centre of Marseilles. (In the same way quiet Alsatian villages with no Arabs vote National Front.) Where the sink estates did not riot is more important than where they did but no television cameras go to these areas. In fact, the vast majority of the third generation immigrants in the suburbs took no part in the disorders and many were as terrified by what went on as the French population in general.

The problem should not be thought of simply in terms of spatially delimited sink estates. The wider trends of the whole of French society should be taken into account. To a significant extent, the troubles should be seen as a reflection of the growing geographical segregation of the French population partly due to the booming housing market and the continuous rise in rents in the private sector.  And the doings of the affluent in France should also be mentioned. The rich are beginning to privatize the French republic for their own ends. Rich ghettoes, like Sarko’s own constituency of Neuilly to the west of Paris has only 2 percent of council housing when the legal obligation is for 20 percent. The same is true of neighbouring Levallois and the pattern is repeated all over France. Clearly the rich are having some difficulty integrating into the Republic, perhaps they don’t want to.

After all, they send their kids to private, often catholic schools, where they learn how different they are from everyone else. Thereafter they take advantage of higher education facilities to propel their horrendous offspring into the better jobs. A short sojourn in the States completes the picture. More importantly, recent events have allowed the government to sneak through controversial tax breaks for the super-rich whilst introducing more tax free enterprises into the sink estates – but then again, perhaps, this was what was really at stake in the first place.

MM (Paris)

Report from Paris (2005)

From the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following report on the recent riots in France as seen by a migrant worker there.

At the end of October there was a heavy riot in the suburbs of Paris as a result of a police identity card control. Three African immigrants, one from the west coast and the other two from North Africa were controlled by police around Seine Saint Denis in one of suburbs of Paris. There was a disagreement between the immigrants and the police on duty. So, the three immigrants raced for safety but, unfortunately, two ran into a high tension compound and were electrocuted. Another one ran in a different direction and alerted his friends to what happened. Before they could trace the two boys and call the fire service to rescue them, it was too late.

   These suburbs have been neglected, segregated for people of the same ethnic and religious background, for the past thirty years. Some of those living there who acquired good skills in one trade or the other were denied a job opportunity because of their colour, location of their residence or Islamic names. An English adage says that an idle man is the devil’s workshop. Since these immigrants were denied social and economic integration into French society, they devised what means of livelihood they could in order to keep the body and soul together. For many years French society has regarded them as outcasts and vagabonds who have no value just because of their colour and fate.

   When this incident happened the Interior Minister of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, a hardliner and the son of an Hungarian immigrant, supported the action of the police and said that they were on a drive to control criminals and drugs in those suburbs instead of showing compassion and regret over the death of the two African immigrants. After his television broadcast, these immigrants, comprising black Africans and the North Africans, plus their sympathetic friends from Asia, Latinos, West Indies and other Europeans, joined hands in the riots.

   On the second day of the riots, the Interior Minister bragged that he would beef up the police to one thousand to control the situation. And that night about eight hundred cars were burnt excluding houses. The riots started from Seine Saint Denis around Paris and spread all over France. These cities are Bordeaux, Nantes, Toulouse, Tours, Belfort, Essonne, Roubaix, Strasbourg, Lyon, Vaucluse, Besancon, Aulnay, Marseille, Amiens, and many more cities in France.

 The cost of the damage in the three weeks of riots in France amounted to 200 million, just because of racism, xenophobia, and segregation that was imposed on immigrants by capitalism. And this is the country that propagated a disguised colonisation to third world countries under the pretence of a policy of association and assimilation. And today their fake paradigm programme is exposed to the world for us to know the danger in capitalism.

   On 11 November, BBC radio reported that the European Union Justice Commissioner, Franco Frattini, told France to integrate its ethnic minorities in other to avoid further such occurrences. On 13 November, the same EU gave 50 million to France to rebuild their country. They had forgotten to pass the message across to other EU member states that prevention is better than cure.

  To my greatest surprise, on the streets of Paris and other cities that I visited in France many French people confessed in front of the television cameras that they had never seen riots like this in their life. And these were just riots with petrol bombs and stones thrown by few boys! And I asked myself, what if they had seen the genocides from Biafra to Rwanda that imperialism caused, because of its egocentric intent, at the expense of poor Africans in particular and the third world countries at large.What is happening in France today should be a lesson to nations like Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

  As a socialist propagandist, I hate vandalism, I believe in peaceful social and political dialogue. But, when people take the law into their hands, that means that they have been oppressed beyond bounds and they are prone to explode. And their explosion can result to rioting, rebellion, terrorism and

sometimes total anarchy.

  At this juncture, EU should use its tongue to count its teeth and know that the Fortress Europe has brought severe damage to France and that many more riots are on the way to other EU member states that have refused to open up their immigration policy that encourages marginalised ‘illegal’ immigrants. Immigration policy in the West is based on corrupt western politicians conniving with the third world politicians; as a result, immigrants continue to cross borders and seas no matter what the risk ahead.

  Sarkozy is a man who believes that he can become the President of France in 2007 by fighting immigration. Capitalism has blindfolded the world that our level of forgetting things is quite enormous. If not, how can some political riff-raff like Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the Belgium Interior Minister Patrick Dawael be propagating what their forefathers could not achieve  ears ago? These two sycophants are looking for cheap popularity in their political party because they live in the land of the blind that have eyes but cannot see. They will bring woes to the entire population of these two nations.

   Lastly, I am advocating that the only solution that will enable people of different race to live in peace is socialism. And capitalism should be eradicated without further delay to enable us to enjoy the beautiful things of the world without fear.

Dele C. Iloanya, 

Paris

Editorial: The Unemployed Riots in France (2005)

Editorial from the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following the death in the last week of October of two teenagers electrocuted while trying to avoid a police identity card check, riots broke out in the suburb of Paris where they lived. These soon spread to other suburbs of Paris and then to those in other cities of France. Police were stoned, cars set alight  and fire engines attacked, night after night,for three weeks.

  

Most of the rioters were the children or grandchildren of workers who had come to work in France from its former colonies in North and West Africa. This led some to see the riots as another aspect of some Islamic attack on “Western civilisation”. Predictably, the notorious French racist politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen, said it was all due to immigration.

Actually, in a sense, it was a revolt against “Western civilisation”, but not by Islamists. It was a revolt by unemployed youth, living in rundown estates with the worst amenities, against the fate capitalism has imposed on them. Certainly, most of the rioters were nominally Muslims and the children of recent economic migrants, but essentially they were workers who had been thrown on to the scrap heap even before they had had a job.

Insult was added to injury by the French interior minister talking about people on the estates as “riff-raff” and about “cutting out the gangrene” and “cleaning by pressure hose”. He maintained he was only referring to drug dealers and petty criminals but this was not how it was perceived on the estates.

Capitalism needs a reserve army of  unemployed, to exert a downward pressure on wages as well as a source of readily-available extra labour-power that can be called upon during the expansion phase of the capitalist economic cycle. In addition, there is always a surplus population who, for various reasons, are never going to be employed. The level of state “benefits” paid to these non-working sections of the working class is fixed more by political than economic considerations, basically by what the state can get away with without provoking riots.

In France the state has evidently pushed a section of these workers too far. The result has been a revolt against the state as represented by the police, the fire brigade and public buildings. The French state has replied in kind. Sending in more police, declaring a state of emergency, imposing curfews, handing down severe sentences including deportation to countries convicted rioters are supposed to have “come from” but have never been to.

Of course, in the end, the state will win and the riots will be put down. After the repression, however, the state will spend a little more money to improve amenities and job prospects on the estates, the price of avoiding further costly and damaging unemployed riots.

But what a comment on capitalist civilisation! In a world which has the potential to provide a decent life for everybody, a section of the population is driven to riot just to get a slightly less small pittance to live on. Rioting, though perhaps understandable, is not the answer. What is required is not blind rage but that the quite legitimate rage of these victims of capitalism should be accompanied by an understanding of the situation capitalism has put them in. Capitalism causes – in fact, requires – some workers to be surplus to requirements and suffer above average social exclusion.

Once this is understood, then it will be realised that the constructive thing to do is to work for a new society in which having to obtain money, by hook or by crook, to acquire what you need to live will be a thing of the past. A society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life where enough for all will be produced since satisfying people’s needs will be the sole aim of production. A society where everyone will be “socially included” because we’re all fellow human beings.

News in Review: Too Simple (1964)

The News in Review column from the February 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

AT HOME: Too simple

Peter Simple, the Daily Telegraph engaging columnist, is one of the few unrepentent reactionaries still in business. The bluest of Tories now profess to be progressives, but not Simple. He hates science, looks with suspicion upon anything labelled as progress.

His mythical community of Stretchford is a typical new town where masses of workers have been dumped and where their standards of culture and ignorance have taken control. His satirising of the popular press, through the medium of Jack Moron, is positively savage.

It is almost inevitable that, because he flinches at ugliness, because he probes constantly for left wing humbug, because he hates mob ignorance, Peter Simple should sometimes hit a nail on the head. This is what he wrote on December 18th last:

  Teenagery is an industry. It brings immense profits to those engaged in it. It is as much a typical feature of our civilisation as the indiscriminate use of agricultural poisons, the destruction of the seemliness and beauty of our surroundings, the plague of motor-cars. None of these things would be a problem if there were no money to be made out of them. It is useless to appeal to the better nature of those who profit from the teenage industry.

Simple has no answer to the problem but then he is not the sort of man from whom we expect answers. Indictment is his field: “There is no money,” he says, “in decency.”

It is too much to expect the Daily Telegraph to benefit from their columnist's flash of insight and realise that the ugliness and the futility of the world is caused precisely by the fact that all production is carried on because someone hopes to make a profit from it. But that is the truth of the matter.

As long as capitalism lives there will be the soulless wastes of Stretchford and there will be the sort of people who gobble up the spew of Jack Moron. And, presumably, there will be Peter Simple to look on it with a weary, irascible eye, hating it all but nevertheless supporting it.


ABROAD: Kenya, too

Everyone should now be accustomed to the nauseating acts which are played out whenever another country gets its independence. The celebrations among the people of the country, who appear to be happy in the delusion that they have gained something from the substitution of one set of rulers by another. The extreme nationalism of the new government — often imposed with a heavy hand. The back slapping and banqueting, between men who were only recently denounced as insatiable terrorists and the representatives of the government which so denounced them. All very familiar and all very sickening.

So it was when Kenya became independent, last December. An estimated £400,000 was spent on the celebrations, including a Miss Uhuru beauty contest which Mr. Jomo Kenyatta left in a huff because the band did not play the Kenya National Anthem when he arrived. Persuaded to return, the new Prime Minister warned that non-Africans must respect the African personality (wasn’t there a man, before the war, who used to say the same sort of thing about the Aryan personality, at big rallies in Nuremburg and other German cities?) and said that if the band had not been Africans they would have been deported.

The Duke of Edinburgh attended a garden party where four former Mau Mau generals also turned up, but the Duke did not leave because his job was to stay and be chummy. Mr. Kenyatta had his photograph taken dancing with the rather bewildered looking daughter of Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys, who had presumably been briefed by daddy to do the honours to the ex Mau Mau leader. Mr. Kenyatta received a telegram from Sir Alex Douglas-Home which looked forward to welcoming him at the next Commonwealth Prime Minister’s Conference in London.

Now with all this mateyness flying about nobody would think that not so long ago Kenyatta and the other Mau Mau leaders were reviled by the British government as primitive savages, heads of a secret society with disgusting initiation rites, terrorists who delighted in orgies of violence. This is the sort of propaganda which was put out in the past about other nationalist movements —about EOKA in Cyprus and the IRA in Ireland, for example.

In each case it eventually suited the British ruling class to come to terms with the nationalists. The propaganda changed and the nationalist leaders were welcomed to the circle of international rulers; their past, no matter how bloody, was forgotten and they soon became respected men. Kenyatta is only the latest of yesterday’s enemies to receive this treatment.

The state of Kenya is beset with all the usual problems of a newly independent African country and the future of its people is not bright. Whatever hardships they may suffer, we may be sure that there will always be plenty of official hypocrisy for them to consume.


BUSINESS: Buses for Cuba

It was not surprising that Washington expressed its regrets at the contract under which the Leyland Motor Corporation will supply four hundred buses to Cuba. Castro is perhaps America’s biggest and blackest bogy man at the present.

But equally it is not surprising that Leyland are eager to do business with Castro. They are no exception to the rule that production under capitalism is carried on for profit and they are ready to send their goods anywhere, if they think that the return is good enough.

Leyland are not, of course, the only vehicle manufacturers with this idea—the Cuban deal was settled in the face of competition from German, French, Japanese, Spanish and Czech salesmen. The struggle for export sales, in this case, is obviously at least as fierce as for the home market.

Governments, as a rule, encourage their industries to export and often offer all manner of financial incentives to them to do so. there are exceptions to this, though—when the overall interests of a country's ruling class make it inadvisable for them to trade with another country, a government will often restrict or forbid exports to that country.

So it is at the moment with the U.S.A., which has a long list of countries on its black list, including Cuba.

But some industries chafe under these restrictions. In this country, for example, there is more than one pressure group which advocates the development of trade with the Eastern bloc, even at the risk of upsetting the Americans. These groups arc not interested in the politics of the thing: they are concerned only with the fact that the Iron Curtain countries and China might well be a very profitable market for them to exploit.

There are at present no British restrictions upon non-strategic trade with Cuba and, for Leylands, selling buses there has for a long time been an attractive proposition. Over eight hundred have been sold since the war and Leylands are hoping for another order for a thousand. The firm also say that the Cubans pay their bills promptly and reliably, which just about seems to clinch it as far as the bus makers’ interests go.

And if these interests clash with the wishes of the State Department, that only goes to show what a confused system we live under. Capitalism's alliances are supposed to make the world a safer and more settled place. But even within those alliances there are all manner of divided interests, of stresses and strains and—often—open rifts.

A Guide for ambitious candidates (1964)

From the February 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the next General Election draws nearer, there must be many Members of Parliament, and many who aspire to become M.P.s, anxiously casting about for material for their election addresses and for the public meetings at which they will have to present themselves to the voters. These addresses and meetings are full of pitfalls for the unwary, the unsophisticated — and the honest. This guide is offered to assist such candidates through their campaigns.

Progress: All candidates must stand for progress. It is a good plan to say, at all appropriate moments, that we cannot put back the clock, or that we must be always forward looking or some such other meaningless phrase. If you are challenged to state what you mean by progress, mention automation, television, synthetic fibres, and so on. You may also be able to get away with earth satellites and nuclear energy, provided nobody in your audience is bright enough to connect these with inter continental ballistic missiles and hydrogen bombs. But if there are such people present you will probably have a difficult evening anyway, because they are bound to have some awkward ideas on progress and might even question whether what you call progress means better lives for the mass of the world's people. If they do, get the chairman to say that you must cut your reply short because you have another meeting to attend.


Housing: You are bound to be asked about housing. If your questioner is someone who is homeless, or about to be evicted, or is living with several children in a couple of rooms in a basement, you can exploit his plight in your reply. Lean forward, adopt a very earnest expression and assure him that you, and only you, can guarantee him a decent home. Labour and Liberal candidates can use the question to flay the government; Tories can turn the point by quoting suitably doctored statistics on the rate of house building, slum clearance, and so on.

All candidates should in any case have a supply of such figures readily available—they always sound very impressive. In particular, make play of your party's intention to do something about housing in the future. It is not advisable to dwell upon the past—somebody might point out that slums are developing faster than houses are being built and that no government has ever been able to solve the problem, although all of them have promised to do so.


Prosperity: This can be treated in the same way as housing. Compare pre- and post-war levels of wages, hours of work, and so on. Make sure that the figures you give for the average wage do not take into account any of the lower paid industries and that it includes payment for overtime, bonuses and such like. On the other hand, your figure for the length of the working week should be a basic one; it should not include overtime because this would show that the working week is longer now than before the war.

Promise to stop prices rising. Conservatives can excuse the rises which have happened since they came to power by blaming wasteful administration by the Attlee government. Labourites can attack confidently on this issue, provided nobody remembers their own record. Liberals also have a pretty free hand here, because of the length of time since they held power and the remoteness of the chance that they will ever get back.

Ignore any questioner who wants to know about the ownership of the means of production and the proportionate division of incomes; these issues are too fundamental, imply airily that prosperity for everyone is just around the corner, provided we all pull our belts in, work harder and keep our wages in check. If anyone is unkind enough to point out that your party has always made this promise, avoid the point by chiding him for being obsessed with the past and not looking forward to the glorious, progressive future.


Health and Education: You have a lot of scope here. Refer to the National Health Scheme as a great and merciful step forward in human welfare. (Tories will have to go easy here and forget that they originally opposed the Scheme.) Become indignant about the bad old days, when poor people could not afford to pay the doctor, the dentist and the optician. On no account go into the reasons for the Health Service, lest you reveal the fact that it is just another method of keeping the workers as fit as possible for better exploitation.

State that the best medical treatment is now available to everyone, but do not go too deeply into this, as there may be in the audience, say, a mother who contrasts the attention she got when she had her last child with that which the ladies of the Royal Family get when they produce. Somebody may also mention that Aneurin Bevan, although he fathered the Health Scheme, did not die in a ward full of other people, just like any unprivileged member of the working class. You can evade this one by attacking the questioner for besmirching the name of a dead man.

On education, mention the fact that more people than ever go to university and imply that this is because they are better off. Do not get involved in arguments about which income bracket tends to get to which university and whether a working class student goes there for the same reasons as does a rich man's son. Do not be afraid to mention public schools; in fact, you may be able to stir up some applause by pointing out that Churchill and Attlee were the products of those schools and asking what we would do without them. (On no account mention Profumo, who went to Harrow; he will not help you make your point.)


Young and Old: This is an opportunity for you to appear at your most humane. State, with the air of a fearless discoverer, that young children are the adults of the future and hint at the great burden of public service which you now bear and which you will one day pass on to them. Follow this by saying that is why you are happy that children today are taller, heavier, stronger, etc., etc., etc. You may be sure that only a very determined heckler will want to know why industry is so interested in healthy children.

At the same time you must make it clear that old people do not escape your concern. Speak at some length on the labours they have performed and upon the nobility of a long life of hard work. You may even cultivate the ability to produce a tear, or at any rate a catch in the throat, at such moments. But make sure that these can be interpreted as only the results of manly sympathy and not of weakness.

Make it plain that you are all too well aware of the sufferings of countless old age pensioners and do not refer to the fact that this is the lot only of retired workers. Promise that a vote for you is a vote for higher pensions. All candidates, provided that they are careful in their selection of historical evidence, can attack their opponents on this score. But all of them should avoid mentioning the inconvenient fact that, in spite of the decades of promises, the conditions of old people are still a social disgrace.

Peace and Disarmament: Every candidate must stand for peace. Even if you actually advocate a war—for example, over Suez in 1956 or the Polish Corridor in. 1939—you must make it sound as if you are only in favour of wars to preserve peace. (Most audiences will fall for this one.) Say, of course, that you stand for just and honourable peace and do not be drawn into the trap of defining these terms. If you find yourself in a discussion of the fact that previous peace treaties have only drawn out the frontiers over which the next war has been fought, blame this onto the lack of acumen of bygone statesmen, or upon the perfidy of foreigners. Let your listeners believe that you are above such mistakes.

Speak with pride of pacts like the recent Test Ban Treaty — imply that you, or your party, had a hand in it, whether this is true or not. Do not discuss the real reasons for the Treaty, nor the fact that it has been signed only by those nations who have bombs, but do not at present want to test them and by those who have no bombs and are not likely to have them. If a member of your audience points out that France and China, who are the countries most likely to want to test bombs in the near future, have not signed the Treaty, reply by suggesting that this is exactly the sort of behaviour to be expected from dirty foreigners like de Gaulle and Mao tse-Tung. You will find that, for most audiences, this is an acceptable line.

Foreign Affairs: Although you must be careful to say that you deplore racial discrimination, it is usually pretty safe to play up to your audience's patriotism by implying that all foreigners are vaguely odd and that the only really trustworthy person is a Britisher. Make sure that in at least one spot in your address—more, if the applause warrants it—you refer to This Grand Old Country Of Ours. Speak of the conquests of other nations with asperity—few people will remind you of the unpleasantly bloody history of the British Empire.

Refer to our Exports as often as you can and give out the usual propaganda about how important they are—but do not say to whom they are important. Give details about the successful export efforts of some foreign industries—Japanese shipyards, Continental dambuilders, and so forth—and suggest that this is a scandalous situation. Somebody in your audience may remind you that this country is one of the world's great exporters and that in any case the success or failure of a country's exports have little or no real effect upon the conditions of the majority of its people: in which case you are having a very unfortunate evening indeed.

Yourself: You must present an image of a sober, responsible family man who, although he has great talents, is still one of the ordinary people. Make it clear that your opponents are not supplying what you think is the right type of leadership and that things would be much better if the leaders were changed. You should not have much difficulty here; most of your listeners will have accepted that they need political leaders. Get the chairman to introduce you as The Next Member For This Constituency, but do not wait too long for the applause after this, lest the audience remain embarrassingly silent.

Do not shrink from shaking the dirtiest of hands, kissing the wettest of babies, lingering on the most heavily cabbage-scented doorsteps. Above all, do anything, go anywhere, promise anything, if it will win you votes.

And Finally . . . Don’t Worry! The promises you make may be wild, but perhaps you won’t be elected anyway. And if you do get in you can always think up excuses for breaking promises (blame the Russians, the French, the Chinese, or your political opponents) and in any case the trick worked, didn’t it?

But above all, remember that ever since capitalism came onto the scene political parties have lied and swindled their way into and out of power. The people who have been tricked have always forgotten the lies and the broken promises and have continued to vote for capitalism. So if you don’t get in, some other fraud will.

Ivan

Goodwill to all . . . ? Well, just now and again (2005)

From the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well did we Standard readers?  Show goodwill to all or at least to some of our fellows during the Christmas and the New Year break and, was it a good feeling?  Was it good to give as well as to receive – was it better to give or better to receive?  Now that we are all back nose to the grindstone, the conflict going on in our heads between the drudgery of factory, the office or the shop, or wherever it is that we find ourselves tied to again, and with the frolics of the holiday extant in our memories.  That song still in our heads which occasionally finds its way to our lips, constantly interrupted and usually ceased, by the numbing thoughts, the bland conversation and presence of that cold relation between the product and its maker.  Just some of the elements of the workplace which seem to demand for themselves all the space in our heads.  We are quickly reminded what a misery and a waste of our lives is this daily drudge.  ‘Oh!  I wish it could be Christmas everyday…’  

Socialist readers say that the only aspects of any value worth considering about this holiday break are that we proles get some time off the drudgery of everyday work and get time with our families and friends.  Also, we can pig-out on all the good food, if we are so inclined, enjoy the special TV programmes and have at least one chance in the year to give some kindness, affection and love to our fellows and hopefully, to receive like in return.  Readers north of the border enjoy a little extra indulge on Hogmanay. . .

Otherwise, that whole charade has very negative feelings for us.  All the money and debt required, the huckstering, the pretence, and the religious connotation and, that feeling that all the kindness, affection and love is primarily expressed in a material form — that sort of love that I can only describe as counterfeit — material love (gifts) to satisfy some fetish with the must-have commodity.  We know too that unless we give a gift, a card or a calendar to another we are unlikely to receive like from them in return — a sort of coercive love.

Our children are deceived and urged to request gifts from a fictional figure called all the way up from the 4th century Bishop of Mrya re-branded by Coca Cola and renamed Santa Claus and, unless they behave themselves, he will not deliver — more coercion.

Finally, the ideology or culture demands of us that we all undertake the same ritual every year.  Go out and spend as much money as we’ve got and more that we haven’t got, on gifts, cards and calendars as well as buy the same fattening foodstuff, stuffing the turkeys with sausage and the capitalists with profit.  And on Hogmanay we are to praise the last year as well as the New Year as though they were something special.  Perhaps last year was, if we’ve survived. Unless we follow this line we will not enjoy ourselves and we might be seen as outcasts or spoilsports. In no time at all it seems we are back again in the world we know (but don’t love) where other rituals dominate the scene and here its not “goodwill and love” we hear, but, “go on, stick one on him and then wrestle him to the ground”.

At this time of the year are these feelings of goodwill — kindness, affection and love between fellows — , an ideological or cultural thing or are they symptomatic of deep longing for another world where humans could be free to behave with kindness, affection and love as a matter of course all the year round? We are also to wish each other well for the coming New Year, and hope our luck will bring us a better life despite the cruel truth that our material conditions are likely to remain the same.  In the cold miserable light of a capitalist day, nothing much has changed by the notching up of another year since the supposed birth of the fantasy Jesus Christ.  Sure, one or two of us might in a New Year win the lottery — and then we can begin to live a little easier, if you can square you conscience with a world of haves and have-nots.

In socialist society, not only will we have free access to the products and services of human production and to life itself, too we’ll get free access to all the human support, kindness, affection and love from all our fellows all year round, instead of for just a mean two weeks.  In free society this behaviour will become the norm in our human world.  Why would you want to pay, when you can have free access?  In addition, we will be free of the drudgery and stressful life that is our everyday experience now, that which we are glad to see the back of for a skimpy two weeks of partying at the end of the year.

William Dunn

Cooking the Books: Acceptable capitalism? (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Addressing a press dinner in London in November, the head of BMW in Britain, Jim O’Donnell, attacked the behaviour of the four businessman who BMW sold Rover to in 2000 for £10. Apparently, they paid themselves an average of £3 million each in 2002 as well as setting up a generous pension scheme for themselves, despite MG Rover still making heavy losses. This, said O’Donnell, was “the unacceptable face of capitalism” (Times, 12 November).

Edward Heath, when Prime Minister, had famously said the same thing about Tiny Rowland and Lonrho in 1973. But this criticism implies that there is an acceptable face of capitalism. If so, what is it? Is it acceptable that capitalist firms (such as BMW, for instance) make a profit out of the difference between the value of what their workers produce and what they are paid as wages and salaries? Is it acceptable that capitalist firms should direct their investment to producing what is the most profitable, while essential human needs are left unmet? Is it acceptable that governments should support and encourage all this?

Apparently so. Supporters of capitalism only get worked up when some capitalist lines his pockets at the expense of other capitalists. But the four businessmen can easily reply that they did nothing illegal, and that in fact they were following the economic law of capitalism by taking money out of an unprofitable line of production and investing it, or making it available for investment, in some line that is profitable.

As far as Socialists are concerned, capitalism has no acceptable face. Everything about it is unacceptable. Its accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Its exploitation of wage-labour. Its putting of profits before satisfying people’s needs.

The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1964)

From the February 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who have read Lenin’s Left Wing Communism. An Infantile Disorder, will recall that in an appendix he attacks the anti-parliamentary Italian “Lefts.” This group, despite its extremist position, remained a part of the Italian section of the Third International until it was excluded by Stalin for supporting the Russian Left Opposition. This year the French followers of this group have brought out a very interesting pamphlet on Russia entitled L’Economie Russe d’Octobre à Nos Jours, which is summarised below. Note that in what follows we are summarising the pamphlet and not necessarily expressing our own opinions.

Lenin’s plans
Before the Bolsheviks seized power in October, 1917 Lenin developed the theory that, as the Provisional Government was not prepared to carry the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion, the proletariat must take power. Once in power the proletariat would have to put into practice a number of immediate economic measures. These measures would not be socialist, but state capitalist. Lenin was impressed by war-time Germany where a form of state capitalism had been operated in the interests of the German capitalist class. What the proletariat in Russia must do, said Lenin, was to operate a similar state capitalist system but in their own interests.

War Communism
Once in power the Bolsheviks introduced these emergency measures ― confiscations, requisitions, various controls, rationing, nationalisation of the banks and the establishment of a state monopoly for foreign trade. None of these measures was in any way socialist or, indeed, regarded as such ― at least not in Russia. At this time the government was a coalition of Bolsheviks and Left Social-Revolutionaries (the peasant party). In agriculture the Bolsheviks were forced to grant the SR demand for the division of the landed estates among the peasants instead of their own demand for the nationalisation without compensation of landed property. In fact, as Lenin pointed out, there was nothing that could be done against this as the peasants had already expressed their views by seizing the land.

When the Soviet Government introduced its New Economic Policy in 1921 a number of Communists, inside and outside Russia, denounced this as a betrayal of socialism. As a matter of fact, however, there was nothing peculiarly socialist about this period of so-called “war communism”. The measures adopted were those which any bourgeois government would have adopted in the similar circumstances of civil war, foreign intervention and the threat of famine. One of the measures of this period which particularly attracted Communists outside Russia was the forced requisition of agricultural produce from the peasants when needed as this implied the abolition of the market. But there was nothing socialist about this. The Soviet Government used the system which had been developed in feudal Russia for distributing corn in time of famine. Thus the requisitions of this period, far from being a form of Socialism, were simply the reappearance of a mediaeval phenomenon caused by special circumstances.

The New Economic Policy
By 1921 it was obvious that the expected world revolution had failed to materialise (due to the betrayals of the Social Democrats). This meant that the Bolsheviks had no choice: they had to let Capitalism develop in Russia. The Soviet Government realised this and adopted the policy of “state capitalism” developed by Lenin in 1917. This was defined as the development of Capitalism under the control and direction of the proletarian state.

Figures showed that in 1919 industrial production was only one-seventh of the pre-war figure. The virtual ending of the civil war allowed Capitalism to be developed again with the full approval of the Soviet Government. A number of the emergency measures taken in the period of “war communism” were rescinded to facilitate this development: some factories were handed back to their owners and a tax in kind was substituted for the forced requisitions. The Government saw as their main enemy the petty-peasant economy and decided to rely on Capitalism to do the work of destroying this for them. Lenin realised that there were dangers involved in this, but unlike those who accused him of betrayal he was a realist. He knew he had no choice. In his report to the XIth Congress of the Communist Party in March, 1922 Lenin quoted a passage from an émigré bourgeois newspaper which read :

  What sort of state is the Soviet government building? The communists say that it is a communist state and assure us that the new policy is a matter of tactics: the Bolsheviks are making use of the private capitalists in a difficult situation, but later they will get the upper hand. The Bolsheviks can say what they like; as a matter of fact it is not tactics but evolution, internal regeneration; they will arrive at the ordinary bourgeois state, and we must support them. History proceeds in devious ways. (Our emphasis.)

Lenin commented that this was quite possible and went on,

  History knows all sorts of metamorphoses. Relying on firmness of convictions, loyalty and other splendid moral qualities, is anything but a serious attitude in politics. A few people may be endowed with splendid moral qualities, but historical issues are decided by vast masses, which, if the few do not suit them, may at times treat them none too politely. (quoted p. 57)

Lenin thus realised that nothing the Bolsheviks could do could prevent the development of Capitalism in Russia or, even, the degeneration of proletarian rule into the “ordinary bourgeois state”. This is precisely what did happen in Russia. The “vast masses” behind Stalin working for the ordinary bourgeois state triumphed over the “splendid moral qualities” of the Left and Right Oppositions struggling to preserve proletarian rule.

Agriculture
In 1928 occurred the famous “turn to the Left” and Stalin began his policy of “de-kulakisation “. The kulaks, or rich peasants, were to be eliminated and peasant farms “collectivised”. This policy was opposed by both the Left and the Right Opposition because they saw this as a step backward. They regarded it as the worse possible compromise with the peasant economy. For it smashed private capitalism in the countryside. But this private capitalism was a progressive force which NEP had wished to encourage precisely because it would lead to the weakening of the peasantry.

Stalin’s “collectivisation” had the opposite effect. It has led to the stabilisation of peasant economy. For the collective farm is a static form which shows no tendency to evolve toward the expropriation of the peasantry. Khrushchev by denationalising the machine and tractor stations has strengthened the peasantry even further. The collective farm is nothing new in Russian history. In the middle ages there existed similar peasant corporations, the cartels, where the more important means of production were held in common while the peasants retained their individual house and surrounding land, some livestock and tools. This is precisely the position of the collective farm today — and the importance of the private plot for Soviet agriculture should not be underestimated. In 1960 33 per cent. of cattle were raised on family plots, 48 per cent. of cows, 31 per cent. of pigs and 22 per cent. of sheep (p. 80).

Soviet agriculture has been in a state of chronic crisis since Stalin’s forced collectivisation. The table below shows that, except as far as pigs are concerned, the figures for the various types of livestock per inhabitant the situation was worse in 1960 than in 1916.

A similar situation exists with regard to grain production: “the production per inhabitant was 576kg in 1913; it had been 610 kg in 1960 (1950?), but only 588.6 in 1959” (p. 119).

Three sectors in Soviet agriculture can be distinguished today : State capitalist (the State farms), private capitalist (the collective farms in their co-operative aspect) and sub-capitalist (the family plot).

LIVESTOCK (millions)       
                       1916    1960

Cattle              58.8     75.8

Cows              28.8     34.8

Pigs                 23        58.6

Sheep/Goats    96.3     132.9


INDEX OF LIVESTOCK (per head) 
                       1916    1960    % change

Cattle              100      82        -18.00%

Cows              100      77        -23.00%

Pigs                 100      163      63.00%

Sheep/Goats    100      98        -2.00%


Industrial Development
The Russians and their apologists are very fond of pointing with pride at the figures showing industrial development in Russia and saying that only a socialist economy could do this. But consider the figures :

Years      Average annual increase per head

1922-28             23%

1929-32             19.2%

1933-37             17.1%

1938-40             13.2%

1941-46             -4.3%

1947-51             22.6%

1951-55             13.1%

1956-60             10.4%

It is quite clear from these figures that not only is the law of the decreasing annual rate of increase verified for Russian capitalism as for others. But they also show that war and invasion provided a stimulant to expansion as in other capitalist countries. Nor is the increase due, as the modern Trotskyists claim, to State planning. The figures show that the highest annual rate was achieved in the years 1922-8 when there were no plans. The same figure would have been realised if the 1918-22 civil war had been lost and a huge trust of Western enterprises had developed the country instead of the Stalinist State. The figures were achieved as “the result of the revolutionary elimination of mediaeval obstacles to economic development, and (were) not at all the product of red or white brains” (p. 91).

Conclusion
All we know about the Russian economy has shown us that the development of production there has followed the directing lines of capitalism in passing through its two stages: revolutionary installation of bourgeois economic and social structures first; consolidation of these structures afterwards. Between 1928 and 1952, Russian pre-capitalism has become a fully-developed capitalism and this process has transformed Russia into a modern and “civilised” country.

Apologists for Russia call this “the construction of Socialism.” Furthermore, the fantastic development of production they call “communism” and they insert between these two stages the transition from “Socialism” to “Communism,” which in fact is only the stabilisation of the capitalist forms of production and life” (p. 130).

The present Russian vision of ever-rising wages and ever-falling prices seems to show that they want to deal with “commodities, value, money, and all the features of capitalist production forever.” But this has nothing to do with the “communism described time and time again, from the first erudite texts of the young Marx to the theoretical analyses perfect in their conciseness, of the fundamental book of our doctrine, Capital ― this communism will finally realise the end of capital, of wages, of commodities, of money, of the market and of the firm” (p. 131, their emphasis).

We would agree with this conclusion. There are, however, a number of views expressed in this pamphlet which we would not endorse. We would not agree that Russia had a “proletarian state” until the Left Opposition was defeated. Even under Lenin it was quite evident that the Soviet Government because it was developing capitalism was coming into conflict with the Russian working class. Nor would we agree that the rule of the Bolshevik organisation was equivalent to the rule of the working class. In October, 1917, not the working class but the Bolshevik organisation seized power. Certainly at the same time interesting makeshift organs of administration, the Soviets, appeared, but the Bolsheviks soon saw that their power was replaced by the rule of the Bolshevik Party. The Russian revolution was, in our view, essentially a bourgeois resolution. Of course, peculiarly Russian conditions determined the particular form of this bourgeois revolution ― a revolutionary intelligentsia leading the working class and peasantry against Tsarism and the bourgeoisie ― but its content was unmistakenly bourgeois. This is why Bolshevism should be seen not as a working class trend but as a bourgeois-revolutionary theory using Marxist terminology and concepts.

The pamphlet can be obtained from “Programme Communiste,” Boîte Postale No. 375, Marseille-Colbert, France, for 4 New Francs.

Adam Buick