Caught In The Act: Out of touch (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Out of touch

Willie Whitelaw went down to the mid-Staffordshire by-election to help the Tory candidate but probably lost him a bucketful of votes when he bought a box of chocolates and grandly said he wanted only the pound notes in the change. The shop girl had to remind him gently that we use only pound coins now—the notes went out years ago.

Being out of touch is one of the criticisms being levelled now at the Thatcher government—out of touch over Poll Tax. mortgages, interest rates, privatisation, the National Health Service . . . They are so out of touch that they lost a rock-solid seat like mid-Staffordshire— and that to a Labour candidate whose pre-packaged. master-minded campaign was openly contemptuous of the voters. Like football teams—or rather like their managers' excuses—when governments are out of touch they are also out of luck. Whitelaw's well-meant blunder was hungrily recorded by the news-hounds who accompanied him on his sweetshop safari, to be retold to an increasingly bewildered and irritated electorate. Thatcher's standing has crashed, as if she has fallen off a cliff, from that of a woman who single-handedly beat the Argentinians. Arthur Scargill and inflation and who then went on to persuade the people of eastern Europe of the benefits of McDonald's burgers and privatised water, into that of a reckless and stubborn dogmatist who would do everyone a favour by applying for her pension and her bus pass.

Squabbles

Of course there are still some hard-core Tories who pretend that all these difficulties are, to use one of Nigel Lawson's unhappier expressions, a “blip" and that all is in fact well within the government. But these loyalists ignore the evidence of their own eyes and ears and what they read in their favourite newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Sun. To begin with, there is the squabble over the leadership, before it is officially available to squabble over, between Heseltine, Tebbit and Howe. Not that any of them ever admit that the leadership is in question or that they would ever dream of opposing Thatcher. It is just that, in all modesty, if the party were ever to be in need of another prime minister who will give his all in the service of this Grand Old Country, well perhaps they have something to offer, perhaps they could be persuaded . . Since all these hopefuls also say that they wholeheartedly support Thatcher's policies and will do their utmost to ensure that we get another dose of Tory government under Thatcher at the next general election it is rather difficult to see why anyone should take them seriously.

Another symptom of the government's malaise has been the sudden eagerness of some of its prominent members to desert it. We refer to the moving examples of Peter Walker and Norman Fowler, both of them the slickest of political operators but who are now revealed as sentimental family men. Walkers survival through the years of opposition to Thatcher, while all around him other ministers were being picked off to crash into back-bench obscurity, must rank with the world's most thrilling escape yarns. Norman Fowler had some of the stickiest jobs in the Cabinet, some of its dirtiest work directly connected with class conflict and working class poverty but he adroitly rode most of his problems by setting up enquiries. By the time the enquiry reported Fowler was off to some other ministry, leaving an exceptionally unpleasant can to be carried by his successor— like the hapless John Moore at the Department of Social Security. Walker and Fowler have left the government, earnestly professing undying loyalty to it. on the excuse that they need to spend more time in their sumptuous homes with their lucky, secure families—a lot luckier than the families who desperately try to make the best of the cruel reforms which Fowler initiated at the DSS. Does anyone believe these reasons? Perhaps there should be an enquiry to find out.

Labour ecstatic

Naturally the Labour leaders are ecstatic about these developments as each day brings yet another crisis for the Tories. As they scent the government's impending doom they are presumably spending less and less time with their families. All that is needed, they happily burble, is one last electoral heave to dispense with the Tories and then we shall have a government of realism and humanity. People who worry about how they will pay the Poll Tax. or about whether the Building Society will be asking for their house back, or what will happen if their doctor's budget runs out just as they need some treatment. may find this an attractive vision. A reference to the history of Labour government should deflate their misplaced optimism.

In the middle of 1968 the Wilson government were facing a crisis which was remarkably similar to that of the Tories today. They had been returned to power, on a surge of expectation, with an increased majority in 1966. But two years later they were in an economic crisis with a persistent deficit in the balance of payments; they were in continual conflict with the unions over the statutory wage-freeze (the BOAC pilots were constrained to make a little history in this); they had lost a series of by-elections, the opinion polls said that only 27 per cent of people were satisfied with Wilson as prime minister and that if there were a general election then the Labour Party could expect to hang on to only 50 seats.

Plots

George Brown had finally managed to resign from the government because he objected to being left out when they were discussing economic crises (apparently he still wasn't bored by them) and Ray Gunter left the Cabinet grumbling about it being ‘overweight with intellectuals". It wasn't clear whether Gunther thought the government's crises could have been avoided with a bit of educational subnormality. In any case his departure was not deeply mourned. There were active plots to ease Wilson out of Number Ten, on the theory that he alone was responsible for capitalism's waywardness, encouraged by the Times, the Observer, the Economist and. under the deranged guidance of Cecil King, the Daily Mirror. Meanwhile, the Tories busily promoted their own candidate for prime minister as a "Man of Integrity". It was, of course, Ted Heath. Yes. it was rather a long time ago.

The Wilson government's response was to do just about the only thing they could do—plough on patching things up as best they could while pretending that the problems were only temporary provided everyone kept their nerve. Wilson soothingly assured the nation ". . . new and spectacular evidence from all over the country showing the robust strength of British industries" —rather like Tory ministers today who bleat about the "underlying strength of the British economy" or words to that effect. The Labour Party got out a mid-term manifesto which admitted some mistakes but insisted that basically the government was on the right lines—which is what the less obdurate Tories now try, when they harp on the violence among Poll Tax protests—to divert attention from their current problems by setting up a conflict, between the Commons and the Lords, a revival of the famous battle cry of Peers versus People.

Good and bad luck

What this shows is that governments do not basically differ. They all grapple with the problems of capitalism which are always beyond their powers to influence significantly. How the voters judge governments is based largely on what might loosely be called luck. Governments have their good times when, perhaps to their surprise, capitalism's affairs go well for them and the voters love them. And they have their bad times when the crises come one after another and the voters switch their support to another, equally ineffectual, style of reforming capitalism. These are the times when the cracks show, the squabbles become public, when some ministers suddenly want to go home to their wives and families and others can't remember things like what currency to use in a shop.

Ivan

Socialist Teachers (1990)

Party News from the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

A meeting will be held at the Socialist Party Head Office, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN (nearest tube: Clapham North) at 2pm on Sunday 20 May.

Further information: Kerima Mohideen, c/o Head Office.

Where the Greens go wrong (1990)

From the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not a day goes by without the problems of the environment being featured in the press and on radio and television. Particularly since the industrial revolution, there have been developed vastly increased powers of production which have spread across the planet and which are being operated in a very destructive way. So the question is: how do we establish a society in which all people are able to cooperate to provide a decent life for each other which at the same time will be a society which is in balance with nature?

The Socialist Party holds that only socialism can set up the relationships of co-operation, the freedom and the rational control over our affairs which can get us out of the mess we’re in. For all their good intentions, and for all their apparent radicalism, the policies of the Green Party are impractical because they stand no chance of establishing the kind of world they want to see.

The destructive nature of modern production has developed as part of capitalism. Because we live in a competitive, profit-motivated system enterprises come under an irresistible pressure to use the cheapest and most labour efficient methods. There is no choice about this. Companies simply have to go for low cost options and cannot afford to worry about the ecological consequences of this. To choose high cost options would be to commit economic suicide.

Under capitalism the production and distribution of goods takes place – and can only take place – according to the economic laws which govern the profitable circulation of capital. These laws are of an absolutely compelling nature. You can break the criminal law and sometimes get away with it, but you cannot break the laws which regulate the profit system without suffering financial loss or going bankrupt. What this means is that production methods cannot be chosen on their merits, as being environmentally friendly.

Constraints of Market System

The Central Electricity Generating Board is a state capitalist enterprise which every year throws up 4.2 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. It’s not the only villain. West Germany has been putting up 3.5 million tons every year and the countries of the EEC have been putting up over 20 million tons.

In 1984, the British government came under pressure to reduce its emissions by 30 per cent. It refused because the cost would have been £1,000m. At the time British capitalism was struggling to get out of a deep depression in which there were nearly 4 million unemployed and in these circumstances the British government was not in a position to add £1 billion to its energy costs. You only get out of a depression by becoming more competitive, by improving the prospect of profit and by improving investment confidence. You can only achieve these things by lowering not increasing your overall production costs. This is a fundamental and compelling fact of market life.

Everybody must be aware of the tragic absurdity of the situation. We’ve got the urgent need to eliminate these harmful acid emissions and not just by 30 per cent. We’ve got the techniques for doing it, and there are millions of unemployed, so there’s a vast availability of labour for the work. Yet we are unable to bring these things together. We are held back by the economic constraints of the market system. We cannot do it because the profits of a privileged class minority who own and control the means of life come before the needs of the community. There are no sane grounds on which this can be justified.

The only way to get out of the mess is to establish socialism which will be based on common ownership, production solely for need and democratic control. With common ownership all means of production and distribution and all resources will be held in common by the whole community.

You can’t have the oil resources of the North Sea or anywhere else owned by oil companies or governments, you can’t have the land owned by agribusiness and exploited by them for profit, you can’t have the means of life, mining, industry, manufacture and transport owned by capital, and at the same time expect to run a decent society based on cooperation and social responsibility. It is just not possible. If you want a world of co-operation and responsibility then all these means of life must be brought under the democratic control of the whole community on the basis of common ownership.

On this basis, instead of the wages system through which workers are exploited, there will be a community of free producers who will cooperate to produce goods and provide services solely and directly for needs. The community will have access to the pool of goods created free from the barriers of the market, without exchange of any kind and therefore without the use of money which is only necessary for making profit.

It is only by this means that we can sweep aside the economic straitjacket which constrains all social action under capitalism. To come back to the problem of eliminating acid emissions from power stations, the cost of £1 billion would not be a factor. That money barrier would disappear and through co-operation we would use the techniques which are available, apply our energies and get on with the job.

In socialism we would not be bound to use the most labour efficient methods of production. We would be free to select our methods in accordance with a wide range of socially desirable criteria, in particular the vital need to protect the environment. It wouldn’t matter if ecologically benign methods of producing energy required more allocations of labour than destructive methods as we wouldn’t be producing commodities which have to compete in price for sales in the market. We’d be free of all that.

The Green Party has talked about a “steady-state” society and this is something we should aim at. What it means is that we should construct permanent, durable means of production which you don’t constantly innovate. We would use these to produce durable equipment and machinery and durable consumer goods designed to last for a long time, designed for minimum maintenance and made from materials which if necessary can be re-cycled. In this way we would get a minimum loss of materials; once they’ve been extracted and processed they can be used over and over again. It also means that once you’ve achieved satisfactory levels of consumer goods, you don’t insist on producing more and more. Total social production could even be reduced. You achieve this “steady state” and you don’t go on expanding production. This would be the opposite of cheap, shoddy, “throw-away” goods and built-in obsolescence, which results in a massive loss and destruction of resources.

This is something that socialism could do. The problem for the Green Party is that they want this, but they also want to retain the market system in which goods are distributed through sales at a profit and people’s access to goods depends upon their incomes. The market, however, can only function with a constant pressure to renew its capacity for sales; and if it fails to do this production breaks down, people are out of employment and suffer a reduced income. It is a fundamental flaw and an insoluble contradiction in the Green Party argument that they want to retain the market system, which can only be sustained by continuous sales and continuous incomes, and at the same time they want a conservation society with reduced productive activity. These aims are totally incompatible with each other.

Old Failed Policies

The Green Party sees itself as a new force in politics but its basic approach to problems is years out of date. Like the Labour Party, it imagines it can do all sorts of things through the tax system. It says, for example, that it wants a tax system which will substantially redistribute wealth. The Labour Party tried that years ago and it failed, and the Green Party will fail for the same reasons.

Like the old Labour Party they imagine that by having the right kind of government in charge of capitalism they will be able to administer it in the interests of the whole community. The reason the Labour Party failed should be obvious. In its everyday operation capitalism staggers along according to its economic laws which cannot be controlled or rationally directed, on the basis of an economic antagonism between classes with capital trying to maximise its profits at the expense of wages and salaries and workers struggling to maximise wages at the expense of profits. It staggers along on the basis of competition and economic rivalries between enterprises and between capitalist nations.

Yet the Green Party thinks it can form a government which somehow, as if by magic, can ignore this reality and act on the basis of a common community interest through cooperation and socially responsible policies. This cannot be done. The tragedy is that we’ve got a lot of sincere and enthusiastic people in the Greens being sidetracked by these out-dated illusions which have dissipated so much energy and wasted so much time in the past.

The Green Party manifesto contains an elaborate battery of new taxes through which they hope to restructure society. Again, the old Labour Party manifestos contained similar proposals with the same intentions. The Labour Party abandoned them because they failed, but the Green Party has resurrected the corpses of these dead policies.

There’s a community ground rent, a resource or conservation tax, pollution charges, increased consumption taxes, higher taxes on large firms, a new company turnover tax, and new trade taxes which would operate through import and export tariffs.

We can project a scenario for what would happen under a Green government. Imagine that it has passed a law standardising the production of all bottles and glass containers so they can be returned to food and drink producers to be used again. It’s a sensible idea – socialism would do it – but this is a Green government under capitalism and it has put firms in the glass industry out of business and made a lot of workers unemployed. As a result of its trade tax on imports other government have retaliated and placed an embargo on the imports of British goods. This has put more firms out of business and more workers out of jobs. As a result of higher company taxes on large firms there has been a sharp drop in business confidence with a corresponding reduction in investment. Again, this has made more workers unemployed. With less trade and less taxable income, there has been a sharp fall in funds flowing into the Green Exchequer. It has had to abandon its guaranteed income scheme and is facing widespread strikes in the public sector with vital services breaking down.

These depressed conditions have led to an alarming run on the pound, with the Green Chancellor frantically buying in sterling to keep up its value. Having dissipated government funds on this and other measures the Green government has been forced to abandon its plans to invest L1 billion to reduce acid emissions from power stations.

In other words, the Green government is facing mounting hostility from the trade unions, employers, the City and the international business community. It is in desperate straits struggling with a worsening financial crisis. They’ve had to set aside all their plans for dealing with the problems of the environment. Their poll ratings have hit zero, and they’ve fallen out amongst themselves arguing about what went wrong.

In the light of the economic realities of capitalism and the experience of previous reformist governments, which is the more likely scenario? The one being projected in the Green Party’s sublimely optimistic literature or the one just outlined?

Urgent Need for Socialism

The obvious, and only practical, way forward is to get rid of the whole insane capitalist structure. This is the serious work begun by the socialist movement which has to be supported. One of the problems is that throughout this century we’ve had a lot of people who don’t like the system and who want a better world, but they were diverted by the superficially attractive but fatal illusion that capitalism can be made to serve our needs through the right kind of reformist government.

In the meantime the problems have stayed and some have got worse. The Green Party is the first to stress that we don’t have a lot of time, and it is certain that we cannot delay the solution without suffering the consequences. There can be no justification, on any grounds whatsoever, for wanting to retain an exploitative system which robs workers of the products of their labour, which puts privileged class interests and profit before the needs of the community, which robs the soil of its fertility, plunders nature of its resources and destroys the natural systems on which all our lives depend.

The only alternative is socialism. We must concentrate all our efforts on the work of building up a majority of socialists. It might seem a big job because our numbers are small, but we wouldn’t need many more for us to become a strong voice in the community and every new socialist makes the work easier.

Pieter Lawrence

50 Years Ago: May Day: Bedlam Let Loose (1990)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Exactly one year ago the Socialist Standard's annual May-Day Message emphasised the imminent danger of war: today this war has been in progress for eight months. Poland, Russia, Finland, and now the Scandinavian lands, have been drawn into its destructive vortex.

The League of Nations. "Collective Security”, the "Peace Front"—all have vanished, and in their place has come the line-up of allies in war. as it has always, down throughout the history of capitalism.

"Armed strength means peace!" "Alliances prevent war!" Does anyone believe those discarded catch-cries?

Yet right up to the outbreak of hostilities millions pinned their faith to such spurious arguments. Even now we can hear in some quarters regrets: "If only the Western Powers could have made a pact with Russia . . .!”

The cause of war to-day is capitalism; the line-up in war is forced on the countries concerned by their interests as capitalist competitors for wealth and trade.

(From the editorial in the Socialist Standard, May 1940).

Voice From The Back: A Defender of Capitalism (2009)

The Voice From The Back column from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Defender of Capitalism 

It is well known that journalists defending capitalism often make a fool of themselves. It is even better known that Daily Mail journalists are particularly foolish in that regard. Here is one – Andrew Alexander proving that point. “We are witnessing the death of capitalism, according to various excitable commentators, some alarmed and some drooling at the prospect. Neither need get worked up. Capitalism will survive. And it will do so because it is natural – not, as some claim, an alien system imposed on gullible people” (Daily Mail, 11 March). Alexander then goes on to use the hoary, old fairy tale about a shipwrecked crew on a tropical island exchanging coconuts for fish and claims this would lead to the invention of money. It is a view that completely ignores the real history of humankind. The first period of human history had no concept of private property and the invention of money is a very late development in that history. There is plenty of evidence that society has developed through various stages of primitive communism, chattel slavery, feudalism and then capitalism. Far from being “natural” capitalism is just another stage in private property society. Mr Alexander is correct in one respect though. People who imagine that the latest slump in capitalism means its termination are completely wrong. Capitalism by its very nature has slumps and booms. Its abolition will only come about with the conscious political action of the working class.

The "Lazy Man" Myth

One of the opposition that socialist get when advocating a new society of common ownership and production solely for use, is that it would be impossible because of the “lazy man” who wouldn’t work. These opponents overlook the fact that socialism could only come about when a majority were in favour of working to the best of their ability and taking according to their needs. Far from the working class being innately lazy, even inside the cut-throat system that is capitalism there are many examples of people working in a co-operative fashion. Inside families many parents sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their children, many people volunteer to do unpaid work to help the needy and the sick. Perhaps one of the best examples of selfless endeavour on behalf of others is that of lifeboat volunteers who risk their lives to help others without pay. Another opposition to a socialist society that is often aired is that is impossible because of the existence of the “greedy man”. If the working class were really greedy they would dump a society that today leaves them in poverty while rewarding the capitalist class with immense wealth.

The Recovery Myth

“The world economy is set to shrink by between 0.5% and 1.0% in 2009, the first global contraction in 60 years. In its gloomiest forecast yet, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that developed countries will suffer a ‘deep recession’. The global economic body says ‘the prolonged financial crisis has battered global economic activity beyond what was previously anticipated’” (BBC News, 19 March). To illustrate than none of the experts have a clue this is the same IMF that was predicting just two months earlier that world output would increase by 0.5 percent! In fact capitalism is an economic system that is based on slumps and booms and no amount of political “spin” can govern its unpredictability.

The Music Jungle

Everything inside capitalist society is driven by the profit motive. So it comes as no great surprise to hear that the popular-music industry is a victim of the rapacious demands of the commodity-producing society. Here is the highly successful pop song-writer and singer, formerly of the Eurythmics, Annie Lennox on the dog-eat-dog nature of the business. “The music industry is a bloody nightmare. The egos, the slightly criminal elements, the betrayers, the ones who want to screw you.” (Observer, 29 March)

World Poverty

Most people are aware of the awful poverty that exists in parts of Asia and India but capitalism is a world system with world-wide social problems. “Volunteers from one of the world’s most impoverished countries are to travel to Scotland to help people in communities blighted by drink and violence. The aid workers from Pakistan have been warned that they will see shocking poverty when they arrive next month in the east end of Glasgow to work in some of Britain’s most run-down housing schemes…. In Pakistan, a third of the 170m population lives below the poverty line – defined as earning less than $2 (£1.36) a day. However, the average life expectancy for men is 62, compared with 54 in parts of Glasgow” (Sunday Times, 12 April). No doubt many of these doomed men will be singing on a Saturday night “Glasgow Belongs To Me”. In reality though, Glasgow – like ever city on Earth – belongs to the capitalist.

It’s election time again (2009)

From the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party will be standing in the elections to the European Parliament on 4 June. These elections will be held under a system of proportional representation and the whole of Greater London will be a single constituency. We will be presenting a full list of 8 candidates. There are over 5 million electors in London. Which will be the largest number of workers up to now who will be faced with possibility of voting for world socialism. Below is the socialist manifesto on which our candidates will be standing.

Every few years groups of professional politicians compete for your vote to win themselves a comfortable position, this time in the European Parliament. All of the other parties and candidates offer only minor changes to the present system. That is why whichever candidate or party wins there is no significant change to the way things are. Promises are made and broken, targets are set and not reached, statistics are selected and spun.

All politicians assume that capitalism is the only game in town, although they may criticise features of its unacceptable face, such as greedy bankers, or the worst of its excesses, such as unwinnable wars. They defend a society in which we, the majority of the population, must sell our capacity to work to the tiny handful who own most of the wealth. They defend a society in which jobs are offered only if there is a profit to be made.

Real socialism
The Socialist Party urges a truly democratic society in which people take all the decisions that affect them. This means a society without rich and poor, without owners and workers, without governments and governed, a society without leaders and led.

In such a society people would cooperate to use all the world’s natural and industrial resources in their own interests. They would free production from the artificial restraint of profit and establish a system of society in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation. Socialist society would consequently mean the end of buying, selling and exchange, an end to borders and frontiers, an end to organised violence and coercion, waste, want and war.

What you can do
You can vote for candidates who will work within the capitalist system and help keep it going. Or you can use your vote to show you want to overturn it and end the problems it causes once and for all.

When enough of us join together, determined to end inequality and deprivation, we can transform elections into a means of doing away with a society of minority rule in favour of a society of real democracy and social equality.

If you agree with the idea of a society of common and democratic ownership where no one is left behind and things are produced because they are needed, and not to make a profit for some capitalist corporation, and are prepared to join with us to achieve this then vote for the SOCIALIST PARTY list.

The election will of course be taken place outside London too, in fact in most of Europe. To take account of this, our manifesto will be translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian and Swedish and distributed by socialists there as well as being published on the website of the World Socialist Movement at  www.worldsocialism.org. In the rest of Britain, and in Ireland, the following leaflet will be distributed.


Flying pigs and the Euro elections

You might have heard of the Euro elections, the biggest in history, 500 million people, 27 countries, June 4th? You’re supposed to choose which of your local crème-de-la-crème get to go on free holidays to Brussels and Strasbourg, and the powers that be are a bit worried that you won’t take it seriously enough to bother voting. Shame on you!

Just to show how desperately important all this is, here’s a few ways in which the European Parliament has recently changed your life enormously:

• working time directives limiting your weekly hours to 48 (but don’t worry, the UK government opted out of that one pretty smartly).
• all-inclusive air-fare prices (for those of you frequently travelling to Brussels and Strasbourg…).
• REACH directive on industrial chemical use.
• roaming mobile phone directives (for those of you frequently travelling to Brussels and Strasbourg…).

Alright, not very Earth-shaking, admittedly. If you’re struggling to make ends meet on benefits, or facing redundancy or any of the hundred problems workers are always having, these are probably not the issues that will drag you out to the polling booth.

The fact is, the whole Euro show is not really designed to do anything for YOU, it’s just designed to stop the big Ruling Piggies from going to war with each other, like they did in the two World Wars. Though it’s a good idea to avoid wars, since it’s always workers who end up suffering, it’s really the expense that bothers them, not your welfare. If they make the Euro-trough big enough, goes the thinking, they can all shove in their snouts without getting in each other’s way. It’s all about the money, surprise surprise. While money and capitalism exist, it always will be.

You might think, especially with this economic depression, that capitalism does nothing but make a slave out of you, and that it’s only the rich that benefit. If your local candidates are not saying this, why bother voting for them? Well, better to make a statement than stay silent. All you have to do is write something rude across your ballot paper, or if you prefer, ‘Abolish money and capitalism’ or ‘World Socialism, common ownership and democratic control’, if it’ll fit. A vote’s always worth using, even when there’s nobody worth voting for.

And when you’ve done that, go and find some like-minded people at www.worldsocialism.org

Pieces Together: Trust me, I'm a doctor! (2009)

The Pieces Together column from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trust me, I'm a doctor!

“Dr. Hershel Samuels, an orthopedic surgeon, put his hand on the worker’s back. “Mild spasm bilaterally,” he said softly. He pressed his fingers gingerly against the side of the man’s neck. “The left cervical is tender,” he said, “even to light palpation.” The worker, a driver for a plumbing company, told the doctor he had fallen, banging up his back, shoulder and ribs. He was seeking expanded workers’ compensation benefits because he no longer felt he could do his job. Dr. Samuels, an independent medical examiner in the state workers’ compensation system, seemed to agree. As he moved about a scuffed Brooklyn office last April, he called out test results indicative of an injured man. His words were captured on videotape. Yet the report Dr. Samuels later submitted to the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board cleared the driver for work and told a far different story: no back spasms, no tender neck. In fact, no recent injury at all. “If you did a truly pure report,” he said later in an interview, “you’d be out on your ears and the insurers wouldn’t pay for it. You have to give them what they want, or you’re in Florida. That’s the game, baby.” (New York Times, 31 March)

No Profit, No Pill

“A pill which could prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths from heart disease, the biggest killer across the Western world, has been shown to be safe and effective in its first trials on humans. The magic bullet, containing five medicines in a single capsule, sharply reduced cholesterol and blood pressure levels and has the potential to “halve cardiovascular events in average middle-aged individuals”, the researchers say. The finding is a major boost for a medication with huge potential against the worldwide epidemic of heart disease and stroke. Doctors say that, if further trials prove successful, all men aged over 50 and women aged over 60 should be offered the pill in what would be the first example of mass medication for the middle-aged in Britain. Yet no Western pharmaceutical company has shown interest in developing the so-called polypill because it does not promise big profits. It would sell for pennies because its five constituent medicines are cheap, have been around for decades and their patents have expired.” (Independent, 31 March)

Fred and Forlorn 

“Oxfam is warning that the economic downturn is creating more poverty in the UK, making life tougher for the fifth of the population already struggling to get by. Kathleen Carter lives in poverty. At her home in Stockton-on-Tees, she cares full-time for her disabled son and husband. Her life is a constant round of cleaning, cooking, preparing medication and shopping on a very tight budget. The only income is from her pension and a small amount of benefits. She says: “It can be very soul-destroying. I’ve got to think of everything I buy, life is a real struggle because all the time you are thinking about what you are spending.” Mrs Carter is one of the so-called Freds. It is a term Oxfam has created standing for Forgotten, Ripped-off, Excluded and Debt-ridden.” (BBC News, 8 April)


Of all the slums in all the world . . .

“This seaside city is known as a rich stockpile of art deco architecture, the hub of Morocco’s economic growth and the setting of an all-time classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

But Casablanca is also the capital of a bleaker aspect of modern Morocco — sprawling slums, where huge families are packed into shanties with tin roofs rusted by the ocean winds, and goats and donkeys munch stray garbage.

“It’s as if we’re eating straight from the gutter,” said Mina Abujaman, 48, describing the squalor.

“We spend half our time cleaning up,” said the mother of seven and grandmother of two, pointing at the children playing in the mud while women carry water back from the communal fountain - all amid whiffs of sewage.

It’s not surprising, of course, that things do not go according to plan in a crowded Arab city where illusion is part of the atmosphere. Tourists’ snapshots of busy alleyways miss the squalor behind the walls, and the famous 1942 movie “Casablanca” was not filmed here at all, but mostly at studios in Burbank, Calif., with the misty farewell of hero and heroine shot nearby at Van Nuys airport.” (www.wtop.com)


Blogger's Note:
The wee piece, 'No Profit, No Pill', is not in the PDF version of the May 2009 Socialist Standard I have in front of me, whereas the piece, 'Of all the slums in all the world . . .', is in the PDF version of the Standard but is not on the website.

I decided to include both on the blog.

The cult of Irish Republicanism (2009)

From the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Real IRA and the Continuity IRA represent nothing but the pale ghosts of yesterday.

For over a hundred years now Ireland, and particularly Northern Ireland since it came into existence in 1921, has been politically structured by what Sean O’ Casey called, in one of his memorable plays, The Shadow of the Gunman. The gunman, and more recently in deference to the times, his female equivalent, has been legal and illegal, protestant and catholic, brave and cowardly but at all times and in all guises, a dangerous irrelevancy as far as the working class is concerned.

Ruling classes everywhere mythologise the politics of their regime in order to conceal the fact that their wealth and opulent lifestyles are based on the poverty and degradation of their subject classes. In Ireland that process has been further mystified and obfuscated by years of colonisation and the deliberate action of Britain, the colonial master, of introducing religious sectarianism into Ireland’s toxic tribal mix at the beginning of the 17th century.

That evil, the curse of inter-religious conflict, was part of Elizabethan England’s strategy for a final solution to the problem of Gaelic resistance to English rule in Ireland which was most formidable in the province of Ulster. In 1603 the native Gaelic people were driven from their lands; their lands were confiscated by the Crown and gifted in large tracts to undertakers favoured by the English Court. In turn the beneficiaries of this act of imperial theft introduced tenants from Scotland and northern England and it was no accident that these were largely protestant.

The plantation of Ulster was simply part of the process whereby ruling classes further their interests and build empires. The incoming ‘planters’ were not the villains in the piece; rather were they innocent instruments of a power-hungry imperialism; poor peasant farmers following a promise of a better existence – in fact many would have been the descendants of earlier ‘Scotti’ emigrants who left Ireland in search of a better life in Scotland. History should have absorbed the conflicts created by the plantation of Ulster but, history is largely fashioned by economics, and a radical dichotomy in the land tenure between the province of Ulster, the area planted, and the rest of Ireland was to foster bitter new conflicts between opposing forms of nationalism, each concealed in a quasi-religious political doctrine; bitter, nauseous and wholly irrelevant to the interests of the working class on the island of Ireland.

Karl Marx might well have been thinking of Ireland when he said:

  Men make their own history but they do not do it as they please; they do not do it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

The land question
In pre-capitalist society the means of life was the land. It was the means of production and just as in capitalism now, where social class is determined by whether one is a working functionary within those means or an owner of those means, so in feudal Ireland where one stood in relation to the ownership and control of the land determined their social status.

Even for feudalism, Irish land law was brutally harsh with virtually no rights either in law or in custom attending the lot of the tenant. He was a tenant-at-will, the will of his landlord; without any security of tenure, ‘fairness’ of rent or right to any compensation for any improvement to his holding or his habitation. Indeed one visiting English agronomist is reputed to have said, not as an insult to Irish peasants but in criticism of their conditions of tenure where improvement carried the penalty of higher rent or even eviction, that it was an encouragement to the peasant to learn to live like a pig.

Because they were vital instruments in the strategy of conquest the Ulster planters could reject the absolute servitude of the native peasant in the country and, accordingly, their landlords had to grant them what later became known in Ireland as The Three F’s: Fixity of tenure, Fixity of rent and Freedom of sale of what was effectively their leaseholds. In Ulster this practice became known as ‘Ulster Custom’. It created circumstances in which a surplus over immediate need could be made and where leaseholds were sold and could be aggregated making smallholdings into farms and peasants into small farmers. It extended the use of money within the community thus establishing an essential element in the development of trade: a purchasing power.

Industrial revolution
By the time of the Industrial Revolution Ulster had its nascent capitalist class and it developed apace with the development of capitalism in Britain, a development enhanced by the general level of literacy, a burgeoning commercial trade and a not insignificant number of immigrant entrepreneurs. During the mid-19th century, referred to by the economist Hobsbawn as The Age of Capital, Ulster underwent rapid development in shipbuilding, heavy and light engineering, as well as textiles and rope-making. In fact Ulster industry became an integral part of British capitalism; dependant for energy and raw materials on Britain and its Empire and vitally beholden to the then-prevailing system of Empire Preference for its market.

Ironically, it was in this climate of bourgeois prosperity in Ulster that Republican ideas began to emerge and the idea of backing those ideas with the threat and the reality of armed force. The idea of republican violence did not come from the dispossessed or the rebellious catholics but from elements within the protestant middle-class who argued that the government – which they generally referred to as the Crown – was supporting discriminatory measures against Irish trade.

Typical of those articulating this opinion was the Belfast industrialist, J Alexander Hamilton who told an audience of his class peers in the Belfast Linen Hall on the 14th May 1784:

  “It cannot be said that the government truly represents our interests in matters of trade or industry nor can we hold faith with the Crown to allow it that right. Our limping independence is on the sufferance of the Crown who again can be influenced by powerful English interests in trade and industry to restrict us and hamper the further development of our trade and industry… What they had the right to give they had the right to take and it is our sacred duty to remove from the crown that right and build our own constitutional structures, our own freedom and the absolute right to plan for the advancement of our own trade and commerce. It is a lesson that has been learnt in America and one that we in this country will have to learn even if it means the broadening of outlook in matters of political concern at home.”

That was the voice that spoke incipient republican rebellion, echoed by Henry Joy McCracken and the northern leaders of The United Irishmen. They were protestants, articulating the problems of Ulster capitalism and allying the rebellious interests of their class, with clarions of patriotism. Their republicanism came from the French Revolution and the American War of Independence via the pages of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and encapsulated in the vision of Wolfe Tone.

Four years later in 1798 Irish Republicanism staged an abortive rebellion in the name of “Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter”. In Ulster the enemy was the forces of the Crown; in the rest of Ireland, apart from a failed incursion by French forces in the west of Ireland, the rebellion was largely restricted to the county of Wexford where the United Men were largely Catholics, their leader a catholic priest and their primary enemy protestants – inevitably their rack-renting landlords.

While capitalism was developing in Ulster in the rest of the country outbreaks of violence were common. The landlord and the Crown were the enemies of the downtrodden, brutally impoverished serf-like Irish peasant; it was a political struggle that was allied to patriotism only insofar as the Crown was identified with the landlord and the reality of agrarian poverty. The heady days of European revolution in the mid-19th century was reflected in Ireland more in the literature of protest than armed conflict. There was little violence; the patriots of the Young Ireland movement spoke the hurt and anger of a people in despair; people whose staple diet, the potato had for a second year turned to foul putrefaction in the fields; people burying their dead because they could not afford to live on the abundance of cereal crop and livestock that was being shipped out to foreign tables. Early victims of the brutal capitalist doctrine of Laissez-faire.

The Fenians
Within a decade the population of Ireland had been reduced by some two million to an estimated six million. The land was still haemorrhaging its people to England, Australia and, especially, to the United States where Irish conspiracy, rooted in the Clan na Gael was fostering the Fenian movement for republican insurrection in Ireland. The Fenian Brotherhood was closer to the common people preaching a class gospel and angering the Church which caused Archbishop Moriarty, with questionable theological soundness, to speculate that Hell was not hot enough nor eternity long enough to punish them.

The vagaries of world capitalism was having a drastic effect on food prices which were falling rapidly and gravely effecting the income of the Irish peasantry more and more of whom were falling into rent arrears. Between 1872 and 1885 well over 200,000 tenants were evicted and at one protest meeting in response to mass eviction notices served by the landlord, a catholic priest called Geoffrey Burke who had inherited an estate from his brother, a speech by Tom Brennan, a prominent Fenian, demonstrates how far ahead in its thinking the Fenian movement, now in decay, was over the purely nationalist thinking of the Irish Parliamentary Party and its political heirs Sinn Fein. Brennan said:

“You may get a Federal Parliament, perhaps the Repeal of the Union, nay more, you may establish an Irish Republic, but as longed as tillers of the soil are forced to support a useless and indolent aristocracy, your Federal Parliament would be a bauble and your Irish Republic a fraud,” (quoted in The Land League Crisis, N D Palmer. Yale Historical Publications).

Fenian activity was poorly organised and badly coordinated but it left its martyrs to fester in the fecund soil of bitter discontent and, in the incarnation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood it was to light the fuse of Irish Rebellion in 1916 and the subsequent Anglo-Irish War out of which modern Ireland emerged. It is impossible in a short article to knit all the threads of festering revolt that were converging on a political denouement in Ireland: Michael Davitt’s courageous Land League and the attempts to unify the struggle against Landlordism with the struggle of an emerging proletariat played a vital role that ultimately found a measure of success in a series of Land Purchase Acts between 1885 and 1903. These Acts made interest-bearing loans of public money available to buy out their holdings. The landlords made token protest but in most cases were glad to salvage a final settlement from their ill-gotten plunder.

Fledgling bourgeoisie
The story of the part played by the terrible potato famine of 1845/50 in helping to create a southern, largely catholic, middle class, has still to be written but it was a factor among many others in the emerging of a politically-articulate, fledgling bourgeoisie. More importantly for the future of Ireland the political interest of that class was in direct conflict with those of its class brethren in Ulster. Charles Stewart Parnell the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party enunciated the political requirements of nascent southern capitalism in a major speech at Arklow on the 20th August 1885; in precise terms Parnell made clear the economic motive for an Irish government: to protect a weak Irish capitalism confronted by the competition of English capitalism.

Subsequently a more bellicose Sinn Fein said the same thing:

  “If an Irish manufacturer cannot produce an article as cheaply as an English or other foreign capitalist, only because his foreign competitor has larger resources at his disposal, then it is the first duty of the Irish nation to accord protection to that manufacturer.”(Sinn Fein Policy, 1907 Edition)

That was the political policy which underpinned the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent IRA guerrilla struggle to ‘free’ Ireland. The IRA was an army of workers fighting for the clearly-defined interests of their bosses. Ironically, as we have shown earlier, the protection they wanted to achieve for southern capitalists would have been ruinous for northern capitalists. There was no basis for unity.

Since Partition
Since the partition of Ireland in 1921, Sinn Fein and the IRA have undergone many vicissitudes but, effectively, after partition and the defeat of the IRA in the ensuing civil war they had become a cult, a representative of “the dead generations”. In 1962, after an abortive ‘Border Campaign’ that had become its period of attrition a short time after it began in 1956, the IRA confessed its lack of support, accused northern nationalists of selling their heritage for a mess of potage – British ‘welfare’ capitalism – and established constitutional Republican Clubs to pursue social issues. The absurdly sectarian Unionist government – always conscious of the benefits of an IRA threat at election times – immediately banned the Clubs and left the framework for thirty-odd years of sectarian violence.

Does the resuscitated IRA that resurfaced in 1970 and after decades of struggle won a share in the political administration of the entity it set out to banish, disprove our contention that the concept of armed IRA struggle had become a futile cult following their political and military defeat by southern government forces in 1922?

The answer to that question is twofold. Firstly, their very presence in the current northern administration is not a victory; on the contrary, it is an acknowledged recognition of the failure of armed violence to unite a people. Secondly, the IRA of the 1950’s that accepted its political rejection by the people, like earlier incarnations of that organisation, was a purely political movement whereas that of the 1970’s was built around a catholic population under attack. The followers of the republican cult might well have wished it otherwise, but the muscle of the movement that emerged out of the early stages of the recent troubles was catholic and sectarian. Today the question is changed, changed dramatically, and mutations of the Provisionals, like the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA represent nothing but the pale ghosts of yesterday. They are a curse on the body politic and the only progressive act they can commit is to disappear.

Richard Montague

The Crisis: don’t read about it! (2009)

From the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sun newspaper should be no more abhorrent to socialists than any other capitalist propaganda rag. In a spirit of intellectual equanimity I occasionally take the wretched organ along with more sober rags of the ruling elite in order to gainsay and refute the views of supporters of the profit system.

Now, as the world capitalist system moves inexorably towards another catastrophic slump it behoves the class traitor scribblers of the “popular press” to divert our attention from the problems facing us as a consequence of capitalism’s irresolvable internal contradictions.

But don’t worry - the Sun has a “Happy Page”:

“The pound crumbles, the economy tumbles and Gordon Brown finally rumbles that we are heading for the big recession.
So to take your mind off the sad economic tidings there are plenty of cheery stories scattered throughout The Sun.
And for uninterrupted fun turn to Page 20 our new Happy Page.
If you have any stories or photos that will raise British spirits why not send them to us and do your bit in the War against Gloom effort.”

As the “Real Economy” goes into recession and people lose their jobs, homes and belief in the future of their communities we are exhorted by the Sun to turn to page 20 and have a chortle as workers’ lives under capitalism crumble around our ears.

Socialists have long understood the function of the reactionary media in the intellectual conditioning of capitalist society. Workers are bombarded by propaganda on a myriad of fronts. In the last 30 years the Sun has cornered the market in combining “politics”, gambling and tits with criminal and celebrity witch hunts.

Whilst the world working class is entering a period in which there will be a sustained, angry and possibly violent attack upon our meagre living standards and individual rights by the ruling class, we must challenge the “official” media at every turn, the more apparently “learned” daily journals such as the Guardian, Independent or Telegraph as well as the Sun.

At this time the fanciful notion that “taxpayers money” is being used to stave off capitalist crisis is being promulgated by the mainstream media. Whilst, in reality the capitalist class is using State funds generated on the backs of the labour of workers to prop up the profit system and to provide them with a surplus. The capitalist media are also wrestling all their capacity to prepare us for yet another period of belt-tightening.

The reasons for the failings of capitalism, and the potential to resolve the problems caused to people under the grip of the system are often very near to the grasp of workers’ thinking, both individually and collectively. My trajectory towards socialist consciousness began as a very young man witnessing the “shaking out” of staff at R.M. Douglas Construction Ltd of Birmingham in 1992. I saw proud middle-aged, “company” men, some with over 25 years service, cry openly as they were told they were surplus to requirements for the firm.

So, as the reality of capitalist recession imposes itself once more on the already beleaguered working class the last thing we need to do is to read “Happy News” on Page 20 of The Sun newspaper.

Andy P. Davies

Watching over us (2009)

Book Review from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spies, Lies and the War on Terror.  by Paul Todd, Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald: Zed Books £14.99.

The ‘Cold War’ has been replaced by the ‘War on Terror’ as a means of defending the interests of Western capitalism. The identification of a new enemy has paralleled an enormous increase in the amount of snooping that goes on, with governments spying ever more closely on their own citizens. These are the kinds of developments chronicled in this volume.

For the United States in particular, the gathering of intelligence has come to serve the purpose of pre-emptive war, aimed at stopping any perceived threat to the power of the capitalist class before it can be put into action. This may involve ‘creative destruction’ in the Middle East (a term coined by an American neo-con, not by the authors). The idea of a US military presence in the Middle East became a long-term goal, eventually realised in Iraq. In fact, intelligence is sometimes massaged (as with Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction) or deliberately ignored. Consequently much US policy backfires, as when Iran has benefited from the elimination of regional rivals (the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Saddam).

At the same time, and as state and corporate intelligence functions increasingly merge, domestic spying is becoming more and more pervasive. The National Security Agency in the US, for instance, has been monitoring all phone calls made to overseas, and the president has powers to authorise surveillance without a warrant. Sometimes the information recorded is laughable, with Quaker meetings logged as ‘suspicious incidents’, but the spread of government intrusion into people’s lives is no laughing matter.

Similar developments have been taking place in the UK, with increased powers for the police and much so-called anti-terrorist legislation. There have been arrests of people (as in a supposed bomb plot in Manchester in 2004 and one in East London in 2006), accompanied by lurid press speculation and much disinformation from police sources; in neither case was any evidence found, and the arrested were released without charge. Lengthy detention was introduced for those who had not done anything, just supposedly threatened to undertake some action designed to advance a political cause.

The War on Terror, then, not only results in killings on a massive scale in Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, in the interests of Western, specifically American, power. It also leads to the creation and expansion of databases containing enormous amounts of information on people, information that we cannot access, let alone challenge, even if we know it’s there. This book gives a detailed and frightening account of how and why this is happening.

Paul Bennett

Whose news? (2009)

From the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Why are high house prices and high profits considered good news?

We are all used to hearing from the TV or radio that what we are about to experience is the ‘news’. Preceded by a little tune supposed to promote gravitas and/or imply the very latest fast technological process of news gathering we are presented with a sober middle-class gent or couple sporting sensible hair, grey suits and dazzling white smiles. A stranger to our culture may be very surprised that whichever channel is chosen the content of the news is almost identical. Indeed the choice of headlines is nearly always the same; a little odd considering that in this country we have over 100 digital channels! What can be the reason for such a strange phenomena? Could it be that there is total unanimity concerning what is important in human behaviour (this would be the only example of such total agreement within our species) or is there some agenda shared by those who own and operate our media?

It would be fair to say that the mainstream media in this country (TV, radio and newspapers) are owned by a tiny minority. Socialists have always maintained that the media’s obsessions reflect those of the ruling class who own them. The fact that high house prices and high profits are considered good news when it is the majority who are exploited even more as a result gives you an idea of the values shared by the owners of the media. The main disagreements (at least within the newspapers) concern the different commercial interests within the owning class – the dreary and unending European Union debate being an obvious example.

Another element that is thought to contribute to the ‘news’ is topicality – the story should reflect a perspective on a contemporary value or popular obsession. For our general readers it is obviously important that our analysis should begin with a reflection on contemporary events. However part of that analysis for us is a proof of the illusion of novelty/topicality of events within the anachronistic culture of capitalism.

A friend of mine has recently given up his subscription to a newspaper on the grounds that it merely repeats the same old propaganda values whatever the story. This is the essence of ‘the news’ in today’s media. It seeks only to find different stories to ‘prove’ its own value system. The ‘credit crunch’ is either the result of greedy bankers or lack of government supervision of the financial services. It could never be a proof of the instability and irrational nature of capitalism itself.

There arises an inevitable contradiction within journalism between the observation of change and its reporting when restricted by the use of reactionary values and language. It is the nature of language to struggle to find new concepts and metaphors to describe the changing world we live in. When change is accelerated during a revolutionary period this tension can create linguistic confusion and creativity (Christopher Hill’s book The World Turned Upside Down illustrates this wonderfully using examples from the English Revolution).

It is important to emphasise that propaganda is not always consciously produced by a conspiracy of journalists and press barons. I remember Michael Parkinson saying that he never experienced owner/editorial interference during his journalistic career. This, of course, merely emphasises the care taken to employ only political ‘fellow travellers’ rather than proof of the non-propagandist nature of the media. Within the commercial media the usual worker and owner tension can destroy real journalism under the profit and propaganda imperatives of our authoritarian culture.

What is really corrosive to good journalism is to be completely unaware of the political bias that is inherent in any interpretation of events (the news). Of course this is to give the benefit of the doubt to journalists and not to accuse them of downright lies. My father once found himself, in his role as a union shop steward, in the centre of a local news story. After an interview he gave to a journalist he was outraged by what was subsequently printed. This was, in part, testament to his political naivety but it also emphasises that what is printed must fit within the propaganda value of ‘the story’ even if this necessitates downright lies.

What would qualify as news for a future socialist media? Of course when we are in a position to produce stories for the mass media the world will begin to be a very different place. Reporting will surely emphasise the relationship between the rising political awareness of the population and the activities this provokes. Presumably what remains of the present media will portray the changing political landscape as a disaster for the world and everyone in it. A socialist media will initially have to counter this increasingly hysterical propaganda. Then the production of a forum for debate will become ever more important as the need for information to make democratic decisions becomes vital.

As the need to counter reactionary propaganda recedes then the media will transform itself into a vehicle of information and entertainment. Because the need for ‘escapist’ entertainment will also recede I suspect a different, possibly more ‘mature’ kind of fiction will replace it. I hope to live to see a world where fictional characters deal with important political dilemmas rather than personal and romantic ones. And what of sports? I hear the reader say fearfully. Perhaps, at last, competition between those who wish to compete will be confined to the sports arena where they belong.  By this time your writer will be enjoying a cricket game in Jamaica in his role as your Caribbean sports reporter (editors permitting).

Wez.

The Ire of the Irate Itinerant (2009)

From the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Your vote means power . . . Don’t waste it on the profit system (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

1979 General Election Manifesto

What They Offer
For the past year a General Election has been expected and you, the voters, have been blasted from every direction by the crude sales tactics of the power-hungry political leaders. The Tories have directly conducted an estimated £l-£l¼ million campaign to sell their second-hand policies, while the Labour party have enlisted trade union leaders and union funds to convince you, the voters, to accept policies that would be intolerable coming from the Tories. Now that the election is here the political leaders grovel for your vote. THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN’S election address is different for three reasons.

1. The Socialist Party does not ask you to vote for a would-be leader but to consider the merits of a serious idea. While the other parties consider the voters too stupid to do their own thinking, we recognise and depend upon, your ability to understand our case. In fact, the Socialist Party of Great Britain asks you not to vote for us unless you are convinced by what we say.

2. The Socialist Party does not speak the same language as our political opponents. They talk about “the balance of payments problem”, “the nation”, ‘‘the good of the economy”, “law and order”. Theirs is a system in which able workers are thrown on to the scrap-heap when it periodically becomes unprofitable to employ them; in which houses stand empty while homeless families live in misery because they can't afford to pay for a home; in which food is destroyed while millions starve; in which Christian morality is preached while governments store up piles of arms to destroy the world in the quest for markets.

Socialists speak the language of class struggle; that there is a working class who produce the wealth of society in return for wages or salaries, and a capitalist class who reap the profits simply because they own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth. For Socialists the important issue in this election is—Who is to own the means of life; the wealth producers or a minority of rich parasites?

3. The Socialist Party does not offer you promises of “higher wages” or “ more welfare facilities” or “greater security”. The sad but indisputable fact is that as long as you go on supporting capitalism, its problems will be with you. A system which produces even the necessities of life for sale on the market at a profit causes poverty and insecurity for the majority alongside luxury and power for the few.

Many workers will agree that everything we’ve said so far is only too true. Yes, the other political parties ARE opportunists; yes, there IS class inequality; yes, the real problem IS capitalism. But what's the alternative?

What Socialism Is
The only alternative is Socialism. A society in which the whole community will own the means of production mid distribution of wealth. Class divisions will cease to exist, because instead of the separation between owners and producers of wealth, everyone will own and produce in common. Authoritarian leadership will give way to genuine democracy in which people will really have a say, because no longer will a minority possess power and privilege. Production for profit will be replaced by production for human needs, whereby goods will be freely available for people to take according to their needs. Work will be carried out on the basis of free co-operation instead of the coercion of the wages system. The division of nations will give way to the unity of one world. Inequality based upon possessions, status, race or sex will vanish as human beings create, for the first time ever, a sane society geared to the fulfilment of human needs. Critics of Socialism claim that given free access, people will act irresponsibly. This we dispute. It is perfectly possible for people to act sociably when a Socialist majority puts an end to the rat-race.

THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN is the only party in this election to stand unequivocally for Socialism—although there are others who pay lip service to the idea. Labour says that Nationalisation is Socialism, but state intervention is just another way of managing capitalism. The Communist Party says that Russia is Socialist, when it’s simply a state-capitalist dictatorship of one party. There arc even some trade union leaders who say that Socialism means “responsible wage restraint” when in fact it means the abolition of the wages system.

For the working class, the vast majority of the population, Socialism is the only alternative to the chaos of the profit system.

YOUR VOTE MEANS POWER . . . ARE YOU PREPARED TO GIVE IT ONCE AGAIN TO ONE OF THE PARTIES OF CAPITALISM . . . OR WILL YOU JOIN US IN TRANSFORMING THE SOCIALIST IDEA INTO REALITY?

An Irish rose which smells (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Thirty years ago Eire became The Republic of Ireland. What has happened to the promises made then?

Over a hundred years of direct British rule in Ireland ended in 1921 when, by agreement between representatives of Irish nationalism and the British Governmnt, on the one hand, and the representatives of that portion of Irish Unionism dominant in north-east Ulster and the British, two separate Irish ‘Home Rule’ governments were set up in Ireland.

The decade immediately preceding this British-enforced compromise had been fraught with political and religious violence which, though deliberately manipulated by the contenders for political power, had its roots in the uneven development of native capitalism.

The ‘settlement’ of Twenty One offered an excellent solution to the owning class in Northern Ireland. Their struggle was waged with the weapons of bluff and religious bigotry. Aside from the slogans, their real aims were their continued access to the British market and avoiding inclusion in an all-Ireland political entity controlled largely by the political representatives of their fledgling class brethren in the south, whose development required protection from the more highly developed competition of British capitalism.

Equally, the ruling class in the new Irish Free State could be jubilant. They had won sufficient political freedom to legislate for their own immediate needs: tariff walls, import quotas and such other devices as would allow for the undisturbed domestic nourishment of ‘competitive free enterprise’. But more, separation from the industrial capitalism of the North eliminated the possibility of opposition to protectionism and had the added bonus of ensuring a useful clerical control over the working class.

The only black spot on this otherwise cloudless horizon were the ‘politics’ that had been fashioned in the struggle. In the South, some of the republicans remained victims of their own propaganda; they continued to believe in their notions of ‘freedom’ and had to be disabused of such nonsense in a short, sharp civil war in which the new Irish Government demonstrated how much they had learnt of the art of military butchery from the departed Black-and-Tans.

In the North, too, the Protestant workers, who were being primed with blood-curdling bigotry in preparation for a possible war against the Catholic nationalists, put their teaching into effect with a murderous assault on their class brethren who were Catholics.

The ‘settlement’ of Twenty One, and the ensuing internecine struggles, set the political pattern for the future. In the Irish Free State the pro-Treaty party became Cumman na nGaedheal (now. Fine Gael) and formed the government. Later, in 1926. the anti-Treaty party became Fianna Fail and established itself as the main opposition party. What passes for stability in capitalism was finally established in the Irish Free State and the way prepared for the illusionary ‘free choice’ offered by capitalist ‘democracy’.

Northern Ireland, on the other hand, had been deliberately fashioned demographically and geographically in such a way as would ensure the permanence of Unionist rule. There, even the illusion of change was to be denied ; there was to be no ‘swing of the pendulum’ to lull the working class into the belief that things, even if they didn’t actually improve, were improvable.

It is amusing, when members of Fine Gael or Fianna Fail condemn their modern counterparts of the IRA as ‘mindless gunmen' and gangsters, to reflect on their own beginnings. The State that the new government took over in 1922 had been established with the bomb and the bullet; by deeds, if we allow for the heinous development of arms manufacture and military strategy, every bit as violent as those we witness today in Northern Ireland. For example, in the first three months of 1921 the ‘old’ (and, now respectable) IRA shot 74 ‘informers’ after trial by what Irish Ministers now refer to as ‘kangaroo’ courts. During the last six months of the Civil War, the new Irish government executed almost twice as many republican ‘irregulars’ as had the British in the previous six years.

The new Government of Cumman na nGaedheal commenced its presidency over general poverty and mass unemployment (which latter, it claimed, was no concern of the State) and ensured that its full support was given to strike-breaking activities. For example, no sooner had the hated British been driven out of the country than the new Irish government was appealing to the British Postmaster General to lend blacklegs to break the Irish postal workers’ strike and when, in the following year, the farm workers struck against the ranchers, the Government obligingly arrested and interned their union leaders.

In 1926 de Valera, who had been the political leader of the ‘Irregulars’ in the Civil War, forsook the bullet and the bomb and entered the Dail. By 1932 his party, Fianna Fail, had won a majority and formed a government. Fianna Fail were to hold office for sixteen years during which it distinguished itself by introducing anti-trade union legislation such as the Wages (Standstill) Order, the Trade Union Bill and the Industrial Relations Bill—all peripherally associated with the social doctrine of Corporatism, the economic infrastructure of fascism and the social gospel of the Roman Catholic Church.

It all worked well--for the class Fianna Fail represented ; known in Ireland as ‘gombeen men’ who had, as yet, to learn the carrot con trick practiced by their more sophisticated brethren in most other European countries. In the eight years between 1940 and 1948 the taxable profits of this upstanding breed of Catholic businessmen rose by some 200 per cent. In the same period, by skilful use of the legislative weapons placed at their disposal by Fianna Fail, they were able to reduce real wages below the level obtaining a decade earlier.: So successful, indeed, were the capitalists and their pensioned government in reducing wages that even the capitalist-orientated International Labour Office drew protesting attention to the fact. Almost 8 per cent of the population escaped in the emigrant ships during this period of Fianna Fail rule; still, deep in their Celtic twilight, the political hacks of capitalism carried on governing for the rich and privileged and the priests prayed their thankfulness for the virginal state of Irish capitalism and the ‘innocence’ of its wage slaves.

Fianna Fail introduced a new Constitution enshrining the power and the privilege of the priests and the gombeen men and, by implication, constitutionalising the misery and poverty of the great majority. In the meanwhile, the political scum who had ruled before De Valera took over, underwent many vicissitudes. After their electoral defeat in 1932, these ‘democrats’ flirted with the Blueshirts, an openly fascist organisation started by their ex-police chief and they changed their alias to Fine Gael. Time, and political manoeuvering, laundered the reputation of Fine Gael somewhat and, in 1948, Fianna Fail were kicked out by the electorate. A coalition, headed by Fine Gael, formed a Government. A new Republican Party, led by an ex-IRA leader of the Thirties, Seán MacBride, and the particularly gutless Irish Labour Party, were Fine Gael’s partners in crime.

It was to be a real change this time! A change guaranteed by the presence of ‘socialists’ and ‘republican-socialists’ actually in government. A change spelt out in the glossy posters of rivers and forests that were going to belong to ‘the people’. It was a time for singing and the people sang: ‘How Can You Buy Killarney?’ Oh, the promises! the hope! the frenetic dedication to the struggle for real change! And, to be fair, there was change: the Government dropped the official title ‘Eire’ and became the Republic of Ireland.

For the Irish workers there was still grinding poverty in all its forms; unemployment, low wages, slums. Only drunken patriotism had a respite in the partial realisation of a dream—and an American businessman did buy part of Killarney—with dollars! But still . . . wasn’t there an enfant terrible in the Government? A real ‘left winger’—and no less a person than the Minister of Health! Sure enough, the Minister introduced a Bill in the Dail to allow ‘free’ medical care for expectant mothers and children up to the age of five years. The Bill would have brought the new republic a small part of the way along which most other European countries had already travelled.

The Catholic bishops, however, would have none of it. It was rank ‘socialism’! The virtue of Christian charity would be endangered and god would be displeased! They ordered the government—the government of the Republic of Ireland—to abandon the Bill. The Government apologised to their lordships and dropped the Bill.

Since 1948, of course, there have been changes. The most significant of these have been brought about by a later, Fianna Fail, Government decision, in the early Sixties, to abandon the economic doctrine of protectionism—which was the lynch pin of Sinn Fein policy before and after the Easter Rising of 1916. It was a final and callous acknowledgement of ‘The Cause’ for which politically ignorant members of the working class had earlier died or suffered imprisonment or maiming.

The history of The Republic of Ireland, which was Eire, which was The Irish Free State, should be studied by those latter-day Republicans who think that their policy of ‘Eire Nua’ offers ’the people’ a real change. Is ‘Eire Nua’ any more ‘revolutionary’ than the ‘Proclamation of 1916 offering all the wealth of Ireland to ‘the people’ of Ireland? We all know what the outcome of that was.

Richard Montague (Belfast) 

World Socialist Party of Ireland