50 Years Ago: On leadership (1979)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The society we aim at building in the future is one wherein all will have a free and equal hand in the ordering of affairs. When can such a society be built on foundations such as blind worship of the leaders of a day?

We repeat, therefore, again the lesson we have been repeating for the last 25 years: no leader, however' honest, clever or well intentioned, can lead the workers out of slavery. No man or group of men, however intellectual, can found a new society which depends for its success upon the knowledge and understanding of the bulk of the population. There is no royal road to socialism. It can only be attained by working men and women who know what socialism means and how it is to be obtained. Therefore it is necessary for working men and women to do the comparatively small amount of thinking that is necessary to understand socialism. When they have done so they will know the steps to be taken, and will no longer need to rely on the weak reed of leader ship.

(From an editorial ‘The Communist farce’, Socialist Standard, October 1929.)

The theory of capitalist crises (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the long run, production under capitalism expands. The accumulation of capital, the self-expansion of value, is, after all, the economic logic of capitalism. The expansion of production, however, does not proceed smoothly at a steady rate but is interrupted from time to time, so that the graph of production under capitalism has the appearance of a series of peaks, each generally higher than the previous one (see graph). The troughs in between represent periods variously described as crises, depressions, recessions.

World capitalism is now in one of these troughs, and has been since 1974. But sooner or later it will recover from this depression, just as it has from all previous ones. This is because a depression itself creates the conditions for a re-expansion of production.

In a depression, three things occur which tend to raise the rate of industrial profit. First, a number of capitalist enterprises go bankrupt and their assets are sold off cheaply to their rivals. The result is a fall in their capital value, or a depreciation of the capital invested in them, so that less profits are needed to maintain the same rate of profit. Secondly, the increased unemployment tends to depress wages, and this once again tends to raise profits. Thirdly, the cutback in productive investment means that the demand for money-capital is reduced while at the same time the supply (from capitalist enterprises who are not re-investing) is increased, resulting in a fall in the rate of interest and so to a rise in the proportion of surplus value going to industrial profits.

These — depreciation of capital, lower wages, lower interest rates — eventually raise the prospects of making profits high enough to encourage those capitalists who have not been re-investing to begin investing again. Business confidence returns. Production begins to pick up and, through the chain reaction effect of more money being spent both by capitalists investing in new means of production and by workers now earning wages again, at an increasing rate.

So begins the process of economic recovery which develops into a boom . . . and eventually ends in a crisis and another depression. This is because boom conditions lead to ‘over-investment’, to too much wealth being devoted to expanding the means of production. This is inevitable due to the anarchy of production under capitalism, to the fact that production is not socially controlled and planned but is decided by hundreds of competing enterprises — and, on the world scale, states also — acting independently and in isolation.

When business is booming, capitalist enterprises assume that this will continue and so plan to expand their productive capacity. The demand for labour power increases, unemployment falls as the ‘reserve army of labour’ is drawn into production; wages, under the pull of enterprises competing among themselves for scarce labour power and the push of trade union action from the workers, rise. This in itself tends to reduce the rate of profit.

But what generally sparks off a crisis is one key industry over-expanding in relation to its particular market. The competing enterprises in that industry will all have assumed that they would be the beneficiaries of the expanding market and all of them will have expanded their productive capacity. The result is that the market for their particular product becomes saturated; they have over-expanded their productive capacity in relation to their industry’s market. Unsold goods pile up, the expected profits are not realised, the industry in question is forced to cut back its production. Now the chain reaction which encourages the recovery of production after a depression works in the opposite direction. Other industries are affected by the cut-back in the industry, which has over-expanded and, if this is a key industry, the end result is a generalised depression.

So the cycle — depression, recovery, boom, crisis, depression — has been completed and is ready to begin again. Governments try to intervene to stop this cycle, and occasionally make matters worse by their mistaken monetary policies, but there is essentially nothing they can do about it. This — boom, slump, boom, slump, boom, slump — is the way capitalism works.

It is important to realise that crises are not caused by overall production having expanded beyond overall market demand, as is suggested by one theory which was once popular in social democratic circles, and echoes of which are still to be found in the writings of some calling themselves Marxists. Such ‘under-consumptionist’ theories argue that crises are caused — and, in an extreme form, that capitalism will eventually collapse — through total social production coming to exceed total social purchasing power, or what amounts to the same thing, through total purchasing power coming to be insufficient to buy the total social product.

Crises under capitalism are not caused by a lack of purchasing power. They are caused by the anarchy of production under capitalism leading to an overexpansion in relation to a particular market, or, from the point of view of production, over-expanding disproportionately in relation to other industries. When this happens, the purchasing power to buy the over-produced commodities is there but it is not used because the commodities in question are not what those who have the money want to spend it on.

To be more specific, what happens in a depression, as far as overall market demand is concerned, is that some capitalists choose (because of low or nil profit prospects) not to spend their money on buying machinery, raw materials and labour power. This non-spending, or hoarding of money, interrupts the circulation of capital. Which is precisely what a depression is: an interruption in the circulation of capital. It is also why depressions are never permanent. Sooner or later, in one way or another, the conditions will arise which will encourage those capitalists who have been hoarding their money-capital to re-invest, so restoring the circuit.

Those who hold the under-consumptionist view that crises are caused by capitalism’s tendency to produce more than it can sell have got it wrong. If it were indeed the case that built in to capitalism was a chronic tendency for market demand to fall short of production, then how could capitalism have continued for so long? It should have long ago foundered in a glut of unsaleable goods. The fact that capitalism still exists, and still manages to expand production in the long run, is a living, if unpleasant, proof of the falsity of all under-consumptionist theories.

The fact is that there is no flaw in the economic mechanism of capitalism that is going to cause it permanently to break down or clog up. Capitalism will continue going through its cycle of depression, recovery, boom, crisis, depression until the working class consciously decide and act to end it by bringing production under the conscious democratic control of society on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production.

Adam Buick

The GDR: up against the wall (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The German Democratic Republic’s location on the periphery of the Soviet bloc and its constant confrontation with one of the most powerful economic forces of the Western world, the Federal Republic, has had its effect on the formation of internal opinion and dissent. In contrast to its East European neighbours, there is no sustained civil rights movement and manifestos of ‘opposition’ have appeared in official publications. As the country celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, however, there are signs that the East German leadership cannot re-establish with the population an understanding similar to that which existed in the early 1970s.

A new, tough orientation on the regime’s part is linked to a challenge to the Communist Party leader Honecker’s authority. His failure to manage the economy over the last few years (and what some see as his dangerous concessions to consumerism) have laid him open to attack from sections of the leadership who fear a general decline of political controls. Since the spring, the government has sought to link political repression against writers directly to its drive against the ‘grey’(Deutschmark) market. Sharply rising prices for raw materials and a deterioration in the terms of trade with the Soviet Union have led to demands for greater effort, without the Party being able to provide adequate rewards. Wages of East German workers have risen faster than the supply of consumer goods, with private savings at the beginning of last year standing at a record level of 80,000 million marks. A reluctance to respond readily to yet another call by the Party for increased production, voluntary shift work and rationalisation points to further clashes.

Although rents, electricity, transport services and basic goods like bread, potatoes, sugar and salt are relatively cheap, their sales price does not cover production costs — the low prices of these products correspond to the extremely low wages drawn by the majority of the population. The state takes its subsidies, which maintain the price of necessary goods at a low level, from the enormous differences which exist between the production costs of luxury items and the sales price to the consumer. For the majority, then, there are low wages, and therefore necessary goods are cheap and permit the reproduction of their labour power, while the privileged receive high salaries and have access to luxury items. ‘Illegal work’, normally undertaken at weekends, brings more income than a whole week of regular work in state enterprises.

Additionally, the suicide rate in the country is striking. According to the most recent figures it stands at 35 for every 10,000, while there are 22 for every 10,000 in the Federal Republic.

Widespread anger and resentment exists, on the one hand over the privileges enjoyed by the ruling elite in the form of exclusive shops selling Western goods, and on the other over the scarcity of items such as cars, television sets, good clothes and furniture. Recent strikes in the Fritz-Hekert-Werke in Karl Marx- Stadt, the Narve electric lamp factory in Berlin, and demands for payment in hard currency (Deutschmarks) for workers who are employed in export production for the West, indicate the scope of the difficulties with which the Party is faced. An ‘affluent society’ similar to the West is not just the ambition of the rulers anxious to perpetuate their power, but also corresponds to the immediate interests of the ruled.

While the size of the country and the thoroughness of police surveillance have prevented the growth of a significant underground, the last two years have seen the coming into the open of the first dissident, inner-Party opposition in Eastern Europe. Coping with such internal critics has posed more of a problem than would be the case with religious/ ethical reformers and ‘anti-Marxists’.

At the beginning of 1978 a manifesto purportedly drawn up by the ‘League of Democratic Communists of Germany’ was published in the West German magazine, Der Spiegel (2 and 9 January). Predictably, the document’s main concerns were with the establishment of a pluralist democracy in the East and the reunification of Germany. Attacks on the Soviet Union and the corrupt and inefficient system in the GDR were the manifesto’s other main thrusts:

No ruling class of Germany has ever sponged so much and secured itself against the pepple as those two dozen families who run the country like a self-service store. None has ever had such excessively golden ghettoes built in the forests which are guarded like fortresses. None has so shamelessly corrupted and enriched itself in special stores and private imports from the West, through decoration, bonuses and special clinics, pensions and presents, as has this caste.

Calling the Soviet leaders ‘Red Popes’, Communist leaders generally ‘Red-lacquered Nazis’, and the East German Party’s Politburo ‘Polit Quislings’, the League seek an end to what they call “the Asian production method of bureaucratic state capitalism”.

The most telling attack on the Party in the 1970s has come from a middle ranking cadre, Rudolf Bahro, presently serving an eight-year sentence after being found guilty of ‘treason’ in July 1978. Published in West Germany in 1977 (and in England last year), The Alternative in Eastern Europe is a left-Communist critique of the GDR system and what he calls a “strategy for a real communist alternative”.

Bahro argues that the Soviet type system, which is a model for the GDR. constitutes a distinctive type of social formation which is neither capitalist nor socialist. He suggests a parallel to Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of production in which there exists a ruling class not based on private property ownership but organised as an administrative and ideological apparatus. But he ignores the hallmarks of capitalism which predominate in the GDR just as much as in the West. The fact that a monopoly of the means of production is not legally recognised is immaterial — wealth is in effect the property of an individual or group if there exists a right in fact against the other members of society to use it and control its use.

Bahro’s position is not the familiar Trotskyist one, however. He shares our view that the objective backwardness of revolutionary Russia and the weakness of the working class there led inevitably to a new omnipotent state apparatus; that Lenin and the Bolsheviks, whatever their intentions, had paved the way for Stalin’s forced industrialisation and all the “practically unavoidable consequences of a definite historical progress”. For him, as for us, the East European system is not a deformation of socialism.

In the GDR, social and political needs are subservient to the goal-rationing objectives of the state Party apparatus. The oligarchy at the top of the pyramid decides the goals for which the surplus product should be used, and subjects the entire reproduction process of economic, social and cultural life to its regulations. Bahro’s concern is with the conception of the division of labour in society, and he argues that the basic attitude of the producers to ‘their’ state is not essentially different from that of workers in Western society to ‘their’ corporations. He points out that “given the perpetuation of the division of labour, commodity production and money, nothing has altered in the principle of how work is assessed. Wages are simply the price that the appropriator state pays for the commodity labour-power.” (p.205). Just as the worker in the West not only improves his own conditions of existence by productive activity, within the given limits of the system, but above all expands capital, so in the GDR “he increases the potential for the Party and state machine’s power of disposal, and thus increases his own impotence in relation to it” (p.241).

Bahro maintains that for the last twenty years the GDR has been spending labour on a growing scale for luxury goods for the privileged strata. “We can hear”, he says, “ the director of a Berlin textile works, a factory moreover which predominantly employs female labour, say on the radio that ‘the growing needs of the population dictate to us the three-shift system’ — even if wardrobes are bursting! If you do not want to remain ‘backward’, you must throw out your furniture three times in the course of your life. We accelerate the ‘moral depreciation’ of technical consumer goods.” (p.269). This pressure on workers to keep buying is depressingly familiar, although Bahro rightly points out that while in the West trade unions are a reality, it is scarcely possible in the GDR to influence the relative level of income since it is the Party and government which adjust the proportions in favour of particular groups.

Bahro places his hopes in an accumulation of what he calls “surplus consciousness” which can no longer be satisfied and contained within the system of subordination and hierarchical division of labour. For the first time in human history, he argues, an energetic capacity is no longer absorbed by the immediate necessities of human existence. Whereas previously the scarceness of the means of satisfaction always opposed educated elites with uneducated masses, the increasing demands of technology bring about the conditions for widespread growth of individual development and consciousness.

Unfortunately, though perhaps inevitably, his ‘alternative’ programme leaves much to be desired: the abolition of all bureaucratic privileges and the democratic control of administrative processes is its extent. A new ‘League of Communists’ is to implement a series of measures, including university education for all and the rotation of manual and intellectual work, and the result (which he calls socialism) will demand the continued existence of the Party.

To be an effective opposition, however, the workers’ struggle for legal rights of political expression in the GDR must be coupled with a determination to achieve socialism, a world society where goods and services are freely available according to need; where the state, national frontiers, political parties and the wage labour and capital relationship itself no longer obtain. Only this is worth an eight-year prison sentence.

It should not be forgotten that the GDR remains a Soviet military zone, with twenty Russian divisions kept on a war footing. The three million East German workers who voted with their feet between 1949 and 1961 doubtless have few regrets about leaving what is now considered the best example of ‘socialism’ in practice. Yet it would be wrong to say that the grass is greener over the Wall; seeds on both sides have scarcely taken root.

Melvin Tenner

Grappling with Grundrisse (1979)

Book Review from the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ by Roman Rosdolsky, Pluto Press, 1977.

There has never been a time when the conditions for a transformation to a Socialist society have been so ripe. Socialism has never been as indispensable and economically feasible as it is today, (p.488)

 This is certainly not a book for the dilettante or the dabbler, but for the dedicated Marxian buff. We have here a systematic comparison of the seven large notebooks compiled by Marx during fifteen years exhaustive study of the bourgeois economists, with the published product, the Critique of Political Economy and Capital.

These notebooks came to light, somewhat mysteriously, in 1931. The source, presumably, was the archives of the German Social Democratic Party, known to be Marx’s (and Engels’) literary executors. They next turned up in Moscow at the Marx-Engels Institute, which published them, but they were not translated into English until 1973.

They are now published by Penguin under the title Die Grundrisse, referred to as ‘the rough draft of Capital’, and reading like a telephone directory or railway timetable. Here is no Karl Marx the brilliant political literateur whose searing epigrams made Capital world famous, but Dr. Marx the methodical, painstaking craftsman systematically cutting down sequentially P. Proudhon, David Ricardo, Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, J.B. Say et al.

Rosdolsky’s work is no slavish recap of Marx but a rigorously critical reappraisal. He claims that a mistake was made in The Communist Manifesto in stating that capitalism could “no longer maintain its own paupers”, and that Marx was unduly influenced by the crises of the 1850s. Leafing through Rosdolsky’s copious quotations, we can almost hear Marx’s cerebrum ticking over, following his devastating onslaught on the orthodox and radical economists to his positive conclusion — Surplus Value. Item: Adam Smith, who never understood the real nature of creative labour, calling it all ‘pain’. Item: David Ricardo, who could never accept the existence of constant capital. Item: P.J. Proudhon, with his pathetic ‘free credit’, and many others.

Not content with all this, he then embarks upon a rasping re-evaluation of the whole of the ‘Golden Age’ of Marxian literature, from 1890 to 1925. He reviews and challenges almost every writer of note: the Germans — Kautsky, Bernstein and Luxemburg; the Austrians — Hilferding and Bauer; the Russians — Plekhanov, Tugan, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin; Joan Robinson (Britain); and Sweezy and Baran, the Americans, are all taken to the cleaners.

It is difficult to follow Martin Nicolaus’s somewhat obscure, if not peevish, stricture in a footnote reference to Rosdolsky in his foreword to Die Grundrisse. He calls Rosdolsky’s book “quotation- ridden” and complains that ‘Ros’ has “not taken the science [of Marxism] a single step further”. How you evaluate Marx’s work without quotations is a secret known only to Mr. Nicolaus. Seeing that Rosdolsky was exposing the Stalinist economists (?) for the sycophantic fakes they were when Mr. Nicolaus was writing rubbishy pamphlets about the ‘Workers’ State’, we are satisfied that it was Rosdolsky who ‘took the science further’.

An intriguing sidelight of Die Grundrisse is the further evidence it gives on the notorious Bohm-Bawerk controversy, that is, Bohm’s claim that Marx ‘invented’ Production Price in the third volume of Capital to explain away the ‘discrepancy’ between average profit and the Labour Theory of Value in the first. We now know not merely that Marx wrote (as Hilferding proved) Production Price before Volume I was finished, but that it was in Grundrisse years before Capital was even started.

Incidentally, the little old SLP (now defunct) published Hilferding’s reply to Bohm in 1920, much to its credit; and Eden and Cedar Paul, the English translators, sparked off what Rosdolsky called a ‘splendid polemic’ between Bernstein and Hilferding (in Die Neue Zeit) over the use of the German word ‘daher’ — ‘consequently’ or ‘therefore’. Hilferding claimed that Bernstein left it out deliberately to distort Marx (p.519), but Rosdolsky points out that Engels had already put it in (in Volume I).

Rosdolsky is slightly suspect in accepting what he calls “Luxemburg’s breakdown theory”. This all turns on the precise translation of the German word ‘Zusammenbruch’ which means ‘collapse’. (Whether he means this or ‘break-down’ is arguable.)

The section on the Law of the Falling Rate of Profit and the almost complete recap of Marx’s private ruminations on the nature of the Law of Value and Labour in socialist society, are well worth re-publishing in the Socialist Standard.

‘Ros’ suggests that the notorious ‘increasing misery’ thesis refers to the industrial reserve army only, and corrects common fallacies regarding the proportion of Surplus Value to increases in Constant Capital, which is inverse.

As a result of this book, and the ‘rough draft’ on which it is based, we now know considerably more about the origin of Marx’s Capital. Certainly Lenin, Hilferding, Luxemburg and Franz Mehring (Marx’s biographer) were all unaware of its existence, as were the founders of the SPGB. Despite this, we were able (in 1904) to get it all absolutely right. Everything in Die Grundrisse proves this.

Horatio

Labour under socialism — intense exertion (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

“In the sweat of thy brow shaft thou labour”; this was Jehovah’s curse upon Adam. Once this is labour for Smith — a curse. Tranquility appears as the adequate state, as identical with ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness’. It seems quite far from Smith’s mind that the individual “in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill facility”, also needs a normal portion of work and of the suspension of tranquility.

But Smith has no inkling whatever that the overcoming of obstacles is itself a liberating activity . . . hence as self-realisation, hence real freedom whose action is precisely — labour. He is right that in its historic form as slave-labour, serf-labour and wage-labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external forced; and not labour by contrast as ‘freedom’, ‘happiness’.

. . . for labour which has not yet created the conditions for itself in which labour becomes attractive work, in no way means it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier conceives it.

Really free working, e.g. composing, is, at the same time, precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.

(The Making of Marx’s Capital, p.611.)

Running Commentary: Blue murder (1979)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blue murder

Why is it that in wartime there are so many objections when the other side does its job and kills people to further its own cause?

In the last war, for example, the Allied propaganda machine treated every one of its own casualties as a massive tragedy, while it encouraged the idea that the only good German was a dead German. Blue murder was screamed when German aircraft attacked Britain, but the Allied raids on Germany — far, far worse than anything the Luftwaffe managed over here — were praised as acts of heroism with a central streak of humanity.

A similar situation — although on a lesser scale — exists now in Ireland. The IRA say they are at war with Britain and the British government have responded by sending troops to Northern Ireland to wipe out the IRA.

And of course people are going to get killed. When this happens to a member of the IRA there is a chorus of approval in the British press; good riddance, we are told, to another murdering terrorist. So it was in Palestine just after the war, in Cyprus, Aden, Malaysia . . .

But the reaction is very different when a British soldier meets his end at the hands of the IRA. When this happens the incident is usually described as an 'outrage’, as a ‘murder’ carried out by ‘cold-blooded cowards’. This was the response when the IRA operation at Warrenpoint killed an unusually large number of British paratroops.

If the IRA were really no more than a bunch of cold-blooded, bungling and cowardly murderers it is very doubtful if they would have lasted so long in their guerilla campaign. The attempt to convince us otherwise is another example of the truth falling as the first casualty in war.

The great tragedy of Ireland gets no mention in the media, nor from the respective propaganda machines. Once again it is members of the working class who are dying on both sides. They die not in their own interests, nor to build a world fit for human beings, but in the interests of their own ruling class.

In the wars of capitalism, every working class death is an outrage, and in the war in Ireland, as in every one before it, all workers should refuse to take part. They have a bigger job; to live to build a new society in which war will be a black memory.

Not what it was

If we are to believe the press, there was not exactly a desperate rush to take on the job of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Two bishops were up for consideration; one of these had already declared that he disliked the prospect of being Archbishop, and the other—Robert Runcie, who got the post — took a fortnight to decide, changing his mind several times in the process.

Now why should there be this reluctance to take on the job of head of the Anglican church? Was it because being Archbishop is too strenuous a way of getting a living?

Perhaps it is hard work, trying to persuade millions of people to accept meekly their inferior, degrading position in capitalist society while you have two palaces at your disposal and are having to get by on £12,500 a year.

Then there is the matter of having to churn out all that old, discredited religious mumbo-jumbo, always under pressure to justify itself against the expansion of human knowledge. There is the realisation that day after day religious taboos in sexual and social relationships are being treated with open contempt. They simply don’t fit in with material experiences.

And of course the job is just not what it used to be. Although ranking, in theory, immediately below the Queen and above the Prime Minister, the Archbishop can have no illusions about the real extent of his powers. It is, for example, a long time since the contents of the Book of Common Prayer was a hot political issue.

It can be small consolation that the Archbishop has the occasional get-together with his fellow purveyors of nonsense in other religions to decide how religious ideas can best survive in a hostile intellectual environment. And even less, that he must sometimes intervene in the sexual and marital problems of the royal family.

The new man has been written up as an attractive person who is a clever negotiator and who wants to make his church a more open institution. And he is said also to be very brave; during the war he was a good Christian in the tanks and he got a medal for his contribution to killing people.

A lot of rubbish has been talked about the man and about the appointment and about the Church of England. This is entirely appropriate; religion is itself a nonsense, one which workers should reject in favour of working for the best possible existence in the only life they have.

Striking fallacy

Among the many durable fallacies which do their bit towards sustaining property society is the notion that strikes are indulged in only by ‘blue collar’ workers — the lower paid industrial or manual workers who are persistently selfish and disruptive.

Blue collar workers, as is well known, lounge amid forests of parked cars on sumptuous council estates. They bleed the Welfare State dry, and when, in the rare intervals between being on strike or pretending to be ill, they are at work, they spend their time playing cards out of sight of the foreman.

Meanwhile, the Germans and the Japanese are hard at it, turning out cars and radios and cameras which capture the traditional British markets.

Last winter this notion was revived when there was the inevitable backlash against the Labour government’s long campaign to hold back wages. There was then a number of strikes which, receiving disproportionate publicity, were blamed for the fall of the Callaghan government.

But of course strikes and other industrial action are not confined to any particular type of worker. Among the other sort — ‘white collar’ workers — they are now common enough not to cause any surprise. One recent example was the unprecedented action by staff at magistrates’ courts who were forced into strike action by an intransigent negotiating attitude from the Home Office.

Another group showing a remarkable tenacity are the television technicians, whose strike blacked out all ITV programmes. While nobody is starved as a result of this strike, there were rumours of serious withdrawal symptoms among addicts of Crossroads and News at Ten — and of even graver cases sitting for hours watching the unblinking apology on the screen for the break in transmission.

Now many of these technicians are high up in the wages league. Theirs is not a dispute over low pay; it is an example of workers using all their muscle to resist a lowering of their standards.

Whatever job a worker does, and whatever the pay for it, does not change the facts of their class position in capitalist society. Capitalism is divided; on one side are the workers, who sell their abilities for a wage, and on the other the capitalists, who buy those abilities.

The interests of those two groups have always been opposed, and that will stay as long as capitalism lasts. Only a basically different society can bring us social harmony.

The Communist Party isn't (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chief thing to realise about the Communist Party is that it isn’t. Whatever the party stands for (and it is not exactly easy to know), communism simply does not figure. You can go through reams of their paper, the daily Morning Star, and among the thousands of words you will be lucky if you find a mention of the word. Can you imagine reading an issue of the Socialist Standard which says nothing about socialism? Quite unthinkable. And also quite impossible, because we print our definition of socialism in every issue, irrespective of what the articles happen to be discussing in any particular month. What, you may ask, would be the point of a journal of the Socialist Party which kept quiet about socialism? What, then, can be the point of a communist party which keeps quiet about communism?

So let us make it clear from the outset that there really is only one communist party in this country, and that is the SPGB. We are, and always have been, the only party that stands for one thing only — the common ownership of the means of production. It makes not a scrap of difference whether you call that socialism or communism. Conversely, the form of ownership in the world today is capitalism, call it what you will. So another question that the so-called Communist Party has to answer (and this article will contain quite a number) is: why did you form your party at all? After all, your founders in the early 1920s were fully aware that there had been a party preaching communism in the country since 1904. One or two of them, like T.A. Jackson, had actually been members of the SPGB, so they couldn’t plead ignorance of the fact that a genuine communist party was already in being. It stands to sense that if you think that socialism/communism is the only answer to the evils that afflict society, then you join the party that stands for the establishment of that system. (The same applies, of course, to the proliferation of parties like the SWP and the IMG. Their founders did not join the already existing socialist/communist party, and there could only be one possible reason for that. They did not really stand for communism at all. They just paid lip service to a name. Their real objective must have been something else.)

The Communist Party’s raison d'etre was clear from the outset, and had nothing to do with communism. It was simply to act as the propaganda mouthpiece of the gang who had seized power in Russia and who called themselves communists. (They even changed the name of the country by adopting the equally fraudulent title, the USSR. One of the two ‘esses’ stands for Socialist; which one it is doesn’t matter because the name Lenin should have adopted was the Union of Soviet Capitalist Republics. But honesty was not one of Lenin’s most outstanding characteristics.) The new Russian ruling class, who had crushed the people who had crushed the Tsar, felt they needed parties who would support them in the various countries of Europe (and in the other continents too, soon enough). They founded them and funded them. And, paying the piper, they called the tune to which the spurious communist parties, including our own dear CPGB, danced.

When Moscow said form ‘united fronts’ with Labourites and Social Democrats, they enthusiastically did so. When their masters said that Labourites were ‘social fascists’ who should be physically smashed, they did that just as enthusiastically. When Stalin apparently wanted the Western powers to join him in an alliance against Hitler, our communists were there leading the red thugs who attacked the blackshirt thugs. And when Stalin made his infamous pact with Hitler in 1939 and so gave the green light for the outbreak of World War II, the communists denounced the war as an imperialist adventure and forgot to smash Hitler. When Hitler obliged his ally by launching his attack on Russia in 1941, the British ruling class had no more fervent supporters than the communists, who actually denounced trade unionists who went on strike as traitors to the great People’s War (it had changed to that overnight, you see).

It is necessary to point out here that when communists talk about their heroic deeds in smashing the British fascists in the heady days before the outbreak of the war, it was by no means only fascists that they smashed up. They were equally enthusiastic smashers of socialist meetings too. All this is quite understandable. After all, the state which has oppressed the Russian working class ever since Lenin seized power would not stop at breaking up socialist meetings. Anyone trying to make socialist propaganda in the so-called workers’ state would soon find themselves dealt with by the KGB and put into prison, or a labour camp, or the grave. The Communist Party of Great Britain merely aped their masters — and their paymasters too.

Anyone who doubts that can get some revealing information from the memoirs of the late Bessie Braddock who, before becoming a Labour MP after the war, was a leading member of the Liverpool communists. Yet even now there is precious little attempt to hide the fact that the Russian party subsidises the party here. It is only thus that the party can cope with the enormous expense of running the Morning Star. The bulk of its circulation goes to Russia and the satellite countries of Eastern Europe, where the ruling class pays well for the pleasure of filling their libraries (and doubtless their dustbins) with the rag. These days the majority of the Communist Parties of Western Europe call themselves Euro-communists and pretend to criticise (but rather quietly, of course; no demos, no breaking the windows of the Russian Embassy, nothing vulgar like that: that sort of thing is only for the American Embassy) such things as the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

If the CPGB has really ended its role as the puppets of their Moscow paymasters, can they — can anyone — say what they are supposed to exist for? To advocate reforms of capitalism while pretending to be communists who want to end capitalism? But there is a party called the Labour Party which is vastly bigger, much older, and has been doing that rather well ever since it started. The real truth is that without Russia, the communists would simply disappear. Their paymasters go on funding them because they realise that their Euro-communism is merely a veil to enable the CPGB (like their fellows in France and Italy and Spain) to appear to be not too close to the oppressive regime in Moscow.

Let us end with a couple more questions to the CPGB (our columns are open to them to reply — not that theirs would ever be to us, of course). In all the millions of words in the Daily Worker until Stalin’s death in 1953, can you show us one single word denouncing the red monster who slaughtered millions of innocent Russian workers (quite apart from those killed in the Hitler war)? Can you show us one single word in the Morning Star denouncing Russia as a capitalist police state which denies even basic trade union rights such as are available to workers here? And finally, why did you change the name of your paper? Was there some sudden feeling of guilt, some realisation that it was not a workers’ paper after all? It seems a small question. But it has never been answered.

L. E. Weidberg

Victory for Socialism and those who want it (1958)

From the July 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is often said that the “world is full of surprises,” but when a split occurs or a new group is formed inside that Super Political Pawn-shop—the Labour Party, nobody is particularly startled.

If the S.P.G.B. did not know its reformist opponents so well, we might have been surprised to learn that a newly formed (or rather resurrected) group inside the Labour Party claims to want “Victory for Socialism.” The Socialist Party of Great Britain, it would seem, has a lot to learn, for we were formed in 1904 with the single purpose of establishing Socialism—and without compromise have worked ever since for its victory. Now, after all these years of thinking that Socialism meant a change in the system of society, from the present one of wars and class war, wages and profits, to one where none of these things would exist, a classless world in which goods are produced for use, we discover (via the new group) that Socialism really means—capitalism with smaller tombs and lower rents. This kind of outlook typifies reformists everywhere. They start off not really understanding the significance of the Socialist case, then they dismiss their own misconceptions of Socialism as “futuristic pipe-dreams.” In the blind conceit that they know their way, they proceed to carry on the “day to day struggle” of trying to make capitalism with its wage-slavery less burdensome to the working class whose life-blood it sucks. It is a self-evident fact to every Socialist, that the evils which curse the lives of the working class CANNOT be removed within capitalism. If, as the so-called Communist and Labour Parties claim, the problems of slums insecurity, poverty, wars and slumps, can be got rid of bit by bit, one at a time, there is no need for Socialism. It is the fact that these and other such problems, are part of capitalism that makes Socialism necessary. If on the other hand they claim to know that the one solution is Socialism, then to continue toying with the effects of capitalism is the depth of stupidity and the height of folly.

Day to Day Capitalism

Rent Acts and hydrogen bombs are the current evils which stir the emotions and fire the slogans of the reformists. Capitalism is so sick that every day brings some fresh manifestation of the need to get rid of it. Ten years ago the reformists were wasting time and energy on now forgotten slogans and campaigns; in ten years’ time, who knows what they will be hollering about, except to say that it will be the latest ugly developments of a basically ugly system. If, ten years ago, instead of telling us that Socialism is “a pipe dream,” they had made the little effort necessary to understand it and then worked for it, the present fearful mess might never have existed. In trying to solve the day to day problems of capitalism the reformers thus became part of it and only help to prolong its existence—such is the price of ignorance.

The Bitter Truth

In order that anything worthwhile may be achieved it is no use the workers being just anti-Tory. The so- called “Victory for Socialism” crowd and the rest of those who support or belong to the Labour Party are at one in wanting to swing the current anti-Tory mood in the direction of another Labour Government.

It is true that the V.F.S. group claim to be “left wing” and to disagree in some ways with the Labour Party leadership but in a General Election they would be asking you to elect those very “right wing” they claim to oppose, for if another Labour Government is elected it will be these who will take over. They say they want a Labour Government with “sound policy” on peace, wages, rents, and pensions, etc., but they must face the hard facts of 1945-1951, bearing as they do, indelible witness to the uselessness of Labour Governments to the working class. They are now arguing about H bombs, which are only developments along the line begun by the Labour Government which established Harwell and took the first steps towards this “British” H bomb. It was the Labour Government which started the present arms drive. Under capitalism then as now, armaments come before houses, pensions, or anything else. Pensions and housing troubles are part of the general poverty suffered by the wealth producers. If the workers fail to learn from their past experiences of Labour Governments, they will go on electing strike-breakers and war-planners until the obvious dawns on them and they realise their real position under this system and organise with us to end it.

The various reforms and limited objectives dealt with in this article, are by no means new, but while workers are prepared to waste their time on such things, we must continue to explain their correct nature. All these points and more besides were raised at a discussion the writer attended at the Islington Open Forum a month or two ago, where most of those present supported the “Defeat Socialism” Movement under that other name. Other points, such as Industrial Action, Slogans and Demonstrations Lobbying M.P.’s and Leadership will be dealt with in a later issue, but on this occasion, let us take stock—let us see that attempting to deal purely with the effects of capitalism, its ugly life is prolonged. Movements of whatever name which do not seek the immediate establishment of Socialism (as defined in our Object) whilst they can never really defeat Socialism they certainly help delay it.

Harry Baldwin

Link to Part 2.

Blogger's Note:

There is little or nothing about the Victory for Socialism group on the 'net. The best I could find was this interview with its leading light, Stephen Swingler M.P., which appeared in the February 22nd, 1958, issue of the Trotskyist journal, 'The Newsletter'.  (Page 53). 'The Newsletter' was the journal of Gerry Healy's mob, The Club, (which later became the Socialist Labour League), and they probably saw Victory for Socialism as a nice wee vehicle to ride alongside, picking up recruits and building up their profile.

Victory for Socialism (What It Involves) (1958)

From the October 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Concluded from July issue)

As the result of pressure of other work, a couple of months have gone by since the first part of this article appeared in the July issue. The lapse of time, however, has not done any harm.

On the contrary, as we have been dealing with a Labour Party splinter group (The Victory for Socialism Group), it has given them time to peter out again, nothing having been heard of them on any scale for many weeks. Not that they are not likely to pop up again, but, as we have said, these movements come and go with the ups-and-downs of Capitalism and have no significance at all in terms of sustained work for Socialism.

We have already explained that the limited (day to day) objectives of the Labour Party and its splinters commit them to continue Capitalism. Capitalism, it must be realised, is a social system, not merely a form of government. State control and private ownership are simply different forms of the same thing and do not in any way touch the basic nature of Capitalism. What is the basic nature of Capitalism? How is Capitalism marked off from any other system?

First and foremost the means of living, that is to say, factories, machinery, land and transport, etc., take the form of Capital.

This means that by State Bonds, company shares, or outright personal ownership, part of the wealth created by past exploitation is invested for the purpose of further wealth production on a continuous basis of exploitation. IT IS THE UNPAID, SURPLUS PRODUCED BY THE WORKERS WHICH SERVES AS THE BASIS FOR THEIR OWN FURTHER EXPLOITATION and also provides for the rent, interest and profits for the owners of Capital.

Following from this form of ownership and indispensable to it, there must be a class which owns nothing but its ability to work, a class whose only access to life’s essentials is through wages.

Wages hide from open view the filching-away process because in working for wages it appears that we get paid for what we produce, yet a moment’s thought will teach us that this cannot be true.

Our wages provide our keep in terms of so much food, clothing and shelter, etc., and enable us to raise future wage workers.

The total value of wages, however, is not all we produce. The employers do not employ us just to keep ourselves, but also to keep them, too. and in much more luxuriant conditions than ourselves. When it is said that “they put up the money so they are entitled to a return,” just remember that the many thousands of millions of pounds, dollars and roubles, etc., tied up as capital all over the world today were NEVER produced by those who own them, but by workers in the manner described above. No matter how small a Capitalist may be when he starts, when he is big enough to live on a property income (State or private), it is not produced by him, but by propertyless wage labour.

It only remains to say that the selling of goods and services for profit is the universal means by which the Capitalist disposes of the surplus in order to realise it in cash. The terms we all use in a more or less familial way, such as trade, prices, wages, world markets, finance, and everything arising from them, are hall-marks of Capitalism.

Now that we have had a more detailed look at the kind of monster we are dealing with, it will be easier to see why the S.P.G.B. insists that Capitalism cannot be made to work in peace and harmony. Its internal strife and conflicts are part and parcel of it. It cannot be otherwise than anti-working-class, for it rests upon their exploitation. In the light of these facts the squirmings of the so-called “left” reformists to make this system run more smoothly, present to us Socialists a picture of pathetic tragedy and it should be easy to see what the Socialist attitude to Industrial action, Slogans, Demonstrations, Leadership and lobbying M.P.’s must be. All of these things art merely aspects of the way workers react to the conditions of Capitalism, painfully aware that something is wrong, but seeing only effects and not causes; they shoot in the dark, hoping, more by luck than judgment. to hit something.

The S.P.G.B. attitude to Industrial action has been stated many times in these columns. It is that set out by Marx in Value, Price and Profit, namely, a frank recognition of the need for workers to organise into trade unions, in order to resist the downward pressure of employers upon wages and conditions and whenever possible (for instance, during a boom) to push up wages and improve conditions of work. This attitude is based on the fact of the class-struggle and the knowledge of the necessary antagonism which exists between owners and non-owners, the buyers and sellers of Labour power. It is in the workers’ interest to gain as much as they can—the boss can always be relied upon to look after his end.

This does not mean at all that workers can achieve common-ownership of the means of living by industrial action. It is the powers of the State that legalise and enforce the property rights and privileges of the Capitalist class, and it is these powers that must be captured and abolished by the working class in order to introduce Socialism-classless-Society.

To demonstrate, shout slogans and lobby M.P.’s, after having voted for one or the other parties to run Capitalism, does not bother the Capitalist class, who can rely on millions of workers to continue upholding the system that robs them. Only an understanding of Socialism can really help the working class. This is what the S.P.G.B. (and its companion parties) alone works for.

Harry Baldwin

Will Formosa touch-off World War III? (1958)

From the October 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

As this article is being written shells are raining down on Quemoy and every day some of the 125,000 military and civilians on the island are being killed or maimed. As the news is heard over radio and television in the comfort of our homes, or read in the papers, some are asking, or at least thinking, “ Is this the start to World War III?

Mr. Dulles said:

“Military dispositions have been made by the United States so that a Presidential determination, if made, would be followed by action both timely and effective.

“The President and I earnestly hope that the Chinese Communist régime will not again, as in the case of Korea, defy the basic principle on which world order depends, namely, that armed force should not be used to achieve territorial ambitions. Any such naked use of force would pose an issue far transcending the offshore islands and even the security of Taiwan.

"It would forecast a widespread use of force in the Far East which would endanger vital free world positions and the security of the United States. Acquiescence therein would threaten peace everywhere. We believe that the civilised world community will never condone overt military conquest as a legitimate instrument of policy.”

How it started

Immediately after the defeat of Japan, the U.S.A. backed Chiang Kai-Shek in the civil war against the Communists. American post-war financial backing from 1945 until 1949 amounted to U.S. 3,875 million dollars. (China Stands Up, by R. K. Karanji.) This turned out to be a bad investment for the American Capitalist class because the Nationalist military machine lost the war, and took refuge in the island of Formosa, where they have since remained as a quisling government, lavishly supported by the U.S. Quemoy is one of the islands between Formosa and the Chinese mainland.

The British Government considers that support to Chiang Kai-Shek is throwing good money after bad, and with their long and intimate experience in China were amused at the American policy of pouring money into Chiang Kai-Shek’s coffers. Much of this money is lost in graft, and most of the arms have found their way into the hands of the opposing Communist side.

It would be a feather-in-the-cap for the Chinese Government to capture Quemoy and help to develop a spirit of chauvinism in the Chinese people, who so far seem somewhat lacking in patriotic fervour. And, in any case, Quemoy is a step towards Formosa itself. 

American Strategy

Formosa, together with the outlying islands, including Quemoy are an island crossroads, halfway between Shanghai and Hongkong, and halfway between Tokyo and Saigon, so that control of the island by the Chinese Nationalists means that they (on behalf of the U.S.A.) control these routes. Another aspect of the island’s strategic position is that along with Japan and the Phillipines it acts as a bastion of American defence, or as a spring-board in case of invasion to the Asian mainland.

Another use of Formosa to the U.SA is that so long as control is invested in the Chiang Kai-Shek clique there is always the inherent danger of invasion of the mainland, and this risk keeps large bodies of Chinese troops tied down. American assistance is vital for the defence of Formosa, even apart from the fact that every year the personnel of Chiang’s forces get a year older. There is little in the way of replacement as the families of these men have mostly been left on the mainland. Although some native Formosans have been drafted into the army, these are unreliable troops. There have been a series of rebellions throughout the islands from time to time, including trouble amongst the Formosan cadets. The Chinese administration is loathed as alien and corrupt. But the “democratic” American Government regard Chiang’s control of Formosa as vital to their interests at present.

Formosan capitalist class

But Formosa, with a population of over nine millions, has its own rapidly developing capitalist class which, supported by the workers, would no doubt oust the Chinese administratfon and resume trade with the huge Chinese market on the mainland. It is simple for the capitalists in Formosa to attribute the workers’ problems to the foreigners in control. This, of course, is a time-honoured dodge, but it always seems to work, because the workers there, as elsewhere, are not Socialists and do not understand their class interests.

The development of Formosa reads like an American success story. The index of industrial production, for instance, has risen from 49.4 in 1949 to 142.2 in 1957, and it is very much the same story for other aspects of the economy.

Wealth is produced whenever a good investment appears, as was shown last year in the successful sale of stocks and bonds amounting to 40 million Formosan dollars of the Ta Tung Engineering Corporation and the Formosan Cement Corporation. How fortunate these Capitalists are to have such industrious workers slaving away for them!

Also, the progress of the Chinese Petroleum Corporation in the island must be a great comfort to the shareholders; present plans in course of fulfilment are providing an output over four times the 1947 figure. But this is not sufficient for them. Like Capitalism elsewhere they need an efficient and economical administration with as little graft as possible, although there is always a certain amount of corruption in present-day society where money opens so many doors.

But Chiang Kai-shek does not provide what is required and the more Capitalism develops in Formosa the more is the need felt for a better administration. The pot is reaching boiling point, with the Nationalists sitting on the lid.

Probably neither the governments of U.S., China, Russia, or even Chiang Kai-Shek or Formosa particularly want war. But there is always the chance that the sparks now flying may ignite these fire-eaters and the situation may grow out-of-hand and embroil the world.

The Hope for Peace

Should war result, no benefit will accrue to the workers, who will be induced to fight the war. Whatever side they support they will be the losers, even though some of their masters may win markets, trade routes and sources of materials to enable them to increase the profits their workers turn out for them. THE ONLY ANTIDOTE TO WAR LIES IN THE SPREAD OF SOCIALIST KNOWLEDGE. When the workers realise the Capitalist cause of wars they can no longer be misled by their ruling-class into support of them and this alone will see the end of these scourges of mankind. This is one of the reasons why the spread of Socialist knowledge is so very urgent.

One Damned Thing After Another

But let us face it—even if the fighting over the Formosian islands is settled, the threat of war will remain —and possibly on a grander scale. Chinese Capitalism has designs on Indian territory and is steadily working towards a showdown there. The July issue of China Pictorial, an official Chinese organ, showed a big chunk of North-eastern Assam and parts of Bhutan and Ladakh as belonging to China. On September 4th the Indian Premier, Mr. Nehru, said that “the Chinese Communist Government had failed, in spite of repeated reminders, to revise its maps of China so as to exclude territories which are indisputably Indian.”

Elsewhere Chinese exports of manufactured goods are ousting the Japanese products, among others and relations between the governments are growing more strained.

Capitalist development generally is making the whole world a danger zone for war. It is difficult to foretell the result of the present fighting because of the complications that lie behind, but certain it is that the Formosan incident will not be the last.

Frank Offord

Editorial: Next year's T.U.C. (1958)

Editorial from the October 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Dull Congress

Nobody got excited at or over this year's Trades Union Congress at Bournemouth. The delegates and visiting reporters seem to have had a rather boring time and the editorial summings-up have reflected the same view, that it was a very dull Congress. One reporter, Mr. Hugh Chevins, industrial correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, in an article “ T.U.C. Leadership in a Coma,” gave it as his assessment that the T.U.C. has reached a state of complete immobility. "They (the leaders) have come to a dead end. They move neither forwards nor backwards; neither to the Right nor to the Left. New ideas seem anathema. New policies are dangerous. Change of direction is practically unthinkable.” (Daily Telegraph, 6th September, 1958.)

But he did not take the complacent view that if nothing happens at the T.U.C. so much the better: he fears that if the present leaders do not bestir themselves “they will lose to the irresponsible elements of disruption” (meaning presumably the members and supporters of the Communist Party).

Mr. Chevin's main criticism of the T.U.C. General Council is that, in order to preserve the appearance of unity, they refrain from declaring their real beliefs about the policies trade unions ought to be pursuing at the present time, so controversial issues that might lead to lively division of opinion are smothered, or buried under ambiguous resolutions that mean anything or nothing.

The Manchester Guardian (6th September, 1958) commented on the depressing absence of new policy particularly on the wages issue, though on all sides there is now in trade union circles “tacit admission that the tactics of recent years have failed to secure much real improvement for trade union members.”

The kind of new policy the Guardian would like to see is that touched on by Mr. Birch, a member of the General Council, who urged the trade unions to be “expansion minded "—interpreted by the Guardian to mean co-operation with the employers to raise production. 

Deplorable Outlook

We, as Socialists, do not share the desires and fears of the two critics referred to. But we have wider and deeper criticisms of our own. The outlook and activities of the T.U.C. and the individual unions are from the Socialist standpoint mostly deplorable. And it seems to get worse year by year if only from the point of view that the passing of the years and the gaining of experience might have been expected to bring steady improvement

The fact is that the T.U.C., having at one time been a movement of revolt and protest against some of the effects of capitalism, has now become the almost inert prisoner of the system. For most leaders (and most of the members) the aim of the Unions and the T.U.C. is simply to do the best they can wholly within the framework of capitalism. But they even lack the courage and clear-headedness of some of their predecessors who declared openly their acceptance of capitalism. Now none of them dare admit this, everything has to be wrapped up in a woolly pretence of wanting something other than capitalism.

They Still Look to Nationalisation

What is more, the only alternative officially recognised by the T.U.C. and embodied in its objects, is the replacement of private capitalism by State capitalism or Nationalisation; so Congress is committed in its objects to “nationalisation of land, mines, minerals, and railways.” It is so inert that nobody seems to have noticed that the mines and railways were nationalised a decade ago. And, indeed, this is very fitting, because instead of nationalisation having solved any problem the miners and railwaymen are vociferous in their complaint that their problems still await solution.

Nationalisation has turned out to be so disappointing (as Socialists foretold it would) that most of the leaders now fight shy of demands for further nationalisation schemes and it is left to the truly reactionary backwoodsmen of the Communist influenced fringe to go on putting down resolutions as if nothing had happened to expose the futility of the whole idea.

What are Unions for ?

On the day to day issues of wages and strikes the situation is equally lamentable. Long before the T.U.C. was formed every union took it for granted that they would fight for wage increases, particularly when prices rise, and would reject wage decreases. After all, that is why they were formed. Yet year after year the time of the T.U.C. is taken up debating whether they are or are not in favour of the principle of “wage restraint.” 

Armaments and Jobs

On wider issues the T.U.C. is bound by its Constitution to endeavour “to improve the economic or social conditions of workers in all parts of the world, and to render them assistance whether or not such workers are employed or have ceased to be employed.”

An admirable aim—if it meant anything. Interpreted into actuality we find Congress again acting within the framework of accepting capitalism internationally, as it tacitly accepts it here in Britain. It accepts armaments, and decisively rejected a proposal that British capitalism should alone get rid of the “H” Bomb. Nobody even suggested the possibility that the world’s workers would be happier if there were no war machines anywhere, and one delegate actually opposed that motion on the ground that most of the £1,500 million spent on British armaments goes “on wages to our members.” (News Chronicle, 4th September, 1958.) He was barracked by many delegates, but was, of course, putting into words what is a common outlook among armament workers.

Next Year’s T.U.C.

As Socialists we know what the T.U.C. ought to be doing in the interest of the workers of the world. We look forward to a Congress at which most of the objects of the T.U.C. will be scrapped, disaffiliation from the Labour Party decided, and a significant number of delegates representing Socialist understanding and conviction will place it on record that they oppose capitalism everywhere in the world, including Russian State capitalism, and stand for Socialism. Furthermore, that they recognise the urgent need of Socialist political organisation everywhere, aiming to gain, for the Socialist working class, control of the machinery of government to inaugurate a Socialist system of society. As Socialism involves the abolition of production for sale and profit, and the abolition of the wages system, this will be tantamount to a recognition that the function of the trade unions will be ended and there will no longer be the need for the workers to have a defensive organisation to bargain about wages and pass resolutions about prices. But as the Trade Union movement will by then be overwhelmingly Socialist, they will see that the new state of affairs will be a matter for congratulation.

We wish this could happen next year.

Parliamentary Fund Appeal (1958)

Party News from the October 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Party needs money for many things, but one of the most pressing problems facing the Party today is the state of the Parliamentary Fund. At the moment, it amounts to £68 odd. That, as you will appreciate, is but a drop in the ocean. We need money for this Fund and we need it quickly. The present Government is nearing its end and may at any time announce its dissolution.

We are contesting the Bethnal Green constituency; the candidate has been appointed and Hackney branch is proceeding with plans for indoor meetings in the autumn.

We need £500 immediately. The donations of members and sympathisers are our mainstay and we ask you to give generously and quickly so that this effort can be a worthwhile one.

Send your donations to the Treasurer, 52, Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

The economics of world poverty (1958)

From the October 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism spells plenty for the class who own the means of life—the capitalists—and poverty for the working class who produce that plenty. We are told this in The Observer (March 2nd, 1958):—

“One-third of the people of the world go to bed hungry every night.

“One-fourth of the population of the earth earns less than one dollar a week. This is about four dollars less than per capita expenditure in the United States on alcohol.

“The highest per capita income in Asia is in Japan and that is only $100 a year. The per capita income in the United States is over $1,500 a year.*'

“One-half of the population of the earth lives in Asia and yet they receive only 11 per cent, of the total income of the world.”

"Never before in the history of the world was there so much wealth . . . poverty, education, . . . so little coming to the knowledge of the truth . . . so much power. . . . prepared to be used for the destruction of human life.”

And it was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen of New York who made the above statements to an audience of politicians and administrators at a meeting of national leaders in the ballroom of a Washington hotel, in February last.

Although Bishop Sheen was speaking to a representative gathering of capitalists, it is primarily an indictment of their world economy; its shortcomings and failures. Let us follow the course the arguments take: —

"Our moral duty to aid the under-privileged arises from the fact that we have superfluities and the superfluities of the rich are the necessities of the poor.”

“(The “under-privileged,” the “poor” and the “rich” in this context, refer to the industrially underdeveloped countries; their poor standards of living, compared to those of the highly industrially developed countries.)

"A second reason for our moral duty to aid others is because the earth and the fullness thereof were made by God for all the peoples of the earth and not for the privileged advantage of few.”

This earth, this blessed plot!! made by God! This material universe upon which humans live and crawl, to fly now, many of them, is indeed something to set the imagination soaring, at least to those who have given this universal order more than passing thought.

It is common sense, common knowledge, the outcome of many generations of human experience, how the resources of the earth have been put to human use. It is likewise becoming more widely known that these resources, transformed by the labouring activity of the working class, result in the production and distribution of all those necessities which today make life possible. As to the part which God plays, we are reminded of the chat between a rural rustic and the local vicar:—

"Vicar (stopping to admire a garden): 'Wonderful indeed what God and his brethren can make out of a garden.

"Rural rustic: 4 Ay, yer reverence, but you should have seen this 'ere plot when God 'ad it to 'is self'.”

Bishop Sheen then made the following statement: — 

“ The under-privileged countries need our machinery for their fields, our clothes for their backs, our shoes for their feet and our food for their stomachs.”

In the terminology of capitalist economics what the Bishop is no doubt trying to explain is that exchange relationships between the industrially advanced nation states and the industrially backward ones of the world are not functioning as effectively as Bishop Sheen thinks they should. We were rather expecting, and interested to learn, why? But Bishop Sheen fails us. This is a problem which no doubt is confounding, not only the world’s stock exchanges, but likewise the economic professors of the world, too. As Bishop Sheen puts it—“ so much education . . . so little coming to the knowledge of the truth.” It would certainly seem that the professors have let the capitalists down. Just now America is, industrially, suffering a “stand-still,” though their millions of 'unemployed could be howling busy. As Bishop Sheen goes on to say:—

“ It is their stomachs that are empty; it could be our hearts that are empty.”

But how far do we get discussing empty hearts? It is common knowledge, for example, that the American economy has earmarked many billions of dollars on experimenting with the “ H ” bomb, guided missiles, and so on.

We were half expecting at this point that Bishop Sheen would come out with something more forthright than the following:—

"But governments are not completely inspired by an amor benevolentiae, or the love of others for their own sakes”

This revelation dates somewhat. Consider, for example, the hate let loose in the two world wars, diplomatically engineered by politicians, supported by the churches, inspired by capitalists’ greed for profit and plunder. But Bishop Sheen is not finished yet. He goes

on to point out:

"Foreign aid has many aspects, military, political,’ economic and social. One of these aspects worth examining is the giving of aid in order to combat communism by keeping the under-privileged nations within the orbit of the free world.”

In this respect, however, caution should be observed. In giving such aid it must be remembered, he says, that the Russians can and are doing this—to further communism and if it extends its “slave holding” methods, it will be in the position to give even more than the “free West.” It does not follow, he further suggests, that the powers which give the most to the under-privileged, will be assured of winning their allegiance. Besides, this aid by Russia and the “free West ” there is, he points out: — 

“What might be called a third world power . . . God and prayer! . .. One out of every seven persons in the world is a Muslim. 375 million of them in a world constitutes a great supra national force! ”

Think of all those millions of potential customers, he whispers to his capitalist audience! Now we are really getting to the capitalist heart of the matter: down to the skin and the bone, stomachs withall! Bishop Sheen is now in “full cry” with his sales talk. Cautions may now be discounted; they are superseded by the introduction of this “third power,” the Holy Ghost of the church —considered by Bishop Sheen the “inspiration ” of the “free world.”

Whilst not even attempting to disillusion the Bishop, we should just like to say by way of an aside, that it has been hushed about that the Russian orthodox church played a very significant part in world war two. This took the form of encouraging the Russian armies to resist the German invasion at its crisis. For this the Russian church were promised a more sympathetic consideration [♦] for their future status in the Soviet realm. Likewise, no doubt the Russian elite who top this realm will be correspondingly condescending to the Russian church in their attempts to set an example of respect for the formalities of church traditions. We shall expect to hear that it is now the right thing to attend the services whilst winking the other eye, if it but help to reconcile the Russian masses with their enslaved conditions. After all have not the free West been winking both eyes at their own church with its mumbo jumbo for generations! fobbing the working class off with “pie in the sky” as a consolation for the poverty of their material conditions. This is confirmed by Bishop Sheen when he opines:—

"The Soviets would have the world believe there is only hunger of the belly. One great country which has risen to prosperity because it holds that God has endowed men with certain unalienable rights must recognise that "not by bread alone doth men live.’

What kind of “prosperity” the millions of unemployed in Bishop Sheen’s America may be anticipating, now and in the immediate future, can be better imagined than described. The road up to this “prosperity” for the working class of America, it’s grim industrial struggles with its armed thugs and strike-breaking battalions—outstanding and distinctive features—is one long story of brutal repression, equalled and surpassed only by Russian slave labour and concentration camps of the present era.

To sum up, it would seem that Bishop Sheen has in mind a religious revival as a means of combating communism. If the Russians see things in a similar light than we may expect bibles by the billion, missionaries by the million, air-shipped to the uncharted wastes of Asia, Africa (including Timbuctoo, too). Bibles or boots, missionaries or machines, Gods or goods, the material needs of the industrially undeveloped countries and their toiling and impoverished millions will remain unsatisfied, just in the same way as the working class of the most advanced industrial nations goes unsatisfied today.

Finally, it must be noted that the guy who reported Bishop Sheen’s sermon, states that the Bishop embroidered on it as he spoke. What we have missed, we may never know! As far as it went it may have been well intended —for his capitalist friends. That he never once revealed, however, that the private property institutions of capitalism-exploitation of the working class for profit—the resulting poverty and degradation, plus the war-mongering which flowed therefrom, was the primary cause, gave us pause for reflection.

Capitalism is like this; populations thinned by starvation—unemployment—or war (a whole world plunged in twilight) and we felt tired with Bishop Sheen. He said a lot, but left. ..”. . . so little coming to the knowledge of the truth . . .” and we also went to bed hungering for it, like some of the “one-third.”

O. C. I.

♦This “hearsay” is confirmed by “Pendennis” in The Observer, April 13th, 1958, in an article “Five Monks to Moscow.” The writer says: “ They will be the first monks to have been invited to visit Russian monasteries since the revolution. . . For years the Church virtually went underground until in 1942 Stalin appealed to the priests to encourage the war effort (italics ours) and congregations and services suddenly reappeared. Since the war the church in Russia has been very much more in evidence. . . .”

SPGB Meetings (1958)

Party News from the October 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard