Howard Zinn's 'Marx in Soho'

Review of 'Marx in Soho' by Howard Zinn (Published by South End Press. Distributed by Pluto Press) that originally appeared in the Socialist View, the journal of North East Branch of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Granted his request to return to earth for just one hour, to clear his name and refute the rumour that his ideas are dead, a bureaucratic mix up finds Karl Marx in Soho, New York, instead of Soho, London where he once lived.

This short, one-man play sees Marx alone on stage, with only a table, a chair, books, newspapers and a glass of beer as props, reminiscing about his family life, enthusing about the Paris Commune and reliving an imaginary confrontation with the 'shaggy anarchist' Bakunin.

Zinn's Marx can be humorous one page, and deadly serious the next in vitriolic condemnation of a system he spent his life trying to overthrow.

One moment Marx is recounting his countless journeys home from the British Museum, past open sewers telling how it was "only fitting that the author of Das Kapital should slog through shit while writing the condemnation of the capitalist system." The next he is grappling on the floor with a drunken Bakunin. Then, just as suddenly, we can hear the bearded man launch a vehement attack upon the notion that the Soviet Union was socialist: "Do they think that a system run by a thug who murdered his fellow revolutionaries is communism? Scheisskopfen . . . can that be the communism I gave my life for? . . . [Angry] . . . Socialism is not supposed to reproduce the stupidities of capitalism!"

For anyone coming into contact with Marx's ideas for the first time, dreading the thought of long, studious hours in front of volumes of insipid texts on political economy, having only ever heard second-hand and distorted accounts of Marx's theories, fear not; this is a welcome first point of reference in which Zinn makes his ideas accessible and the man himself. less the spectre that haunted Europe, than some 19th century alternative comedian who just happens to know what capitalism is really all about.

John Bissett

See also:
Howard Zinn's 'Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste'

Who The Hell Was Karl Marx? (1998)

The following is a transcript of a paper that was presented at the Socialist Party of Great Britain's 1998 Summer School, which was held at Fircroft College in Birmingham, England. It is reproduced from the pamphlet, Marxism Revisited.

"Prepare to meet the greatest, perhaps the only, genuine philosopher of our times, who will soon attract the eyes of all the world. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel, fused into one person - I say 'fused', not juxtaposed - and you have Karl Marx."

That was written by Moses Hess to his friend, Feuerbach, at the time when Marx was only twenty-four years of age. By that time, he had already attracted the attention of most of those people in Europe who were interested in formulating socialist ideas. He had made the acquaintance of the leading radical democrats in Germany; and, of course, he had met with the one person who, before Marx had been writing about communist ideas, had been producing work advocating a communist society in Germany, namely, Moses Hess, whose work, The Sacred History of Mankind, put forward ideas later to be adopted in Marx's writings.

That is one, very complimentary, statement about Marx. Here is another:

"Marx was the best hated, and most lied about, man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Capitalists, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him; and he died, beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers - from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America - and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages; and so will his work!"

That was, of course, the speech at his graveside on the 14th of March 1883 by his lifelong collaborator, Frederick Engels.

Here is just one other comment which tells you something about the personal qualities of Marx, personal qualities that are often somewhat overlooked. "Of all the great, little, or average men that I have ever known, Marx is one of the few who was free from vanity. He was too great and too strong to be vain. He never struck an attitude: he was always himself." That was William Liebknecht's comment in the biographical memoirs of Marx that he wrote.

I want to begin by saying, not simply, "When Karl Marx was born . . ." but that Karl Marx was born. In other words, he was a human being. Unlike many great figures of history and of philosophical thought, whom people gather to remember and to think about, Karl Marx is not some kind of miraculous, messianic figure who came down to earth in order to produce some sort of miraculous picture of the future. He was not someone from whom works of genius emanated because he was, himself, some extraordinary genius. He was not somebody who was out of this world; he was somebody who was of this world. He made mistakes: he was born at a certain time; he reflected that time; he transcended many of the conventions and errors of that time; and he was to make errors of his own which would contribute, to some extent, to the understanding of Marxism in our own time, and that is a very important point, because I think that, at the outset of a weekend of talking about Marx and who he was and what he did, it is extremely important that we don't push ourselves into this rather dangerous ghetto of turning Marxism into a figure of religiosity and Marx himself into some kind of extraordinary, non-human, prophetic entity.

So, Marx was born, Marx died, Marx left us a legacy of ideas that we must now build upon; and I propose to deal with those ideas (and a huge number of such ideas) in four categories. Marx started off in his writings in the 1840s by addressing himself to the problem of human alienation. Marx did not discover the alienated position of human beings in society. Human beings in property societies have always felt alienated. They have always felt to some extent separate from themselves; mediated in their social activity through the channels of property; limited and constrained in their development because of the particular class they were born into; capable only of that which was historically possible at any one time. And there has always been an element of frustration and constraint within the human condition as long as people have been divided into classes in society.

Marx started off in the group around the philosopher Hegel, and particularly the radical disciples of Hegel, who looked at the problem of society as being the expression of alienation through religion, and who questioned religion as being a means of salvation from alienation. Marx went on to produce his own critique of their anti-religious position, because what he said is that to simply secularise what had hitherto been seen as religious problems is in fact to fail to understand why a society requires illusions in the first place in order to sustain it.

Marx says, "The real happiness of the people requires the abolition of religion, which is their illusory happiness. In demanding that they give up illusions about their conditions, we demand that they give up a condition that requires illusions."

There is something fundamental in the methodology of Marx's thinking inherent in that statement. It is that illusions themselves are not simply errors of judgement. They are not simply failures to grasp what sensible people would understand. They are, in fact, the reflection of a condition in which the only way that you are going to be able to develop yourself - the only way that you are going to be able to reflect the social situation that is around you - is by building illusions that will protect you.

In a capitalist society of the kind that we have now, the illusion that, not only do we have to go to work to earn a living, but that there is some sort of innate freedom in going to work and some choice in whom we work for, is precisely a reflection of a condition in which we do not have those choices. In fact, in any society, the more that people talk about choice, the more you can be certain that choices simply do not exist. It is only a condition where there is an absence of choice that makes choice such an important part of the lexicon of self-delusion.

Marx is therefore saying that to seek happiness - and one can actually find enormous reservoirs of happiness in illusion; in self-deception; in the belief that life might be miserable, but heaven will be wonderful; in the assumption that, if you work hard now you will have a horrible time and you will be paid very little and perhaps your family and your immediate circumstances will suffer, but think of what life will be like in ten years' time when you are one rung up the ladder of wage slavery. These illusions are part of a necessary superstructure which exists to reflect a society that requires illusions in order to tolerate it.

The essence of these illusions, for Marx, is not simply metaphysical or about philosophical apprehensions of existence, but it is, in fact, rooted in the most material activity of human beings - arguably, apart from speech, the most unique capacity of human beings - and that is the ability to work. Work, says Marx, is the basis of alienation in a property society, because property is, in fact, merely the accumulation of appropriated - or, if you like, stolen - work from other people. So, in his earliest writings about alienation, Marx says:

"The worker does not affirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and unhappy, develops no free physical and mental energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. His work is not voluntary but coerced, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need but only a means to satisfy other needs. Its alien character is obvious from the fact that, as no physical or other pressures exist, labour is avoided like the plague."

And, of course, we see that today with the distinction that arises in our vocabulary between work and employment. When people say, "I hate work!" They don't hate work: they need to be physically and mentally energetic. They will very often return from their jobs to work very hard, to have hobbies, to go to places, to help other people, to do things which are going to be of benefit to themselves and those they like; but what they hate and what they regard as some sort of fearsome plague is the coercion of having to work for somebody else, of having to be employed, which after all comes from the French verb 'to be used' - to be used up - by somebody else.

Marx went beyond what most philosophers start and finish with, which is a position of human beings alienated in society, and an attempt to enquire as to the cause of that alienation. Marx said, not only is the position of human beings as, at worst, an unfree people within a productive environment which does not allow them to be free, which necessitates illusions as a source of happiness; but all of this is historically rooted.

Here is a second, broad theme of Marx's outlook in relation to human development. He sees history as a dynamic force. "In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will." The first, very important, point: people do not enter into relations with one another in society because of choice - again that important concept which is always there as a delusion where you don't have real freedom. There is no independence from ones social environment. There is not a choice about whether you are rich or poor, whether you are born into the aristocracy or whether you are a peasant. There is not a choice as to which part of the world you are born into and what kind of historical developments have occurred before you are born. These relationships are inherited as a result of the position of classes that have gone before you and the formation of society into a pattern which is independent of you. These relations of production, says Marx, correspond to a particular stage of development of the material forces of production.

So here Marx juxtaposes two approaches to production: the relations of production and the forces of production. Broadly speaking, we can say that the forces of production are the means whereby wealth is produced, services are produced. The factories, the mines, the offices, the transport systems, the communication systems - these are forces of production, and they develop at a particular rate and in a particular way; but they develop within the context of particular relationships, and those relationships are relationships of class: who owns them; who doesn't own them; who has power over them; who doesn't have power over them; who has access to the people with power; and who is disempowered entirely. The forces of production and the relations of production are the two key concepts. The sum total of these relations constitutes the economic structure or, you might say, the system of society, the real foundation upon which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond particular forms of social consciousness.

Two points here: the first one is that there is a social system. Marx is moving beyond this idea that society is simply a set of relationships which are developing independently of people's wills, and a set of forces of production which have their own independent momentum. He is saying that there is, in fact, a systemic whole; there is a structure; there is something which is beyond exit if you are going to be part of society, and that is the system of society in which you live. You cannot live as a person of capitalist society in a feudal society. You could not live as a feudal landlord in the classical antiquity of slave ownership. You are entrapped within that system of society as long as those particular relationships exist. And, secondly, Marx is saying that the ideas which support that society, the laws, the political ideologies, all of the social consciousness, is in fact an ideology. It is, in Marx's own terms, a false consciousness which is there in order to bolster and maintain and concretise those relationships of society and make them in fact appear as if they will always exist.

"The mode of production in material life determines the social, political and intellectual life processes in general." And then Marx says, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." And here, again, Marx is saying something extraordinarily important, and something that nobody had said before: that the way in which people think is not, as the idealist philosophers had imagined, the process of the production of ideas independently of the material environment within which the humans live. The mind does not have some life of its own. Ideas do not have some capacity to uproot themselves from the world around them, but, in fact, the basis of all social consciousness is the existence of human beings in a material world. And most importantly here - and here is where the concept of dialectic, very often associated with Marxist thought, is so important - the thought of human beings is itself part of the material environment. The material environment is not separable from thought. And, similarly, thought is inconceivable outside of the material environment. So, in fact, the material determination of thought means simply that ideas cannot emancipate themselves independently from the social environment that they are in. (They cannot meaningfully do so, at least. One could conceive of a situation where people fantasised within a particular material environment about that which is, in reality, materially quite impossible.)

What Marx was not saying here - and he had been frequently accused of saying this - is that economics determines everything. What he is not saying when he talks about the forces of production and how those forces of production, in developing, set the scene for particular relations of production to develop, and then break the boundaries of existing relations of production, he is not saying that there is nothing in life apart from production, and nothing aside from a rather vulgar, reductionist, economic analysis that one needs to think about. He is not saying that the music of any period or the artistic production of any period or the philosophical creativity of any period in contemplating the times in which people live is something aside from and irrelevant to what is happening in society. What Marx is saying is that there is something fundamental, there is a primacy, about the economic drive of the development of society which means that all of those other factors, artistic, political, legal, become secondary in relation to it.

Engels, in a letter of 1890 clarifies this: he says,

"The determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase."

So Engels himself, reflecting everything that Marx also wrote about historical materialism, is saying that history is something greater than economics but not extricable from the economic process.

What Marx particularly turns to in understanding the relations of production is the manifestation of these relationships in broad social terms in the class position of human beings. What is the class position of human beings? It is the relationship in which any one of us stands to the means of production. Is it a relationship of ownership and control or is it a relationship of disempowerment, of dispossession, of having to sell ourselves in one form or another physically in the form of a slave for eight hours a day and forty hours a week in the form of a wage-slave to an employer?

Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, put the position of classes as a manifestation of social relationships over and above anything else. In a very famous opening to the very first section of the Manifesto he says (and he wrote it together with Engels), "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Straight away, that means that when you go back to that first notion of alienation: the single, frustrated, self-deluding, constrained individual in society and you look at this notion of history and forces and relations, you now have a concrete, historical picture. You start to have something which is empirically testable. You can look at history and say, is it the history of class struggles, or is it the history of great men, or evil, or moral goodness, or creative ideas, or sublime imagination, or the will of God? Is it any of those things, or is it, as Marx says and as I think the historical picture shows, the history of class struggles, between free men and slaves, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, all standing in contrast to one another.

Modern capitalist society, said Marx, which has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not doneaway with class antagonisms. That is very important because, bear in mind that Marx was writing at a time when capitalism was new. That is probably one of the biggest differences between Marx and us. Marx was writing at a time when capitalism was new, confident, and asserted all kinds of illusions which had yet to be tested, but which people like Marx could see to be untrue. We are at a time when capitalism is old, sterile, used up. Unconfident in its own programmes for change; lost for any kind of ideological direction; and no longer open to be tested in terms of its promises to be about liberty and fraternity and classlessness - all of the promises of the early capitalist system, from the French revolution and the American revolution onwards.

So it is a class society, capitalism, and it has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in the place of old ones. Our epoch has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps into two great classes directly facing each other: the capitalists and the proletariat, or the working class.

Is this true? Well, let us look at those excellent figures that Adam Buick produced for the Socialist Standard a few years ago which went into this in great detail, because one can not simply assert these things: one has to analyse them; one has to investigate them; one has to find out from the very authorities of capitalist economic control - the Inland Revenue, the Treasury - are these figures true or not? What we were able to show was that the top one per cent in British society - where there is a more even spread of wealth than in the vast majority of countries in the world at the moment - the top one per cent of the population owned 18 per cent of the marketable wealth, nearly one fifth. The top two per cent owned a quarter of all the wealth; the top ten per cent, fifty-three per cent of the wealth, more than half the marketable wealth so it would seem that what Marx was saying about the significance of class in understanding history is still extremely important. How could you understand the Gulf War; how could you understand the Second World War; how could you understand the conflict between one party and another, or the imagined religious difficulties between one group and another without understanding it in terms of the real underlying class conflicts?

Marx, in a letter to Annenkov in 1846, says something which, I think, helps us to move on to the next theme and helps us also to understand the very essence of why history is at the heart of Marxism: "A man who has not understood the present state of society may be expected still less to understand the movement which is tending to overthrow it." And I think that what Marx is saying there is that the movement to overthrow society is not something which stands above history, as an ideal, as a dream, as a transcendent force rejecting history because history is something too messy and horrible and divided and antagonistic. It is actually born from within history. It is a process of history. That which it leads towards is itself historical in its very essence.

Then Marx gets into perhaps the most complex investigation of his life. Perhaps the one that is overstated in relation to his historical investigation because of its unique brilliance. That is the understanding of the economics of commodity production. First of all, Marx makes a distinction between that which is produced for use and that which is produced as a commodity. A baker bakes bread all day in order to sell it. He doesn't care if it is stale; he doesn't care if it tastes good; he doesn't care if it contains all kinds of things that make people sick. And then he bakes one loaf of bread, not to sell, but to eat, for himself, to share with a friend, to pass on to somebody who is not well in hospital, let us say; and that is the distinction between the production of commodities and the production for ones own needs.

But what is it that makes a commodity have a value? Commodities derive their value from social labour. And Marx considers it important to talk about the crystallisation of social labour, not simply an individual making one particular thing in separation from everyone else, but socialised labour. The value of a commodity, for Marx, is determined by the total quantity of labour contained in it. But part of the quantity of labour in any production of commodities is unpaid labour, because labour power, that commodity which the working class has under capitalism, that commodity which defines the working class, is in fact a quite unique commodity. It is the only commodity which has the capacity to produce values over and above itself. It can, by being applied to other wealth, make more wealth than it can be sold for on the market.

So when one talks about the application of capital as a relationship which is there to produce more and more and wealth (that is the function of capital - wealth which is there to produce more wealth) that is to say everything which is not part of the human labouring process in production; the fixed machines, the dead labour embodied in those machines; the electricity and other energy sources that are used; the lighting that is used during the production process - all of that is constant capital. It starts out with one value; it finishes with one value, and that value has to be embodied into the commodity that is produced.

But then there is a second form of capital, and Marx recognises the importance of this in terms of the trickery of capitalist production. That is variable capital, the human labour power which goes into the production of all commodities. And the importance of human labour power is that it produces value greater than itself and it is paid, therefore, less than the value of what it produces.

So commodities can be sold at their value, whilst at the same time labour power in being paid its own value is always producing more and more and more than that value. And the moment, of course, that labour power does not produce more than its own value it becomes redundant. It becomes dispensable. It can be thrown on to the scrap heap of unemployable labour power, as, of course, has happened to millions of people here in Europe at the moment and millions more throughout the world.

Marx then says, well, what do you do in response to this sense of being a seller of labour power, of being forced into this position where you can do nothing else but go out and work for someone else by hand or by brain - in fact, by both. What do you do in relation to all of that? And what the trade unions were saying, even then, in the early days of industrial capitalism, is that, if you constantly push up the value of labour power - if labour power which is producing all of this surplus can claw back some of this surplus - then it will be able to bring dignity to labour. It will be able to provide the full fruits of labour and fair wages and decent jobs and all of the other things which, at that time, at least seemed like a radical proposition and now seems like a rather sterile and laughable trade union demand.

Marx put an extraordinarily radical and revolutionary position in relation to that trade union attempt to keep your head above water within the market. First of all he said, do it, because if you don't do it you will be stamped on and degraded to the lowest possible position. So Marx had no argument with the need for strike action, for trade union organisation, for workers to try to get as much as they can. But he said:

"Quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects. They are retarding the downward movement but not changing its direction. They are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work,' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wages system.'"

I want to say two things about that. First of all, that what Marx was saying here was that there is essentially a choice, a fundamental political choice that you have in any position confronted with any power that you don't like to be up against. One is to constantly try to drive back the malignant consequences of that power that you don't like. One is to constantly find yourself on this treadmill of resistance against the awful developing and ever more sophisticatedly original ways of making your life difficult and exploited and oppressed. But the other, and the revolutionary one, says Marx, is to actually see the system as a system; to recognise that there will never be such a thing as a fair wage, because wages are, by their inherent nature, legalised robbery. They are taking from the workers that which produces profit by denying the workers the ability to have all of the fruits of their labour. And secondly, what Marx is doing here is positing the possibility of there being an alternative to the current system. This leads to the final section of what I have to say: the necessity of revolutionary action, the necessity of revolution.

Returning to the earlier quote that I gave from the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, there is a point there where Marx is talking about how the relations of production change. He says, "At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution." Now, actually, that epoch of social revolution existed when Marx was writing. It was inherent in the very birth of industrial capitalism; the very contradictions between the ability to produce an abundance and the lack of access to wealth by so many people who were in positions of poverty; the capacity to create enough for everybody to have harmonious and peaceful lives and the inherent drive towards competition and its ultimate manifestation: warfare and mass murder; the ability of human beings to become creative and ever more intelligently in control of their environment and the crushing control of the social system as an environmental force upon people, surrounding people, entrapping people within the system. What Marx was saying is that there comes a point where these contradictions become such manifest fetters on development in society that the epoch of revolution begins. Well, we are now in the epoch of revolution. Of course, it is a very long epoch of revolution, but then all of history has been an epoch of revolution, because history is itself a constant state of motion. History is not something which is a final situation; it is a dynamic and dialectically developing process.

So to the necessity of revolution: in the Communist Manifesto, Marx says, "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The working class movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority." Two very important points, here: one is that when you come to look at the historical movements, however grand their rhetoric, however much they talked about fraternity and liberty and equality; however much they talked about national liberation and the rights of man, and so on, they were essentially, all of them, movements of minorities to take power at the expense of the majority. The significance of the development of the working class is that the working class is the first class in history which is a majority class. It is not a minority. When the working class becomes aware of its position, it becomes aware of the position of most people, and it becomes aware of the audacity, the exploitation, the oppressiveness of only a minority of people.

Secondly, the working class movement, when it becomes a movement for itself, not simply an unthinking movement but an intelligent movement, is a self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, for the immense majority. It is, in other words, a movement directed by the members of a class because they are members of a class, in order to end the system of class relations. They have understood the relations of production in which they find themselves, and they have decided to end that as a majority - not to become a new ruling class, but to end class.

Marx became involved in the 1860s, in 1864, at the very time when he was struggling with this huge economic effort of trying to produce an analysis of commodity production, with an organisation called the International Working Men's Association, which is now known as The First International. His life at this time was really divided, split between three things: first of all the struggle for his own survival that was often not an easy one with a large family, frequent problems of intense deprivation for members of his family, certainly the early death of at least one of his daughters as a result of poverty; certainly at least one of his children who died soon after he was born died as a result of poverty and the absence of health care; and the early death of his wife - all of those things Marx was struggling to deal with. Secondly, he was struggling, very much on his own, very much as an independent scholar, looking at the economics of capitalist society; and then, thirdly, he was involved in this new international social organisation of the working class, which he was desperate to try to move, politically, in the direction of understanding the economics and historical dynamic of capitalist society, rather than planning to reform that society or reconstitute it as another kind of capitalism or co-operative capitalism or more trade unions within capitalism.

In drawing up the rules for the First International, Marx sat on a committee with two other people and established as the very first principle of the working class movement internationally that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class themselves. The working class cannot, in other words, rely upon others to change society for them, leaders to do it for us, and, above all, cannot be a movement which is outside of this idea that he puts in the Communist Manifesto of being a majority, independent, self-conscious movement.

I began by saying let's not turn Marx into a heroic suprahuman figure of history. He wasn't. He made mistakes. He didn't always apply the theories that I have outlined here to everything that he looked at practically or participated in. He didn't always manage to see what was ahead of him, and he didn't always fully understand the history of every part of the world that he wrote about, because he had an immense determination to write about countries, not only that he lived in, but that he didn't live in, and he actually taught himself languages at a speed that would certainly be beyond most of us here.

That was Marx, the man. What we are left with is Marx, the legacy: the legacy of a theory of society which is fundamentally revolutionary, which is absolutely pertinent to the kind of society we are living in today (which is still a capitalist system of society) and a theory which will simply not go away, much as it is derided or declared dead, as long as there is a capitalist society to be analysed, fought against and replaced by socialism.

Steve Coleman

What Does The IWW mean by "Abolition of the Wage System"?

"Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wages system!" (Quote from Karl Marx's Value, Price and Profit.)

Though I don't necessarily agree with every dot and comma of the following article, I do think it scores well in presenting a clear and concise exposition of a central plank of revolutionary socialist politics: our commitment to the abolition of the wages system.

It dates from 1984, and it was written, designed and produced by the Vancouver General Membership Branch of the IWW.

The Industrial Workers of the World believe in a better life for all. In considering what's right and what's wrong with our present society, the I.W.W. naturally includes how we are paid for the work we do: wages and salaries.

What are wages?
Wages or salaries are the money given to us by the boss in return for a set amount of time we spend at the job. We get so much an hour, or so much a month. Whether we've spent the day working hard or had to "look busy" much of the time, we receive exactly the same amount.

But for the same eight hours of employment, people are paid greatly varying amounts. We are paid different rates for doing the same job in different locations (i.e., truck assemblers get paid more in Windsor than in Vancouver) and for doing different jobs in the same location (i.e., in Vancouver accountants are paid more than daycare workers). Even when we're employed by the same company in the same building, various tasks are often paid at varying rates (i.e., electricians, assembly line workers, secretaries).

These differences in pay are mostly a result of events which happened in our past: our history. Certain jobs get a particular rate of pay because of some decisions by the boss. Other jobs get a particular rate of pay because of actions taken by our forefathers and foremothers. As teachers grew more militant. for example, that task changed from a low-paying to a better-paying one. Overall, unionized jobs show the results of past fights for better pay and conditions.

On the other hand, a failure to stay militant results in lower comparative wages There was a time in B.C.'s history when woods workers overall were among the highest-paid blue-collar employees. No longer.

On every job, a number of excuses are offered to explain why I should get more pay than you, and why he or she receive more than both of us combined. Years of education and training are often cited, though this education is largely supported out of taxes we all pay. So those who receive this education really benefit twice. Meanwhile, should employees with four years of university receive more than employees with seven years of an apprenticeship?

Another argument is that some people have more responsibility or take more risks. This can be in connection with our own life or others' lives, or concerned with valuable items or money. But then, why aren't those who work at the most hazardous jobs (as determined by Workers' Compensation Board statistics) the most highly paid? Or. why don't bank tellers earn a lot of money?

Should the people who produce what society needs most be the best paid? This would mean that farmers and agricultural laborers who produce our food would be among the highest paid people. They aren't now! And those who manufacture our clothing are still often immigrant women working for very, very low pay in sweat-shop conditions. And the host of non-union carpenters and others building our housing aren't very well reimbursed for their work, either.

What's wrong with wages?
As can be seen, then, the present wage system is totally irrational. It is a hodge-podge of differing amounts paid to people for a range of often-contradictory "reasons". In fact the work of all of us (however humble) is equally necessary to keep this society going.

About the only sure conclusion that can be gathered from the present wage system is that the further up the corporate ladder from actually producing goods or services a person is, the more money he or she takes home.

As well, most of us are really paid only enough to meet our basic needs. Advertising makes sure we consume as much as possible, and the widespread extension of credit makes sure we spend most of our lives in debt.

Besides being irrational, the present wage system is completely undemocratic. We are constantly told by teachers, the media and politicians that we are free citizens of a democracy. But this democracy ends for us the moment we show up for work. On the job we not only do not make the decisions, but we have to obey the orders of people we definitely did not elect to rule over us.

If we don't like it, we are "free" to quit. After that, we can either "freely" starve to death or "freely" agree to obey the orders of some other employer on some other job.

When we are employed, we get as wages only a part of the value of what we produce. We are therefore robbed at the point of production; this is the true meaning of exploitation. Besides our wages, the product of our labor goes to pay for raw materials, for research and development, for things our community needs (paid for in the form of taxes) and for profits taken by the already rich owners and managers.

It's true that in any social system workers would not be able to receive as wages the complete value of the product of our labor, for all systems require plant maintenance, research and development, etc. But the decision as to how to divide up among these categories the wealth produced as a result of our work is not made by us.

Until we who produce this wealth can decide ourselves how it will be used, there is no such thing as a "fair" wage or salary for any of us.

Finally, the wage system as a whole defines our society. Who can really determine what we are "worth"? To classify people according to "worth" is undemocratic, anti-human, a vestige of a barbarous past. All human beings have worth by nature of their humanness. It is only a step from classifying people according to "worth" to deciding to exterminate the "unworthy". The roots of the Russian Gulag and the German gas chamber lie within the wage system.

In our society today, we pretend there are paying jobs for all who "want to work" and those who have such jobs enjoy the best things of life. The rest of society - housewives, the unemployed, senior citizens and so on - has to settle for a lower standard of living and/or being dependent on the personal goodwill of those who are presently employed.

No one has ever proven that our society can provide a constantly-growing number of jobs to match population growth and displacement by technology. Indeed, the evidence is that society can't. But under the wage system, society is still organized to offer rewards and punishments, praise and blame, as though these wage-paying jobs are available for all.

What would replace the wage system?
The present irrational, undemocratic wage system has to go. What the I.W.W. offers in its stead is not a blueprint, but an opportunity. We believe a reorganization of society is needed so that decision-making on the job as well as off is made democratically.

Since human beings are remarkably ingenious, we believe different groups of people will come up with different democratic alternatives to the present way of running society.

Wouldn't this be a happier place to live if the available work and resources were more equally shared than at present?

Shouldn't we put an end to the traffic in human flesh - where we have to compete with others just like ourselves as we sell our talents and time and selves to the highest bidder in order to get a means of livelihood?

How much of what we do at our job is really necessary, helpful, ecologically beneficial, moral?

How can there be world-wide unemployment on a planet where much of the population is starving, ill-housed, ill-clothed, illiterate? Why is the world so organized that although there is an enormous amount of work to be done there is a shortage of jobs?

Do schools really have to stress competition (if two people help each other, that's "cheating") and ranking (you "pass," I "fail")? What would society be like if education instead stressed co-operation and full development of the self as part of the whole community?

Is a barter- or money-based marketplace the only possible means by which we all can provide each other with what we need for a good life?

Why shouldn't things of which there is an actual or achievable abundance - such as basic food stuffs, basic clothing, public transport, etc. - be made "free"? Of course, nothing is "free" since we have to work to produce things. However, many goods and services such as primary and secondary education, libraries, roads, water and sewage systems, utilities, etc. in many countries are out of the price system and free to the user. How many other common items could be free?

Abolition of the wage system, as the I.W.W. sees it, would profoundly change how we work and how our work affects our lives, our community, our planet. We want a society where everyone's basic mental and physical needs are automatically met - a healthy, ecologically-sound society which battles against the formation of social hierarchies.

At present the wage system creates and perpetuates a wide range of injustices, drastically narrowing the potential of what it means to be a human being. Wages are necessary only in a society of compulsion. Abolition of the wage system is a step working people every place have to take if we are ever to build a better world, rather than. just exchange one set of bureaucrats and bosses for another.

Vancouver General Membership Branch of the IWW, 1984.

Upton Sinclair and The Jungle (2006)

From the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The centenary of an anti-capitalist classic.

A hundred years ago, in the summer of 1906, the American author Upton Sinclair completed a novel called The Jungle. The work, a 'muckraking' account of labour and unsanitary conditions in the Chicago stockyards, quickly established itself as a classic denunciation of industrial capitalism and one of the most revolutionary novels of the age.

Originally commissioned for serialisation by the radical American journal Appeal to Reason, The Jungle catapulted Sinclair to international prominence and placed him at centre of a radical social movement that sought to resist the acceleration of monopoly capitalism during the 'Progressive Era' in early twentieth century America. The dominant theme of this movement was the attempt, through works of literature, to arouse resistance to the escalating dominance of a political and economic elite whose control over the media stifled public awareness, debate, and activism.

The Jungle was written in a turbulent age. When Theodore Roosevelt became President in 1901, America was a country deeply divided by the extremes of wealth and poverty. The period since the Civil War had been overshadowed by the rapid development of capitalism and an ebb and flow in the workers' bitter struggle to organise the defence of working conditions against the onslaught of capital. After the mass strike of 1877, employers' repression of labour was aided by the courts and the enactment of anti-union conspiracy laws as well as the revival of state militias (later to be renamed the National Guard) as the instrument to break strikes. Open class warfare intensified after the 1886 Haymarket incident, when police attacked a Chicago demonstration demanding the 8-hour working day. In the resulting chaos a bomb was thrown, police and protesters were killed, and the leaders of the radical groups involved arrested, charged and seven of their number subsequently executed for murder. The newspapers whipped up public hysteria against the labour movement and the violent suppression of strikes by armed troops and private armies became widespread across America. Blacklisting, strike-breaking, the murder of trade unionists and police harassment were orchestrated by the business and political elite to prevent the formation of a mass working class organisation. The offices of trade unions and radical groups were often raided and ransacked, leaders arrested, printing presses destroyed and armed vigilante groups were organised by business to break-up meetings.

The Jungle captured the brutality of the era and not unexpectedly Sinclair had difficulty finding a publisher for his devastating novel. An employee at the publishers Macmillan wrote, "I advise without hesitation and unreservedly against the publication of this book which is gloom and horror unrelieved. One feels that what is at the bottom of his fierceness is not nearly so much desire to help the poor as hatred of the rich." Undaunted, Sinclair self-published and the novel immediately caused uproar, but not in the way he had hoped.

Sinclair's intention in writing the novel had been to draw attention to the appalling conditions and squalor of wage-labourers under capitalism by unfolding the tragedy of his central character, Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant working in the meat packing houses of Packingtown, a suburb of Chicago. But his objective was lost on the public, overshadowed by his descriptions of the unsanitary conditions and inadequate regulation in the meat processing plants. Creating a fear that public indignation would lead to a collapse in confidence and hence in the profits of the Beef Trusts, the nauseating detail exposed in The Jungle prompted instead the intervention of President Roosevelt and the subsequent passage of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Sinclair would later lament, "I aimed for their hearts, and hit their stomachs."

Widely read
Although failing to accomplish his immediate goal, Sinclair remained a highly acclaimed and widely read author, whose other works included King Coal (1917) and The Profits of Religion (1918). But in 1919 he completed The Brass Check, which he considered "the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written" (8th edition 1920, p. 429.). The work was a devastating critique of the contradiction of capitalist newspaper production for profit and a so-called "free press." It accused American journalism of being a class institution serving the rich in which "Politics, Journalism, and Big Business work hand in hand for the hoodwinking of the public and the plundering of labour." (The Brass Check, p.153). In 1942 he wrote Dragon's Teeth, a novel on the rise of Nazism that won him the 1945 Pulitzer Prize. A prodigious writer, he completed, ninety-two books and twenty-nine pamphlets attacking all aspects of social injustice until his death in 1968 at the age of 90.

But for all Sinclair's criticism of the capitalist economic system, he naively clung to the belief that capitalism could be reformed and made to organise in the interests of the working class. He held a deep 'moralistic' view that capitalism could be tamed by social justice and was strongly influenced by the 'reformism' propagated by the Socialist Party of America (established in 1901) which he had joined in 1902. The Socialist Party of America regarded its immediate task as building a mass party to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and consequently attracted members with a wide variety of reformist opinions.

Like all parties of capitalism that have revolutionary pretensions, the Socialist Party of America was never able to offer a unified response to a number of important questions and in the course of the next 40 years would be torn apart. In the early years the membership held conflicting views on trade unionism, (in particular its relationship with the American Federation of Labour and the IWW) entry into the War, the social reforms of the 'Progressive Era' under Woodrow Wilson's administration and the 1917 Russian Revolution.

In the 1930s the Party would split over its response to Stalinism and the rise of Fascism in Europe. But it was the government's legislation to shore up American capitalism under Roosevelt's New Deal, that finally sapped the Party's remaining support and by 1937 the Socialist Party of America was a spent force. The confusion sown by Party propaganda caused many workers to regard the legislation of the New Deal as the embodiment of the "socialistic" principles that seemed to overlap with the Party's own "immediate demands" for social reform.

Sinclair too must take a share of the responsibility for misguiding the American working class. When America entered the First World War he wrote an article in the radical journal The Masses, that argued that America should enter the war to defeat anti-democratic German militarism and, together with others including Charles Edward Russell and A. M. Simons, resigned his Party membership in protest against the Party's anti-war position. He wrote, "If Germany be allowed to win this war - then we in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the next twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defence of the democratic principle."

Woodrow Wilson's decision to enter the war and its aftermath effectively crushed the American radical labour movement. The Espionage Act of 1917 legitimised government repression by banning radical journals, imposing crippling fines and exposing labour leaders to beatings and arrests. Eugene Debs, once leader of the Socialist Party of America, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment after making his famous anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio in 1918. In 1927 Sinclair wrote an article for The Nation in which he recanted his view and conceded that his earlier stance on the First World War had been incorrect.

Ran for Governor
In the 1920s Sinclair, a firm supporter of Prohibition, helped to establish the Californian chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and after rejoining the Socialist Party of America he became their unsuccessful candidate for governor of California in 1926. In 1934 he again stood for governor but this time he abandoned his own party and entered the Democratic Party Primary, winning on a platform known as EPIC (End Poverty in California). In his election proclamation Sinclair maintained that capitalism had gone into permanent crisis and proposed the utopian establishment of a co-operative system for Americas ten million unemployed, "producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging those goods among themselves by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labour certificates." (The Literary Digest, October 13, 1934).

Although he lost the election, Sinclair received considerable support, polling over 879,000 votes (37 percent) but split both the Democratic Party and the Socialist Party of America. Many of his colleagues were appalled by his action, and Sinclair's son David accused him of "insane opportunism," to which Sinclair mildly replied that he was just trying to "educate" the public. After his defeat Sinclair largely abandoned EPIC and returned to his writing.

Sinclair, like the political party he supported, was riddled with contradictions. A scathing critic of capitalism he never once demanded its abolition, preferring instead to compromise with capitalism and pursue abstract notions of 'social justice'. He claimed to be a socialist and yet for much of his life was a member of a political party that would only have administered the capitalist system. He supported America's entry into the war - and the murder of American workers - while acknowledging that the war had nothing to do with the American working class. He was prepared to make alliances with the capitalist organisations including the Democratic Party despite believing that, in the American two party system, elections were when people "go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the candidates of their exploiters." (The Brass Check, p.222.) He claimed to be a friend of the working class but would occasionally display racist and nationalistic tendencies in his works.

Sinclair displayed immense talent when he wrote The Jungle. The novel brought him fame and position of influence but his naivety and muddled thinking in the political sphere did little to advance the cause of workers in America.

Steve Trott

The Labour Party Leadership Battle

Reproduced from A Revolutionary Act, which is the personal blog of John Bissett, who is a regular writer for the Socialist Standard.

Countless column inches and seemingly endless hours of news reports have been given over to the leadership crisis the Labour Party is currently engulfed in. Speaking up for Prime Minister Tony Blair, Home Secretary Charles Clarke said Blair would stand down when he was good and ready to do so and he accused Chancellor Gordon Brown of "absolutely stupid" behaviour in challenging Blair, commenting that Brown needed first to prove his fitness to lead.

Fitness to lead? Now there's a thing. It assumes leaders have some special qualification acquired over years of study and self-sacrifice when the only real qualification is the ability to hoodwink others into thinking you possess knowledge and qualities they do not. Unlike other professions - doctors, surgeons, architects, physicists - whose skills come via many years of hard slog - politicians require none whatsoever. The only requisite credentials needed when standing for election are that you are over 21 years of age, not insane and with no recent prison record.

Despite this, many workers think we cannot function without leaders. This is a fallacy and one perpetuated by the master class to help them maintain their rule over our lives. Indeed, so prevalent is this philosophy, that from the cradle to the grave we are taught to mistrust our own intelligence and to feel somewhat inadequate, to look up to our 'betters and superiors' (schools, church, politicians, parents etc) for their expert guidance and to accept without question the plans they draw up for our future.

Moreover, the whole concept of leadership and the need to choose the candidate most fitted for the post of leader is keenly promoted by aspiring leaders. In truth, history confirms them to be pitiable exemplars of honesty, integrity and compassion, forever paying lip service to truth and justice and other grand notions equated with leadership.

Blair has proved to be just as deceitful, dishonest and corrupt as every British prime minister that preceded him, ready always to defend power and privilege over the real needs of the people who elected him. From the moment he won a fourteen minute standing ovation from a CBI Conference just prior to the 1997 Labour victory, through the myriad scandals his Party has been caught up in, and right through to his perfidious reasoning to invade and occupy an immiserated but oil rich country, he has constantly lied to the electorate, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and bullied anyone bold enough to stand up to him.

Nothing Brown has said or done inclines us to consider he will act any differently. As Prime Minister he will lead the executive of the capitalist class - what else are governments but the national administrative arm of capital? - and as leader he had better be seen to be "batting for Britain", defending the interests of big business at home and abroad. This is the real remit of the leader in capitalist society.

It is assumed by many that leaders run the world. Well, I rather think it is we, the workers, who run the world. Politicians might make government policy, which becomes law, but it is we who build and work the hospitals and schools. It is we who build the bridges, roads and railways, ports and airports; all the products that humans need to survive. It is we who produce everything from a pin to an oil-rig and provide humanity with all the services it requires - we the working class! We don't depend on leaders for these skills or for their guidance. They have no monopoly on our knowledge and intelligence or on the inventions we dream up to enhance the quality of life. If all the worlds' leaders died tomorrow, few would really miss them and society would function just as before.

The concept of leadership has emerged with class society and will end when we abolish class society, when we abolish the capitalist mode of production and all that goes with it. The master class have been allowed to lead because of their control over the means of living and by virtue of their control of the education system and their monopoly of the media and other and information processes.

It doesn't have to be this way. The greatest weapons we posses are our class unity, our intelligence, and our ability to question the status quo and to imagine a world fashioned in our own interests. Leaders perceive all of this to be a threat and so will do anything to keep us in a state of oblivion, dejection and dependency. Our apathy is the victory they celebrate each day. Our unwillingness to unite as a globally exploited majority and to confront them on the battlefield of ideas is the subject of their champagne toasts.

Remember this as the battle for leadership of the Labour Party hots up.

John Bissett

The Edukators (2005)

Film Review from the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Edukators. The Warwick Cinema, Carlisle

Co-written and directed by Hans Weingarten, the eponymous heroes of this film are two young men - radicals, we might perhaps call them - who seem to have fused feng shui with Situationism to create a stylish and esoteric new form of political protest. Their method is to break into the homes of the rich but, rather than steal, they move the furniture into new spaces, or rearrange it into newforms, to create a visual spectacle designed to shock the occupants out of their cash-encrusted apathy. Like high-class catburglars, they leave prominent calling cards stating 'the days of plenty are numbered' or 'you have too much money,' and later read of their exploits in the newspapers.

Played by Daniel Brühl (Jan) and Stipe Erceg (Peter), it starts to go wrong for the Edukators when, unknown to Peter, his girlfriend, Jule, and Jan become an item (never let a woman spoil a good relationship, the film seems to imply). Witness to police brutality, bullied by her manager, bullied by her landlord, and crippled by debt, Jule has been sufficiently radicalised by these experiences to align herself with Peter and Jan and become the unofficial third Edukator.

The kind of Spectaclesque rich bashing they engage in may leave some of their older victims remembering that there's a beach beneath their gravel driveway. Indeed, after the Edukators have been forced to abduct one of their victims they learn that he was once a radical who rubbed shoulders with the prominent Lefties in the glory days of '68. Now a rich entrepreneur, the Edukators - and the audience - are moved to wonder if his revolutionary ideals are now dead, or just dormant. During his captivity he befriends Jan, Jule and Peter; cooking for them, washing their clothes, sharing their drugs, and it seems that the accumulated detritus of thirty years in the business world begins to fall away to reveal, to some extent, the idealist heonce was, or at least a more benign capitalist, a Scrooge on Christmas morning. The Edukators suspect his motives and are alarmed by their developing friendship with their class enemy and 'hostage'. His abduction by the Edukators becomes his education, and he parts company with his captors on friendly terms, letting bygones bebygones and, more importantly, promising not to contact the authorities. But some leopards never change their spots . . .

To some extent the film is reminding us of the generally perceived view that youthfulness and radicalism seem to go hand in hand,whilst 'ageing' and 'conservative' are words which frequently keep each other company. There are many people who claim to have been socialists back in the sixties, yet after a few pints confess that Enoch was right. And some know, and some even perhaps are, former radicals who now vote New Labour and watch the world go by from behind the Financial Times.

As The Edukators should have tried to explore more often, there are probably many reasons why youthful would-be smashers of the state mature into upholders of the status quo. It is often the case that self-styled radicals were never radical in the first place, and a promising career is a great incentive for abandoning one's revolutionary ideals. But as Socialist Party members will evince, radicalism never dies: it simply loses its dress sense.

Neil Windle

Is The Truth Stranger Than Fiction? (2002)

From the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever heard the rumour that Paul McCartney was killed in a road crash in 1966? Apparently he was replaced by a double and surreptitious references to this are included on the cover - and in the songs - of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album. If not, perhaps you've heard that the moon landings were really shot in the Nevada desert? Or that Elvis faked his death and was seen, a few years back, working in a Burger King in Kalamazoo?

If you're familiar with any of these rumours then you've come across a major contributory factor in the persistent blurring of truth and fiction now prevalent throughout society: the conspiracy theory. From the Latin word conspirare, conspiracy means literally "to breathe together", but its most common interpretation is more pejorative than that, hinting at secret plots, clandestine illegal activities and mysterious doings away from the public gaze.

It has been a feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first century politics that conspiracy theories have been given more prominence and credence than almost ever before. Indeed, not since the Nazi rise to power in 1930s Germany, with their scare-mongering about "Jewish international finance capital", has the conspiratorial view of the world been in such vogue.

There's someone looking at you
It's not that conspiracy theories are in any way a novel phenomenon - far from it. They can be traced back to biblical times and beyond, with widespread and pervasive conspiracy theories probably arising for the first time during the Crusades. The difference between previous times in history and the modern era is twofold - firstly in the extent to which baseless conspiracy theories have recently proliferated and taken hold even amongst otherwise sophisticated and well-educated sections of the population, secondly because of the way in which virtually no major event or phenomenon can currently unfold without someone crying "conspiracy!" from the rooftops and finding a ready audience. Name a recent historical event - and it was a "conspiracy". Diana's death? A conspiracy, of course. European monetary union? A fiendish conspiracy hatched by un-elected, shadowy forces. September 11? Quite an obvious conspiracy (though by the US government itself apparently, not Al Qaeda).

Indeed, in recent times we seem to have entered an era of paranoid politics. For a whole series of complex reasons that have been charted previously in the pages of this journal, interest in real political ideas seems to have declined in the last ten or twenty years, especially in the so-called "advanced" capitalist states, and hand-in-hand with this has gone a suspicion of all those engaged in the political process.

We live in a technologically complex, sophisticated and supposedly "meritocratic" society and these are influences which have helped strip away much of the mystique previously surrounding our supposed elders and betters in the political elite, in the royal family and among others in the public spotlight. This distrust, which has been fuelled by very real revelations of wrong-doing in high places, has tainted the popular perception of not just the individuals involved but of the entire political process - and this is not just a phenomenon confined to Britain either. Mainland Europe, Japan and the United States (not to mention many of the more developing industrial states) have been gripped by the same distrust. And as any pop psychologist knows, distrust - in the right environment - breeds paranoia.

Postmodernist junk
The "right environment" in question is the one presented by postmodernism, that loose body of thought which contends that interpretation is everything and the truth an ephemera, and that science and reason are merely particular interpretations of events, being "narratives" with no more claim to validity than any other. It is postmodernism and the parallel distrust of science and progress that has arisen in recent years that has opened the way for conspiracy theories to multiply - whether they have a basis in reality or not. At the same time - and without coincidence - various New Age and occultist ideas and practices have gained ground. Postmodernism, irrationality and conspiracy theories now unite to form a bizarre trinity that informs much popular interpretation of historical events and processes.

Given this, it comes as no surprise that those most attracted to New Age and occultist theories are typically those who also give most credence to conspiracism as a systematic way of interpreting events. These are people who do not merely contend that conspiracies of some sort have taken place or have been uncovered (whether it be the JFK assassination or the Roswell UFO crash) but whose entire worldview is a conspiratorial one.

The Nazis, whose worldview was one drenched in anti-semitism to the extent that they thought the world dominated by a cabal of Jewish bankers, were steeped in a mysticism and occultism that had been handed down to them by fellow initiates of secret societies like the Vril Society and Thule Society in the period after the First World War. Modern day paranoid conspiracists are typically little different, blending the irrational theories and practices of the New Age with their conspiracist worldview.

In fact many have gone one step further than the Nazis and earlier conspiracists in thinking that all major conspiracies - real or imagined - together with all secret societies, are intrinsically linked, being but different aspects of the same age-old conspiracy. The current favourite is that they are all linked to the Illuminated Ones or "Illuminati" who were, amongst many other things, allegedly behind the founding of the United States (and its Federal Government), the United Nations, the European Union and other supposedly "centralising", "controlling" bodies.

So it is that in this theory, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, etc are all slowly working towards the achievement of some kind of centralised, totalitarian New World Order, and the clues - as always - lie in their occultist practices. For instance, here's the late William Cooper, a former US naval intelligence operative in his conspiracy-lovers' bible Behold A Pale Horse, illustrating the psychological tie-up beautifully:

"The numbers 3,7, 9,11,13 39 and any multiple of these numbers have special meaning to the Illuminati. Notice that the Bilderberg Group has a core of 39 members who are broken into 3 groups of 13 members in each group. Notice that the core of 39 answers to the 13 who make up the Policy Committee. Take special notice that the 13 members of the Policy Committee answer to the Round Table of Nine. You know that the original number of states in the United States of America was 13. The Constitution has 7 Articles and was signed by 39 members of the Constitutional Convention. The United States was born on July 4, 1776. July is the 7th month of the year. Add 7 (for July) and 4 and you have 11; 1+7+7+6 =21, which is a multiple of 3 and 7. Add 2+1 and you get 3. Look at the numbers in 1776 and you see two 7s and a 6, which is a multiple of 3. Coincidence, you say? I say "Baloney!" and I'd really like to say something a lot stronger". (pp.92-3).

In a similar vein, David Icke's recent works (notably The Robots' Rebellion and The Biggest Secret) are a case study of how spiritualist, astrological, numerological and conspiracist ideas (with a bit of "hollow earth", gaia and ufology thrown in for good measure) can interlock and reinforce one another. He too has jumped on the Illuminati bandwagon, upping-the-ante as only he knows how, claiming that the initiates of this secret group of "controllers" are really shape-shifting reptilians, notably including Ted Heath and the British royal family. And lest anyone think that David Icke and others of his ilk are an irrelevant political joke, his books sell tens of thousands of copies and his public meetings across the world are full and booked-up often months in advance - this being fairly typically of the genre.

Strange world
In some respects, we do indeed live in strange, puzzling and disconcerting times. Mass starvation exists amongst plenty. Wars constantly rage across the globe even though everyone says they want peace. And when "too much" is produced by the factories and farms, people get made unemployed and are plunged into dire poverty, presumably for being too successful.

In this environment, it is no wonder that people look for irrational explanations for seemingly irrational problems. Conspiracy theorists take the view that such a complex organism as modern world society must be controlled from the top - someone, somewhere must be pulling the strings. For instance, unfamiliar with the analysis of Marxian economics, they are yet to realise that at the heart of the capitalist economy is a genuine "anarchy of production" based on ruthless competition, where firms produce goods with only profit in mind and not the needs of other firms or the limits for their particular market - and without an overall external controlling force. This particular blind spot in their conspiracists' perspective can lead them to make ridiculous, unsupported claims like the following, quite typical of its kind:

"In 1929, the Brotherhood [Illuminati] bankers crashed the Wall Street stock-market and caused the Great Depression. From this problem came the solution, the 'New Deal' economic package offered by Roosevelt which won him the Presidential election of 1933. The 'New Deal' was a replica of the economic package offered by Hitler to the German people to solve their manufactured economic problems . . . Soon afterwards, with the American economy now completely under Brotherhood control, Roosevelt put their symbol, the pyramid and all-seeing eye, on the dollar bill. He was saying to the American people 'Gotch-yer'" (The Biggest Secret by David Icke, pp.230-1).

No explanation of this type of argument is ever put forward beyond a re-iteration of the inter-connectedness of some sections of the capitalists class (the Rothschilds and Rockefellers usually attracting particular attention) combined with the hoary old myth about the "mystical" power of the banks being able to create multiples of credit from a given deposit base. And needless to say, while all the evidence points to the economy being essentially beyond the control of politicians, bankers and economic forecasters too, the conspiracy theorists interpret every event (even contradictory ones) as being evidence that everything is under political control to the last detail and that the forecasters are just "playing the game".

In truth, very little concrete evidence is ever put forward for the more far-reaching conspiracy theories that imply a conspiratorial worldview. The stock-in-trade of the conspiracy writers is rumour, innuendo, guilt-by-association and half-knowledge passed off as fact. Take Bilderberg and its ilk as an example. Yes, there is plentiful evidence that organisations like the Bilderberg group exist. Yes, there is evidence that their members are rich and powerful people with their own agendas and quite some influence. But no, there is no evidence that such organisations "rule the world" and carefully manipulate states and economies at will - and no-one has yet provided any.

The dispossessed and disenchanted
Who are the real believers in conspiracy theories like these anyway? Conspiracy theorists are fond of quoting selected people "in the know" to show that the conspirators themselves occasionally admit what they are up to. Carroll Quigley, renowned expert on Anglo-US relations and mentor to Bill Clinton is a favourite, especially his book Tragedy and Hope, though in reality it is a weighty tome that says plenty about cross-Atlantic ruling class networks (The Round Table, Royal Institute for International Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations) but little about global conspiracies. Former British Tory Prime Minister Disraeli is another favourite, especially his statement that "the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes" (Conspiracies, Cover-ups & Crimes by Jonathan Vankin, p.265) but that is a quote that is familiar due to overuse more than anything else that there is to commend it. Disraeli had in fact been intrigued by conspiracy theories and secret societies from his youth and was apt to make phrases like this whether he really believed them or not.

Most conspiracy theories are really believed not by those who come into closest contact with the conspirators but by those at the bottom of the pile who are typically furthest away from them, metaphorically speaking - the disenfranchised and dispossessed. They are most likely to be found on the extreme fringes of capitalism's political spectrum, on the far left and the far right, whether they be anti-globalisation crusties of J-18 fame or the US militiamen polishing their guns in the hills of Montana and Arizona.

Interestingly, many if not most of the famous real-life conspiracies that have been documented beyond reasonable dispute have been hatched not by large, elaborate networks of the rich and powerful (who have a tendency and opportunity to use more subtle means, at least on the whole) but by comparatively small, well-organised groups of political dissenters, from those behind the Gunpowder Plot through to the Bolsheviks and in recent times the perpetrators of 11 September. That can be no surprise - the fewer people that know of a secret, the more chance there is of it being kept under wraps until the appropriate moment arrives.

Conspiracies everywhere?
So do conspiracies actually exist at present? Of course - from minor political conspiracies and plots (e.g. the Tory Party plot a few years ago to depose Margaret Thatcher) to the more renowned activities of political dissenters meeting in secret (the actual origin of most secret societies). There are of course plots and conspiracies by the rich and powerful to cover-up their misdeeds too on occasion (like Watergate) and it almost goes without saying that there have been well-documented clandestine activities by the ruling class and its agents against the organised labour movement, even from before the days of the First International. But we can also say with a fair degree of certainty that:

1. No reliable evidence has ever been furnished in support of a conspiracy "worldview".
2. Such views are typically the product of misplaced theories and perspectives that interlock with, and reinforce, other erroneous ideas (such as with the Illuminati and numerology; anti-semitism and the occult).
3. Postmodernist culture has helped open the floodgates to a swathe of unsound conspiracy theories that seek to systematically interpret world events in a non-rational and unscientific manner.
4. Conspiracy theorists' assertions that a complex, technologically advanced society like capitalism cannot be at root "anarchic" in many of its operations, are misplaced.

So the conspiratorial worldview is certainly not helpful in promoting an understanding of modern society and is itself, in large part, a product of the times we live in.

The organisation of society as it currently exists - capitalism - is certainly not a conspiracy, even if its structure means that conspiracies exist from time to time within it. And for those interested in overthrowing the system which now seemingly leads to secrecy and paranoia almost like night leads to day, a more fundamental approach is needed than that exhibited by the conspiracy theorists. A truly democratic society, where power no longer resides in the hands of a few, and where the incentive for power struggles and subterfuge will decrease accordingly, cannot be built within capitalism, by its very nature. Instead, a democratic socialist revolution, carried out by the majority and in the interests of the majority, will be the time in history when the conspiracy worldview is finally put to bed.

Meanwhile, for those struggling with the complexities and contradictions of life in capitalist society we can certainly say this: the truth is out there somewhere. It is just that it is not generally to be found in the New Age literature and conspiracy quackery currently invading the shelves of high street book stores across much of the western world. And there's definitely no mystery about that.

Dave Perrin

Banksy Punks Disney

Banksy Punks the World and its Brother

9/11 - Five Years On

The following statement was issued by the World Socialist Party of the United States in the immediate aftermath of the horrific terrorist attacks on 9/11/01.

Terrorism, and the greater terrorism

The World Socialist Party of the United States condemns the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We offer our condolences to those who lost family or friends in these attacks. We do not believe that violence is an effective or acceptable means for social change, or change of any kind. We condemn all acts of violence, regardless of who carries them out.

As much as we disavow the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we also denounce the military strikes against Afghanistan, and any other attacks that follow. No capitalist war is worth the shedding of a single drop of blood, on either side.

We urge the people of the United States, that is to say, the working class, to recognize their common interests, and common plight with the people of all other countries, including Afghanistan. These people are not our enemies. The enemy is the capitalist system.

In addition, we urge the workers of America to recognize that fellow workers of Arab or Middle-eastern descent who live in America are not the enemy either. They are trapped in the same anti-human capitalist system as all other workers, both in America and the rest of the world. The workers of America must not take out their anger over the attacks on fellow workers of Arab descent.

We also wish to make it clear that the picture on the cover of our journal, the World Socialist Review, was printed before the September 11 attack on the Pentagon. The picture has nothing to do with the attack.

We are working to abolish the system which allowed and is responsible for these attacks and invite all who wish to permanently end terrorism and all forms of war to join us.

National Administrative Committee. WSPUS

Articles from Socialist Standard on 9/11 and its aftermath:

From the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard - 'September 11, 2001: Reflections on a Somewhat Unusual Act of War'

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard - 'Terrorism versus Terrorism'

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard - 'Reactions'

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard - 'The Middle East Connection'

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard - 'More Reactions'

From the December 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard - Redefining War

From the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard - The War: Capitalism Does it Again

Is Protest Really Enough? (2006)

Demand the Impossible

In coming weeks, people across the country will be attending meetings leading up to the massive "Time To Go" protest which is set to coincide with the Labour Party Conference in Manchester.

No doubt many will be veterans of the mass protest in London over 3 years ago which attracted almost 2 million people - people fully aware at the time that the events of 9/11 had no link to Saddam Hussein and that he posed no military threat to the West. Likewise, the many who marched to Hyde Park that day were right in believing that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction - a fact that has now been proved - and that any war in Iraq would fully destabilise the country. And you would have been in a minority had you not realised the link between the intended war and the fact that beneath the sands of Iraq lay huge oil resources.

Undoubtedly, after over three years of campaigning you will be revolted by the incessant lies of the Blair government as it has tried to justify the occupation of Iraq and its further plunge into chaos. Week in, week out, the government has distorted the truth and sunk to all manner of low tactics to justify its position. And now, after all of your campaigning efforts, the meetings and demos you have attended, the petitions you have signed, the umpteen arguments with your friends and neighbours, you are hereprotesting again, having been proved right, marching today, demanding a withdrawal of US and British forces from Iraq, hoping to halt a looming attack upon Iran, demanding Lebanon be left alone and calling for no replacement for Trident.

Three years of solid protest and your cause is not one inch further forward! Whoa, hold on! Do you not think you might just be wasting your time here today? Granted, the Iraq War has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands and innocent Iraqis are still being killed every day. And yes, Blair has increased the British troop presence in Afghanistan and even kept schtum during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. But do you not think you're asking the wrong questions, making the wrong demands? Repeating the mistakes of the past? We're not saying you are wrong for asking questions, only that you do not ask enough. Indeed, question everything! Were not suggesting you are demanding too muchtoday - in truth, you are not demanding enough.

Whilst this march demands the withdrawal of western forces from Iraq and pleads that Iran is not attacked, it supports the very system that creates war by not questioning the premise of war. War is a bedfellow of the system we know as capitalism, being waged over trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets, natural resources and the profits that can be had via the same. By not taking issue with the nature of capitalism, and the root of war, this gathering is making the mistake of every previous anti-war demo and meeting and paving the way for more in the future. Wars will continue as long as capitalism exists. By demanding the British and American governments act we further give them legitimacy by acknowledging their right to make war and indeed end it.

Now we're not being churlish here. It is heartening to see so many here today, united in common voice - it reveals the workers can be mobilised around issues they feel are important. But from our experience - and weve had 100 years' experience of observing campaigns and demonstrations and protests around every kind of reform and demand imaginable (were the oldest existing socialist organisation in Britain, having been formed in 1904) - we can confidently say that this demonstration is just one of hundreds over the years that address the symptoms, not the cause of the problem, and will make no significant difference to the established order, either here or in Iraq, or to the way politicians think. Three years ago, two million marched all over Britain; there were demos and vigils every night in opposition to the war. Over one-hundred Labour MPs voted against Blair's war, and to top it all the push for war received no UN sanction, but still the troops were sent. So much for one of the biggest protest movements in labour history!

Consider this. Across the globe there are literally hundreds of thousands of campaigns and protest groups and many more charities, some small, some enormous, all pursuing tens of thousands of issues, and their work involves many millions of sincere workers who care passionately about their individual causes and give their free time to support them unquestioningly. Many will have campaigned on some single issue for years on end with no visible result; others will have celebrated minor victories and then joined another campaign groups, spurred on by that initial success.

And, considering the above, two things stand out: firstly, that many of the problems around us are rooted in the way our society is organised for production, and are problems we have been capable of solving for quite some time, though never within the confines of a profit-driven market system; secondly, that if all of these well meaning people had have directed all their energy - all those tens of billions of human labour hours expended on their myriad single issues - to the task of overthrowing the system that creates a great deal of the problems around us, then none of us would be here today. Instead we would have established a world without borders, without waste or want or war, in which we would all have free access to the benefits of civilisation with problem solving devoid of the artificial constraints of the profit system.

If you are now confused forgive us if we come across blunt, but which part of "to end war we must end capitalism" do you not understand? Its simple! Every aspect of our lives is subordinated to the requirements of profit - from the moment you brush your teeth in the morning with the toothpaste you saw advertised on TV until you crawl into your bed at night. Pick up a newspaper and try locating any problem reported there outside of our "cant pay - cant have system". Crime, the health service, poverty, drug abuse, hunger, disease, homelessness, unemployment, war, insecurity - the list is endless. All attract their campaign groups, all struggling to address these problems, and all of these problems arising because of the inefficient and archaic way we organise our world for production. Youve got it! Were unlike any other group here today out to reform capitalism, who beg governments to be just a little less horrid, who ask our masters to throw us a few more crumbs from the bread we bake. We are not into the politics of compromise and we certainly are not prepared to be satisfied with crumbs. We demand the whole bakery!

We are here today to urge you to stop belittling yourself and your class by making the same age-old demands of the master class. Demand what until now has been considered "the impossible"! Join us in campaigning for a system of society where there are no leaders, no classes, no states or governments, no borders, no force or coercion; a world where the earth's natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled and where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used to the benefit of all; a world of free access to the necessaries of life. Wouldn't such a campaign movement not only address the real root of every campaign and protest currently being waged?

The choice is yours - the struggle for world socialism and an end to our real problems or a lifetime attached to the 'pick-your-cause' brigade and the certainty you will be retracing your footsteps here today in years to come. Please use the contact details below for more information.

The Socialist Party
spgb@worldsocialism.org