Obituary: Pieter Lawrence (2007)

Obituary from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to report the death at the end of March of comrade Pieter Lawrence of South London branch. He was born in Western Australia in 1932 where his parents had emigrated to try to make a living as farmers (his mother was Dutch, hence the spelling of his name) but the great slump of the 1930s forced them to return to England. In 1951 he joined the Socialist Party, of which his elder brother, Charles, was already a member. A conscientious objector to National Service, after a short spell in Wormwood Scrubs he agreed to go into the medical corps. Then, disliking being a wage slave to an employer, he worked on his own, first as a tree surgeon then as an antiques dealer. He was for many years an active member of the school parents association in his local village.

In the Party he was a writer, outdoor speaker, indoor lecturer and a memorable contributor to Party conferences. He served on the Executive Committee on a number of occasions, most recently in 2006, as well as on the Editorial Committee of the Socialist Standard, and the World Socialist, and also on the Party’s Education Committee. Arising out of the latter he was instrumental in the setting up of an ad hoc committee about Production for Use, to examine the evidence for how, once the barriers of minority class ownership and production for profit had been removed, the world could produce enough to supply all its inhabitants with adequate food, housing, clean running water, medical services, education and other amenities. The committee also looked into ways in which socialist society could organise the production and distribution of goods and services without money, involving a self-regulating system of stock-control. One result of this was the Party’s pamphlet Socialism As A Practical Alternative, the first edition of which was published in 1987 and which Pieter drafted.

The practicality of socialism as a solution to the problems created by capitalism remained his primary concern thereafter. This was reflected in the publication last year of a political novel The Last Conflict (reviewed in the December 2006 Socialist Standard) and of an on-line book Practical Socialism: Its Principles and Methods which can be found at www.pieterlawrence.com. He also actively promoted the view that socialists needed to reflect on our attitude towards the need for some coercion and restraint in a socialist society (particularly its early days), though not all aspects of his views on this found majority support within the Party, especially regarding whether law and legal institutions would continue into socialism.

Our sincere condolences go to his partner, comrade Phyllis Hart, and to their son and grandchildren.

Rand-Lords (2007)

From the Socialist Banner blog.

Interesting read from Alec Russell, the southern Africa correspondent of the Financial Times, in the New Statesman.

The economic policies of the African National Congress have moved to the right, embracing capitalism with such relish, particularly through "Black Economic Empowerment" (BEE), a key part of the government's policy to level the economic playing field.

Even President Thabo Mbeki, the very man who unleashed this capitalist fervour, is expressing unease. Last year he used the annual Nelson Mandela Lecture to castigate those for whom "success and fulfilment means personal enrichment at all costs and the most theatrical and striking public display of that wealth".

Moeletsi Mbeki, the president's younger brother, one of the government's more trenchant critics is appalled by the Black Economic Empowerment policy. It is, he says, just a cosy arrangement between white business and the black elite.

Many "struggle" veterans have appreciated that after years of fighting the good fight they do not need to stay poor. What is more, it is rather easy to become rich, given the desperation of white businesses to prove their commitment to the new era by finding a black partner, and, in many cases, any old black partner.

"We [black South Africans] must have business role models," says one of the better-known members of the ANC billionaire elite, who has had dozens of directorships handed to him on a plate primarily because of his "struggle" credentials.

"Are you denying us the right to make money?" says another. "This is banker heaven"

For the past two years the economy has grown at about 5 per cent. Consumer confidence is at a 25-year high; the Johannesburg Stock Exchange's top 40 index has gone up nearly 250 per cent in the past three years.

House prices are up more than 125 per cent since 2003.

New car sales soared by nearly 16 per cent to an astonishing 714,000 last year. There are 55 BMW dealerships in the country (plus one Rolls-Royce and two Porsche showrooms).

According to figures quoted by the business magazine Finance Week, the number of "super-rich" (those earning more than four million rand - £285,000 - a year) has risen by 50 per cent in the past five years. 16% increase in number of dollar millionaires in 2005. There are 3 South African billionaires on Forbes's 2007 Rich List.

While blacks, Asians and people of mixed race accounted for less than 25 per cent of this category in 2001, they now account for 34 per cent; that figure is expected to rise to over 40 per cent by 2011.

However:
After ten years of ANC government, income differentials in South Africa remain the second widest in the world. Fully half of South African households are classified as poor, earning less than R355 per adult per month [about £28 or US$52]. This poverty is not confined to any one race group but is concentrated among blacks - 61 percent of Africans and 38 percent of Coloureds are poor, according to Julian May of the University of Kwazulu, Natal. He also points out that the poorest 40 percent of households account for only 11 percent of total income while the richest 10 percent of households, making up only 7 percent of the population, accrue 40 per cent of total income.

Indeed, that is the crux of the question. For a few to achieve riches, the rest of us must remain in poverty.

As the Socialist Party prophetically said in a pamphlet on Racism from 1988:-

"South Africa will become another developing African capitalist state (perhaps one of the most powerful and influential) where the ruling class are predominantly black . . . [The people of South Africa ] will have thrown off the shackles of apartheid to become 'free' workers. The chains they will then have will be those of wage slaves all over the world".

Alan Johnstone

French presidential election: now for round three? (2007)

From the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back

When Francois Mitterrand was first elected President of France in 1981 there was dancing in the streets. Last Sunday when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected there was rioting in the streets. Perhaps there would have been dancing again if Segolene Royal had won. But, if so, it would have been as deluded as it was in 1981 - since within a year or so France had gone through three devaluations and the Mitterrand government imposed austerity on the working class.

As Socialists, who know from Marx's analysis how capitalism works, we know that what is decisive in determining what happens to the living standards and working conditions of wage and salary workers is not the political colour of the party or person in office but the workings of the production-for-profit system. It is not governments who determine how the economy works but the capitalist economy which determines how governments act. Sooner or later capitalism forces all governments to put profits before people and to attack the working class on behalf of the capitalist class.

The only choice in Sunday's French election was between somebody who said openly he was going to do this and somebody who'd be forced to it despite what she said. So our advice to workers in France was: it wasn't worth voting for either, but as always keep your powder dry for the struggle on the economic field over wages and conditions.

Sarkozy is unpopular because he has made no secret of the fact that he's going to impose austerity on the working class from the start. He has presented himself as a French Mrs Thatcher. Things, he argues, have been too comfortable for the French people; what they need, if France is to survive in the fiercely competitive arena of world capitalism, is not measures aimed to protect them from the effects of world capitalism (as Royal was promising, but wouldn't have been able to deliver any more than Uncle Mitterrand could) but measures to adapt to and go along with world market pressures. The working week must be lengthened, the welfare state cut back, employment protection weakened - and, in addiction, the suburbs where immigrants live must be cleared of yobbos with a pressure hose.

Sarkozy has got a mandate for this, but only from 53 percent of those who voted. This will surely prove insufficient to push through these measures without resistance from the other 47 percent (and from those who didn't vote). So, expect turbulent times in France over the next few years as the class war, initiated in this case by the capitalist class against the workers, hots up.

Adam Buick

Pushing The Envelope (2007)

Book review from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jörg Blech: Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills. Routledge

Most of us are probably familiar with the idea of companies creating a market and a demand for their products: advertising toys to kids would be an obvious example. How this kind of thing is put into effect will naturally vary according to the industry in which a particular company operates. A pharmaceutical concern, for instance, may need to convince people not just that their product will cure a particular disease but that they quite probably suffer from this disease in the first place and so need curing. This is the kind of thing that Jurg Blech chronicles in this informative book.

Thus diseases are invented, people are given unnecessary check-ups, and good health is turned into a virtually unattainable state. Normal life processes, such as hair loss, are argued to be medical problems, and slight symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome are sold as serious disorders. Disease awareness campaigns are set up to publicise a 'disease' which people may be unaware they are suffering from. Almost everyone can be categorised as unwell in some way if the criteria for health are redefined at will. The companies that make the medicines have doctors on their side, of course - doctors whose research they finance. Drugs and medicines can do a great deal of harm: undesirable side-effects are the fourth most common cause of death, after heart disease, cancer and strokes.

As a specific example, the amount of testosterone in men usually decreases after their fortieth birthday, though not necessarily by a significant degree. But of course this last point hasn't stopped the identification of (among other names) 'testosterone deficiency syndrome'. Fortunately this can be remedied by rubbing a gel into your stomach or shoulders every morning. In the words of a spokesperson for one company who make such a gel, 'Androtrop gel will only be successful if demand for it is created.' Selling a disease and its 'cure' is little different from selling cereals or the latest fashion.

In his final chapter, Blech notes that disease and poverty are related. Richer smokers live longer than poorer smokers, for instance. A Swedish study indicated that, when workers are sacked, they produce more stress hormones, which is likely to lead to the constriction of blood vessels. But those who market a disease have no time for such ideas: a person is ill because they are not taking the right medicine rather than because of the pressures of their lives. While we cannot argue that socialism will be a society without illness, we can certainly suggest that it will be a society without artificially-created illness - whether resulting from the stresses of capitalism or the bogus disease-marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.

Paul Bennett

The Anti-War Right (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The US anarcho-capitalist Libertarians are wrong to think that capitalism could exist without a state or that its competitive struggle for profits does not lead to wars.

The anti-war movement in the United States may be underwhelming at the moment, but clearly anti-war sentiment today, four years after Bush declared the mission accomplished, is very strong. This does not mean that everyone in the US who opposes the war in Iraq (and/or Afghanistan) does so for the same reason, or that they share the same political outlook.

It is true that the bulk of anti-war activists view themselves as belonging to the "Left," as that hard-to-pin-down political place is known. And there is a tendency to view the Pro-war vs. Anti-war dynamic as closely reflecting the Right-Left divide. The leaders of the Democratic Party certainly benefited from this perception in the recent election, despite their history of issuing Bush one blank cheque after another to wage his wars.

It turns out, though, that a growing number of "rank-and-file" Republicans are taking an anti-war stance. Indeed, the recent electoral success of the Democrats reflects the growing disgust of that creature known as the "moderate Republican" with Bush's foreign policy. In many cases, these are people who thought invading Iraq was a swell idea back in early 2002. Their newfound opposition to the war is not based so much on the mountainous death toll or destruction of that country, as the obvious fact the war is unwinnable.

It would be a gross caricature, however, to imply that anti-war sentiment on the Right is limited to these unprincipled Republican "flip-floppers" who wisely turned their backs on the "dead-enders" sticking with Cheney and Co. There are more than a few on the Right who have opposed the war from the outset, for principled reasons.

Take the Libertarians, for example. Or I should say, some Libertarians, as they are split into pro- and anti-war camps. The former, sometimes called "pseudo-Libertarians" by the anti-war camp, essentially seem to be individuals who don't mind the world going up in flames as long as their taxes remain low.

Some of the most informed and spirited anti-war Libertarians can be found at the website antiwar.com, including its leading light, Justin Raimondo. The website was created back in 1995, and at the time may have seemed a Republican effort to score points on the Clinton administration (because Libertarians have burrowed deep inside that Party like Trots cuddling up inside the Labour Party). Pro-war liberals in particular labelled this anti-war viewpoint "isolationism" to suggest a fascistic or anti-Semitic quality, as this was the term applied to the "old Right" that opposed entry into World War II. The preferred term among the Libertarians themselves is "non-interventionist," and they largely supported Bush in the 2000 election based on his pledge to not get involved in "nation-building." When Bush soon showed his true colours, and the bulk of the "anti-war" Republican flocked to his crusade, these Libertarians, to their credit, stuck to their principles.

Capitalism: antithesis of war?
So what are the principles of the Libertarians that allowed them to hold their ground in the face of the war-hysteria on the Right at the time?

Setting aside the strong sense of moral outrage that they share with any sensible person witnessing the atrocities in Iraq, Libertarians have opposed the war there and elsewhere because of a general opposition to expanded state power, which they view war as facilitating. The mission statement on antiwar.com notes that the Libertarian "opposition to war is rooted in Randolph Bourne's concept that War is the health of the State," and emphasizes that, "With every war, America has made a 'great leap' into statism."

The opposition to the state might sound pretty good to your average anarchist or socialist, but the Libertarian anti-state position is based on a blind faith in the free market. They argue that the benevolent forces of the market economy are curbed by the centralised power of the state, which results in a curtailment of individual liberty.

The logic goes something like this: Free-market capitalism on its own would naturally lead to a world of personal freedom and economic prosperity, but this is thwarted by the power of the state, an organism that grows robustly at times of war. Hence, war must be opposed not only because of its own obvious evils, but as a way to drive back the power of the state which is standing in the way of a better life.

For Libertarians, moreover, capitalism is an inherently peaceful system. They ridicule the idea that there is a connection between the nature of capitalism and the wars that constantly break out under it. Raimondo, for instance, goes so far as assert that, "capitalism—free markets—is the antithesis of war" (28 October 2002 column). The Libertarian economist Walter Block, for his part, describes the essentially peaceful Libertarian (free-market) principles that should govern capitalism:

"The non-aggression axiom is the lynchpin of the philosophy of Libertarianism. It states, simply, that it shall be legal for anyone to do anything he wants, provided only that he not initiate (or threaten) violence against the person or legitimately owned property of another. That is, in the free society, one has the right to manufacture, buy or sell any good or service at any mutually agreeable terms. Thus, there would be no victimless crime prohibitions, price controls, government regulation of the economy, etc." ("The Non-Aggression Axiom of Libertarianism")

This Libertarian view of the benevolent nature of a market economy (= capitalism) is a selective one, to say the least. Their focus is on exchange, as a mutually beneficial act. This is a real "win-win" situation, where I give you my widget and get your gadget in return. What is left out, however, are some of the strikingly war-like aspects of a capitalist economy, starting first and foremost with the cut-throat competition that goes on in the pursuit of profit. Nor do they dwell on the class divisions inherent to such a system and the conflict that that results.

In the Libertarian's mind, capitalism is—or should be—a world made up of enterprising capitalists, minding their own business(es) and interacting peacefully, without any need for the state to intervene in these affairs or for wars to be waged overseas. Here we are basically dealing with the viewpoint of the individual capitalist, particularly the small-scale one, who experiences the state as an unpleasant institution that appropriates his hard-earned wealth through taxation, sometimes to pay for wars that bring him no direct benefit. Remove this alien force, he reasons, and life would immediately be much rosier.

The "liberty" that Libertarians wax so philosophical about is the freedom of this economic actor to chase after his profit in peace; never minding the fact that his own profits are squeezed out of workers, thus depriving them of their own personal liberty!

The wider view
The state and the wars it wages may seem a complete waste of taxpayer money to the individual capitalist (and to the Libertarian who translates his myopic viewpoint into a grand philosophy), but things look a bit different if we consider the capitalist class as a whole.

Like any ruling class throughout history, the minority capitalist class needs the state, as an apparatus of coercion, to maintain its grip on power. And in addition to this age-old function of the state, a capitalist state is also necessary as a means of coordinating the diverse interests of individual capitalists in order to represent their collective interests as capitalists. The example of Enron alone shows how deregulation may benefit a tiny stratum of capitalists at the expense of their bourgeois brethren who have to purchase exorbitant or shoddy products. (This does not mean, however, that state intervention and regulation can turn capitalism into socialism, as Libertarians fear and leftists hope.) Given this twin-necessity for the state - as policeman and mediating judge - the more far-sighted or financially comfortable capitalists view the taxes directed to the state apparatus as money well spent.

Libertarians, in short, loathe the state without understanding why it must exist and play certain roles under their cherished capitalist system. And the same shallowness characterizes their view of war, which is fervently opposed without an understanding of its root causes.

Capitalism, as already noted, generates its own war-like behaviour at home, where capitalists will go to any lengths to vanquish the enemy (= competitors). We may find this selfish behaviour deplorable from the standpoint of human decency, but it does have its own necessity. And there is a similar capitalist logic at play when nation-states jostle and throttle each other for access to markets and resources, despite such behaviour being the height of idiocy from the perspective of humanity as a whole.

That does not mean, of course, that every war goes as planned, achieving the greedy goals intended. Just as the best-laid plans of a company to win out in competition may fail, military adventures have been known to backfire perfectly (just look at Iraq!). Still, regardless of whether or not goals are met, the ultimate impetus for conflict between nations can be found in the unceasing competition over raw materials, access to markets, and the like, which itself is the direct outgrowth of that insatiable thirst for profit among the capitalists within a given nation. Even if a conflict is directly triggered (or at times averted) for this or that specific reason, war itself is inevitable under the capitalist system of production for profit, as the experience of the past decades alone amply demonstrates.

A world without war
An anti-war Libertarian reading this criticism might say: "Our free-market principles are really beside the point; the important thing is to end the war now!" Libertarians at antiwar.com and elsewhere are calling for a political realignment through a Left-Right "united front" to end the war. They are more than willing to join hands with leftists (who they mistake for socialists) over the single issue of ending the war immediately. And there is every chance that such an alliance can succeed, because bringing the disastrous war in Iraq to an end has become an urgent necessity for the capitalist class itself - although it still dreams of salvaging some benefit from the fiasco.

Meanwhile, the "Far-left" is happy to hide its own "socialist" principles from view in order to build a broad anti-war coalition (which is just as well considering the state-capitalist content of those principles). Looking at the political landscape, it is hard not to have a sense of deja vu, as it resembles the situation in the late sixties and early seventies when those who pointed out the need to do more than just end a single war - and who called for "Socialism now!" - were branded "sectarians" and given a moral browbeating for distracting attention from the immediate task at hand.

But recall what happened after the Vietnam War. The US was gun-shy for a couple of years, sure, but less than a decade later Reagan was revving up the war machine again. Since then we have seen conflicts on an ever-escalating scale, culminating (so far) with the horrifying carnage in the Middle East. The reason is not simply the malevolence of US leaders or an insufficiently powerful anti-war movement, but that the competitive economic system that triggers the war-impulse remains firmly in place. This system was not overcome in the Vietnam War era, when socialists were written off as unrealistic dreamers, and today the people of the Middle East are paying a heavy price.

End war in Iraq? Yes, right away! But let's not - once again - forget about the victims of future wars. They can only be saved by all of us deciding to rip out the weed of capitalism (which Libertarians mistake for a precious flower yet to bloom) by the roots. The hard truth of the matter, but also a source of hope, is that we will be stuck with the tragedy of war until we manage to move beyond capitalism, to a society where things are produced to meet human needs, not as a means to the profit-making end. In such a society, which is cooperative rather than competitive, there is no longer any basis for war, as the divisions and conflict between classes and nations will have dissolved along with the very existence of those categories.

If Libertarians are serious about liberty, and truly want to live under a state-less system where peace (not just the temporary absence of war) reigns, then they need to consider ending their silly love affair with capitalism, whose invisible hand has been slapping all of us around and pushing us to slap and to slay each other.

Michael Schauerte

Fighting Back (2007)

Book Review from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century by Peter Linebaugh (Verso Books)

This is a detailed history of the rise of capitalism in eighteenth-century London. During this period you really could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread. But public hangings were not simply a punishment for a crime committed; they were a form of state terror used by the ruling class to force the poor of London to accept the criminalization of their customary rights and accept new forms of private property under the wages system.

In the resulting class war thousands of London poor met their fate on the gallows at Tyburn. Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin were famous at this time as heroes of the London poor, as men who would "rob from the rich to give to the poor". Even today the exploits of the highway robber Dick Turpin are well-known in Britain. But Sheppard, thief and gaol-breaker, became notorious around the world. Over a century later the Australian press were making comparisons between Ned Kelly and Sheppard. In America, Frank and Jesse James wrote letters to newspapers signed "Jack Sheppard". Sheppard, Turpin and many others were eventually caught and hanged. However, their legacy remained a problem for the ruling class. For as Linebaugh writes, their exploits became "an essential part of the oppositional culture of working class London, a serious obstacle to the formation of a tractable, obedient labour force. Therefore, it was not enough to hang them - the values they espoused or represented had to be challenged".

But the working class fought back, culminating in the little-known Gordon Riots of June 1780. In this insurrection, Parliament and the Bank of England were attacked, the houses of judges and major employers destroyed. Newgate prison was attacked, its prisoners released and the building completely destroyed (this was only nine years before the storming of the Bastille in revolutionary France). Between 400 and 500 people were killed. Yet by the end of the eighteenth-century the social relations of wage labour and capital were predominant. To avoid confrontation, public hangings ceased but they continued within the relative safety (for the hangman!) of prison walls. There is however one remaining vestige of this violent period: the Punch and Judy show. Brought to London's Drury Lane in 1790 by the Italian puppeteer Giovanni Piccinni, the show expresses "the emotions of a class riven with unresolvable contradictions". In the murderous rage of Punch we see the frustrations of a class at war. Punch is arrested and sent to the gallows but refuses to comply. The hangman "puts his own head in the noose to teach Punch how to do it, and Punch hangs the hangman".

A magnificent and important book.

Lew Higgins

May Socialist Standard - All Capitalists Now?

Editorial

Scottish Nationalism

Regular Columns

Pathfinders Crystal Ball Gazing

Cooking the Books #1 Underlying Cause

Cooking the Books #2 Just A Yellow Metal

Greasy Pole Hazel Blears – nuts in May?

50 Years Ago Should Irish workers support the I.R.A.?

Main Articles

Forever Blowing Bubbles Those attracted by the 'buy-to-let' bonanza, turning themselves into mini-rentiers in a bid to escape wage slavery forever, are likely to get their fingers burnt.

William Wilberforce was no saint Wilberforce was opposed to slavery, but what were his views on wage slavery?

The anti-war Right The US anarcho-capitalist Libertarians are wrong to think that capitalism could exist without a state or that its competitive struggle for profits does not lead to wars.

It's a bloody crime – or is it? "The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business" (Clarence Darrow).

The Military are not that Unintelligent Military planners can't afford to be stupid - as a recent MOD publication shows.

China: primitive accumulation of capital During the last quarter of a century millions of Chinese peasants have migrated to the cities. But has life improved for them?

Letters, Obituary, Reviews & Meetings

Letters to the Editors 'Racism' & 'Climate Change'

Obituary Pieter Lawrence

Book Reviews London Hanged by Peter Linebaugh & Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills by Jürg Blech

Meetings Glasgow, Birmingham, London & East Anglia.

Voice From The Back

How the Other Tenth Live; Primitive Accumulation of Capital; Mind the Gap; Escape (I); Escape (II); Getting Things Done

Rosa Luxemburg's 'What are the Origins of the First of May?'

Cut and pasted from the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back

The fortunate idea to use the celebration of a proletarian day of rest as a means of obtaining the 8-hour day first originated in Australia. In 1856 the workers there decided to organise a day of a total stoppage of work to demonstrate for the 8-hour day. The date of this demonstration was to be 21 April. In the beginning the Australian workers had envisaged this only for the year 1856. But this first demonstration had such an effect on the proletarian masses of Australia, stimulating them and leading to new campaigns, that it was decided to repeat this demonstration every year.

What in fact could give workers more courage and more confidence in their own strength than a massive stoppage of work which they have themselves decided? What would give more courage to the eternal slaves of the factories and workshops than the gathering of their own troops? Thus the idea of a proletarian festival was rapidly accepted and began to spread from Australia to other countries until it conquered the whole proletariat of the world.

The first to follow the example of the Australians were the Americans. In 1886 they decided that the first of May would be a universal day of stopping work. That day 200,000 of them left their work and demanded the 8-hour day. The police and legal harassment later prevented for some years the workers from repeating demonstrations of this size. However in 1888 they renewed their decision, planning that the next demonstration should be the first of May 1890.

In the meantime the workers' movement in Europe had strengthened and motivated itself. The strongest expression of this movement took place at the congress of the Workers International in 1889. At the congress, made up of 400 delegates, it was decided that the 8-hour day should be the priority demand. The delegate of the French unions, the worker Lavigne from Bordeaux, proposed on this that this demand should be expressed in all countries by a universal stoppage of work. The delegate of the American workers drew attention to the decision of his comrades to go on strike on the first of May 1890 and the congress decided on this date for the universal proletarian festival.

On this occasion, as thirty years before in Australia, the workers were actually thinking of a one-off demonstration. The congress decided that the workers of all countries should demonstrate together for the 8-hour day on the first of May 1890. Nobody spoke about repeating the day without work in the following years. Naturally, nobody could foresee the brilliant success that this idea was to have nor the speed with which it was to be adopted by the labouring classes. However, it was enough to demonstrate once on the first of May for everybody to understand that the first of May had to be annual and perennial.

The first of May demanded the establishment of the 8-hour day. But even after this aim has been achieved the first of May should not be abandoned. As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the dominant classes continues, as long as all the demands are not met, the first of May will be the annual expression of those demands. And, when the better days come, when the working class of the world has won its emancipation, then humanity will probably also celebrate the first of May in honour of the determined struggles and numerous sufferings of the past.

Rosa Luxemburg

(Article by Rosa Luxemburg published in the Polish journal Sprawa Robotnicza in 1894, translated from the French translation at the following link.)

May Day 2007

From the World Socialist Party of the United States MySpace page

May Day 2007

In light of the fact that conditions remain the same regarding the struggle for the rights of 'immigrant' workers, the World Socialist Party has decided to reissue it's May Day statement from '06.We also feel that is does an exemplary job of describing just what we are fighting for - democracy in the class struggle and a new, non-reformist direction. -Jason (WSP)

World Socialist Party May Day Statement

May Day 2007

Somethings going on in the U.S. Its obvious that in the immigrant workers movement we are seeing a new form of the class struggle arise. Based in the working class struggle of Latin America, a movement for the largest strike wave in 60 years is building. Indeed, along with many other congruent factors, the current immigrant workers rights movement is laying the groundwork for what may be the biggest mass labor movement in a century.

New Organizing
For workers to stand up for their interests often means harassment, repression, prison or death. More insidious, however, is the history of attempts by the Left to talk workers out of thinking for themselves. The history of the 20th century shows the leaders of working class movements - the Communists, the trade union officials, etc. - while often doing beneficial work on low levels, also pushing a bigger agenda - defending the USSR, political contacts, etc. - that eliminates our interests. These leaders naturally design their goals to mesh with the system; they are not thinking beyond the needs of capital in their urgent projects.

In Mexico, new methods of organizing around these problems were created to draw out large groups of people. In the U.S. weve seen a similar movement growing up around the Seattle WTO protests. The method of creating mass leaderless protests is a new one and not without problems. But it does allow for a measure of real democracy, as opposed to the rigidly organized movements that were typical between the 1930s and 80s.

But Watch Out!
The working class is often cursed with the worst sorts of friends. The unions, the leftists and the small capitalists all know what to do. These folks aren't just offering advice, they offer themselves as a leadership and give us only division. Don't worry, they will do the hard work for us. All we have to do is show up and clap for them. They will admit they have misled us in the past, even that theyve sold us out. Promises are always made no mistakes, no sellouts this time.

Knowledge is Needed
What is needed, really, is to know what not to do:
- Dont give up democratic decision making
- even if it means leaderless rallies, we all need to have a voice in the movement.

Movements are communities of thought that reflect priorities and assumptions, and a lack of practical democracy mirrors the same lack of interest in real democracy that clutters the worldview of most capitalists. Without insisting on democratic control, workers will find themselves once again muscled out of the chance to really stand capitalism on its head.

Don't let outside organizations - parties, unions, etc. - turn leaderless rallies into opportunities for self-advertisement. Anyone who cannot see through the polite fictions of capitalism is, whether they think so or not, going to end up prescribing yet another new set of bosses to replace the currently unpopular set. Do't set yourself up for realizing too late you were just a pawn in someone elses game.

Above all, don't forget that capitalism can only provide what capitalists regard as a reasonable profit. Thinking outside their box will sound only like extravagant fantasy to them, and they will never budget a penny for it. For now, we live under the capitalist system, so we have to understand capitalism. Not even radical businessmen are interested in sacrificing profits just for the sake of the human factor. The history of protests is littered with the bones of false confidence. The sum total of all demands must always be able to fit through the drain of profit. That is all they can give us - but they will expect givebacks in return.

About Us:
Since 1916 the World Socialist Party has been organized to provide a clear and concise analysis of the capitalist system, its methods of organization and its problems. Workers can only solve those problems by eliminating capital and wages from the economy, and returning the control of wealth production to the worlds communities, where it resided before economic classes and governments arose. We invite you to investigate our work.

World Socialist Party
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Charity versus Equity

From the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back

Just before Christmas last year a letter arrived from Action Aid citing a number of manifestations of the iniquities of global capitalism. The letter was an appeal for funds, specifically for the 'Global Campaign for Education' to 'make sure the governments of the world keep their promise to provide free primary education for all by 2015.'

Action Aid stressed that a donation isn't a hand-out or an imposed solution but a project that puts power, decision-making and responsibility back into the hands of a whole community. In fact the appeal had a letter within the letter. Two teenage Guineans appealing by letter for the world's poorest people to the people of Europe, wanting to give their message of a life of poverty in Africa, believing that the people of Europe could bring a solution. All they wanted was education, the key they believed to a better life in their home country. They said that because their families were poor the choice was between food and education. In attempting to carry their letter to Europe (believing their oral message may not reach its destination) they both perished in the undercarriage of the plane in which they'd stowed away, but their message did arrive in Brussels International Airport with their dead 14 and 15 year old bodies.

The main points of their letter were wishing to seek help with the development of Africa; help to fight poverty; and to bring war to an end in Africa. (Guinea, with a population of about 9 million, shares borders with Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau and has had to contend with tens of thousands of refugees and numerous cross-border incursions in the last decade.) Finally, 'however, our greatest need is education.'

No doubt Action Aid and other charities, through generous donations, are able to make a dent in alleviating some of the pressing problems affecting impoverished societies in Africa and other areas of the world, but these can only be dents because they don't aim to change the system to one that can continue to support all societies in an equitable and sustainable manner.

Appropriate development such as desired by local communities, poverty elimination, an end to war everywhere and universal lifelong education are some of the fundamental principles of socialism as are power, decision-making and responsibility to be firmly in the hands of the people.

Certainly, support and compassion are needed meantime, but just imagine teams of people like these already established with logistics skills, people on the ground experienced in organising, a worldwide workforce empathetic to the importance of working for and with the community for common goals, at the time when the majority of the world's people - in Africa, in Europe, in Asia and the Americas - are intent on working together with the sole aim of establishing a socialist world for the benefit of all, with no hindrance of class, race, colour, religion or wealth.

What better tribute could we give to these two courageous youths and to the thousands of others dying daily from malnutrition and preventable and curable diseases than to double our efforts at bringing about an end to the horrific, inhumane system called capitalism and replacing it with one based upon common ownership and democratic control by and in the interest of the whole community?

Janet Surman

China: primitive accumulation of capital (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is not able to develop until, in addition to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few people, there were also vast numbers of men and women free to sell their mental and physical energies, their labour power, for wages, and "free" from other means of obtaining a living such as the ownership of land. This, according to Karl Marx, was — and is — the primitive accumulation of capital. Peasants in England, Scotland, in continental Europe and, later, elsewhere were forced off the land and herded into factories. Today, we witness a similar situation in China and its so-called autonomous province of Tibet. Feudalism, even pre-feudalism and compradore capitalism, is being replaced by full-blooded capitalism known to the West for a century.

Until the 1980s, 80 percent of the Chinese labour force worked on the land. They were an enormous source of exploitable labour. During the last quarter of a century, however, millions of peasants have, by force, harassment or the promise (bait) of a better life, migrated to the ever-expanding cities of the People's Republic of China. For a few, life has indeed improved, even if they have become exploited wage slaves. But for most?

According to Amnesty International (reported in the West Australian, 3 March), millions of Chinese workers who have moved from the countryside to serve the country's expansion are "overworked, underpaid, denied access to health care, education for their children, and even the right to live permanently in the cities which use their labour," and are treated as an underclass. Continues the Amnesty report:

"They are forced to work long stretches of overtime, often denied time off when sick, and labour under hazardous conditions for paltry wages. As well as being exploited by employers, migrant families face discriminatory government regulations in almost every area of daily life."

They are, says the West Australian, easily exploited by unscrupulous bosses, many of whom withhold their wages, knowing, in the end, the workers will simply be forced to return home. Indeed, conditions in China today often parallel those chronicled by Marx and Engels in 19th century Britain. Conditions in the coal mines are particularly bad, with as many as 5,000 miners dying, and thousands more injured, every year in the cities, workers are herded into "shanty towns" or squalid apartments. According to the report, most workers in China "lack free trade union representation in their factories and restaurants, often working 14-hour days, 30 days a month . . ."

Strikes are illegal. But, as we know, they, as well as riots and even mass revolts, have occurred throughout the history of the People's Republic of China. The class struggle is alive and well! Meanwhile, a very rich minority of capitalists, of whom many are or were Communist Party functionaries, and factory managers, have emerged in China during the last 20 years or so. One such capitalist Yan Jiehe, is said to be worth more than £850 million.

Peter E Newell

Child Slavery and the Chocolate Factory

From the blog, Socialist Banner

The BBC is reporting that child labour, in fact, near enough actual slavery, remains an unresolved problem in the Ivory Coast, the world's biggest cocoa producer.

A 2002 report by the industry body, the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, put the number of children working in dangerous conditions in cocoa in West Africa at 284,000 in 2002, 200,000 of them in Ivory Coast. Many children on cocoa farms don't get to school, some exchange their childhood for work, a roof over their head and a meal a day. Others have been sent by their parents into virtual slavery, suffering beatings and abuse. Progress in eradicating child labour has been slow.

Naturally not very particularly good news for the chocolate manufacturers in the more developed countries. There can be no worse PR for a chocolate company than news that children in West Africa - the source for the bulk of the world's cocoa - are being forced to pick beans used to make chocolate for the children in the West.

A voluntary industry initiative, called the Harkin-Engel protocol, was set up in 2001. Its initial aim was to have a system in place to monitor labour conditions on cocoa farms by July 2005. That deadline shifted has now towards a 2008 deadline to monitor labour conditions in 50% of farms in Ghana, the world's number two producer, and neighbouring in Ivory Coast.

Mme. Amouan Acquah, the government official responsible for child labour issues in Ivory Coast, makes the excuse that "We are in a state of war. We cannot make such guarantees." Yet with or without war, Ivory Coast's cocoa has always made it to the world market. Critics say that if the cocoa can get to market even in times of conflict, then it should also be possible to monitor labour conditions on the farm.

Mme Acquah points out "The issue at the heart of this [child labour] is poverty."

In the words of cocoa farmer Eugene Djedje "No one is obliged to send a child to school. If you don't have money you don't go."

Some major companies that knowingly use chocolate produced by slave labor:
- Hersheys
- M&M/Mars
- Nestle
- Ben & Jerry's
- Kraft
- Toblerone
- Hauser Chocolates

Alan Johnstone

The “nine eleven truth” movement by John Moeller

From issue 3/110 of the newspaper, Solidarity, which is produced by the British Trotskyist organisation, the Alliance for Workers Liberty.

A meeting in the Casa, the former headquarters of striking dockworkers in Liverpool. Nowadays it is the usual location for left wing events in town. The hall is so crowded that some listeners have to stay outside in the corridor. It might be triple the size of a normal lefty audience. Who has attracted this many people? It's Mr David Shayler.

Shayler used to work as a spy for the British Security Service, until he discovered that his employer doesn't stick to the usual official ideals of liberal democracy (the branch he worked for tried to kill the Libyan leader Gaddafi with a car bomb). Shocked, Shaylor quit his job and told some professional secrets to the media, which led to his temporary imprisonment.

Generalising his own experience with the intelligence services, Shayler was one of the prominent figures who claimed after 11 September 2001 that the attacks on the World Trade Centre were not caused by Islamist extremists, but by the Americans themselves, namely by the CIA.

Conspiracy theories of these type have become very popular all over the world during recent years. A whole movement has emerged - in the UK too - called the "nine eleven truth" groups , investigating what is "going on" behind the scenes of events like 9/11.

When you listen to their discussions two typical features of the conspiracy theorists become very obvious: the presumption of an idée fixe, which has to be justified afterwards; and a highly selective perception, which takes everything in account which is likely to give evidence for that idea and ignores everything which contradicts it.

"We mustn't let ourselves be divided", insists Mrs Annie Machon, David Shayler's co-defendent and former colleague, "no matter what in particular one or another believes to have happened on 9/11, the important thing is that we all agree that the official version cannot be true."

To prove their case the "truth activists" adapt rather bizarre theories, which are far more unlikely than the official version. David Shayler, for instance, claims that what we have seen flying into the WTC were not real aeroplanes, but mere holograms, projected into the sky to cheat us.

Why do people believe in this stuff? And, an even more basic question, why are they so keen on speculating about unlikely "truth" about an event which happened thousands of miles away and had little direct impact on their lives?

Shayler explains his motive: "Our democracy is in danger . . . the spies have become so all-powerful that they're already controlling even our elected members of parliament. If we won't stand up and act, this will lead to a totalitarian rule of one kind or another." This alarmist statement expresses an idealistic view about liberal democracy which is very common among the "truth movement": Elected representatives are there to carry out the will of the people and to look after their well being, aren't they? If our needs and desires are neglected by those representatives the only explanation is that there must be someone who secretly prevents them from doing their job - either by cheating, or by corrupting them.

In fact, they are doing their job quite well. The function of states in the capitalist world market is to provide convenient conditions for investors and to protect property. If they don't do so, they will fail in the competition against other states. Thus, whether they like it or not, democratic rulers have to organise the effective use of their electors' labour for the accumulation of capital, with all the negative effects this causes.

The trick of bourgeois democracy is that it also encourages people to participate in the discussion on the improvement of their own exploitation! This has proved to be much more effective than dictatorial rule - at least in wealthy countries which can afford to distribute some benefits to workers for their participation.

Are the conspiracy-searching activists basically democratic idealists who have gone mad, driven round the bend by elected governments who do the opposite to what they expected? That's part of the explanation. However, where does this idealism comes from" There are elements within the milieu who don't hesitate to cheer on even the most barbaric Islamist actions, if they are directed against the American empire and the alleged conspiracy behind it. That is nihilism not idealism.

The element of truth which underlies the "nine eleven truth" movement is that, as they say, we really don't have the sovereignty over our own lives. But we don't need a secret plot to explain that alienation.

It is more productive to think about the alarm clock that interrupts your dreams in the morning and forces you to work; or the boredom and stress of wage labour which steals your time and energy; or the permanent threat of personal failure in competition which undermines your mental and physical health; the exclusion of both material wealth and the satisfaction of participating in the productive co-operation of society while you are unemployed; the security service men who prevent you from taking what you desire in shops and warehouses. And so on...

The majority of people don't have control over their lives because they are detached from the means of production and have to sell their labour-power as a commodity. There have been times in history when this insight has been relatively widespread among working-class people, impelling them to organise themselves collectively to improve their living conditions or even to do away with the system of wage labour.

But we live in a time of defeat of working class organisations. That has led to atomisation, isolation and therefore impotence of the individual. It has become increasingly difficult for people to imagine how to fight collectively for their interests.

The situation has made a whole leftist milieu ready to adapt conspiracy theories of Shayler's type: a struggle against the imaginary evil of a world wide conspiracy becomes the substitute for the struggle against the real evils which occur in everyday life in capitalist society.

The total absence of economic questions in the debate at the Casa was one of the most conspicuous details of the evening. "You must speak to your neighbours, your colleagues, your family members", urged Mrs. Machon, "to make them aware of the lies they are telling on TV about 9/11!". Well, it's all right to communicate with the people around you - but why start a conversation on such an odd topic rather than on questions which affect your lives directly?

If the "nine eleven truth" groups were simply a movement of concerned citizens observing the intelligence services and accusing the bourgeois state when it violates its own laws and ideals, there wouldn't be much to oppose. But they are something different.

Their conspiracy theories claim to give an exclusive insight in the hidden causes for all the evils of the world. In doing so, they lead attention systematically away from the most important immediate antagonisms. They spare people the possibility of confrontation with the powerful and the risk of failure.

This worldview is attractive and hermetic, and hard to criticise. This type of thought is not, as it has been argued, a first step to becoming more conscious and critical about the problems of society, but the opposite: it is a kind of collective psychosis which increasingly detaches people from reality.

The fact that a meeting of the lunatic "nine eleven truth" sect takes place in the location where struggling dockers used to meet a decade ago, is a horrible indication of the lamentable state of the British left of today.

John Moeller

Cooking the Books: Underlying cause (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 23 March 2005 an explosion and fire occurred at the BP-owned oil refinery in Texas City. Fifteen workers were killed and 170 injured. The US Chemical and Safety Hazard Investigation Board decided that, on this occasion, it would investigate not just the technical causes of the explosion - which valve was left open, who left it open, which alarm wasn't working, and the like - but also "the underlying and significant cultural, human factors and organizational causes of the disaster that have a greater impact".

The result was a report two years later which the Times (21 March) headlined "Watchdog points finger at cost cuts in damning verdict on BP. Budget pressures behind refinery fire. Top management knew of problems".

BP had acquired the refinery when it took over Amoco in 1988. Following this, BP's chief executive, Sir John Browne, set a target for all its plants of reducing fixed costs in the year 1999-2000 by 25 percent. These are costs other than labour and materials and consist mainly of buildings and equipment including the costs of maintaining them. "In 2002", the report discovered, "BP engineers proposed connecting the Isom blowdown drum system to a flare but BP chose a less expensive option". The refinery manager "ruled against the investment and stated in an e-mail: 'Bank the savings in 99.999 per cent of the cases'".

The Chemical Safety Board's report concluded: "Cost-cutting and budget pressures from BP Group executive managers impaired process safety performance at Texas City".

To go beyond the technical reasons for the explosion and investigate other factors was a step in the right direction. But not far enough. The Board only looked for "the underlying and significant cultural, human factors and organizational causes" within BP. But why stop there? Why not ask what pressures BP's top executives were under to behave in the way they did?

If the Board had done this, they would have to have taken into account the declaration issued on the occasion of the BP take-over of Amoco in 1998:

"The managements of BP and Amoco already have a shared financial philosophy. The targets our companies have previously set are very similar - powerful annual earnings growth, a strongly-competitive return on capital, and dividends in line with underlying earnings" (see article, BP-Amoco Merger).

And also that, at the time, the price of oil was low, meaning that the main way to keep up profits would be by cutting costs rather than increasing sales. And that in fact it was to face what Sir John called in the same statement the "fierce" competition on the energy market that was behind the take-over. And, further, that takeovers involve an expenditure of money which has to be raised one way or another. And that raising this added further pressure to save money and - "in 99.999 per cent of the cases" – bank it.

The cost-cutting exercise was successful - in the middle of it Sir John was elevated to be Lord Browne of Madingley for services to industry - as recorded by the Times financial columnist Carl Mortished:

"In 2000 BP boasted that it had generated $2 billion in cost-savings, and then, in 2001, Lord Browne of Madingley announced a further $2 billion in 'performance improvements'. By the end of 2002 a further billion dollars was pulled out of the hat and the BP chief executive announced a programme of $2 billion stock repurchases. The cashflows were being delivered in places such as Texas City".

Joe Hill: songwriter to the working class (2000)

From the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eighty-five years ago, on 19 November 1915, Joe Hill, a rootless, unassuming migratory worker and member of the IWW, was executed by a five-man firing squad in the prison yard of Utah State Penitentiary for the alleged murder of a Salt Lake City grocer and his son in January 1914. Though the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence was used to convict Hill, his guilt still remains a matter of controversy and should not really concern us here.

The facts themselves are pretty much straightforward. On the night of 10 January 1914 one John Morrison, a former policeman, and his two sons, Aveling and Merlin, were closing their store when two men wearing red bandannas forced their way in shouting "we've got you now." The commotion that followed resulted in the deaths of Morrison and his son Aveling and the wounding of one of the intruders, shot by Aveling.

Five miles away and two hours later, Joe Hill turned up at the office of Dr F N McHugh bleeding from a bullet wound in the chest. Hill informed the doctor before being treated and driven to the Eselius household (known IWW activists) that he had sustained the injury in an argument over a woman. McHugh then informed the police of the visit and agreed to take part in Hill's capture. Three days later, McHugh turned up at the Eselius household to check on Hill's wound, drugging him in the process. Once Hill was drowsy, the police burst in, shot him in the hand and arrested him.

Although Hill's trial was a long way off, the police and press had already found him guilty of the murders. Only 10 days after his arrest, the Mormon-controlled press began a series of articles vilifying Hill, lambasting his songs as "inflammatory" and "sacrilegious" and mounting a panic campaign about the IWW menace to Salt Lake City, a campaign that would continue right up to the trial date five months later and right on through it.

From the offset, the trial itself made a mockery of the US judicial system. None of the witnesses, including Merlin Morrison, only yards away when the incident took place, identified Hill as the assassin. No evidence suggested Hill had ever met Morrison or had a grievance against him. The gun McHugh claimed to have seen at his surgery was never recovered and the bullet that allegedly passed through Hill's body whilst in the store was never found.

Hill had maintained that he had been shot whilst his hands were raised above his head and this seemed to fit with the evidence presented to the court that the hole in his coat was four inches lower than the bullet hole in his back. As no money had been stolen during the incident, no motive could be established and no concern was given to the fact that 12 other men had been arrested before Hill in relation to the crime or to the report that that same evening another four men had suffered bullet wounds in Salt Lake City.

Hill's obstinacy and refusal to answer questions during the trial did not help his case. Feeling under no obligation to explain his injury in detail, other than maintaining it was the result of a feud over a woman, he insisted upon the principle that he was innocent until proven guilty. Moreover, Hill fired his defence team, citing their incompetence in cross-examining witnesses and failing to object to leading questions from the District Attorney. Only days before the jury found Hill guilty did a leading labour lawyer, O N Hilton step in, but to little avail. The death sentence was passed.

During his 22 months in prison, Hill kept himself busy writing articles, poems and the songs that had already made him a popular figure. Outside, the campaign to free Hill involved workers the world over, attracted tens of thousands of letters, petitions and resolutions. And whilst the IWW were only too happy to fully back the campaign, Hill objected to his lawyer: "I cannot expect my friends to starve themselves in order to save my life".

The labour movement was not alone in backing the Hill campaign, for it went on to involve the Committee of Californian Women, Virginia Snow Stephen, the daughter of the president of the Mormons (who was later thrown out of university for her pains) and the Swedish ambassador to the US. The acting US Secretary of State urged a reprieve and twice President Wilson asked Governor William Spry of Utah to reconsider the case.

Spry was having none of it, the stay of executions and appeals to the parole board were to no avail. Spry was himself a leading Mormon and had vowed at the time his political clique ousted the right-wing anti-Mormon American Party in 1913 "to sweep out lawless elements, whether they be corrupt businessmen or IWW agitators". The same Spry had broken a strike by Western Federation of Mineworkers and allowed the Utah Copper Company to import strike-breakers and to hire an army of gunmen to guard them.

Spry was all too aware that it was the IWW that had upset Utah's ruling elite by organising workers in the employ of the Utah Construction Company in which the Mormon community had hefty financial interests. In June 1913, the IWW had organised a strike among 1500 workers on the UTC's Denver Rio Grande railroad. The company hired scab labour but railwaymen helped keep them at bay by demanding IWW membership. Eventually the company was forced to yield, prompting one official to retort that "before the end of the year, every single IWW will be run out of the state". With police co-operation, gunmen were deputised, IWW meetings violently broken up and their speakers arrested and jailed on charges of "inciting to riot".

Len De Caux, in The Living Spirit of the Wobblies (1978), summed up the mood of the times in Utah, describing how "an employer-based clerical-rightist regime dominated politics, press and courts. It blamed the IWW both for stirring up workers against bosses and for its radical irreverence towards established convention". Hill's lawyer commented: "the main thing the state had on Hill was that he was an IWW and therefore sure to be guilty. Hill tried to keep the IWW out of it [the trial] . . . but the press fastened it upon him".

Hill was never a leader or an organiser as such for the IWW. He was largely uneducated, never drank or smoked and was not known to the police prior to his arrest. He was however an activist and the author of many a song that the community he lived in at the time of his arrest would have found nauseating. In his three years as an activist for the IWW he had taken part in the 1910 San Pedro dock workers' strike, the San Diego Free Speech campaign, the abortive "revolution" in Tia Juana intended to make California into a commune and fought alongside the rebels in the Mexican Revolution of 1911. This was enough to ensure his guilt, regardless of the evidence presented at his trial.

Despite the death sentence hanging over him, Hill remained cheerful and calm until the end, embarrassed by the campaign to save him. Just before his death he wrote a brief letter to leading IWW organiser Big Bill Haywood: "Goodbye, Bill, I die a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning. Organise!" As was customary in Utah, condemned prisoners were given a chance to choose their method of execution. Hill chose the firing squad. Legend has it that strapped into his chair, Hill even denied his executioners the chance of giving the order to fire, shouting the command himself.

Thirty thousand people attended his funeral in Chicago, after which his ashes were placed into small envelopes and scattered to the winds in every state of the union and all over the world on May Day 1916. Of his funeral, the Desert Evening News reported: "No creed or religion found a place at the service. There were no prayers and no hymns, but there was a mighty chorus of voices singing songs written by Hill". A reporter on the same paper asked: "What kind of man is this, whose death is celebrated with songs of revolt and who has at his bier more mourners than any prince or potentate?"

The answer was simple. There was nothing "great" about Hill. He was a man of simple tastes, a member of the working class with an ingrained hatred of the system that impoverished the lives of his fellows, but with a unique ability to condense the arguments against injustice into songs which changed the words of well-known Christian tunes. Moreover, he stood as a symbol of the lengths the master class would go to silence those bent on helping win the world for the workers.

For 85 years workers the world over have song the songs of Hill, whether it be Casey Jones the Union Scab, The Preacher and the Slave or Dump the Bosses off Your Back. As the ballyhoo of the US presidential election reaches its peak it is as well to remember that workers in America too have made a contribution to the movement to bury the profit system for ever.

John Bissett