Editorial: Crises and Catastrophe (2013)

Editorial from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the market economy is booming there’s a tendency to assume this state of affairs will last forever – on so many occasions have we heard that ‘it’s different this time’ and that ‘we’re in a new paradigm now’. Yet when a slump occurs – as they do periodically – the mood of incautious optimism changes quickly and pessimism and despair can set in.

This has most obviously been the case with the present recession (or series of recessions, depending on how you define it). Since the first signs of crisis appeared in late summer 2007, the mood has been bleak. The nadir was probably reached in late 2008 when the collapse of Lehman Brothers led to massive falls in world stock markets and coincided with the seizing up of the credit markets. Unemployment and bankruptcies soon began to rise.

Since then the mood has hardly improved. Unemployment remains at over 2.5 million in the UK and in some counties – such as Spain, where it is 27 percent – is at levels that are at least as bad as the infamous depression of the 1930s.

Into such a space come the advocates of collapse and catastrophe. The end is nigh, they think, and we’d better buy some candles and get some tins in. Their underlying sentiment – that somehow the existing capitalism system is fundamentally flawed in many ways – is of course at least half right. But their fatalism that capitalism is in some way going to collapse around our ears in an economic Armageddon certainly isn’t. In fact, we’ve been here before – and are still here . . .

Much though theories of economic collapse may hold a curious fascination for those who want to see an end to the market system, they have been proven wrong time and again – in fact from the earliest days of the system itself. In this issue, we look at why. We examine why capitalism, for all its weaknesses and flaws, is a remarkably resilient system and why the conditions that lead to economic crises and slumps are replaced after time by conditions that prepare the way for a new boom and a repeat of the cycle.

Socialists have learnt that there’s no point waiting for capitalism to do us a favour and die. It’s just not going to happen. Instead, capitalism has to be put out of its misery and only a majority of convinced socialists can do that, democratically taking the reins of political power, so as to lay the foundations for a society where booms, slumps, crises and catastrophes are a thing of the past.

Spirit of 45 (2013)

Film Review from the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spirit of '45 directed by Ken Loach is an impressive but sentimental documentary about the Attlee Labour government of 1945-51 which is nostalgic for 'Old Labour' and the 'cradle to grave' welfare state. The use of Hubert Parry's choral music to Jerusalem is an added touch of emotionalism.

Loach twice shows part of Attlee's election victory speech at Westminster Central Hall when he says it is a 'Labour movement with a Socialist policy' and that 'His Majesty the King has asked me to form a government.' There is footage of Aneurin Bevan, architect of the NHS and the Housing Plan declaring 'nothing but the best for the working class.' The description of the 1951 Festival of Britain as a 'celebration of working class heroes' is hyperbole. All this gives the impression that the Attlee government was running capitalism in the interests of the working class which is absurd and impossible. In 1945 the working class firmly rejected Churchill (there is footage of the working class recalling Churchill sent the army into Tonypandy and killed striking miners in 1910). Churchill's speech in June 1945 is important as it links Hayek's eccentric paean to capitalist market libertarianism The Road to Serfdom, and today's capitalist economic ideology: 'there can be no doubt that socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state.'

Loach looks at the nationalisation programme of the Attlee government particularly the railways and the mines. There is no socialist analysis identifying that 'nationalisation' is state capitalism (the wages system under new management), and the working class still have their surplus value robbed and need trade unions and the strike weapon in order to protect themselves from their employers.

The welfare state and the NHS are held up as beacons of enlightenment. The end of the commercial relationship between doctor and patient is trumpeted although private practice was allowed to continue, and some charges on the NHS were swiftly brought in soon after its creation when the capitalist state realised how expensive it all was. There was no socialist analysis in the film identifying the welfare state and NHS as essentially a 'redistribution of poverty among the workers', insuring the capitalist class against working class discontent and maintaining a sufficiently healthy and efficient working population. For the capitalist class the welfare state and the NHS meant increased profits and were seen as 'a necessary expense of production.'

Loach looks at the 1947 National Dock Labour Scheme which 'de-casualised' dock work although no reference is made to the 1945 Dock Strike which was condemned by the Labour Government. Attlee even sent the army in. In 1989 the Thatcher government abolished the National Dock Labour Scheme thereby re-introducing casual labour. In the film there is talk of the 'dignity and respect of work' in capitalism which underlines the lack of socialist consciousness. Marx put it eloquently when he wrote 'instead of the conservative motto a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, they ought to inscribe on their banners the revolutionary watchword Abolition of the Wages System.'

Sam Watts, an 87-year-old working class Liverpudlian makes some accurate and pithy statements towards the end of the film such as 'the profit system is rotten and corrupt and the quicker it goes the better' and 'the working class can change the whole of history but it has not grasped that it has this power.’

Spirit of 45 is about taking 'the crumbs off the Master's table' when what the working class need to do is demand the whole loaf, take over the bakery and have common ownership of the wheat field.

Steve Clayton

Greasy Pole: Thatcher and Thatcherism – A Long Time Dying (2013)

From the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hardly a day goes by without our being reminded that 2012 was a wonderful year. Not because of the weather which was lousy. Especially when it poured down on that flotilla of jubilee boats scudding along the Thames with their cargo of the royal family and that female chorus defiantly bellowing Rule Britannia through their sopping wet fringes. It was, we were regularly instructed, a time to shove into forgetfulness all that turgid stuff about the economy drowning in deficit as a result of a horde of idle scroungers sucking at the scandalously luxuriant system of services such as care for the redundant elderly or the vulnerably sick or the unreasonably injured. Whatever the difficulties, the royals and the leaders would see us through. Of course there were a few people unreasonably stubborn enough to refuse to partake of the popular exhilaration but they could be pinched out by reminders that this was some glorious time to be alive and in poverty.

Iron Lady

And now in 2013 it will be the sixtieth anniversary of Elizabeth walking into Westminster Abbey to get the crown on her royal head - which promises to be as sickening and pointless as last year's events. But that will not be for a month or so; meanwhile the plans are for us to be consoled by another female providing a virile incentive to prod our British pride into life. Not a female standing on a boat in the rain or waving to us from a remote balcony but one who has obligingly fulfilled several months' predictions by dying. Margaret Thatcher – she who was the Iron Lady, the one Not For Turning, the pitiless Snatcher of the Children's' Milk, who rasped No!No!No! from the Commons at the meddlers over the English Channel, the implacable enemy of any trade union threatening to bring the nation to a standstill. Her death has focussed attention on the controversies immovably associated with her very name; in some cases she is the subject of mindless worship and in others of intense hatred. She died, cosseted in London's most luxurious hotel, on 8th April. Was anyone bothered? Consider the response of one socially conscious young woman whose caring and industrious mother, some years ago dying of cancer, instructed that a bottle of expensive wine be laid down for drinking on the day Thatcher died – which was exactly what happened, in a gathering of joyful friends.

Commons Grovelling

Remarkable as Thatcher had been when alive, in death she was even more so. Her long drawn-out decline had given all parties– the government and the Labour Party led by Gordon Brown, the media, the security forces – plenty of time to prepare. First with their share of hysteria was the gutter press who, as expected, slavered over her memory and lovingly crafted headline warnings to any protestors (perhaps like that woman with her mother's wine) about the reception they might get from the vengeful hordes of Thatcher idolisers. But the red tops were not alone in this; the day after the death the Guardian gave over 35 pages to her. Then there was the decision to recall Parliament so that toadying promotion-seekers could demonstrate their talent for obsequious grovelling. This was requested by David Cameron regardless of the fact that he was in breach of that thing beloved of Parliament – precedent – because such events are by tradition only for matters of national emergency (which might have been more appropriate on the day of Thatcher's birth). There was a predictably robust attempt by Speaker Bercow to frustrate this manoeuvre by Cameron but he eventually gave way to the weight of the Prime Minister's authority in arguing that there should be a proper response to the ‘strength of feeling’ over the death. And – perhaps just to rub in the point – the Commons were timed to spend seven and a half hours on their Thatcher toadying, as against the 45 minutes devoted to the end of Winston Churchill. Consistent with the fact that they had been involved from the beginning with planning this monster of hypocrisy, there were Labour MPs who joined in the ‘debate‘ to be washed along in the torrent of adulation. It was no surprise that their contributions were so widely impoverished of any original or perceptive comment.

Apartheid

For someone who allegedly didn’t believe in state subsidies, it is interesting that Thatcher's funeral is costed at between £8 and £10 million pounds. Some might think this is a bit steep for dragging a corpse through London except that there had to be all those other people in military uniform and others in a different style of uniform –  like dark suits – making long and meandering speeches on the threadbare theme of how historically wonderful she was. Like Cameron: ‘...a great leader, a great prime minister, a great Briton’; like Miliband: ‘we...greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength’; like Clegg: ‘...she left a unique and lasting imprint on the country she served.’ Well, she herself was responsible for much of this rubbish because she also was involved from the beginning in planning the funeral; she had no difficulty in forgetting that all the preoccupation with pomp and diversion was not in accord with her self-constructed reputation for being fearlessly frank in cutting unceremoniously to the core of any situation. She claimed to be a staunch defender of human freedom, which she said was particularly under threat whenever a trade union defended the interests of its members from her government's attacks on their conditions. But the flexibility of her notions about freedom was demonstrated in her support for the vicious apartheid system in South Africa which, along with the suppression, readily tortured and murdered its opponents. The crime, poverty and tensions of that country continue to bear witness to that gruesome time.

Baronetcy

None of this affected the devotees of the myths that Thatcher was meticulously careful in all that she did, leaving nothing to chance. This was not borne out in her obstinacy over the poll tax and her many disastrous choices as ministers. It did however apply when in her Retirement Honours List she made her husband Denis a baronet. This was no ordinary baronetcy, which almost always applies just for the life of the holder; for Sir Denis was pointedly ennobled with one of the rare – hereditary –  honours so that when he died their son, in tune with her indulgence of him, became Sir Mark. Mark had been a forgettable pupil at the expensive, exclusive Harrow School (where Winston Churchill and John Profumo, among others, were also ‘educated’) he scraped through three O Levels before being delivered to a place at a posh firm of accountants but this did not last long and in any case he managed to fail his accountancy exams no less than three times. So he set himself up in business as a rally driver; however he turned out to be navigationally challenged and soon lost his way during a rally which went through the Sahara Desert, causing an expensive operation to bring him to safety. He then turned his talents to a number of suspicious ventures, one of which earned him a suspended prison sentence and, for a time, a ban on entering the United States. Through all such tests of character Mark Thatcher was fondly watched over by his mother who, while abroad on official business, proved her solicitude for him by corruptly influencing an arms deal he was involved in, between the British Firm BAE and the rulers of Saudi Arabia, which set him up with a £12 million pay-off. When Thatcher was under attack for this she contemptuously disposed of the matter by claiming that, like any properly patriotic citizen she had only been ‘batting for Britain.’

World Ratings

In this defence she was pretty safe, since she had won for herself the title of a Prime Minister who had ‘made Britain Great Again.’ The harvest of this is being reaped now in the economic woes and the attendant depression in the living standards and expectations of the most needy people and the fact that in the ratings of the world's economy British capitalism stands some way below the leaders. In terms of Gross Domestic Product the IMF placed it in 2011 it at 8th and in 2012 the Centre for Economics and Business Research placed it at 6th – only just above Brazil. But never mind reality; at her end Thatcher was lavishly robed and looked after while a horde of compliant acolytes were eager to pay their last, well financed, respects to her.

Political leaders are remembered in a variety of styles and intensity, from blind adulation on one hand to seething hatred on the other, with a no-mans-land of apathy or ignorance stretching between the two. It is a gloomy fact that whatever the reaction it is seldom a natural response to what any particular politician has done or failed to do – which all too often has encouraged them to regard themselves as immune from dismissal by the voters. In Thatcher's case the flagrant pomp of her funeral was the work of her adorers – or the simply ambitious. The bitterness of the haters was so tense as to need relief through some kind of demonstration such as turning their backs on the funeral procession or playing the children warbling The Wicked Witch Is Dead. However incandescent the rage about Thatcher, however cynical the manipulation of her funeral, the crucial fact is that she was simply replaced by a succession of other leaders with nothing more to offer. Some twenty years after she was deposed, the working class are subject to the continuing problems of social humiliation.

Nazi Olympics

A parallel to this situation was in the 1936 Berlin Olympics –  when the black American sprinter Jesse Owens won three gold medals. This was not just a superlative achievement for it also went a long way to dismantling the carefully erected self-image of Hitler's Germany as a free, tolerant, sports-loving country when in fact it was a murderous, racist, anti-semitic dictatorship. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 the Games had already been awarded to Berlin so one of the new government's concerns had to be to set up the event to gain the maximum possible credit for them as a country newly risen from the terror, the grief and the waste of 1914-18. They built a vast new stadium complex in Berlin and arranged for devoted crowds to flock there confident that German athletes would justify their leaders' insistence on their national, racial superiority. And since then there have been many examples in other countries of the application of the same distorting technique. One case was in Britain last summer when there was a massive governmental campaign to use any success on the track or in the pool or wherever to detract attention from the damage being done to the living conditions, the health and the expectations of masses of needy people.

Choice For Change

And Thatcher's death and her funeral, deliberately planned over a long period, are for the same objective – to obliterate any awareness of what is actually happening to us in this system of human misery .The Iron Lady? She who was not for turning? The scourge of interfering continentals? Take your pick, then consider the diversion from any progressive forethought about our lives and society. Consider how futile and damaging is the assumption that we must forever choose between the hairline differences of competing leaders. In terms of our security and well-being, what choice was there between Thatcher's repressive abrasion and Major's emollient manipulation? Then what benefit was there when the ruling party changed to put us under the blood-spilling Blair? In reality we do not have a choice, other than for radically applying out own talents to free the world of capitalism's continually chaotic deceptions.

Ivan

Caught in the Act: The Collapse of Trotsky’s Monument (1991)

Book Review from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bad news for Tariq Ali. Having with Redemption written an outrageously funny novel about the pretensions, delusions and follies of the Trotskyist Left in which he was once a prominent participant, he has been denounced as a renegade, a traitor, a bourgeois philistine, a despicable leper . . . only the Leninists know how to denounce like that. Having deployed his wit against the world Trotskyist movement, the crumbling Trotskyist monuments have responded with their dependable witlessness. The totally humour-free Socialist Workers' Review dismissed Ali's effort as "unfunny".

We suspect that Ali can cope with such devastating assaults. Impossible to cope with for him will be what is here: an article in the Socialist Standard praising him as a novelist and recommending this satire to all socialists who for years have laughed their heads off at the antics of the would-be vanguards on the Left. Old Leninists desert all kinds of silly prejudices as they discard their old dogmas, but few of them lose their dislike for those four commonly-spat initials, the SPGB. Bad luck. Tariq – everyone else thinks your novel stinks, but this writer loved every page of it.

Redemption is an almost relentlessly funny novel. What Malcolm Bradbury did to the trendy campus clowns in The History Man, Ali has done to the bar-room Bolsheviks of the Trotskyist left. The story concerns the aftermath of the east European uprisings of 1989 and the preparations for and holding of a congress of the Trotskyist Fourth International to formulate a new political position. The old Bolshevik formula is in worldwide disrepute: the proletariat have kicked out the dictatorship and the only believers left are the would-be dictators. These "leaders" are shown as pathetic, deluded, dishonest, unscrupulous and, not infrequently, insane men.

There are several easily identified caricatures of Trotskyist leaders. They are painfully accurate. Ali is ungenerous and spiteful towards these superstars of the sects, but they in real life are ungenerous and spiteful people whose opportunist tactics and contempt for working-class understanding makes them fair targets for Ali's poison pen. There is Frank Hood (the late Gerry Healy) who has young women from his party, the Hoodlums (WRP), sent to him for sex sessions. Another leading Hoodlum is Laura Shaw (Vanessa Redgrave) who drives to Trotskyist meetings in her chauffeur-driven Rolls and has Hood's body embalmed after he dies at the shock of a young female "comrade" discovering his artificial penis. There is Jed Burroughs (Ted Grant), the Shadow-Shadow Prime Minister and leader of the Burrowers (Militant Tendency) and Jimmy Rock (Tony Cliff), author of The Rockers Guide To Soviet Realities and leader of the Rockers (SWP).

The chapters on these latter two sects, which are both as detestable as each other, are the funniest pages in the book. Also captured with an accuracy which only a novel could capture so acutely (a pamphlet would be libellous, after all) are John Justice and his Satanist Tendency (the ultra-barmy Spartacist League in real life – real life?). Jemima Wilcox, editor of the "New Life Review" (New Left Review), Diablo (a parody of the ex-Trotskyist veteran Pablo) and Jim Noble, the archetypal fascist/Leninist leader of a party based on the American SWP called in the novel the Proletarian International Socialist Party of American Workers -PISPAW for short; get it? This was the section of the Fourth International that Ali used to be involved in.

LEFTWING SEXISM

Ali seems to think – and he should know because he has been closer to the Trotskyist leaders than most of us – that these people are motivated either by sexual disorders, whereby left-wing fantasising becomes a form of replacement for a humane sensuality, and/or egomania. These sound like cheap smears, and might have been intended so, but the analysis is not without insight We live in a society of perverse notions of success. Leninism, as a strategy for successful power-taking, is deeply authoritarian and is bound to attract those for whom the rhetoric of power (dictatorships, central committees, democratic centralism, smashing states, orders from above) is appealing. For such political personalities the power obsession becomes functional rather than instrumental. It should come as no surprise to materialists that the men who run power-hungry sects are created out of the ingredients which make up other authoritarian bosses who expect to have their egos massaged by their followers – and not only their egos.

Emma Carpenter, a disillusioned American Trotskyist in the novel, tells Jim Noble that the Trot sects are mirror images of Stalinism; Hood/Healy is referred to as an "inverted Stalinist". The capitalist system has screwed up a lot of people in its time, so what is odd about the fact that some of them try to screw up their unwitting political followers in a futile attempt to unscrew themselves? Maybe some of the characterisations are a touch crude in their depictions of the psycho-pathology of the fantasy lives of lefty leaders, but there is nothing far-fetched about the novel's description of they way in which so-called radicals have often treated women like dirt. (Let's fight for equality, but tonight, Me Dictator, You Proletarian). Left-wing sexism, an infantile disorder?

Redemption has some interesting things to say about the way that the Left treats women – one half of the species. The character of Maya, the young Brazilian beauty who is made pregnant by the seventy-year old Ezra Einstein, reminds us that while geriatric dogmatists play at revolutions in congress halls it is often women who are connected to those feeling of humanity without which there will never be any genuine socialism.

POLITICAL NUTCASES

Ah yes, socialism. This is where Ali has advanced no further than his days in the Trotskyist mad-house. Ali still believes that socialism came about in Russia in 1917. He applauds Leninism, but is embarrassed by the Leninists. On page one he writes of how popular wisdom had "consigned insurrections to the museum of Europe", but throughout his book he never touches on the root of the Trotskyist fallacy: the belief that by a vanguard-led insurrection working-class liberation, and therefore, socialism, can come about. In this he is at one with the political nutcases in his novel. He quotes Emma Carpenter's grandfather's Menshevik criticism of the Bolshevik adventure, but takes neither that critique nor any of his own a step further. He parodies Rock/Cliffs thesis that state capitalism came to Russia in the 1920s after years of Russia having been socialist, and rightly ridicules such unhistorical drivel, but what does he say about the serious state-capitalist analysis stated persistently since 1918 by the Socialist Party? Trotskyists have never liked to admit that they are simply Leninists who did not like Stalin's continuation of what Lenin began. This writer recalls challenging Ali to a debate several years ago on this very question. He replied that there was nothing that the wise Marxists of our party could possibly learn from him. No, that was not the point of the educational exercise.

The novel concludes with the congress of the Fourth International adopting a strategy from its master theoretician, Ezra Einstein (Ernest Mandel), to infiltrate the religions of the world. More could be gained from this than from boring within the left-reform parties, he believed: "Within ten years I predict we could have at least three or four cardinals, two ayatollahs, dozens of rabbis, and some of the smaller Churches like the Methodists in parts of Britain could be totally under our control. Our aim is to occupy the Vatican and elect a Pope from our movement". The PISPAW delegation responds with a resolution to form a new Trotskyist religion based upon the "dictatorship of the Angelariat". Very funny – nearly as hilarious as so-called Marxists telling workers to vote Labour at election time.

Steve Coleman

Thatcher, the Icon (2013)

Editorial from the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In life, Margaret Thatcher, never humble, gladly accepted her transformation from shopkeeper’s daughter into capitalist icon. She was The Iron Lady, TINA, and the woman who made Britain great again. She was the architect of ‘Thatcher’s Britain,’ a tough, free-market economy whose backbone she stiffened with ‘Victorian values.’ To her supporters, Margaret Thatcher arose as the conquering hero who broke the power of the unions and saved the country. To her detractors, she was the harpy that devastated working-class communities, destroyed British industry and took pleasure in doing it. Francois Mitterrand, the French ‘socialist’ president fancied he saw in her, ‘the eye of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.’

The Thatcher myth obscures the reality. In truth, the grocer’s daughter followed policies that were neither exceptional nor original. When she came to power in 1979 capitalism in much of the world was experiencing its biggest economic depression in 30 years. In Britain, as elsewhere, business enterprises were failing, production had slumped and unemployment had begun to soar. Governments of all political colours were reacting to the economic downturn in the only way that was possible under the iron laws of capitalism, by cutting back on spending and allowing the system to take its course. Those who acted otherwise were soon given a lesson by the system.

If there was anything distinctive about Thatcher’s politics, it lay only in the enthusiasm and energy with which she set herself to her task. ‘Thatcherism’ was a political style: abrasive; uncompromising; and ruthless. It was unapologetic. ‘There Is No Alternative’ she said and hammered the words home again and again. Her message was simple and accurate. Capitalism runs in accordance with its own laws and, despite the assertions of many politicians, offers little choice to those who claim to run it. TINA cut back on government spending, opened the nationalised industries to the discipline of the market, allowed unprofitable businesses to fail and sank her teeth into the miners. She was very, very thorough.

Yet the myth prevails, and we should beware of it. Above all, we should beware of the myth promoted by those that hate her for what she did. Thatcher the hate figure is of immense value to capitalism. It is easy to imagine embodied in the woman herself all the ugly and anti-working-class features of the system: its relentless drive to minimise working-class incomes; its unconcern for working-class lives; and its insatiable demand for profit above all other things. These are its unchanging features; Thatcherism was merely its naked political expression. It may be necessary to remind ourselves at this time that the death of Thatcher, real and symbolic, does not imply the possibility of a more benign management of capitalism. That would be to create another dangerous myth: Thatcher the scapegoat, symbolically carrying into death the sins of capitalism and purifying the system. But capitalism can only be run in the interests of the capitalist class.

For socialists, celebration is premature. The death of Thatcher changes nothing. We will save our celebrations for the time when capitalism, the real enemy of the working class, is defeated.

SWP contradictions (3) (1991)

From the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism, says the SWP, cannot be established in one country. Capitalism cannot be abolished within the borders of a single state because capitalism is an international system. Any attempt to do so is bound to fail. An isolated anti-capitalist state would still have to trade with other countries. So it would still be subject to pressure from the world market to keep its prices competitive by exploiting its working class and investing the proceeds in cost-saving equipment. The end result would be some form of national state capitalism, not socialism.

This is all good stuff and perfectly true. So we shouldn't support movements that seek solutions to social problems within a national framework? Well no, not exactly, say the SWP, we must support "all genuine national liberation movements".

So we are being asked to support movements that are either bound to fail or stand for the establishment of some national capitalist state. But why? Why should we support either type of movement? The SWP, however, insist that we should support movements like the Vietcong in the 60s and the Sandinistas and the PLO and the IRA even though they know that all these can achieve is some form of capitalist regime. 

Some of their fellow Trotskyists try to get out of this contradiction by arguing that what the Vietcong and the Sandinistas established, and what the PLO and the IRA would establish would not be a form of capitalism, but some anti-capitalist transitional form. The SWP, quite correctly, won't have anything to do with this nonsense: in the context of world capitalism all countries must eventually conform to the pressures of the world market to run their economies in a capitalist way.

But, since the SWP does support these movements, on their own admission they are supporting movements to set up capitalist states and regimes. Which is an absurd position for people calling themselves "international socialists" to take up. Genuine international socialists would be advocating international (or, more accurately, world) socialism, not national capitalism, as the solution to the problems of workers and peasants in places like Vietnam, Nicaragua and Palestine.

The SWP position here is not just contradictory. It has disastrous practical consequences, as during the recent Gulf War when it led to them supporting Iraq "militarily but not politically" as they themselves put it. Since they knew perfectly well that Iraq was a capitalist country, this means that they were knowingly supporting one capitalist country in a war against another capitalist country. They were knowingly telling Iraqi workers that it was right for them to die in defence of the interests of their capitalist ruling class. A worse betrayal of socialist principles is hard to imagine.

Adam Buick

SWP contradictions (2) (1991)

From the July 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Russia, says the SWP, is not socialist but state capitalist. The workers there are exploited, like those in the West, by a privileged ruling class who live off the surplus value they produce. So far, so good. But for how long has Russia been state capitalist? From 1918 when Lenin proclaimed that state capitalism would be a step forward for backward Russia? No, not at all, says the SWP, Russia didn't become state capitalist until 1928.

So what was Russia before 1928? Well, says the SWP, it was the "deformed Workers State" that other Trotskyists say it still is. To understand this peculiar term you need to know something about Leninist and Trotskyist ideology. According to this, only a minority of workers can understand socialism; the majority can never advance beyond a trade union consciousness and support for trade-union based reformist political parties. The workers, therefore, on this view, need to be led by a vanguard party composed of the minority of revolutionaries. A "Workers State" is what this vanguard party establishes after the previous capitalist ruling class has been overthrown. So it is not actually a state controlled by the workers, but a state controlled by a vanguard party in the name of the workers.

When Lenin died in 1924 a struggle for power developed between a group led by Stalin and another led by Trotsky. It was the Stalin group that emerged victorious. Trotsky analysed this as a victory for the "bureaucracy" in the vanguard party over those in it who genuinely represented the workers (his group—naturally). Actually, it was a struggle within the ruling party which didn't involve the workers at all. It is this purely political event that, according to the SWP, meant that Russia went state capitalist in 1928.

This is an absurd position. If Russia was capitalist after 1928 it must have been capitalist before as well, since the economic position of the working class was exactly the same before 1928 as after. Excluded from ownership and control of the means of production, they had to work for wages and produce profits which went to maintain a privileged elite of Party and state officials. Political conditions weren’t all that different either: Russia had been a one-party state since Lenin's time and, with Trotsky's enthusiastic approval, the trade unions had become instruments of the state to discipline workers and mobilise them to work harder.

In saying that Russia only became state capitalist in 1928, the SWP is perpetuating the myth that Russia before 1928 was some sort of "workers" regime, even socialist (a recent issue of Socialist Worker said Stalin "smashed socialism" in 1928). This reveals a lot about the SWP's own conception of what they mean by the "workers state" they advocate. It too would be compatible with the rule of a vanguard party claming to represent the workers. It too would be compatible with the working class continuing to work for wages. So it too would be state capitalism, not socialism. 

Next month: the contradiction between saying socialism can't exist in one country and supporting nationalist movements.

Adam Buick

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (2013)

Film Review from the April 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

As part of the Step Into the Dark season, the Barbican recently screened the German 'expressionist' silent film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) with live piano 'four hands' accompaniment by Neil Brand and John Sweeney. The film was directed by Robert Wiene in 1919 in Berlin and cast Werner Krauss as Dr Caligari and Conrad Veidt as Cesare the somnambulist. It was made in the revolutionary period after the Great War when film censorship was abolished by the Council of People's Representatives, and a film Different From the Others (1919)written by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld could depict homosexuality in a sympathetic light.

Dr Caligari is a tale of hypnosis and murder imbued with fear, gloom, and oppression in a dislocated world. It was written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Meyer in Berlin in February-March 1919. They had both fought in the Great War and their experiences had made them anti-militarist and anti-authoritarian.

1919 in Berlin saw Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, the spontaneous 'Spartacist' working class uprising, described by Paul Levi as ‘the greatest proletarian demonstration in history, proletarians standing shoulder to shoulder with their weapons and red flags ready to do anything.’ The SPD government brought in Freikorps soldiers to crush the revolutionary uprising, and socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered.

Dr Caligari has its origins in Janowitz's memories from 1913 of a sex murder in Hamburg, and Meyer's experience of harsh therapy sessions with a military psychiatrist. Janowitz and Meyer also visited a fairground sideshow in Berlin where they saw a man in a hypnotic state predicting the future. Dr Caligari indicts authority, war, the state, conscription and the slaughter of millions of the working class in the Great War. Cesare symbolises the human used as a tool and violated by the state, and authority is seen as inherently insane (Dr Caligari and the lunatic asylum director are the same person).

Dr Caligari is celebrated for its 'expressionist' production design by the painters Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig. The designs are reminiscent of Kirchner's 'expressionist' paintings of Berlin streets. The 'expressionist' design is jagged architecture, stark geometrics, and oblique projected chimneys on pell-mell rooftops, tree-like arabesques, and buildings out of 'normal' perspective in chiaroscuro lighting. The aesthetics influenced films Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Batman Returns (1992) by Tim Burton.

There is controversy about the flashback framing device used in the film which was not in the original story. With the framing device Franzis the narrator is seen as insane and the story a figment of his deranged imagination, and the figure of the lunatic asylum director represents benign authority. Is then Dr Caligari not a revolutionary but a conformist bourgeois film? But the film's ending is not shot realistically: lines have not been straightened and 'expressionist' perpendiculars removed; we have not returned to conventional reality. All the characters such as Cesare and Jane are in the Lunatic Asylum but where is the 'murdered' Alan? Is Franzis right about Dr Caligari?

Steve Clayton

SWP contradictions (1) (1991)

From the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The Labour Party is drenched in the blood of ordinary workers in the Middle East, slaughtered for imperialist rule." SWP "Marxism '91" Programme

The Labour Party, says the SWP, stands for capitalism; if elected it will attack the workers and serve the bosses; Kinnock and the other Labour leaders have blood on their hands for supporting the Gulf War. All very true. So we shouldn't vote Labour? No, no, no, says the SWP, you should vote Labour—and at the next election, as in previous ones, they will produce posters calling on workers to vote for all Labour candidates, including Kinnock, Kaufman and the other war-supporters. Why?

The SWP's facing-both-ways attitude to the Labour Party arises from their contempt for the intellectual abilities of most of the working class. As Leninists and Trotskyists, they think that only a minority can come to acquire a socialist consciousness and that it is the task of this minority to lead the rest of the workers, who are considered incapable of advancing beyond support for trade unions, reforms and reformist parties.

So the SWP is trying to do two things: build a vanguard party and acquire a following of ordinary workers. The attacks on Labour and talk of socialism are aimed at organising the minority who alone can understand these things into the disciplined party that is to play a leadership role, while appeals to "fight the bosses" and "kick out the Tories" are directed at winning followers amongst the inevitably Labour-voting ordinary workers. After all, if you believe, as the SWP does, that most workers cannot understand socialist ideas there is no point in appealing to them on this basis. Why cast pearls before swine? Just tell them that the Tories, not capitalism, are to blame for their problems and urge them to go on voting Labour.

In fact, of course, not only can a majority of workers come to understand socialism but they must if socialism is to be the outcome. Only a majority revolution can lead to socialism as a classless, democratically-run society of free and equal men and women. Minority and minority-led revolutions can only lead to the continuation of class rule in one form or another—as happened in Russia after 1917 under Lenin and Trotsky, which the SWP take as their model, where the leaders of the vanguard party installed themselves as the new bosses while the mass of the workers continued to work for wages. This was state capitalism, not socialism.

Once you recognise, as all genuine socialists must, that workers are capable of coming to want and understand socialism then the attitude to take towards the Labour Party is clear: complete opposition, as to all the other parties of capitalism. Don't, vote Labour any more than vote Tory. Struggle for socialism.

Next month: the contradiction between saying Russia was state capitalist after 1928 but not before.

Adam Buick

Editorial: Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela. Deceased. (2013)

Editorial from the April 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

For Hugo Chavez, there were no affectionate obituaries in the corporate press last month to describe his qualities and achievements and to ignore his less savoury actions as a holder of state power. Obits of this kind are reserved for the deaths of Western leaders, their allies and their puppets, and Chavez was none of these.  As almost every newspaper and TV channel told us, he was ‘a controversial figure,’ which in media code means a politician that does not support Western interests.   We were invited to disapprove.

Outside the exclusive circle of the corporate media, in the independent leftist press and on leftist websites another Chavez was evident:  Chavez, the hero, the reformer, the charismatic leader, the man with the common touch. Here we were invited to celebrate Chavez’s rejection of the West and Western capitalist values, and his building of a new form of popular socialism in Venezuela, spearheaded by social reforms. 

Political obits of whatever colour are brand labels which demand only that we identify where our loyalties lie.  In reality, Chavez’s rejection of the West and his proclamation of a new popular form of ‘socialism’ were rhetorical moves in a political game that had nothing to do with economic fact.  During his presidency, he kept open the doors on the flow of Western capital into Venezuela, while introducing a familiar programme of nationalisation and social reform.   He did not cease to preside over an exploitative capitalist economy, nor did he cut off economic relationships with the West.

Where now for the country? Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s vice president and named successor appears determined to hold on to power and is using his control of the state to crush opposition. It seems likely then that Maduro will lead the Chavistas back into power at the forthcoming elections and, if he does, it is doubtful that there will be any immediate change of policy – barring some unforeseen political upheaval.

Nevertheless, whoever fills the vacuum left by Chavez, and whatever policies they pursue, there remain certain mundane realities of capitalism that the new leaders of Venezuela must acknowledge and the country’s working people must endure. The Venezuelan economy must remain competitive on the international markets or it will die.  Workers must therefore be exploited.  Whether they are exploited by the Chavista state through its nationalised industries, by local corporations or by new employers likely to be brought in to support the country’s undercapitalised economy will make little difference to their lives.

The degree to which they are exploited will continue to depend on fluctuations in the economy, on their own capacity and will to resist the inevitable downward pressure on their incomes, and on government policy.  The fact of their exploitation, though, is inevitable. So is their relative poverty, their limited freedom of choice, and the lack of control they have over their lives. None of this will change until they and working people everywhere have ceased to put their faith in governments and charismatic politicians whatever claims and promises they make.

Greasy Pole: Is UKIP worth a vote? (2013)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A long-established favourite among wildlife TV devotees is the meerkat, those furry, bright-eyed, sociable dwellers in the African deserts using sentries standing straight up on their hind legs to spot approaching predators and ushering the others away into the safety of their burrows. Little wonder that they provoked such raptures. And then some whiz kid in an advertising agency woke up to the fact that ‘meerkat’ sounded very much like “market”. And from that swung out a campaign on TV, the internet and wherever, about a company which, for a fee, will inform us about the comparable costs of insuring cars or homes or of credit cards and loans... The slogan for all this was ‘Compare The Meerkat.’ Among the inducements to use this service there was the chance to be rewarded with a cuddly meerkat to take to bed. Or to buy a meerkat diary or calendar. Or a coffee mug. It threatened to be overwhelming.

Farage

Perhaps it was as a spin-off to this that the Minimalist web-site posted some photographs of meerkats alongside others of Nigel Farage, a founder and current leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). There are in fact some striking facial similarities between the two - which in some quarters may have been regarded as appropriate because political leader Farage pulls the same tricks as any insurance sales person, suggesting that the customers pay – but in this case with their votes – for some promised benefits of security and progress. ‘Well you're in luck, you're in exactly the right place! ... We always put our customers first!’ bellows Compare The Market while UKIP assures us that we can safely vote for them because they believe ‘...in every area of policy, in listening to the people and giving them more control over the services they receive’.

From what is known about Farage, it is unlikely that he took umbrage at being likened to the meerkat. His friend and associate, MEP Godfrey Bloom, says that his lifestyle is ‘...appalling, he'd be the first to admit it. He drinks too much red wine and he smokes too much.’ Which is very different from the way things were under his predecessor, Lord Pearson, who felt he had to resign because he was ‘...not much good at party politics’ or perhaps, as one rather more specific opinion of him had it, ‘a bumbling toff; wealthy, out of touch and eccentric.’ But Farage may prefer to be judged by results: UKIP has recently notched up some impressive electoral performances – notably when it came second in the by-election in Rotherham last November – and he can claim to be one of the most easily recognised politicians in the country. In fact, a recent MSN poll named him as the top politician of 2012.

UKIP

Since its inception UKIP has advanced on the electoral front, if only to occupy some of the ground left open by dissent within other parties and the anger of the LibDem membership at being in coalition with the Tories. Threatening by-election results left panic-stricken Tories asking whether their outlook might be more settled if they dumped Clegg and his LibDems in favour of unity with UKIP. Any such move might be hampered by Cameron's opinion in 2006 of UKIP as ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists...’ although his flexibility in such matters can be judged by his welcoming the LibDems into government in 2010 in spite of his recent assessment of them as ‘a joke.’ Farage was first elected as an MEP – which was by no means consistent with his trumpeted hatred of Europe – in 1999, making his name for such contributions to their debates as his description of Herman Van Rompuy, the President of the European Council, as ‘...having the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk’. He refused to withdraw or apologise and was penalised by the loss of ten days Members' allowance. He leads a group under the name of Europe of Freedom and Democracy, the principles of which enable it to accommodate a Mario Borghezio whose description of the re-election of Barack Obama was ‘Multiracial America has won, which I can't fucking stand’ and who, on a separate occasion, proclaimed ‘Vive les Blancs de l'Europe. And underlying these matters Farage is rated, in terms of his attendance, among the worst value for what he gives as an MEP.

Crash

He has kept up that style, regarded by his followers as challenging the more established and rigid political mannerisms. At the 2010 general election he was not impressed by the custom that the current Speaker of the House of Commons should not be opposed and stood for UKIP in Buckingham against John Bercow. On polling day, he unwittingly attracted further attention when he was a passenger in a private aircraft which nose-dived into the ground when the UKIP banner it was towing became entangled in its tailplane. Both Farage and the pilot were lucky to escape with their lives; Farage was seriously injured but shrugged off the pain as he hobbled about his business, seemingly unconcerned about what other disasters might be consequent on flying a banner-flaunting UKIP and his place in it. The pilot responded by threatening to kill Farage and the crash investigator. Eventually a sympathetic judge decided that he (the pilot, not Farage) was suffering from ‘a depressive disorder of moderate severity... clearly needed help’ and made him subject to a Community Order.

To any voters who can be said to be ‘depressive’ as a result of their betrayal by the political parties of capitalism, UKIP claims to be therapeutically energising, more hopeful, offering something unique. In fact, it can hardly be distinguished from the rest. Typically, its policies claim to deal with capitalist problems associated with wages, unemployment, crime, housing, the health service... It offers nothing to persuade anyone to make an exception and to go out and vote for another period of capitalism and its impotent leaders. There is, of course, one difference for UKIP, in the bizarrely damaging behaviour of its leader. To vote for it on that basis would be a symptom of clearly being in need of help.

Ivan

Winstanley, Marx and Henry George ( 2012)

From the December 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Occupy movement has led to the ideas of these thinkers being discussed again at public meetings.

To mark the first anniversary of the Occupy camp at St Paul’s London Occupy organised a series of ‘New Putney Debates’ in October and November. Some took place in the same church in Putney as the original 1647 debates in Cromwell’s army. Two were devoted to the question of land.

The first, on 1 November on ‘Land and Democracy,’ was billed as:

‘Nearly 400 years ago the Diggers described the Earth as a ‘common storehouse for all’ and objected to land being kept in the hands of a few. Are landowners still oppressing the people today, and how should we respond?’

One response was given by Natalie Bennett, the new Leader of the Green Party, who argued her party’s case for a tax on land values. She quoted Churchill (when he was a Liberal Cabinet minister before WW1) and Henry George as favouring this.

Not being a product of labour, the price of land is determined entirely by demand and can command a higher price the more fertile it is or the more favourably it is situated (for example, in a city centre or near a railway station). Land prices rise whenever the land’s situation becomes more favourable (as when a town expands), the benefit of which is reaped entirely by the landowner without having to lift a finger. The idea of a Land Value Tax (LTV) is to tax away this windfall benefit.

Henry George (1839-1897), author of a widely-read book ‘Progress and Poverty,’ was hugely popular in America and was once nearly elected mayor of New York.  He advocated that a LVT should be the only tax. Hence the other name of the Georgist movement: ‘Single Taxers.’ Natalie Bennett, while favouring a LVT, didn’t go that far. She was challenged by a Liberal Democrat in the audience who said that it was her party’s policy too. She added that it had also been supported by Karl Marx.

This is true. One of the ten immediate measures (the first in fact) advocated in the Communist Manifesto by the Communist League of Germany for implementation had it come to win political control in 1848 was: ‘Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.’ Marx later explained (in a letter to F. A. Sorge in 1881) that, as a separate measure on its own, this was contradictory and criticised Henry George and others for ‘believing that if ground rent were transformed into a state tax all the evils of capitalist production would disappear of themselves’.

In the 1880s and 1890s Georgists and Socialists were rivals for working-class support, the Georgists arguing that to solve working class problems it was enough to tax away the rents of landowners while Socialists argued for the common ownership not just of land but of industry too.

It seems that this rivalry is being revived today, with many in the Occupy movement attracted by ideas of Henry George. This became evident at the second meeting on 9 November entitled: ‘A New Economy.’ The announcement for this started off well enough:

‘The foundations of the New Economy are: the means of life (water, food and housing) for all as a right; land and resources held in common and the benefits share,’

before petering out with ‘alternative currencies to foster greater equality and societal cohesion’.

It soon became clear that the organisers did not envisage ‘land and resources held in common’. What they wanted was a single tax on land values.  According to their handout, one of the ‘alternative currencies’ they had in mind was:

‘land backed interest free currency –spent into the economy to create infrastructure, rental income to fund citizens income and public services.’

In other words, the government would get money by taxing away the rental income, real or notional, of landowners (which these days includes not just the Duke of Westminster but those who own the leasehold or freehold of their homes) and using this to pay everybody a basic income as well as to finance its own expenditure. It is not clear that this is actually an ‘alternative currency’ since the existence of rental incomes to be taxed away assumes that there already is a currency. What they seem to mean is ‘land based interest free government financing,’ which would allow the government to dispense with borrowing money.

Whatever it is, it is not ‘land and resources held in common’. This was, in fact, specifically rejected by the speakers as unnecessary and leading to what happened in China under Mao during the period of the rural communes. This is the standard Georgist position, that common ownership of land would lead to tyranny and dictatorship, so private ownership of land is to continue in their scheme. They are not really opposed to capitalism either. (Henry George certainly wasn’t.) They even defended profit, saying that it was justified in that an element of risk was involved in contrast to interest which was a certain income. They cited Sharia Law as making this distinction too. Basically, what they are against is rent and interest but not profit.

Karl Marx came up at this meeting too when one of the speakers claimed that Marx agreed that landowners exploited both capitalists and workers. Actually, Marx’s position was that the capitalists exploited the workers but then were themselves exploited by the landowners. This is not at all the same, since it means that end exploitation by landowners would benefit only the capitalists and not the workers. Marx also looked forward to the time when: “from the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men” (Capital, volume 3, chapter 46).

It is rather surprising that pro-capitalist ideas should be advocated within the Occupy movement which even the new Lord Mayor of the City of London, Roger Gifford, recognised started off as anti-capitalist. As he told the ‘i’ newspaper (10 November), ‘What they were basically saying was: “We don’t like capitalism as it looks today, we want another system.”’ What the Georgists in the Occupy movement are saying, rather, is, ‘We don’t like capitalism as it looks today. We want to give it a new look.’

What this shows is that it is not enough merely to have an anti-capitalist gut reaction. You need to know what capitalism really is and how it works. Otherwise you are going to be confused and misled, whether by currency cranks or by land reformers.

At the first meeting, Gerrard Winstanley was favourably mentioned many times, even if he was misunderstood as merely advocating setting up agricultural communes. In fact he was far more radical than this, advocating the common ownership both of the land and of products made from it to which everyone would have free access without money –what the announcement for the second meeting called ‘the means of life (water, food and housing) for all as of right; land and resources held in common and the benefits shared’. In this, even though three centuries earlier, he was far in advance of Henry George and his single tax on the rental incomes of land that would be left in private ownership.

It is good that people are discussing the ideas of past thinkers such as Gerrard Winstanley, Karl Marx and even Henry George. It shows that they are looking for an alternative to the capitalist production-for-profit system. It is disappointing, though, that at the moment it is ideas that are not really anti-capitalist which seem to have the upper hand in discussions within the Occupy movement, at least in London.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Capitalism No Better (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Deborah Orr, who writes on economic matters for the Guardian from a vaguely Green standpoint, entitled her 28 December column, ‘It’s time for a better capitalism, one that creates jobs and provides security’, arguing that ‘the civil, civilised kind of capitalism we have long been promised could yet emerge from the rubble of the financial crisis.’

Her argument was based on what she sees some firms as doing in the current economic crisis:

‘After decades during which we have all be told that we must allow the market to decide, the market is making a pro-social and humane decision. It is choosing to sacrifice profits in order to save itself. This is what the sales are all about – companies slashing their profits in order to keep ticking over, providing jobs, maintaining a presence. Staying in the game is being valued above providing shareholder value.’

This is not what sales and their lower than usual prices are about. They are a business strategy designed to maximise income over expenditure, i.e., to make a profit by selling more at a lower profit rather than less at a higher profit.

Some firms, in the present economic crisis, may well be prepared to ‘tick over’, merely covering their costs without making a profit, just to stay in business. But this would not be the start of a ‘fairer’ capitalism in which firms seek merely to cover their costs so as to provide jobs for their workers and lower prices for their customers.

Doing this to try to survive the crisis would not be a ‘pro-social and humane’ decision, but a hard-headed business decision in the interest of shareholders, since if a company goes under – as Comet did before Christmas and Jessops, HMV and Blockbuster did in January – the shareholders lose nearly everything.

Surviving means that when the slump comes to an end and growth resumes, as it will sooner or later (even if later rather than sooner, as there is now talk of a triple-dip recession), the company is still ‘in the game’, ready to take part again in the chase after profits.

In imagining that companies accepting to make no or very little profit could prove to be permanent, Orr is being naive. Capitalism could not function on that basis. What would be the point for a capitalist to invest money in a business just to end up at the end of the accounting year with the same amount of money?

The aim of capitalist production is to end up with more money at the end than at the beginning. What Marx expressed as M-C-M’ where C is the purchase of the materials and labour to produce something. Orr’s ‘better capitalism’ based on M-C-M would not really be capitalism at all, just some unrealistic economic system that could never exist.

In any event, it is not the case that most companies involved in post-Christmas sales are just ‘ticking over’, still less aiming merely to do this. They are aiming to make as much profit as they can and they will be succeeding, even if for some this won’t be as much as in previous years. Others, on the other hand, benefitting from the disappearance of their rivals, will be making more than before.

I wanted to boo! (1996)

Theatre Review from the August 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Gabriel Borkman by Henrik Ibsen (National Theatre)

John Gabriel Borkman is the story of a failed entrepeneur but, more than that, it is also the story of a failed human being.

Borkman the power-seeker does a deal with a friend so that the friend can marry the woman Borkman supposedly loves, whilst Borkman marries her twin. Caught embezzling the bank's funds he serves eight years in jail and then spends the next eight locked in his own room waiting for the call to come, waiting for "the man of vision" to work the financial miracle [sic] on which the well-being of the grateful citizenry supposedly depends.

The action of the play takes place over a few hours. The arrival of the woman he once loved, and now his sister-in-law, and his son's affair with a married woman, force Borkman out into the open - both figuratively and literally - and he dies of a heart attack on a freezing mountainside.

Writing in the programme Michael Ratcliffe notes that Ibsen, like his contemporary Marx, recognised that the pursuit of capital corrodes human relationships. But if Ibsen is, in consequence, critical of nineteenth century capitalism, this is not apparent in the play - or at least the current production. We are presented with a slice of bourgeois life: sisters who don't talk to one another, an aunt who tries to appropriate another's son as though he was a possession to be claimed, an estranged husband who has become almost a hermit, and so on. It isn't very edifying, but as played on the stage of the Lyttleton Theatre one would think it all very normal and unexceptional. Presumably the audience is supposed to be shocked by the pretension, the egocentricity, the cold inhumanity of most of those on display. But if shocks were intended they were certainly not realised when I saw the play in preview. Indeed the final scene in which the callous Borkman dies still muttering about his vision, and now apparently forgiven by his sister-in-law, fails to generate any of the feelings of disgust and anger which it so clearly warrants. Cast and director appear to be demanding our sympathy rather than stirring our revulsion and horror.

The audience seemed not so much sympathetic or affronted, as bored - apart that is for those happily clapping the reputations rather than the performances of an all-star cast, and enrolled members of the Institute of Directors. I wanted to boo. The play is presented in association with the National Theatre's Private Contributors. Presumably on behalf of the international capitalist class?

Michael Gill

The fall of Berlin (2002)

Book Review from the September 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Berlin – The Downfall 1945, by Anthony Beevor, Penguin Viking.

For those able to recall the fall of Berlin in April/May 1945, Anthony Beevor's book is a powerful reminder of the horrific events that brought the war in Europe to a close. These final stages of suffering, death and destruction were only relieved by the hope that the war was near its end. At the time our knowledge was limited to what was made available through the press, radio and newsreel, all of which was heavily censored. Since then, the story has been re-told with more information becoming available. Anthony Beevor has had the advantage of access to archive material and, particularly since the fall of the Bolshevik regimes in Russia and East Europe, to the archives of the KGB.

He is able to tell us for example how the Russian campaign to take Berlin was partly shaped by the desperate need of Stalin and his henchmen to get their hands on nuclear materials. From Klaus Fuchs and other spies, Stalin was aware of the Manhattan Project (the American programme to develop the atom bomb). They were also aware of similar though less advanced research in Germany partly at the Kaiser Wilhelm Insitute for Physics which was situated west of Berlin at Dahlem, designated as part of the post war carve up to be in the American Zone of occupation. The huge numbers of Russian casualties were caused partly by the determination to occupy this research facility. As a result, the NKVD (later the KGB) were able to take possession not just of scientists but “250 kgs of metallic uranium; three tons of uranium oxide; twenty litres of heavy water”. This also reminds us that the death and destruction that marked the fall of Berlin was to continue for three more months in the Pacific culminating in the use of even more terrifying weapons, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What happened at Dahlem with the arrival of Russian troops who, with their bitter knowledge of the atrocities carried out by German forces in Russia and East Europe, were in a frenzy of hate and revenge, was an accepted part of the Russian advance. At its convent, which was also a maternity clinic and orphanage, “Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity”. Estimates from the two main Berlin hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000 rape victims. One doctor deduced that out of approximately l00,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. “Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.”

According to Anthony Beevor, “Stalin and his marshals paid little regard to the lives of their soldiers. The casualties for the three fronts involved in the Berlin operation were extremely high, with 78,291 killed and 274,184 wounded.” The numbers for German forces would have been similar but with many more civilian deaths. For those who lived, conditions became disease ridden and primitive. With the shelling and constant bombing, “Over a million people in the city were without any home at all. They continued to shelter in cellars and air raid shelters. Smoke from cooking fires emerged from what looked like piles of rubble, as women tried to re-create something of a home life amid the ruins.” The casualties amongst women were especially high. With the water system damaged many were killed queuing with buckets at the street pumps. One lingering image is of desperate women, shuffling up to fill the gaps in the queues caused by exploding shells.

On the 30 April Hitler and his bride of the previous day, Eva Braun, killed themselves. Just north of Berlin, Ravensbruck, the women's concentration camp was liberated. On the 1 May Goebbels and his wife Magda killed themselves together with their six children, all aged under twelve.

Anthony Beevor makes no attempt to be seriously analytical. He takes the war as given. His book is then a monumental description of its brutal closing events and the interplay of leading personalities, particularly as they acted out the final drama in the mad, hysterical atmosphere of the Fuhrer's bunker. It was in that closely confined underground space that extreme authoritarianism, blind fear and obedience, and a deranged ideology combined to produce a descent into utter self-destruction. As the main actors lost all contact with reality the author describes this descent as the “Fuhrerdammerung,” but nothing in Wagner's works could match the real life tragedy.

The absence of analysis in Anthony Beevor's book invites us to think about the causes of this death and destruction and to reflect upon the wider social context in which it happened. One response has been to simply say that Hitler was mad. It is very likely that this was true but it still leaves unexplained the reasons why millions gave him the political support from which developed of one of the most hideously cruel regimes of the 20th century.

The reading of page after page of destruction, rape and killing gives the impression that entire populations had gone collectively mad. This was despite the undoubted ability of all to co-operate in ways that could have enhanced the lives of everyone. Instead of a rational understanding of how we could best serve each other's needs through unity there prevailed the divisive and hateful ideologies of nationalism, leadership and racism. And it was the background of national economic rivalries that allowed these attitudes to fester and grow with such disastrous results.

But what have we learned since then? There is not much to be hopeful about. The huge gap between our mutual interests and the ideas we need to realise them seems to be as wide as ever. As a result, the destruction and the killing continues. One lesson of Anthony Beevor's book is that whilst our ideas remain out of harmony with our need for unity and co-operation we will always remain liable to be manipulated into elevating the miseries of death and destruction over peace, security and the pursuit of happiness.

Pieter Lawrence