Building a future (1994)

From the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

I am one of the many tens of thousands of construction workers who are currently unemployed. Disunited, we must be patient and wait. Surviving on the State prescribed pittance as pliant trapeze artistes on the unravelling "safety net" which so enchants reformers. Turning useful people into beggars is a historical, and inevitable,principle of the capitalist system. Perhaps this time, we have got to be extremely patient before capitalist investors decide that the opportunity of making profits from our labour power is a distinct possibility. Until then we must needlessly hang on, suffer quietly, await our masters' call.

Twenty-eight years ago, when I started working as a hod-carrier on the buildings, the economic circumstances were quite different from today. The demand for labour was high, consequently wages and degrees of freedom had been rising. Capitalism was in the boom phase of its cycle, and the construction industry anticipating even larger profits was in the process of restructuring itself. The design of buildings was slowly beginning to change, as were materials. Every aspect of what is a labour-intensive industry had to be cost effective.

Cash-in-the-hand wages were starting to become the norm for bricklayers and hoddies in London. No sick pay, holiday money or wet time for us, after all we were screwing the State, weren't we? Being a nomadic trade—I have had well over 100 jobs—where being a realist is forced on you, the majority took full advantage of the economic situation. It was quite usual for men to jack because there was no crack on the job, teabreaks were too short, or, because you couldn't get a sub when you wanted it. The sub was very important, its availability was one indicator of an employer's liquidity. It was a simple case of once bitten twice shy. Nearly everyone who has worked for subcontractors for some time gets bumped, at the first sign the realists abandoned ship before it sank.

The Monday Club was in full swing at this time. If 50 percent of the workforce turned up on a Monday the subbie was in raptures all day about how loyal his "boys" were. Building trades unions at this time were generally recognised as the niche of opportunists, liars, and the bribeable. Consequently, negotiations over wages took the form of "we want another shilling an hour". If it wasn't forthcoming, then the tools were immediately thrown into the bag and the ladder descended. A new start was just a phone call away.

It was fully understood that what we built during a working week was worth more than what we were paid, it was wholly transparent. The remainder being shared by the layers of pimps that thrived through our labours, this too was understood and despised. Creating profits, through the unremitting appropriation of surplus value from its workers, is the sole function of the construction industry. Building homes, etc is purely incidental to the process.

No boom lasts forever. The speculative jamboree of overproduction ended abruptly and inevitably. A few capitalists went bust. The shrewd, and well-connected ones are still there, conniving their way out of their latest short-lived binge. The long boom was over, and those few freedoms have never returned. The barbed-wire around the sites was in the process of being re-erected, and a new reality was beginning, one that over the coming years would increasingly subjugate the realists.

New income tax laws had been imposed, and were strengthening. Tax was being deducted at source which meant a 30% percent reduction in wages for those without exemption certificates. We were now self-employed--small businessmen no less. A great many workers, inspired by media reports of large sums of money to be earned, had travelled to London. These were among the first to taste the dole. Realists understand that they are disposable. Skint, most of the smaller and more liberal subbies were back on the scaffold with their "boys". The illusion that they had been more than just intermediary workers in the production of profits was still obstinately imprinted on their thwarted minds.

A small elite of subbies were now in a position to more effectively exploit for their masters those who were still in work. Afternoon tea-breaks disappeared and have never returned. Apprenticeships, which had been declining rapidly amongst firms since the rise of the subbie in the early sixties, were now just a source for contrite prattle by reformers. The derisively-paid, and deftly-worked improvers became their replacement. The week in hand was introduced, and the sub became extinct.

Competition between workers became more ferocious than ever. It was common practice when starting a new job to be put to work with the fastest bricklayer on the job; if you didn't keep up, you were down the road before breakfast. Few workers now questioned this, and some gained pleasure from it. Guilt, if you thought you hadn't done enough, and fear of what might happen, became as inseparable from your being as the trowel was from your hand.

A brutal system can create brutes, and the surviving subbies seemed to be in agreement on the type of foreman that they needed to run their jobs. Only the thug would do, no knowledge of bricklaying was necessary. A bully with a watch and few scruples replaced the tradesman. The old boys said that they'd seen it all before, no one really believed them.

Semi-literacy, and a knowledge of various state institutions, form the background for many bricklayers and labourers. Alcohol, and latterly drugs, are an integral part of the everyday working life for most. When the sack can arrive at any moment, to anyone, regardless of ability, just "to keep 'em on their toes"; where working conditions can vary from working in shin-high mud, to ramshackle scaffolds; where names and faces over the years become a blur, simply because of their frequency. And forming friendships is fraught with problems, then escapism becomes a necessity. And callousness a shield.

It's an upside-down world under capitalism. Those who are most useful suffer the lowest social esteem. But, laze in a masterfully-built mansion, and devise ways of turning human sweat into profit and you are to be admired, knighted even. After all, how would we cope without them, once the plans had been drawn and the footing dug and concreted, the walls built and then plastered, the joist and trusses nailed into place, and the roof battened and slated. Surely, we would be lost without a parasite to then sell the building?

A common dream, voiced amongst many workers that I came into contact with through the years was to build one's own home. A few achieved it. Some of those have now lost it. The possibility for all to achieve this dream can become a reality. By uniting, together we can begin the work of tearing down the barbed-wire than surrounds our lives, and bring nearer the day when we can establish socialism, and with it our freedom.

Andy Matthews

Egypt: Workers’ Struggles, Trade Unions and the ‘Left’ (2013)

From the September 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers’ struggles were an important aspect of the Egyptian upheaval from the start. While the world media focused on the political demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, mass protests and strikes erupted, especially in Alexandria and other provincial cities, over such everyday issues as wages, conditions of employment, managerial corruption, bread supply, shortage of housing and grossly inadequate municipal services. For example, people living in the Al-Wahat oasis in the Western Desert expressed their anger at the contrast between the huge sums being spent on tourist amenities, including a luxury hotel carved into the mountainside, and the neglect of their own needs (New Left Review 68, p. 24).

State of insurgency

This remains the pattern today. The run-up to the military takeover at the end of June saw a wave of strikes and protests. In March six cities – Port Said being worst affected – were ‘in a state of virtual insurgency, paralysed by mass civil disobedience and ongoing battles between protestors and security forces’ (Brian Slocums, thenorthstar.info, 5 March). Altogether there were some 2,000 strikes in 2012. One Egyptian activist, Hossam El-Hamalawy, argues that Morsi’s evident inability to ‘stabilise the street’ was one of the main reasons for his removal (jadaliyya.com).

Although many grievances are specific to a particular firm or locality, certain demands are being pursued across the country:

- a minimum wage of 1,200 Egyptian pounds (£120 or $180) per month

- the right to strike

- the right to organise independent unions to replace the state-controlled unions of the Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (EFTU) inherited from the Mubarak regime

- regularisation of contracts for the many workers on insecure short-term contracts

Workers in firms privatised under Mubarak often demand their re-nationalisation. Other demands concern the special problems of workers in the ‘informal sector’ (who get no social benefits) and residents in ‘informal settlements’ – that is, officially unrecognised shanty towns (who get no municipal services). There is widespread opposition to the economic package imposed by the IMF.

Trade unions under successive regimes

There were several attempts to form independent trade unions under the old regime (in 1990 and during the strikes of 2006—2009), but only the current upheaval has made it possible openly and systematically to organise an independent trade union movement. The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU) was established in January 2011.

In October 2011 a group of activists broke away from the EFITU to form the Egyptian Democratic Labour Congress. So there are now two groupings of independent trade unions, claiming three million members between them. The reasons for the split are unclear.

The electoral victory of the Moslem Brotherhood was a setback for this process. The military government that succeeded Mubarak had accepted the right of workers to form independent unions, but Morsi tried to reassert state control of the unions by reviving and reforming the EFTU.

Striking transport workers were accused of ‘treason’; officials of independent unions were prosecuted for ‘inciting to strike’ with five from the port workers’ union sentenced to three years in prison. The independent unions responded by joining the movement to unseat Morsi.

There is some question concerning how independent the EFITU is of the current military regime. El-Hamalawy accuses its leaders of compromising with the generals, suspending strike action and encouraging workers to increase production. He attributes this to the influence of Nasserite ideas, which make them vulnerable to ‘patriotic’ appeals.

Making sense of the Egyptian ‘left’

The last three years have seen a profusion of new and revived political organisations in Egypt. Quite a few of them claim to be ‘left-wing’. Keeping track of these groups and parties is difficult due to the speed with which they change their names, split and merge, and enter and leave alliances. To add to the confusion, in some cases several different English translations of the same Arabic name are in circulation. Moreover, differences inside a single organisation are sometimes at least as significant as differences between organisations.

That said, it seems possible and useful to make a few distinctions.

First, there is a divide between an ‘old left’ and a ‘new left’. The old left draw inspiration from the initial period of the post-colonial state, when Egypt was led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Under the old left can be placed openly Nasserite groups like the Democratic Arab Nasserite Party and the National Progressive Unionist Party (Al-Tagammu), and also the revived Egyptian Communist Party.

The ‘new left’ groups are really ‘new’ only in the Egyptian context, as they model themselves more or less directly on ‘left-wing’ tendencies that have long existed elsewhere. The Egyptian Social Democratic Party and the Egypt Freedom Party resemble the European social democratic parties – that is, they advocate very mild reforms within capitalism in the name of ‘social justice’. The Socialist Popular Alliance Party (formerly the Socialist Party of Egypt) appears to be a more ‘left-wing’ version of the same thing – that is, the reforms they stand for are a little bolder.

There is also a Trotskyist organisation called the ‘Revolutionary Socialists’, which has close links with the Socialist Workers’ Party in Britain.

The Egyptian Popular Current, created after the 2012 presidential elections by the ‘left’ candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi, seems to be an attempt to bridge the old and the new left. It too uses ‘social democratic’ language while at the same time appealing to Nasserite nostalgia (Nasser’s son Abdel Hakim is involved with this party).

Allying against the ‘main enemy’

Another important division concerns the strategy that the ‘left’ should adopt in dealing with the other three major forces within Egyptian society:

a) the state and the military institution as its core

b) the Moslem Brotherhood and Islamists in general

c) private business and the parties that represent its interests.

The crucial questions for Egyptian ‘leftists’ are these:

1) Which of these three is our ‘main enemy’?

2) Should we seek to ally with the other forces against the ‘main enemy’?

A few purists insist that the state, the Islamists and private business are all enemies and the ‘left’ should consistently oppose them all. But most Egyptian ‘leftists’ do not consider this a realistic stance.

There is also a view that gives clear primacy to economic issues and asserts that the cultural divide between secularists and Islamists is of secondary significance. The main enemy is therefore private capital and the ‘left’ should not cooperate with pro-business liberals like the Free Egyptians Party. This too seems to be a minority view.

The ‘old left’ and especially the Egyptian Communist Party traditionally follow a line that equates Islamism with fascism. This makes the Islamists into the main enemy. The ‘old left’ is willing to support a military crackdown on the Islamists (Sabbahi publicly expressed his support on 5 July). Part of the explanation may be that the Nasserites as well as the ‘Communists’ fully identify ‘socialism’ with state capitalism. And Nasserism itself, after all, was a movement of army officers.

Much of the ‘new left’ also consider the Islamists the main enemy. However, this approach is rejected by the Trotskyite ‘Revolutionary Socialists’, who identify the state as the main enemy. Their slogan is: ‘Sometimes with the Islamists, never with the state’.

Curiously enough, this stance reflects the influence of Chris Harman of the British SWP. In his book The Prophet and the Proletariat, an Arabic edition of which was distributed in Egypt by the local Trotskyists, Harman argues that ‘socialists can take advantage of contradictions within Islamism’ and ‘on some issues we side with Islamists against imperialism and the state’ – examples of such issues being the Gulf War and the ‘struggle against racism in Britain and France’. In the current Egyptian context this means that so-called socialists must defend the Islamists against the state – and themselves against the Islamists! (Harman’s book is available online at www.marxists.de/religion/harman)

Stefan

Between the Lines: The future of socialism (1986)

The Between the lines column from the April 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The future of socialism

Brian Magee's cosy studio discussions on BBC2 are like Oxford seminars for spectators; listening to Brian and his guest intellectuals toss around a few concepts is like watching darts on telly - it doesn't really matter whether they score a hundred and eighty or miss the board, the important point is that you're not getting a chance to throw the darts. Thinking Aloud (BBC2, 9 March) was supposed to be about whether socialism has a future. Dick Taverne, who should have realised long ago that he does not have one, came out with some predictable old drivel about socialism being outdated: there are no longer classes, the future lies  with the terrific new ideas of the SDP (or was he saying that the future will be terrified by the new lies of the SDP?). Opposing him was Beatrix Campbell, a very trendy Lefty who thinks that Sweden is fairly socialist and the GLC was proof that socialism works. With confusion-mongers like her claiming to speak for it, what future does socialism have as an idea? Fortunately there was a third guest in the studio, Daniel Singer from France who showed more than a slight acquaintance with Marx's ideas. Singer began by daring to suggest that before the subject could be discussed it was necessary to define socialism; it should be made clear that socialism does not mean capitalism run by bogus socialist governments. It was left to him to state that socialism has never been tried, but that "if there is no future for socialism there is no future for the human race". It is a pity that the rest of the discussion was not conducted in such terms. Instead it was a mass of "to a certain extents" and "the trouble with socialism is . . . " Darts were not only missing the board, but being thrown at targets which did not exist. BBC2 calls it philosophy. I preferred Tony Hancock on BBC1 an hour earlier - at least he made a few points.

The future of socialisme

As if one night of nonsense-talking about undefined socialism isn't sufficient, Panorama (BBC1, 10 March) was concerned to show how Mitterand's "socialism" had failed to satisfy the French workers. In a series of articles over the last three years The Socialist Standard predicted that this would happen and has shown how it has happened. Needless to say, the "experts" on Panorama are too dim-witted to recognise that what has failed in France is capitalism in another form - nothing at all to do with socialism failing.

Milne's admission

BBC head, Alistair Milne, was in a studio discussion presented by David Dimbleby (This Week, Next Week, BBC1, 23 February) and was being attacked by Mary Whitehouse who has made it her hobby of late to watch video tapes of the dirty bits of Eastenders. In defence of the BBC's new highly successful soap opera Mine stated that "Eastenders is just a modern version of the old morality plays." So, here we have an admission: one of the functions of soaps is to convey to audiences right and wrong ways of behaving. "Rightful" behaviour is shown to be socially accepted by the characters in the soaps and leads to eventual success, whereas "bad" actions are shown in such a way as to lead viewers to fear committing such moral transgressions themselves. A very good example of the same process at work is in the kids' soap opera, Grange Hill in which the characters are presented very clearly within the context of approved and disapproved behaviour models. Readers with other examples of how TV drama attempts to mould audience behaviour should send in references and we shall publish your observations in a future column.

A question to Mr Churchill

Winston Churchill, the grandson of the man who never objected to plenty of violence in the media but preferred it in real life, has moved a Private Members' Bill in parliament designed to keep obscenity off the TV. Apart from the fact that the BBC and IBA Charters already commit them to self-censorship, Churchill's Bill is daft because it proposes to make illegal TV showings of explicit cruelty to humans and animals. Does that mean that Mr. Churchill wants to ban all pictures of armies going about their legal business of inflicting cruelty against "the enemy" - including pictures of British soldiers in 1945 who went in for some pretty explicit cruelty against humans in Dresden? Does this new Bill mean that the plays of Shakespeare will be banned from TV - we are thinking in particular of such jolly scenes as the pulling out of Gloucester's eyes by his stepson in King Lear? And will it mean that we shall no longer see Crossroads or Wogan - for, let's face it, what can be more explicitly cruel to humans, not to mention animals, than those offerings? Socialists oppose censorship. And we shall certainly not censor Mr. Churchill's response to our questions if he cares to send one.

Capitalist Utopia

"Imagine a factory where there are no strikes." Have you seen the hideous Nissan advert? It would be interesting if the Gdansk shipyards went in for a similar TV-ad campaign in Britain. When is the denial of the freedom to strike something to be boasted about and when is it an infringement of "human rights"?

Steve Coleman

Editorial: A Common World

Editorial from the April 1984 issue of the World Socialist

Across the entire face of the planet useful labour is held back and subject to domination by world capital. World Socialism will establish the freedom in which it can concentrate its energies solely on human needs.

This will be world co-operation to produce more food; to provide housing, sanitation and clean water for the hundreds of millions who endure sub-standard conditions or live in squalor; to provide health services; to construct a safe world energy system; to stop the despoliation of the planet and the pollution of its atmosphere, its seas, forests and lands; to provide for education and enjoyment; to provide for movement and communication. These are the urgent needs for which world socialism will release the immense resources of potentially useful labour, now held in check by the insanities of the profit system.

Useful labour must realise its own needs. These are the needs of co-operation, of mutual interest, of free development, and above all, the need of free access to all the productive means and resources which are its own universal inheritance.

Everything that is best in this inheritance has one source and one source alone -  that of useful work in all its variety. The work of arts and crafts; the work of science and applied technique; the work of tool making and providing machinery; the work of building and farming; the work of transport, education and health services. All these are skills which have been accumulated throughout history from the first flint implement to the space vehicles of today. This represents the accumulated power of useful labour.

Wherever we look throughout the world we can see the evidence of the best things that useful labour can do - once it can flourish in freedom for human needs.

But also now wherever we look, we see useful labour confined and in shackles. It suffers the waste of unemployment; the demoralisation of poverty and constricted development. Its use is distorted in a world armaments industry through which has been built the means of human destruction. The work of providing for needs is ignored, whilst hundreds of millions are under arms. Labour is forced into the divisive moulds of nationalism and competition.

Wherever we look labour is isolated from the means of production and resources by the laws of exploitative class relations. In its individual exchange with capital, wage labour works as a meaningless economic function, obeying the blind laws of commodity production and the economic tyranny of capital accumulation. Labour is the source of profit and not the activity of providing for needs.

Yet only useful labour, in co-operation, has the power to build a better world and to become the means of mutual care; to work in harmony with itself, with others and with nature. It is a power which is in common between all humanity, rising above the differences of race, culture and language, and the widely differing routes by which humanity has emerged from history. From this diversity, useful labour can enrich all human experience - in co-operation. This universal, self-realisation of useful labour can only be achieved by the human relations of common ownership, democratic control and production for use. In every world problem, in every common hope which remains unrealised and in every common experience of failure and disillusion, is the voice of useful labour demanding its free expression. World socialism provides its clear and conscious political direction.

World Socialism will operate with one simple and ordinary human ability which is universal - the ability of every individual to co-operate with others in a world wide community of interests.

This World Socialist journal is committed to the work of bringing this to fruition. The co-operation which exists now between the Companion Parties for World Socialism will take this work forward and this has only one direction -  the principled growth of the World Socialist Movement.

Politics of Live Aid (1985)

From the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

I confess to being one of the millions of people throughout the world who watched the Live Aid concert, and one of the smaller number of Bob Dylan devotees who sat up half the night and saw it through to the bitter (as it turned out, in view of Dylan's abject performance) end. And I admit to having enjoyed watching all those super-stars strut and stagger, prance and pose on my TV screen. But this was supposed to be more than just entertainment, and to remind us there was, during the sixteen hour concert, repeated showings of a particularly haunting and harrowing film of Ethiopian famine victims. Bob Geldof, the concert's moving force, also continually reminded us that the purpose of the programme was to raise money, and he succeeded. Forty million pounds is a lot of money for a charity to raise in one go.

But Geldof also asked the question: why do people starve on one side of the world while on the other people are paid not to produce food, or "surpluses" are allowed to rot? He said that no-one had yet answered that question for him satisfactorily. I hope reads this article.

On the surface the answer to "what causes famine?" may seem obvious. Shortage of food causes famine, and the present food shortage in Africa is the result of drought. But is this really true? Why, when the world can be turned into a "global village" for the purposes of transmitting pop music , can it not be turned into a "global village" for the purposes of distributing food?

In fact the immediate cause of famine is a combination of events, which includes such things as successive years of drought and crop failures leading to the creation of deserts. But there is no inevitable relationship between even a number of crop failures in successive years and famine. The latter is more likely to be due, not to be an absolute shortage of food, but rather to its unequal distribution both between countries and within a country. So for example:

it is rarely the urban poor who suffer famine (because of access to wage labour) which is usually confined to rural populations which in many under-developed countries have little direct relationship with centres of political power, and therefore little influence (Frances D'Souza and Jeremy Shoham, "The spread of famine in Africa", Third World Quarterly, July, 1985)

And besides the environmental causes of famine there are also political causes such as warfare.

The immediate effect of food scarcity is rapidly rising prices and the movement of men to urban areas in search of paid work that will enable them to buy food for their families. At the same time farmers begin to sell their live-stock like goats and sheep in order to raise money. This leads to a fall in meat prices and hence in the purchasing power of the farmers, who are then forced to sell more valuable assets like plough oxen. When all these options have been exhausted, whole households and villages are forced to move to towns or relief centres in search of food aid:

Mass migration, usually taken as the first sign of a famine, is in fact a terminal sign of distress, and at this stage it is almost impossible to prevent mass deaths, however great the relief effort (D'Souza and Shoham, op, cit).

 The situation in much of Africa is clearly now in this terminal phase. And yet as long ago as December 1982 the Food and Agricultural Organisation said that Ethiopia would need 400,000 tonnes of food aid in 1983; no action was taken and the country needed 1.5 million tonnes by 1985. So why did the world not respond earlier? One answer is politics:

If countries supplying food aid want to ignore famine warnings they will. One reason why the famine was so bad in Ethiopia was that America, which is now supplying half of all Africa's food aid, was sending only a trickle of aid until October 1984. Ethiopia's government has few friends in Washington (The Economist, 20 July, 1985).

 The famine-stricken countries themselves may also, for domestic political reasons, not wish to acknowledge the existence of the problem. In Sudan for example, as late as mid-1984 the government claimed that there was no famine in the country for fear of the political consequences of admitting that people were starving.

But even when the existence of the problem is admitted and a decision is taken to do something about it, politics intrudes. The aid "industry" has vested interests: people who rely on the aid agencies for their jobs may be unwilling to co-operate fully with representatives from other organisations, which leads to pointless duplication of effort. For example, in 1983 Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) received over 300 fact-finding missions from aid donors. They got so fed up with escorting people round the country that they are now refusing all international aid.

Most aid comes from national aid programmes rather than international relief agencies, and much of it is "tied". This means that the recipient government gets money provided it spends it on goods produced in the donor country. Clearly if the motive is to increase exports the interests of the starving in Africa are likely to come a very poor second to those of the rich in the donor country.

Another form of aid is "programme aid" whereby food is given to governments to be sold on the market. About a third of all America's 3.1 million tonnes of food aid and 60 per cent of that given by the EEC takes this form. In theory it enables recipient governments to buy seed and agricultural implements from the proceeds of the food sales; in practice the proceeds are just as likely to be spent on maintaining the armed forces.

Within the recipient country politics frequently affects the distribution of food aid. In Ethiopia the government has tried to prevent food from being distributed in the provinces of Tigre and Eritrea in an attempt to literally starve the rebels in those areas into submission and to force them to leave the region for feeding centres in other areas.

So in entering the aid business Bob Geldof should tread warily: it is a minefield of national and corporate interests, political manipulation and profit-seeking which is likely to destroy the good intentions of the politically naive.

For the sad truth is that despite the razzamatazz that surrounded the Live Aid concert the amount raised, though enormous by the standards of most charitable appeals, was a pittance when compared with the scale of suffering. Workers who gave money to the Live Aid appeal cannot afford to give enough to make a significant impact of the famine, since most of us rely only on a wage, salary or state benefits to provide for ourselves and our children. We do not own the wealth of the world; it is not ours to give.

Aid is in any case a contentious issue: some have argued that it has damaging effects for the recipients since it has the long term effect of weakening the capacity of communities to survive independently. Certainly it has been used for political and economic ends by the international capitalist class to create spheres of influence in the "Third World" and to maintain client states.

But a more important limitation of aid is the effect it has on the donors. Whether it is individuals giving to charities like Live Aid or governments making pious statements about the amount of aid they have provided, a dangerous illusion is created. The illusion, firstly, that something is being done, that we really can "feed the world" through charity and the efforts of a few dynamic and well-intentioned individuals like Bob Geldof. Both have politically disastrous consequences.

Famine is not a temporary upset in an otherwise harmonious world order which can be put right by a quick injection of money and sacks of grain: it is an endemic feature of a world system of society which dictates that those who have money to buy food can eat, and those who have no money must starve; that unsold food produced in one part of the world will not, in general, be transported to where it is needed because no profit would be made. For in our society food is not produced because people need it, but because those who own the farms and the land can make a profit from it. And if it cannot be sold profitably then it is left to rot.

So while it may be comforting to believe that Live Aid has significantly helped those suffering in Africa from the insanity of capitalism, it is dangerous because it ignores the real causes of world hunger. To perpetuate the myth that charity can solve that problem obscures the urgent need for political action to get rid of capitalism. We can eradicate famine: we have the technology, knowledge and productive capacity to produce enough food for everyone and to transport it to wherever in the world it might be needed. There is no need for people to starve but they will continue to do so as long as we produce goods for profit. To remove capitalism requires a much bigger commitment on the part of the working class than it takes to give a fiver to the Live Aid appeal. But whereas giving money to charity might give you a feeling of having "done something" to help the hungry (which lasts until the next awful pictures of unnecessary suffering are flashed onto your TV screen), working for socialism will bring the reward of knowing that you are helping to create a truly humanitarian society in which no-one, wherever they live, will die of hunger. And then we can all listen to pop music without feeling guilty.

Janie Percy-Smith

Cooking the Books: In or Out - Who Cares? (2013)

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

Socialists sometimes talk of ‘the capitalist class’ doing this or wanting that as if they were a monolithic whole with a single interest. In fact different sections of the capitalist class have different interests. Their attitude to the EU is a case in point.

Cameron has rather foolishly promised an in/out referendum on the issue; rather foolishly because (as the vote in parliament on bombing Syria shows) he cannot be sure that the result will be the one he wants, which will be to stay in with reforms, also the position of the Confederation of British Industry, which represents the biggest capitalist corporations operating in and from Britain.

One of the export-oriented big boys put the case for staying in to the Evening Standard (9 August):

‘Britain should stay in the European Union to safeguard exports to the Continent, the boss of Hitachi’s train operations in the UK urged today.… Mr Dormer… said exporters wanted Britain to have warm and stable relations with Europe. ‘Europe is potentially our biggest market and we would not want anything to happen that would create barriers or damage the relationship,’ he said.’

The previous day, the Times had reported ‘Business leaders press for single market withdrawal’:

‘Business for Britain will call for the nation to downgrade its relationship with the EU and become part of a customs union instead… The plans would allow Britain to avoid tariffs when trading with Europe, while not having to sign up to various rules which harmonise business conditions across the 28 member countries. If a future government managed to negotiate such a change, it would put Britain in a similar trading position to Turkey.’

Business for Britain, the Times explained, ‘claims to have the backing of 500 influential figures, including FTSE 100 directors and the owners of smaller businesses. They include Sir Stuart Rose, chairman of Ocado, Richard Burrows, chairman of British American Tobacco, and Ian Cheshire, chief executive of Kingfisher, parent company of B&Q.’ Other backers are Lord Wolfson, CEO of Next, John Caudwell, founder of Phones4U, Sir Rocco Forte, executive chairman of Rocco Forte Hotels, Tim Martin, chairman of pub group JD Wetherspoon, and Charlie Mullins, managing director of Pimlico Plumbers.

It is easy to see what these have in common: they are all bosses of firms producing for the home market. The exception is BAT but they want to push their risky product in developing countries where restrictions on its sale are less than in Europe.

The same relationship to the EU as Turkey? The CBI has already rejected the even less distant relationships of Norway and Switzerland. Its director-general, John Cridland, had an article in the Times (4 July) headed ‘In or out, Britain has to play by Europe’s rules. Norway and Switzerland pay the costs of membership with no say over EU laws. That’s a bad deal for UK businesses.’

This dispute within the British capitalist class has no class interest for workers. Whether British capitalism is in or out of the EU will make no difference to their position as a class forced to work for a wage or a salary and won’t affect the problems they face either way.

So, if the referendum ever comes, you won’t find us joining with the xenophobic right and the xenophobic left to line up behind Ocado, B&Q, Next, Phones4U, Wetherspoons, Pimlico Plumbers and other firms producing for the home market in saying No2EU. We’ll be advising workers who understand their class position to write ‘World Socialism’ across their ballot paper.

Between the Lines: Distorting Marx (1988)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Distorting Marx

You will notice that whenever a TV company chooses to make a film about the meaning of Christianity it hires a Christian to do the explaining. Likewise, when we see TV programmes about motor cars they tend to be introduced by car drivers, not by cyclists who are fundamentally opposed to motor transport or pedestrians who have never sat behind a car steering wheel. Not so when it comes to discussing Marx. To speak about this subject on TV requires different qualifications. Marx is usually spoken about by ex-"communists" who used to belong to the non-communist Communist Party, or by anti-Marxists, or by academics who think that Marx might have been right - about some things - but then again - he might have been wrong - perhaps. In short, the one qualification which is certainly not required when it comes to discussing Marx on the telly is agreement with what the man said, less still, commitment to do anything about it.

So, the new Channel Four three-part series, The Faith of Marxism (Saturdays, 6.30-7pm) came as no great surprise. It is presented by Professor David McLellan who is described - wait for it, now - as "the world's leading Marxologue" and a "practising Roman Catholic" who was training to be a Jesuit priest and now serves as advisor to the British Catholic bishops. And who are the guests whose assistance has been solicited by this mixed-up academic to help him make his point? Firstly, Denis Healey, whose claim to be interviewed is that he used to a Marxist in the 1930s when he joined the Stalin-loving Communist Party while at Oxford University. He decided to leave because "Marx said nothing about the arts". Also interviewed in the first programme in the series (4 June) was Sir Alfred Sherman (ex-CPer and now zealous Thatcherite), a Roman Catholic ex-CPer, Ken Gill of Tass who left the CP because it didn't accept the Tass (as in Tass News Agency) line sufficiently, and Bea Campbell who is a member of the Communist Party's Marxism Today-Young Liberals tendency.

McLellan contends that Marxism is a new religion. In common with religion it has elaborate symbols (banners) and rituals (rallies); it has its Bible (the works of Marx); it settles disputes all too often by reference to the doctrinal texts; and it has its heretics, that is, those who interpret Marxism differently from the leaders. This is a fair criticism of most people who claim to stand for Marxism. It is true that Marxism has been turned into a dogmatic religion which has little to do with the intellectually dynamic and doubting approach of Marx himself. But then, as a Roman Catholic, McLellan is in no position to attack those Leftists who have made a secular religion out of fragments of Marxist thinking. Either one is opposed to religion and to dogma - as The Socialist Party is - or none favours it - as McLellan, the supporter of the Catholic catechism does. There is no particular reason why Professor McLellan, together with his invited interviewees, should not use up three programmes spouting their anti-Marxist prejudices. But when such distortion is all that TV puts out about Marx it is time to ask whether there is not a clear policy that Marx will only be represented on TV on condition that his essential ideas are distorted beyond recognition.

A few years ago McLellan was invited to debate with the present writer on the subject of what Marx really meant. He admitted then that he had learnt a lot and that he respected The Socialist Party as the only true Marxists in Britain. Not long after that the same Professor McLellan debated ina large hall in Islington against another member of The Socialist Party on the question of the relationship of religion to Marxism. In that meeting he was presented with a clear explanation of the materialist conception of history, which is the basis of the non-religious outlook of this party. Given that those two events occurred (both tape-recorded), why did McLellan not consult for interview the one political party in the country which he regards as truly Marxist and which he knows is coherently anti-religious? If he failed to call upon The Socialist Party because he knew that, unlike his chosen guests, we would shatter to pieces his thesis that Marxism is a religion, then McLellan is dishonest. If, on the other hand, he did wish to interview us - to hear our side of the argument, as good academics are taught to do before intoxicating themselves with the soundness of their own certainties - and his producers at Channel Four would not allow him to do so, we shall expect him to have the courage to admit that. This column will be sent to Professor McLellan and by his response can our readers judge him.

On the same night as McLellan's three-parter commenced, another epic of distortion, Reid About the USSR (C4, 8pm) began a series of three hourly programmes. The presenter is one Jimmy Reid, ex-Communist Party member and hero of those gullible enough to make heroes out of strike leaders. Reid now writes a column in The Sun, Murdoch's scab paper. Most of the first programme showed Reid rushing around the Russian Empire admiring the new entrepreneurial spirit of perestroika. It seems they are soon to be opening private clinics for those who can afford to buy superior health treatment, and the government is giving grants to "co-operative" businesses which are out to make profits. Reid was quite happy to describe all of this as Marxism in practice. Why not? It seems that any old fool with any old illusion is free to stand in front of a camera and describe any old dictatorship as Marxist, as long, of course, as he is an ex- pr a non-Marxist.

War and censorship

In its relentless urge to emulate the Gestapo, the British state put pressure on the BBC not to show the TV film Tumbledown (Monday, 31 May, 9.30pm, BBC1). The film, written by Charles Wood, was based upon the reminiscences of an army officer who had been disabled in the Falklands war. In the end the BBC succumbed to pressure and censored 12 seconds of the film - a part in which a British officer was shown to act in a reckless and cowardly fashion. Interestingly, the censors did not choose to remove the really offensive moment of the film where the officer is shown beating to death an Argentine soldier, who lay on the ground pleading for his life. This murder did actually place. The British state obviously is not ashamed of such vicious killing: indeed, the Prime Minister invited us at the time to "rejoice" in such actions, and she went on to win the 1983 election on the strength of the corpses of that slaughter.

The point of the film was to invite sympathy for this killer officer who, after having 40 per cent of his brain blown out and being disabled for life, felt cheated when he returned to Britain was was treated as an embarrassment. Such a murderer will receive no sympathy from these quarters. The film depicted him as a loathsome Hooray Henry when he was in the officer corps before the war began and as a foolishly indoctrinated state thug when he was out there. That he is now treated as a leper by those who paid him to blow people up and beat them to death is his problem. If you don't want to end up as a cripple, you don't join the war forces. Our sorrow is reserved for those wage slaves killed and maimed when they did not choose war, but have had no alternative but to fight as conscripts or fall victims as innocent bystanders. The censors of Whitehall will never succeed in stopping the horrors of war from being shown, as long as the cause of war exists the relics of war will be walking, hobbling and lying in hospital beds as living monuments to the madness of the system which the censors serve.

Neil tried his best

On This Week, Next Week (Sunday, 5 June, 1pm, BBC1) the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, said that there is nothing wrong with the profit motive, that Labour could run capitalism well and that of course Labour is in favour of the market because it's the only possible way to distribute goods. He did not imply these ideas, he stated them, as explicitly as is possible when you are incapable of saying anything simply. He also said - quite explicitly - that there has never been anyone who has seriously advocated the abolition of the market. The Socialist Party stand for precisely that, and has shown why the abolition of the buying and selling system is the only way to achieve socialism in ways so simple that even Kinnock should be able to understand. If he would like to find out about the case for free access he should write to us and we will contribute to the early stages of his socialist education. Kinnock locks increasingly like an apprentice at the Stock Exchange - a working-class kid who's made it to an apprenticeship and is trying to impress his elders and betters that, although he still eats his peas with his knife and only went to a provincial university, he really is just the lad to run their errands and do their bidding. Neil Kinnock really is a pathetic sight - a reformist without even the rhetoric of radicalism; a jabbering repeater of Stock Market slogans. He and his party and its policy review are pathetic, intellectually empty and equipped with principles which give second-hand car dealers a bad name. In fact, has anybody thought of asking him to make a series of programmes about Marxism?

Steve Coleman

Winstanley (2013)

Book Review from the April 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gerard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy, by John Gurney. Pluto Press, 2013 £12.99

This is an excellent new book providing a brief history of the life and times of Gerard Winstanley, the seventeenth century utopian communist. Enough historical context and biographical detail is provided to get to grips with the subject without becoming too immersed in academic debates and a sense is given of the contested nature of Winstanley’s legacy.

One of the points raised by Gurney is that Winstanley was virtually unheard of for over two centuries after his digger writings. British political radicalism up to the latter half of the nineteenth century emphasized the contribution of the Levellers and the defender of parliament against the crown, John Hampden, to political democracy. Winstanley’s legacy was mainly focused on his possible contribution to Quakerism. This all changed, however, with the rise of Marxian revolutionary socialism which led to an interest in Winstanley’s communism and his rise from historical obscurity. It was the German social democrat, Eduard Bernstein who, in 1895, revived Winstanley’s reputation as an early proponent of ‘communistic utopia’ in his Cromwell and Communism. 

Today the situation is somewhat reversed and Winstanley is probably the most celebrated radical figure of the English Civil War period. In fact, he is probably emphasised beyond his historical importance – the subject of numerous academic studies and celebrated as a ‘forerunner’ of socialism, anarchism, libertarianism and back-to-the-land activism.  Winstanley’s legacy is disputed ground but he cannot with any seriousness be regarded as an early proponent of any of these later social movements. Winstanley responded to the world around him with the intellectual tools available to him. He suffered financial misfortune during the turmoil of the Civil War and his angst was expressed through visionary, millenarian, religious mysticism. The social function of religion was fiercely criticized and future salvation rejected in favour of a religion of conduct on earth. Reason, for Winstanley, was synonymous with God and covetousness, competition and false dealing resulted from private property and money. The solution he proffered was a social transformation based on the abolition of private property and money and their replacement with common ownership and working in common. Remaining a mystic, social and political experience led him to a materialist conclusion cloaked in religious language – material equality would not come from spiritual enlightenment but precisely the reverse; true religion could only emerge from material equality on earth. After the Civil War period Winstanley withdrew from activism and became a settled and respected local landowner, tradesman and Quaker. 

One of his most repeated quotes is: ‘Words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.’ Ironically his actions came to nothing and it is his words and writings that have survived for posterity. His practical efforts, which involved cultivating common land with fellow Diggers near Cobham in Surrey, failed to attract support. Instead of sympathy, the Diggers faced extreme opposition and violence from the local population on two fronts. First, they were attacked several times whilst at a site on St. George’s Hill by locals who used the common to graze cattle and sheep.  Second, when they had moved closer to Cobham, they were attacked by the lackeys of the local gentry and they were again subject to violence, including the destruction of houses built by the Diggers. They were forced after just over a year of strenuous effort in the face of vitriolic hostility to give up their practical activity. Their plight is summed up by another of Winstanley’s oft-quoted writings: ‘For freedom is the man that will turn the world upside downe; therefore no wonder he hath enemies…’

It is possible to see in Winstanley’s writings the rudiments of the Marxian concepts of alienation and the labour theory of value. This is, though, to see him through the lens of future developments. He was not a forerunner of Marxian socialism but the turbulence of the English Revolution did lead him to lay down writings which offered up a communistic utopia as the solution to the social and economic challenges he faced.  The historical turn away from celebrating constitutional political radicalism and towards Winstanley’s communism is interesting and positive. Unfortunately many of the most vocal celebrants of Winstanley, such as The Land is Ours and other land reformers, do not do justice to the depth of the ambition of his communism. A recent interesting development is an annual Digger’s festival in Wigan (Winstanley’s birthplace). This year is the third such event, to be held on 7th September (wigandiggersfestival.org).

Colin Skelly

Broken glass (1986)

A Short Story from the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trevor was in the office, standing by Eileen's desk. He was giving her the detailed costs of the glazing in the shop extension that the company had just finished building. Through the windows he could see into the glazing shop where his men were working. Old Len was tidying the racks of glass at the back of the shop, moving large sheets around with the speed and safety which came as second nature after years in the trade. Jack, helped by young Adrian, was trimming large sheets of plate glass on the cutting table for a set of shop windows.

Although they must all have heard the small street door open, none of them looked up at the head that peered inside.

"Bloody 'ell! Excuse my French," Trevor said to the two women in the office. "It's one of them."

The head was certainly unusual - old-fashioned even. It belonged to a man about thirty-five years old, but he had long blond hair down around his shoulders. It did not look very clean or tidy, and it was made worse by the large brown bloodstain on the cotton scarf he wore as a headband. And Trevor had seen him only the evening before.

Eileen did not get up to look. She said, "What do you mean, 'one of them'?"

"Oh, sorry, that convoy of hippies, or whatever they are, that went along the bypass yesterday. The police broke them up - didn't they just!"

The manager came out of his office looking redfaced.

"Trevor!"

"Yes, sir?"

"Have you got an estimate for me on that Collinson job yet?"

"That's the factory rooflights? I gave you an estimate last Thursday."

"You know I can't give that to head office. They made it clear that it's got to be a cheap job. Old man Collinson's a friend of our Company Chairman. He wants to do him a favour. Can we do it?"

"The only way we can cut the price any more is by underpaying the men. You know that."

"I'm not concerned how you do it. Can it be done? Can I tell them yes - or not?"

Trevor was used to being cornered like this, and he had evolved his technique for getting out of trouble. Even so, he began to sweat slightly as he tried to respond coolly. 

"Well, I'll ask them, of course."

"All right, but time's getting short. He wants to know today."

"All right! I'll ask 'em."

"If you want my opinion, you 'ask 'em' too much. You should try telling 'em. You're the foreman!" He turned back into his office and shut the door.

"Yes, sir." said Trevor quietly, narrowing his eyes slightly  as he looked at the blank door. He could have given vent to his anger in front of Eileen, the accounts clerk. She was a mature woman of about forty-five, and she had no more love for the boss than Trevor had. But young Caroline, the manager's secretary, shared the office, and she would tell him every wood.

The hippy was standing inside the door, waiting for someone to notice him. He was wearing wide bottomed blue jeans, faded almost white, but yellowing on the thighs, and an embroidered blue jean jacket with the sleeves torn out and the torn edges fringed. His bare arms were almost covered in tattoos.

After several quick glances in the direction of the office, Len turned round and came forward. "Yes?" he said.

"What's the cheapest glass you sell?"

"Horticultural - greenhouse glass."

"How much is it?" The man's accent sounded to Len like Tyneside.

"Well," he puffed, rather impatiently, "it partly depends on how you want it cut. But it works out about fifty pence a square foot."

The hippy nodded thoughtfully. Then he asked, "Do you sell any flexible sort of putty? Y'know - stuff that stays a bit rubbery."

Len was frowning and making little grunting noises in the back of his throat. "What's it for?" he asked.

"Well - a bus."

"A bus! Oh, no! You want rubber mouldings for that. And safety glass."

"Yes, I know, but . . . " He looked very embarrassed.

From inside the office, Trevor could not hear what was being said. It was obvious, however, that this was another messy problem and he wanted to avoid it if possible. He checked a sudden urge to go out and get rid of the man. He would probably have been rude to him - just because the manager's spite still rankled. The man looked embarrassed, on the defensive. He probably would not have fought back. Trevor had taught himself not to pass these things on to his men. but he realised that he was still capable of doing it to a customer, a perfect stranger.

Eileen got up and went over to the filing cabinet, only  so that she could see into the workshop. "What a scruff!" she said. Len was coming towards the office. There was no escape. Trevor struggled to decide what his attitude towards the man should be, in front of his own workmen, when in the next few minutes he would have to ask them to do several hours of unpaid work.

"Trev, would you have a word with this chap, please? Apparently, he's got broken windows in a bus." Len would not look Trevor in the eye. He was ready to slip away, once Trevor had accepted the problem, but Trevor would not let him. As he walked slowly across towards the hippy, he turned Len with him, asking, "Has he been to a windscreen firm?"

By now, the man could hear the question. By now, Jack and Adrian were hardly pretending to work at all. They wanted to see  - and particularly to hear - what was going to happen. As Trevor looked at him, the man answered the question.

"They won't do it. It's out of date. The bus is twenty years old. And it would have cost an arm and a leg." He looked round at their expressionless faces, his body getting ready to leave, defeated. Then he added, "Anyway, it's not just the bus - all the vans - eighteen windows, side windows, all together."

"You're from that 'peace convoy' aren't you?" Trevor said. He frowned round at the others. They were frowning, puzzled.

"I saw your windows get broken - yesterday, wasn't it - up on the Common?"

"What happened?" Adrian asked.

"The police wrecked us," the hippy said.

"I don't believe you!" said Adrian. He looked to Trevor for support.

"It's true," Trevor said. "A lot of people besides me stopped and watched it."

"Where was this?" Jack asked curtly, groping for the reasonable explanation which, he was sure, was there, somewhere.

"On the bypass - Bentley Common," said Trevor.

"Oh, well, that's it, isn't it?" said Jack. "There's no camping allowed on the Common. There's always trouble over that."

"We weren't camping," said the hippy. "We weren't even going on there. We were heading south. The police diverted us on to that piece of land. We didn't know what for, to begin with. They just blocked the road and directed us on to the grass. Then the Transit van opened up, and they all jumped out with their truncheons and smashed everything they could get at."

"Including your head, by the look of it," said Len.

"Yeah," he said, looking at the floor and scraping it with the toe of his boot. "They were dragging the babies and the girlfriend out. And I thought I could stop them."

Adrian was incensed. He turned on Trevor. "Why didn't you people try to stop the bastards?" The older men looked at one another, knowing that his question was unfair, but unable to answer it properly because they felt a certain amount of guilt.

"Anyway," said the hippy, beginning to turn away at last. "I won't waste your time. I can see that it's nothing like shop windows." He nodded towards the cutting table where Jack and Adrian had been working.

"Well . . . " Jack said loudly, making the hippy pause, but not quite knowing what he was going to say next. All three men looked at Trevor, and he looked from one to the other with a worried expression on his face, remembering the Collinson job again. " . . . where's your bus now?" Jack asked eventually.

"Up on the Common. Where else? We can't really move. I think we shall be breaking the law if we take the vans on the road in that state."

"You're breaking the law by stopping overnight there," said Jack.

"What did you do last night?" asked Len. "It poured with rain about two o'clock, didn't it?"

"You can say that again!" said the hippy. "We just kept mopping up."

"Have you got the dimensions of these windows?" Trevor asked. The man pulled a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it to him.

"Christ almighty!" Trevor said. "This is about two hundred quid's worth!" He stared at the paper for a minute. Then he refolded it and put it into the top pocket of his khaki overall. Then he said to the hippy, "You realise that ordinary glass just won't do for this sort of job, don't you? It's got to be safety glass - which we don't stock - or else perspex, which is damned expensive". Trevor continued to look him straight in the eyes. The hippy did not know quite what to do. His eyes searched Trevor's face for a clue to what was in his mind.

"You've got a bank account, of course," Trevor said, nodding.

"I've got a cheque book, but  . . . "

"That's what I meant," said Trevor. "So if we could manage to find some off cuts of plastic and some sealant filler and could come out, say, this evening, you could pay on the spot by cheque, couldn't you?" He raised his eyebrows to encourage an affirmative answer.

"Well - yes."

Trevor looked at Jack and Adrian and Len. Their faces were totally devoid of expression. They were going along with it.

When the hippy had gone, still not quite certain what had really been agreed, Trevor told them about the Collinson job.

"They've got a f***ing cheek!" said Jack. "They want the 'favour' to come out of our pockets, not theirs. That's about twenty hours unpaid overtime each in that."

"Yes, it will be," Trevor agreed, "but, in these circumstances, you'd be prepared to do it for the basic pay, would you?" He looked round at their reactions. Jack opened his mouth, blinked, and then shut it again. A wry smile dawned. Then he clapped his hands together and said, "Right! Let's get that van loaded up and get out to Bentley Common. We've got an emergency job on."

Adrian looked at his face, trying to be sure what line he was taking. Jack looked the young man in the eyes and said, "I don't know what the company will do if that cheque bounces."

"Now that would be very unfortunate," said Trevor.

"It's your arse they'll kick, Trev," said Len.

"Yes," said Trevor thoughtfully, "it usually is."

Ron Cook

Labour and the Trotskyists (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

So the NEC of the Labour Party has decided to investigate the so-called Militant Tendency, a group of Trotskyites who have been boring from within the Labour Party for years; fairly successfully it seems in that they have managed to get a number of their members adopted as official Labour parliamentary candidates. Socialists normally would not get involved in this argument and couldn't care a damn whether or not the Militant Tendency is expelled from the Labour Party. We are however compelled to intervene when both sides argue about the right of "Marxists" to belong to the Labour Party.

The Labour Party is, and has always been an open-house organisation prepared to accept all comers provided they agree to vote and work for the election of Labour candidates. Which Trotskyites, even those not in the Labour Party, have always been prepared to do. But Marxists? A genuine marxist would not even think of joining a reformist, anti-working class outfit like the Labour Party, which has always supported capitalism and has many times participated in its administration, inevitably to the detriment of wage and salary earners. Which is why membership of, or voting for the Labour Party is incompatible with membership of the SPGB. They are on our list of proscribed organisations and we would consider it an honour to be on their!

The fact that Trotskyites are prepared to vote for and join the Labour Party is one of the many reasons we are opposed to them too. At one time in the 1950s and 1960s, all the Trotskyite groups in Britain - including the predecessors of the SWP and Vanessa Redgrave's comic opera "Workers Revolutionary Party"- were in the Labour Party. They defended it on a number of grounds, particularly that it was supposed to be the "mass party of the working class" and would enact a few more reforms than the Tory Party. Then, after the 1968 General Strike in France had appeared to show that students could have direct access to "the workers" without belonging to traditional reformist parties, most left to set up their own independent parties (for doing which we used to be accused by them of "sectarianism"). Most, but not all. Ted Grant and his group stayed in and, freed from their rivals, were eventually to grow relatively influential. The others, as the application of Tariq Ali to join the Labour Party shows, are beginning to think that the time may be right to start fishing again in Labour Party waters.

The Militant Tendency are Trotskyists, and of the most orthodox variety. They are ardent defenders of the absurd theory that Russia is a "workers' state", albeit of the degenerate kind. Their conception of the "socialist" revolution is a re-run of the Bolshevik coup d'etat of November 1917 with a vanguard party leading the "masses" in a violent insurrection against the government (it is not clear whether Ted Grant is to play the role of Lenin or trotsky). Thus when they proclaim a loyalty to the Labour Party they are being thoroughly deceitful. They have nothing but contempt for the Labour Party and its policy of gradual reform through Parliament. But, as we have said, that is the Labour Party's problem not ours.

As to the claim that the Militant Tendency is Marxist, we have already pointed out that the mere fact of being in the Labour Party is alone sufficient to disqualify them from the description. This also applies to their other views, from the one that the workers need leaders (a Leninist Vanguard Party - them) to their admiration for the alleged economic achievements of state capitalist Russia (whose side they would be prepared to take in any future war with the West). Needless to say, they don't know what socialism is either. This writer once heard Ted Grant say that wages would exist in socialist society. As their admiration for aspects of the Russian system indicate, they stand for a kind of state capitalism. Since the Labour Party, with its so-called "Alternative Economic Strategy" is also moving (at least on paper and for the time being, while they are out of office) in this direction, perhaps there is a place for the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party after all.

The final irony of the situation is that the Trotskyite policy of boring from within "the main party of the working class" seems to have achieved its greatest success at the very moment the workers are deserting the Labour Party in droves. The question now is: if they are expelled from the Labour Party, will they start trying to bore into the SDP?

Adam Buick

Between the Lines: Gobbledegook Time (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gobbledegook Time

It is hard to understand quite why Question Time (BBC1, Thursdays, 10pm) is so called. It should, if accuracy ever became in fashion at the BBC, be called Non-Answer Time or Evasion Time or Any Cliches or, perhaps, just plain Idiots' Hour. The format of Question Time well reflects all that is undemocratic in capitalist politics. At the front sit an invited team of "experts", all accomplished in various ways in screwing up workers' lives. The night I watched (5 March) there was Baker for the Tories, Clwyd for Labour, Carlisle for the Liberals and a journalist whose name I was not only unaware of before the programme but cannot recall a week after it.

The role of the team is to answer "questions" posed by the invited audience. The questions are selected in advance by the producer, so what is really happening is that instead of a presenter asking BBC questions to a panel of speakers the BBC is choosing the questions which the presenter would have asked anyway and allowing them to be posed by an unpaid audience whose function is to ask, not answer. The presenter  of the programme is the self-important Robin Day, a man whose pomposity is only exceeded by his stupidity.

A few years ago The Socialist Party received some tickets for Question Time and a group went along. The programme is recorded an hour in advance, so any serious dissident comment can be edited out. One of us got in a question about war which was then consumed and twisted and evaded and played with by the experts. Later in the programme the panel had reached the dizzy excitement of discussing Britain's membership of the Common Market -  arguably one of the dullest issues in twentieth century history.

Now, members of the audience are allowed to make short one - or two-line comments after the founts of wisdom at the front have had their say and on this occasion the microphone landed in front of one of our members. "I'm not in favour of the Common Market. I'm in favour of abolishing all markets" said the socialist while Day scratched his head. Abolishing all markets? This was too much of a question for Question Time to contemplate and away went the microphone as Day pointed to a well-dressed fellow at the back who looked like he could be relied upon to get us back on to the straight and narrow. Tough luck, BBC, for it was another member of The Socialist Party who got in some first-class socialist points before the microphone danced away, taking with it the chance to address millions of viewers. Back to the panel went the sound and vision: normal service had been resumed.

So what is this freedom of speech which capitalism takes such pride in? The freedom of capitalism's defenders to monopolise the means of mass communication while the advocate of the socialist alternative is given the sacred constitutional liberty to stand on a platform in Hyde Park and address those who have not been persuaded by the media that the case for socialism is not worth stopping to hear.

Pioneers of Reformism

The Saturday-night series on Channel Four, Pioneers of Socialism, was a study in failure. It told the story of four Scottish reformers - Ramsay MacDonald (Labour leader who later joined forces with the Tories), Keir Hardie (who, despite the myth in the programme that he opposed the First World War, actually offered support to recruiting workers for the army), Jimmy Maxton ( who built a career out of promising workers reforms of the wages system which were never and could never be realised) and John Maclean (whose perceptions about capitalism were swamped in 1917 by the illusions of Leninism).

Apart from the enduring historical legend about Hardie opposing the 1914-18 world war, the programmes were well-researched and made clear just how much more the pioneers of the Labour Party understood about the capitalist system than do the pathetic Kinnocks, Hattersleys and Healeys of our time. At least the men who set out to form the Labour Party thought that something vaguely radical needed to be done, even if their vagueness overcame their radicalism. But they were reformists and the great failure of this century has been the reformist claim that capitalism could somehow be humanised from the point of view of the working-class majority.

If these "pioneers" returned today what might they conclude? After well over half a century of reforms supported by their party and seven Labour governments the working class has not had even a taste of socialism. But back in the days when these "pioneers" were active there were some other pioneers, the men and women of the working class who formed The Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904 - two years before the Labour Party was formed.

Like those other pioneers before them, Marx and Engels, the early members of The Socialist Party  were young people in a hurry, certain that the awakening of their class to the need for emancipation from wage slavery was not far off. Socialists today are still in a hurry, still pioneering new and better ways to win our class to a recognition of what needs doing. It is a pity that our efforts are obstructed, not helped, by those who stand in the tradition of those bogus Pioneers of Socialism remembered on our TV screens.

Steve Coleman

Blogger's Note: See Also:

March 1961 Socialist Standard - 'The Keir Hardie Myth'