Football Wars (2012)

From the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1969 rioting by fans during a World Cup match between Honduras and El Salvador appeared to trigger a four-day military conflict –the so-called football war. In fact, the Salvadoran generals merely used the rioting as a convenient occasion for launching a planned attack on Honduras. The main cause of tension was land disputes between Salvadoran migrants in Honduras and local farmers.

Nevertheless, competitive sports like football do have connections with war. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The connections are especially striking where competing teams represent different nations and the memory of past wars is still fresh –or is artificially revived by nationalist politicians and publicists.

The Euro 2012 soccer finals, co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, offer a veritable feast of national and racial hatred. When Russia played the Czech Republic in Lvov (western Ukraine) on June 8, Russian fans threw lighted fireworks and fought Ukrainian fans. When Russia played Poland in Warsaw on June 12, Russian fans clashed with Polish fans and police, leaving 15 injured. Fans from several East European countries have made black players on West European teams targets of racial abuse. And so it goes on. 

The East European media have played their part in fomenting hatred. For example, on the eve of the Russian-Polish match Polish newspapers took care to remind their readers of the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’–the victory of Polish arms in the war of 1920 with Bolshevik Russia.

When talking about ‘football hooliganism’ it is important to distinguish between spontaneous acts by excited fans and the much more serious violence orchestrated by the gangs or ‘firms’ that are attached to many football clubs. These firms are paramilitary organizations that supply commanders, provide training in armed and unarmed combat and conduct preliminary reconnaissance of unfamiliar terrain. They are often infiltrated or even controlled by ultra-nationalist political groups that recruit among fans.

On June 13, The Sun Today described a training and indoctrination camp set up on an abandoned Soviet military base near Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine by Patriot of Ukraine –the paramilitary auxiliary of the fascist Social-National Assembly (SNA). The SNA website (sna.in.ua) –under the motto ‘Strength! Order! Wellbeing!’–explains that Patriot of Ukraine is “the revolutionary avant-garde of the Ukrainian social-nationalist movement”and was established to “purge the nation”and guard the SNA.

The SNA is related to the All-Ukrainian Union ‘Freedom’ (Svoboda), which has captured control of large areas of western Ukraine, including Lvov and other cities, and is poised to enter the national parliament. Both have their origin in the old Social-National Party, but Svoboda has cultivated a more respectable image. You can find videos of their torchlight marches through Ukraine’s cities at http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/120329/ukraine-svoboda-nationalist-party-nazi-echoes-hitler-pt-2.

The ‘national identities’ inculcated through competitive sports impart a sense of meaning and importance. They offer an illusory escape from humdrum lives. For the ‘hooligans’ there is also the temporary emotional release and addictive adrenalin rush of acted-out aggression –cheaper and perhaps less risky than alternatives such as drugs. The identity and meaning are sham, because ordinary working people live much the same lives and face much the same problems everywhere. National identities have nothing to do with real life. But they do the ruling class a great service by blocking any alternative identity rooted in real life –an identity capable of uniting working people throughout the world in the fight for a life from which we will not feel the need to escape.

Stefan

Sport and the Spirit of Capitalism (2012)

From the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today the scandal in professional cycling is doping: a hundred years ago it was racism.

Traditionally, things have tended to be difficult for the American athlete who happens also to be black. Jesse Owens, snubbed by his own President, had to travel to the 1936 Berlin Olympiad for the “warmest ovation of his life” – and a friendly wave from the Fuhrer himself – whilst a young Cassius Clay, disgusted by his homecoming reception some 24 years later, reportedly consigned his Rome Olympic Gold to the muddy depths of the Ohio. Practically unknown today, although in his time as famous as Owens or Clay, is cyclist Major Taylor. Why?

In the couple of decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century, cycling was as hugely popular in the USA as baseball or boxing. Before the arrival of the motor car and aeroplane, it was effectively the world’s fastest sport with its own galaxy of highly-paid superstars, drawn mainly from the ‘artisan classes’. However, as the century progressed this popularity steadily diminished until, by the outbreak of World War Two, it had sunk into almost total oblivion; its traditions and gladiators – particularly its black ones – forgotten.

Marshall‘Major’ Taylor – as a performing trick-cycling youngster, he sported a mock-military tunic – was born into rural Indianan poverty in 1878, his slave parents having crossed into freedom from Kentucky. Effectively adopted by a wealthy white family as companion to their only son, he spent several happy years during which he was treated, and encouraged to view himself, as racially equal. Taylor was, therefore, no Jim Crow-era ‘uppity nigger’, never having been a ‘downity’ one in the first place.

Such lifestyle gave him access to the unheard-of luxury of a bicycle, upon which machine, when he duly returned, aged thirteen, to his birth family, he displayed such prodigious competitive prowess that, allied with his acrobatic skills, he was able to turn professional some five years later.

World champion

His rise thereafter was meteoric. Within a couple of years he had won both national and world titles, broken and re-broken no fewer than seven world records – and all in the face of appalling racial hostility. With cycling’s then governing body, the League of American Wheelmen attempting an outright colour ban to supplement prevailing member antipathy, Taylor experienced frequent difficulty both entering events – and then exiting them in one piece. Under the noses of prejudiced officials, he was routinely fouled and assaulted, at best having to single-handedly overcome the combined efforts of the entire field. Spectators and journalists, however, loved this gutsy, stylish rider – “the few hissed: the many cheered” – and promoters, recognising his box office appeal, welcomed him.

A devout Baptist, Taylor’s refusal to compete on Sundays effectively precluded further world titles and when physically attacked his response, invariably, was to turn the other cheek – and simply pedal a bit faster. Over several years he was, unquestionably, the best short-distance cyclist on the planet, idolised throughout Europe and the Antipodes, practically unbeatable in fair competition.

Retiring in 1910, Taylor, like so many sportsmen, struggled with life-beyond-adrenalin. He entered the fledgling motor trade but proved a better cyclist than businessman. Ever-generous and charitable, his fortune slowly evaporated, his marriage foundered, his health collapsed and dying penniless in Chicago in 1932, his unclaimed corpse was accorded a segregated pauper’s burial.

So much for ‘sport’ within class-divided, socially fractured society. In truth, how could it be otherwise? With life for billions a constant struggle for basic economic subsistence or paltry reward – a rat race – its recreational elements must surely reflect this. Where winning, acquiring, surviving are the overriding imperatives, then cheating, shortcutting, colluding will inevitably follow. And anyway, the race itself is pretty well fixed – odds fiddled, running order predetermined, from boudoir (parked Bentley or park bench) to battleground (boardroom or building site).

When the rat race is over

What then, when humanity has finally transcended the rat race? With the world’s resources now the common heritage how will societal attitudes towards sport have altered and in what ways might the calibre of performance have been affected? Will there actually be competitive sport?

The great post-war Australian coach, Percy Cerutty once averred that the finest athletic displays he ever witnessed were in Aboriginal communities where, uncluttered with and unfettered by what he called “Western values” and religious hang-ups, participants deported themselves with a natural elegance and fleetness of foot, and could endure levels of pain and suffering well beyond those of their ‘civilized’ counterparts.

Replicating that in a concrete stadium would, however, have been problematic. Chucking a spear across an empty field, jumping in triplicate into a pit of sand, lumbering endlessly around a plastic track with neither tasty kangaroo up front nor hungry crocodile behind to stimulate the pace? And what use would a communistic tribesman have had for a gold medal except to dangle it on his didgeridoo?

Such issues will be, of course, for society’s members – locally, globally, varyingly – to settle. Many will doubtless see sport purely as a means of healthy exercise and recreation whether strenuous and vigorous or painstaking and skilful; others may prefer to merely spectate or do nothing.

Some competitive elements and means of recording may well of course linger: football retaining its goalposts and referees, athletics its measuring tapes and stopwatches, judo its belt and points systems, but gone surely will be the all-pervading need to defeat, vanquish and rout: the tackle above the ball, the punch below the belt, the bouncer, the beamer and the hypodermic. Imagine: the Corinthian Spirit restored; amateurism regaining its true meaning and status within sport – and beyond. Imagine: world festivals replacing international competitions; sport for sport’s sake. Imagine too: divisive national flags recycled into cleaning mops; chauvinistic anthems supplanted by…Imagine.

And if some future Major Taylor is observed swooping around a velodrome with a posse of somewhat paler gentlemen in his wake, there will be no question whatsoever of bullwhip or hood: he’ll simply be pedalling a wee bit faster.

Andrew Armitage

Running Commentary: Freddie's Fall (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Freddie's Fall

Speaking in the House of Commons on February 9, Margaret Thatcher added her trickle to the gush of praise poured on Sir Freddie Laker after the collapse of  Laker airways: "Whatever his difficulties now, nothing can take away from the great service he has done. He brought the possibility of travel to people who never dreamed they would have it."

Immediately after the crash a "Sir Freddie Friendly Fund" was set up to which thousands of members of the working class contributed in a bid to relaunch the business of the man who sold us the world. Like the pupils at some public schools who are made to say "thank you" to the master who has just beaten them, these workers were expressing a curious gratitude. Laker did not provide any "great service" for anyone, unless of course we are talking about the milking of "his" workforce to gain great wealth.

Laker services were really performed by the people who built and piloted the aeroplanes, navigated the routes, controlled the air traffic, handled the luggage and worked in the airports. What Laker actually did in this business has been described as "providing the initiative", "being the spark plug" and "organising the show". This means that he was a "good" business man: good at negotiating (arm twisting and trickery), good at managing people (authoritarian and arrogant), a shrewd operator (ruthless) and good at investing (putting ink on to cheques).

Laker Airways was established to make profits for its owners, not as a loving venture to enable poor people to enjoy visits to exotic places. The airline went into receivership with debts totalling over £210,000,000 and there is a plain similarity between its troubles and those of the Polish government. Both organisations were engaged in heavy borrowing in the middle 1970s in order to finance expansion (in 1973, Poland had the third fastest national growth rate in the world) and both were eventually unable to satisfy their creditors who had become particularly anxious with the onset of the recession.

The profit system is founded on competition and it is ironic that one of today's most outspoken worshippers of the advantages of "free enterprise" has been squashed by the system of which he was so fond.

Substitutes

The British Movement has recently formed a Women's Division. In an Organiser's Directive, BM members were told to "encourage  wives and lady friends to join and become active. Most women work for either large concerns or are out throughout the day meeting people so they are often in a better position than the men for spreading our ideas".

What ideas? Well, apart from the notions of "keeping Britain white" and "fighting Godless Communism" which are moronically repeated in slogans throughout BM publications, there don't seem to be any. A recent copy of British Tidings, the BM newsheet, does not reveal very much. We are informed that the development of the Women's Division will play a vital role in enlarging the Movement "to work in an organised way for our Country's future".

The Newsheet continues: "They will have their own uniform. For younger women there will be the very attractive British Movement jump suit in dark blue with usual badges. Party badge, England shoulder flash and where necessary, an armband." LIke the Chinese "communist" uniform, only nicer?

But what members of this organisation are supposed to discuss as they march about in uniforms is nowhere made clear.

However, if members of the British Movement share John Tyndall's view about children's education, we should not expect them to be brought up to have very much to talk about. In the National Front magazine Spearhead (October 1976) Tyndall wrote: "In every school curriculum there should be a number of hours in the week set aside for activities which should bring the young child into contact with rudimentary military procedures . . . there should be a much greater emphasis on physical fitness and the object should be to produce a hard, tough youth capable of great endurance and with a combative spirit".

Perhaps it would be cheaper and more efficient to forget books and education courses altogether and simply train the children by hitting them repeatedly over the head with blunt instruments.

Assault

Warren Hawksley is the Conservative MP who last month tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill to the effect that any male aged between 10 and 14, or young person aged between 14 and 18, found guilty of assault, provocative language or criminal damage should be liable to be whipped.

Hawksley, who no doubt had an expensive education so that his thoughts might be more sophisticated and refined than those of the hoi polloi, has even specified the instruments with which the blows should be struck: canes for children while the over-14s get the birch rod.

There are one or two points Hawksley does not make entirely clear. Will governments continue to be exempt from committing criminal damage when they authorise the production of weapons of war? Will priests and politicians continue to be exempt from provocative language charges when they tell us that our poverty is ordained by heaven or that the unemployed should solve their problems by roving round on a bicycle? Will the police and the army continue to be exempt, in practice, from charges of assault as they go about their duties?

Probably the answer to these questions is "Yes", since the institutions mentioned could not exist if they were forbidden to behave in those ways. And, speaking of the police, it was interesting to hear a police-recruit instructor advising his rookies on the subject of arrest, in a documentary last month ("Training Recruits"—Police, BBC 1, 8 February): "If you deal with working-class people they do not mind at all that much being arrested . . . but wealthy people sometimes take offence to being arrested."

Puny Benn

If you believe the mass media then you will consider Tony Benn to be a socialist of the most extreme kind. A man who wants revolution. A man who, perhaps unlike Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, wishes not to tinker with capitalism but actually to end it. In fact, Benn does talk about socialism more than most politicians in the Labour Party; but when you actually examine what he says you will discover that the change he desires is not all that radical.

Some of his "extremely militant revolutionary" followers must have been a bit put out when he appeared recently in a television interview (After Noon Plus. Granada, 29 January). For ten minutes or so, two interviewers interrogated Benn about the changes he would like to see and Benn outlined a programme of measures concerning the Welfare State, nationalisation, the Civil Service and the House of Lords.

One of the interviewers observed that this list of policies were merely a collection of individual changes: "You are widely regarded as a revolutionary, is it fair to call you that?" Benn rubbed his chin and thought carefully, while "You tell 'em Tony!" must have been shouted at thousands of television screens by proud militants. "Revolutionary change", came the reply, "it's a funny word, isn't it. No. I believe in reform."

Who gets Away?

As the "holiday season" draws closer we are bombarded from all sides with glossy advertisements advising us to forget the drabness and monotony of workaday life for a while and get away from it all. The popular idea of a pleasurable break from wage slavery is to be herded into buses and planes, shunted to sunshine and shingle for a couple of weeks and then shunted back home for another fifty weeks of displeasure.

The wealthy do not have this problem—for them life is one long holiday; and while unemployment is a blight to us, worsening our living standards, unemployment for the wealthy is a reason for delight. Last year, in one of his customarily penetrating insights into the workings of society, Prince Philip said: "A few years ago everybody was saying "We must have more leisure—everybody's working too much'. Now that everybody's got so much leisure, they're complaining they're unemployed. People don't seem to be able to make up their minds what they want, do they?" (Daily Express 11/6/81).

This year the Prince will receive a social security cheque for £160,000, excluding his free lodging in five royal palaces and his wife's two private estates, free travel on Royal planes, train and yacht and other expenses. He will not be clocking on every day, signing on every two weeks or longing for a vacation to taste paradise for a while in a two-star hotel in Barcelona.

Dick Giordano, the managing director of BOC International, is another example of a member of the wealth-owning class who will not be found yearning for a few days in each year when he can do as he pleases as long as it doesn't cost too much. It was announced last month that he had enjoyed a 76 per cent pay increase, taking his "earned" income to £477,000 a year. Meanwhile, households with a weekly income of £50 to £60 in 1979 on average spent £55.64 on holidays (Poverty in the UK, Peter Townsend). Holidays are very often cheap and short-lived bids to escape from reality. But there can be no individual escape from a social system.

Gary Jay

Letter: Capitalism and Apartheid (2014)

Letter to the Editors from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

I would question the claim made in the article ‘Where Mandela Failed’ (Socialist Standard, January 2014), thus:

‘Mandela had to let the big mining corporations operate as usual. They too had in fact been opposed to apartheid as it was impeding the normal operation of capitalism in South Africa. They wanted, and got, a non-racial capitalism.’

I think this is far too sweeping if it is intended as some kind of timeless statement of fact and buys too readily into the liberal myth that capitalism and apartheid were fundamentally at odds with each other (as Merle Lipton argued in her seminal 1985 work, Capitalism and Apartheid) and, in so doing, lends itself to an unduly mechanistic explanation for the demise of apartheid which discounts or downplays the role or political action and human agency – in particular, the township uprisings and the huge costs this imposed on the state.

Like all myths, this particular one has an element of truth in it but what is not sufficiently acknowledged is the other side of the argument. In fact, the big mining corporations – above all, the giant Anglo-American corporation – did very nicely out of apartheid and, historically speaking, were instrumental in pushing for many of the early measures that put in place the migrant labour system, which measures formed much of the legislative groundwork upon which the system of apartheid was later formally erected – like the Native Reserves policy, the Pass Laws and the imposition of poll and hut taxes to force black peasants into the money economy and so make them dependent on employment in the mines. The labour intensive nature of mining required a huge labour force and the corporations worked hand in glove with the state to ensure a steady flow of cheap black labour. Behind the shrewdly crafted image – mainly for foreign consumption, I suspect, and also to safeguard substantial foreign holdings, in the case of Anglo-American, in places like Canada and the US – which portrayed corporations, like Anglo-American, as the valiant and fearless foes of apartheid, these same corporations where involved up to their greasy necks in a cosy incestuous relationship with the racist state in which each saw good reason to cooperate with the other. The state relied heavily on the tax revenues it obtained from the mining companies while, reciprocally, the mining companies benefitted enormously from the racist repression that the state enacted.

As John Summa put it in an article appropriately entitled ‘Anglo-American Corporation – a Pillar of Apartheid’:

‘Anglo-American has an anti-labor history that involves the use of the repressive services of the apartheid security apparatus, as well as its own security personnel, to control and exploit workers. Being the world's largest private employer of black labor and the world's largest producer of gold and diamonds means Anglo is also one of the world's biggest exploiters of cheap black mine labor.’ (The Multinational Monitor, September 1988)

It was pragmatism rather than principle than governed Anglo-American's relationship with the Apartheid state. Its putative opposition to apartheid was more often than not forced upon it by the rise of worker militancy (like the wave of mineworkers strikes in the 80s)– the very thing that you downplay– than by rhetorical commitment to the so called free market. Anglo-American's call for black trade unions to be granted official recognition– like the National Union of Mineworkers– was made, not out of concern for the rights of workers, but out of expediency in the face of unofficial wildcat strikes where a mechanism of negotiation and worker self- discipline was lacking. Ironically this same NUM has become the object of much hatred and contempt among black mineworkers for siding with the authorities in the Marikana miners' strike in 2012 in which police shot dead some 44 miners.

One of the main arguments in favour of the liberal position that capitalism and apartheid were somehow fundamentally irreconcilable was that the latter made for an endemic shortage of skilled labour by restricting skilled and semi-skilled occupations to the minority white population only: the so called ‘colour bar’. The problem with this argument is that, firstly it does not apply so much to industries like mining and agriculture which remained largely labour intensive (although newer mines opened up after the WWII tended to be more capital intensive and this may have lead to some opposition to the colour bar from some of the more progressive mining companies from the 1970s onwards, but certainly not all). The article, however, conveys the impression that it was the mining sector that was in the very vanguard of capitalist opposition to apartheid which, I suggest, is somewhat misleading. Secondly, Oppenheimer himself and others in the white liberal establishment were, as a matter of fact, quite amenable to the idea of retaining the colour bar providing it could be made less restrictive. This was what lay behind the concept of the so called ‘floating’ colour bar which could be raised as and when the need for more skilled labour become more pressing and, indeed, to an extent the government went along with this idea in practice. In theory, this could have gone a long way to address the problem of skills shortages, together with the government policy of encouraging white inward migration from Europe and elsewhere but, of course, other factors intervened which are precisely the ones you have tended to overlook in your analysis.

If there is any merit in the argument you put forward here, and undeniably there is some, it would relate more to the manufacturing sector (and also, to an extent, the high skill end of the larger services sector) rather than the mining sector as such (which along with agriculture, formed the traditional twin bastions of the apartheid economy). Manufacturing became increasingly important in the post war era and it was here that the problem of skill shortages was most acute and obvious. However, even in the case of manufacturing, the relationship with the apartheid state was ambivalent, to say the least. Some branches of manufacturing, such as armaments production, ironically prospered precisely because of the imposition of sanctions against Apartheid. The same, incidentally, could be said of Anglo-American which, because of the pull out of foreign capital– disinvestment was able to massively expand its portfolio of acquisitions bought at knock down prices, including some manufacturing businesses too.

Robin Cox (by email)

Reply: 

There is no fundamental disagreement here. You make some good points which illustrate well how capitalist interests are often divided and in conflict among themselves, and how capitalist and state aims do not always coincide—Editors.

A hundred years of the Labour Party (2006)

From the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party was formed in 1904. The Labour Party didn’t come into being until two years later when a number of Labour and Liberal-Labour MPs, elected at the 1906 general election, set up a parliamentary group. We look at the Labour Party’s dismal anti-socialist performance over the last hundred years.

The 1906 General Election is memorable for two reasons. Firstly, the Liberal Party won a remarkable landslide victory, returning 400 MPs to Parliament. Secondly the fledgling Labour Representation Committee (LRC), under the leadership of James Keir Hardie, trebled its vote to gain 27 parliamentary seats, increasing its representation to 29. These dramatic gains prompted the LRC to rename itself and a little over 100 years ago, in February 1906, the Labour Party came into being.

The earlier decision to set up the LRC was a response to dire working class poverty and more particularly to the legal threat to the trade unions, which were attempting to ameliorate these conditions. Throughout the nineteenth century the state had consciously obstructed collective bargaining, even though legislation passed during the 1870s exempted trade disputes from the conspiracy laws and legalised peaceful picketing. The ‘new unionism’ of the 1880s rapidly expanded trade union representation and, combined with the success of the London Dockers’ strike of 1889, raised concerns that working people were becoming too organised and might mount a challenge to the owners’ interests. The state and employers propagated the notion that unions were synonymous with ‘socialism’, which they claimed would lead to social disintegration, and they looked to the courts to weaken emerging unionisation that might defy the domination of capital.

The trade unions became receptive to the idea of parliamentary representation shortly after the great engineering lockout in 1897-8 and then the Lyons v Wilkins judgement of 1899 which reversed the provisions of the 1876 Trade Union Act that had allowed for peaceful picketing. The 1899 Trade Union Congress proposed a meeting between union representatives, the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabians and the Independent Labour Party to seek agreement on an agenda for parliamentary representation to secure political protection for ‘free negotiation’ with employers. The subsequent conference held in February 1900 agreed that the LRC would be supported by trade union affiliation fees and it elected Ramsay MacDonald as the new organisation’s secretary.

The LRC’s first priority was survival. It was desperately short of funds and its base was extremely weak. In 1900 only 13 percent of the working class had trade union membership and only 18 per cent of these were initially affiliated to the LRC - just 41 unions with 353,000 members. The new party had no programme as such and incorporated various groups that, while calling themselves socialist, held an array of conflicting views. Calls that the organisation should be based on a ‘recognition of the class war’ or commit itself to anything beyond trade union representation were rejected. The LRC was convinced that capitalism could be humanised by reforms and refused to entertain any notion that the organisation should advocate socialism as an immediately realisable objective. Instead, its task was to reform capitalism and strive for a ‘level playing field’ to enable workers to negotiate ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ without state interference.

Trade union affiliations to the LRC were boosted after a disastrous strike in August 1900 by workers in the Taff Vale Railway Company. The workers demanded better working conditions and the right to join a trade union - the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS). The strike was broken and the employers pressed their advantage by fighting and winning a legal action for damages against the ASRS, thereby pushing the union to bankruptcy and making future union strike action virtually impossible. This threat to trade unionism served to reaffirm the LRC’s contention that only by winning political power could workers influence their conditions within capitalism, which in this case meant passing laws to reverse the court’s decision and legalise industrial action.

Despite its weakness, the LRC ran 15 candidates in October 1900 and won two parliamentary seats – Keir Hardie winning Merthyr and Richard Bell taking Derby.

To many unions, however, affiliation to the LRC was not an automatic choice. A succession of unsympathetic Conservative governments between 1885 and 1905 had compelled unions to look to the Liberal opposition for support, although by 1900 some doubts had arisen about the Liberals’ genuine commitment to trade unionism. Nevertheless many trade unions continued to support the Liberals and, in the same 1906 election that saw the LRC make its dramatic gains, 24 trade unionists were elected as Liberal MPs.

It would be misleading, however, to regard the LRC’s 1906 electoral gains as altogether surprising. They were in fact largely attributable to the organisation’s willingness to make alliances with avowedly capitalist political organisations and in particular with the Liberal Party. As an organisation pledged to maintaining and eventually administering the capitalist system, the LRC saw no inconsistency to agreeing an electoral pact with the Liberal Party in 1903, whereby the Liberals agreed to run only one candidate in certain two-member constituencies, leaving the other anti-Tory candidate to come from LRC. The Liberals were eager to avoid splitting the anti-Conservative vote and the LRC was eager to increase its influence.

The fact that such a pact was forged says much about the intentions of the LRC and the later Labour Party. The Party’s objective was to protect workers’ conditions by striving to administer the system and to give workers a ‘fair deal’ within capitalism. The LRC and Labour Party never looked beyond this objective and accordingly did everything in their power to mute any overt hostility to the capitalist system or attract opposition from the owners and their government. Ramsay MacDonald exemplified this strain of thought, arguing that the theories of Marx, the class struggle and the necessity of a politically conscious socialist working class without leaders enacting the social revolution were outdated and invalid notions. Instead, he embraced the views of Bernstein and the German ‘Revisionists’, that ‘socialism’ would come about gradually within the existing structure of society and develop as a result of the growing success of capitalism. It was therefore determined that the Labour Party’s task was to promote this success and to pass useful reforms that would theoretically steer the working class towards a distant socialist society. It was an organisation where ‘immediate demands’ within capitalism took priority over everything else.

Not unsurprisingly the first legislative measure of the new Labour Party and its Liberal allies was to reverse the Taff Vale judgement. This was achieved under the Trades Dispute Act of 1906. The Labour Party also made small amendments to the Workingmen’s Compensation Bill and the School Meals and Medical Inspections Act, but by 1907 the Party had run out of ideas and was reduced to simply accepting Liberal Party reforms. The passing of the Trades Dispute Act, however, coincided with a reduction in real wages and a rising tide of industrial disputes, and these factors encouraged further union affiliations to the Labour Party. The affiliation of the Miners’ Federation in 1909 was of major importance, since mineworkers’ votes cast in favour of the Labour Party represented potentially another 60 parliamentary seats. Potential became reality in 1918 when the Liberal electoral pact was no longer in operation.

By the end of the First World War – in which the Labour Party abandoned any class solidarity and enthusiastically supported British capitalism – it was well on its way to becoming the main opposition in parliament. Towards the end of the war the planned extension of the franchise, combined with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, prompted the Labour Party to redraft its constitution under the influence of the ‘radical’ Sidney Webb. The recast constitution included the famous Clause Four that was intended to appeal to the anticipated ‘leftward’ swing in public opinion and to draw a clear distinction between Labour and the Liberals by committing the Labour Party to nationalisation or state-run capitalism.

The Labour Party participated in minority administrations in 1924 and again in 1929, but it had to wait until 1945 – and the carnage of another World War, in which it again wholeheartedly supported British capitalism – before fully completing the transformation from trade union parliamentary pressure group to a party of capitalist rule. The 1945 Labour government is best remembered for its programme of nationalisation that was touted as solving many of the problems of working people but failed miserably to do so. It is also remembered for its welfare reforms which were presented as bringing improvement to working-class conditions of life but whose main aim was to improve the efficiency of working men and women without provoking a general wage increase. Further opportunities for Labour Party management of British capitalism occurred in 1964 under Harold Wilson, in 1974 first under Wilson again and then James Callaghan, and finally under Tony Blair from 1997.

Given its early history it is hardly surprising that the Labour Party should have developed in this way. The LRC and later the Labour Party were never organised to challenge capitalism or eradicate the irreconcilable class differences between the working class and the owning class that lives on expropriated labour by virtue of their ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. At no time in its history has the Labour Party advocated revolution for socialism, but rather, until relatively recently anyway, relied on a cynical propagation of the pretence that state-run capitalism and reforms represented ‘stepping stones’ to a socialist society.

The Labour Party consciously steered the social-democratic or socialist movement of the early twentieth century away from social revolution to a futile policy of ‘reformism’, maintaining unswerving support for the exploitation of working people, the wages system, commodity production and the private ownership of the means of producing wealth. The one-hundred-year history of the Labour Party is one of deceit and opportunism that has given a bad name to socialism and induced working people to hand political power to representatives of their class enemy to administer capitalism against the working class interests that Labour has pretended to represent.

Steve Trott

Cooking the Books: Green Recipe for Raging Inflation (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Green Party believes’, reads a resolution carried at their annual conference in September, ‘that the power to create money must be removed from private banks.’ What power, and how?

At one time ‘money’ was defined just as the notes and coins issued by the government or a central bank, but modern economists have come to include bank loans too as money. This can be confusing if it is assumed that these two types of money are the same, as is often done. For instance, the Green Party resolution says that only 3 percent of the UK’s ‘money supply’ is issued by the central bank as notes and coins, with the remaining 97 percent taking the form ‘of credit that is created electronically by private banks through the accounting processes they follow when they make loans’ (emphasis added).

This figure is correct (except that some of the 97 percent are loans made by other credit institutions) but, while the 3 percent is ‘created’ in the sense of not existing before, the 97 percent is not. It is already existing purchasing power, originally generated in production as wages and profits, which  banks and other credit institutions transfer from savers to borrowers. The Green Party resolution assumes that this too has been created from nothing and wants to transfer this supposed power to a government agency so that 100 percent of the ‘money supply’ will be under government control:

‘A Green Government will therefore develop and implement a programme of banking reform based on the following principles:

(a) All national currency (both in cash and electronic form) will be created, free of any associated debt, by a National Monetary Authority (NMA) that is accountable to Parliament.’ (http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ec#Monetary)

All money. Not that it would be ‘debt-free’ since money issued by the state is counted as part of the National Debt.

‘(d) Any new money created by the NMA will be credited to the account of the Government as additional revenue, to be spent into circulation in accordance with the budget approved by Parliament.’

That’s much easier than the government having to raise revenue by taxes or borrowing, too easy in fact as the experience of countries like Zimbabwe shows.

For this scheme to work, banks and other credit institutions would have to be banned from making loans as these are part of the modern definition of the ‘money supply’.  This isn’t explicitly stated but it follows that if alongside the activities of the NMA private banks were just to continue to make loans as before there would be a massive increase in the money supply (as most broadly defined today), with the NMA now ‘creating’ the equivalent of the 97 percent, far more fiat money than required by the functioning of the economy, on top of the activities of the private banks. Hello, Zimbabwe.

To avoid this the banks would have to be reduced to institutions which merely take in money and use it to make payments to and for depositors (or focus even more than is the case now on dodgy asset management activities). This would most likely create other economic problems, in particular depriving capitalist enterprises of a key source of funding, so slowing down capital accumulation. Maybe this is what the Green Party wants as it is opposed to ‘growth’, but under capitalism you can’t stop this without provoking an economic crisis.

Clearly, those behind the Green Party’s resolution have not thought it through, but then a party with no chance of forming the government can afford to have barmy policies.

Science, Uncertainty and the Bomb (1998)

Theatre Review from the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. National Theatre.

Michael Frayn, whose previous work has won him a trio of coveted "Best Comedy of the Year" awards (for Make and Break, Alphabetical Order, and the hilarious Noises Off), has, perhaps unexpectedly, fashioned a wonderful play about science which is full of ambiguity and paradox. Its focus is atomic physics, hardly the most accessible of subjects. But such are Frayn's linguistic skills that the audience has little difficulty in following narrative, and what emerges is a compelling play about how science is done, and the way that the scientific enterprise-like other behaviour-is mediated by the personalities of those involved. In the process Frayn has written one of the best plays about science and society that it has been my pleasure to see, and one which is marvellously realised on the stage of the Cottlesloe Theatre.

In 1941, in the Second World War, Nils Bohr, the so-called "father of atomic physics", met Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen. Heisenberg had been Bohr's research assistant in the mid-1920s, and together they had developed two of the key insights of modern atomic theory: the complementarity hypothesis (Bohr) and, especially, the uncertainty principle (Heisenberg). Uncertainty is one of those common scientific ideas (chaos is another) which has become part of the common currency of language, and in doing so has lost much of its original meaning. The uncertainty principle does not suggest that the behaviour of, for example, electrons is unknowable, but rather that "what is limited is the simultaneous measurement of connected variables such as position and momentum, or energy and time". The more precisely you measure one variable (such as the position of an electron), the less certain can you be of the value to attach to the second variable (such as "its speed").

What Frayn has done is to examine the uncertainties which lie behind Heisenberg's apparent motivations. Why did he, a German working on research into nuclear fission, journey to Copenhagen in 1941, to speak to his previous professor, a citizen of a country occupied by Germans? Drawing on biographical and autobiographical records he has fashioned a handful of separate explanations, all but the last of which have already been explored reasonably fully in various publications. Frayn doesn't suggest that our thoughts and motivations are specified as pairs of variables, but rather that a person's thoughts and motivations "cannot be established more clearly than he or she is willing to state them". Frayn wants to know whether Heisenberg (or indeed anyone else) really understands with any certainty the basis of their own thoughts and motivations.

What emerges is a picture of two scientists, previous colleagues, who find themselves caught up in the race to build the atomic bomb. (A year after their conversation in Copenhagen, Bohr was spirited out of Denmark and transported to the United States where he became a key member of the team which successfully built the first atomic weapon.) The evidence seems to suggest that Heisenberg perhaps deliberately mislead the German authorities about the difficulties which faced the research team, and as a result knowingly prevented the likelihood of Germany producing the bomb first. After the end of the war he and his team were captured by the British and brought to Britain, apparently to prevent them handing on any secrets to the French and Russians. And in a postscript Frayn describes the horror with which Heisenberg first heard of the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb. We cannot be certain but it appears that were it not for Heisenberg's common humanity either London, or Paris, or Amsterdam might have been devastated rather than Hiroshima. Such is the murderous way in which the scientific enterprise is used by capitalism. The profits of the few must always matter more than the lives of the many. About that there can be no uncertainty.

Michael Gill

Capitalism – barrier to useful work (2011)

From the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many are suffering the misery of unemployment while much useful, necessary work remains undone. One of the contradictions of capitalism. We want free time, to reduce the working day so that we can move beyond the tyranny of survival into free and creative mutual activity. Both employment and unemployment are capitalism preventing our human development in this direction.

The problems of unemployment are huge – worldwide problems affecting millions in some countries and billions globally if we include the massive numbers of 'informal' workers, those recognised as outside of the system, many of them non-persons living on the very edge of existence with no access to even the basic services.

What is this strange system that grants 'remunerated employment' to some who produce nothing worthwhile or useful for themselves and others whilst totally rejecting others who have the skills and ability to grow food, to build houses, to recycle others' rubbish, to contribute all manner of useful work? Why such a seeming imbalance between the work we can all see needing to be done but left undone and actual available work?

Given the way the world economic system is structured, we recognise the logic that requires a surplus of labour, a spare pool to be drawn on as and when required, a surplus that keeps down wages and favours the employer minority over the employed majority. But, as a member of human society, who can recognise any logic based even faintly on empathy or solidarity or common sense use of human capacities for the benefit of society as a whole?

Much of worldwide discontent and dissent is predicated around this matter of unemployment which creates unnecessary and unnatural divisions between sections of both domestic and international communities. Migrant labourers working for a pittance in lands which themselves have high domestic unemployment; migrant skilled workers enjoying artificially high wages in lands where local graduates can't find work; young people fresh out of education with little or no prospect of finding work while those wishing for retirement are told to expect to work for longer before earning such a luxury; production decimated in many developed countries because overseas underdeveloped countries have won the competition for the lowest wages.

This disconnect, this illogicality stares us all in the face. We know it makes no sense for any of us as a class, a class of workers, or would-be workers. Over the years we have experienced the circumstances getting worse, not better for many. We worry for our children, our grandchildren, the next generation, the stability of the world and the whole human race. We see the inequity (and iniquities) and worry.

The work to be done versus available work

If we were to approach the problem from a different angle we could see how to turn something totally illogical into something that would work better for everybody wherever they are in the world. Doing this would entail ridding ourselves of useless work and wasted time and effort and result in getting the work that is widely recognised as necessary to be done for the good of the people done, by the people.

It will be natural for anyone considering this topic to focus first on their own country and, in particular, their own locality, if only because this is the most familiar and best understood. However, considering at the same time the wider world in general will greatly increase individual capacity to focus on the enormity of the shortfall facing the global population, a shortfall deliberately ignored by the minority who capitalize greatly by their neglect.

This shortfall, this work needing to be done, includes all the obvious stuff seen around any location but neglected because of a different kind of shortfall, lack of funds in the individual, municipal, national or international budget. It can range from the very basic to much larger issues. Housing in disrepair for which private owners are without the means for proper upkeep, public housing which is underfunded and slums which should have been cleared long ago. Holes in the road. Leaks in classroom ceilings. Grubby town centres. Negligence with regard to the safety of the general public. Heavily polluting industries affecting air and water quality. Poor standards of safety allied to working conditions. Old, substandard, decaying or lack of infrastructure of all kinds. Shoddy public transport poorly planned to meet the needs of the greater community. Inadequate and inappropriate energy provision. Lack of local production facilities, whether food or industry. Localities not structured to meet the requirements of citizens. Health and education provision woefully inadequate with insufficient trained personnel to meet the wide and varied needs.

These examples can be expanded ad infinitum according to the local neighbourhood or the wider regions of the globe. The one thing they have in common is that there is much work waiting to be done that, in all likelihood, will not get done for a very long time, if ever, within the constraints of capitalism. The logic of the capitalist system is that profit must be considered above all else, society's needs are a poor also-ran.

Useful work is manifold and includes the production and distribution of material goods and food, scientific research and development, aesthetic and artistic endeavours, service of all kinds including installations, communications, infrastructure, maintenance, health, education, recreational, technological and social; producing and providing the goods and services required and needed by society as a whole on an ongoing basis.

As unemployment figures reach ever higher it must point to the fact that there just isn't enough remunerated work available. Meanwhile, if a comparison is made of the above work waiting to be done with much of the worthless, useless work currently being undertaken for remuneration by millions worldwide it begins to become clear just what a crazy system we are operating within. Work that offers no product, service or benefit to society must surely be considered useless work. What cannot be considered useful or necessary includes all the jobs currently involved in the huge financial industry; jobs which are tied to the movement of money from one place or person to another.

Being considered unnecessary because they produce nothing of use, provide no useful service and are of no benefit to society a large number of institutions would be redundant. All banking establishments, insurance companies, tax collection, benefits and pension offices, to name a few, would no longer be required and, as a consequence, many buildings would be freed up for use to be decided upon by civil society whilst technicians, office and other associated staff would be available for more people-beneficial work schemes.

The worker – employment or meaningful occupation?

When we consider in detail the vast range of tasks undertaken by humanity of blue or white collar variety – manager, foreman, labourer, part-time, full-time, self-employed, indentured, casual, indoor, outdoor, on land, sea or in the air – all are employed in order to fulfil the same requirement, their ongoing needs. All require regular remuneration in order to feed and clothe themselves and their dependents and keep a roof over their heads.

We must wonder why then, in some quarters, there is still a derogatory slant to the use of the term 'worker'. For what is it in reality but a misunderstanding of one's own position in the scheme of things? Whether labourer or architect, hairdresser or world-famous model, cashier at a supermarket or hedge fund computer screen minder, BMW production line worker or BMW owner – whoever must work on a regular ongoing basis in order to live, whatever the size of their remuneration, is a worker. S/he works. S/he is a member of the working class. Anyone not convinced should ask themselves how long as an individual they can afford to be out of work and without pay before their own personal crisis happens?

Isn't it ridiculous, too, that there are still those who can't recognize the different but equal importance of all contributions to society? Who's to say what or who is more important or necessary to society's functions when we know that (a) even if we wanted to we can't all do everything, all the tasks that are needed in our lifetime because we all have limited skills and time, (b) we would suffer as a society without all the seemingly menial, dirty, dangerous or difficult tasks being taken care of and (c) as individuals we don't want to be denigrated or undervalued for our own contribution. When we acknowledge these terms we are also ready to accept all others' contributions as valuable too. Apart from not being able to do everything, most of us probably don't want to have to do everything, preferring to have the time to engage in the things that take our individual fancy, interest or passion; time that the majority do not have at their disposal now.

'Not enough jobs to go around!' This is the mantra. Of course there are! In a global socialist society unemployment will be a word confined to the history books. In a world of voluntary work and free access to goods and services, when society is structured deliberately and logically to do the work that we, the people, declare to be necessary and important, there will be ample occupation for all, liberating us, at last, to forsake individual advantage in favour of the common good now and into the future.

Janet Surman

Dreaming of the future (2014)

Book Review from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poor Man's Heaven: The Land of Cokaygne and Other Utopian Visions by Omasius Gorgut, Past Tense, 2012. 134 pages.

The Land of Cokaygne was a Middle English poem, the word 'Cokaygne' from Old French 'cocaigne', probably meaning ’cake’. Thomas Aquinas had emphasised hierarchy, private property and class divisions as the natural order of human society. Eden was lost, entry to heaven restricted by Church teaching, therefore Cokaygne was a land of no work, free access, common ownership, peace, happiness, and social justice. Cokaygne was a utopia for the serf offering relief from labour and the struggle for food in a hostile natural world where a bad season might mean absolute famine. Peasants looked to a lost communist golden age. 

AL Morton saw Cokaygne as 'arising from lower class self-awareness in terms of class conflict'. Gorgut sees the Peasant's Revolt as 'serfs … becoming aware of their servitude.' John Ball preached 'have your reward both on earth and in heaven. For I say that earth and heaven are not two but one, when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature.' Gorgut writes 'a land with no lords, no clergy, no serfs, but equality under God and the king, confirm that many of the poor believed a Return to Eden was achievable in this life.'

Millenarianism was rife but what was coming to an end was not the world but a mode of economic production, i.e. feudalism. With the rise of capitalism moralising enters into the world of Cokaygne reflecting bourgeois protestant morality evident in the Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting The Land of Cockaigne with its portrayal of gluttony and sloth.

German peasant leader Thomas Müntzer attempted to establish Cokaygne declaring 'All property should be held in common’, and in the English Revolution Digger Gerrard Winstanley wrote of the 'the Earth as a Common Treasury'. Gorgut writes of America 'elevating the New World to Cockaygne-like stature' with the community of Merry Mount, Massachusetts where 'settlers, runaway slaves and servants and native Americans lived together communally, brewing excellent beere and dancing around an 60 foot maypole. This attempt to blend old world carnival fun with practical race-mixing and egalitarianism was denounced by puritan pilgrims who feared and hated everything wild and free.'

American hobo songs of the early twentieth century such as The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Poor Man's Heaven evoked Cokaygne. They still found resonance in the 1980s when The Big Rock Candy Mountain was sung by Tom Waits in the 'hobo' film Ironweed, Rudy Wurlitzer made the film Candy Mountain, and the Indie band The Motorcycle Boy sang their own lyrics to Big Rock Candy Mountain: 'dancing with the working man, looking for the big rock candy mountain.'

Gorgut closes his book with a quote from Hal Rammel: 'Liberated from the everyday, we dream of the world's limitless possibilities, the pleasures of life, and the bountiful earth, one day free for all.' 

Steve Clayton

Why We Want Socialism (1927)

From the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Old people tell us how lucky we are living in an age when the aeroplane and the steamer and the express train bring America as near to London as Edinburgh used to be. We see moving pictures of tigers in the jungle and natives living in uncivilised ways. We read every day in the papers of fresh marvels in the way of machinery—and yet we have to work hard, or look for work, and keep a watchful eye on a doubtful future—just as our forefathers did before the age of steam, gas and electricity.

In spite of all the marvels man has contrived, we still live near enough as of old, a life of struggle and poverty, with a little joy thrown in.

The reason for this is the same as it used to be. As of old the people who work do not own the things that they make, nor the tools that they work with, nor the land that they live on. The things that are made and the tools and the land are owned mainly by a group apart, the rich people who do not work, but live on the money they get from the shares they hold in companies. To buy enough shares in a company to be of any real use, requires a great deal of money, and as working people generally only earn enough to provide themselves with the most urgent of the things they need, the chance of a worker passing into the rich class of owners is remote.

The things that are made to-day, clothes, houses, food and so on, are not made simply because they are useful, though, of course, if they were not needed they would not be made at all. The real reason why such things are made is because they can be sold, and the company selling them make a profit. That is why we read in the papers of this or that company making good or bad profits. And that is why we read of houses falling down, accidents happening, bad food, and bad clothes being made, because the owners of the companies do not care what they make so long as they make good profit.

Now, if the only way of making things was by a rich class of people setting poor people to work, then there would be nothing to grumble about. But who gave the rich their power and their wealth? There is no law of some supernatural power that lays it down that one man shall be born rich and another poor. As the music-hall song used to run, "We all came into the world with nothing, and we can't take anything out."

The pictures we see at picture shows often give us views of natives who know not master and man. People who club together to make the things that are needed, and then distribute what they make to those who need. Why, then, can't we do the same on a much larger scale? Masters are only needed where despots must be served, where there is an oppressed class to be kept in subjection. Just as an allotment holder cultivates his little plot without a master to push him or a shareholder to draw a dividend, so the whole of the people of the world can cultivate the earth in harmonious societies, and reap its fullness in community when once they make up their minds to do so.

Gilmac.

Pathfinders: The Speed of Enlightenment (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone interested in physics yet curmudgeonly enough to hate UK TV’s newest scientific celeb Brian Cox must be having a miserable time of it at the moment. The nation’s favourite teen-throb professor is enjoying a quantum celebrity, appearing almost everywhere simultaneously on live gigs, radio and TV, as well as the Christmas hot-selling bookshelves. Mathematics has its amenable Marcus de Sautoy, archaeology its balding Baldric, but physics has wormed its way into the nation’s Higgs Bosom with a photogenic superstar who unlike most celebs actually knows what he’s talking about. The secret of Brainy Brian’s success is not that he’s especially good at explaining physics, because he isn’t, and in fact often overreaches himself.

Nor is it his disarming aura of schoolboy innocence, which he wears in the full knowledge that whenever he says ‘Big Bang’ half the adoring audience are thinking of something other than cosmology. The real reason is most likely that science, and especially physics, is downright intimidating for most people, but it’s hard to be intimidated by the man who co-authored New Labour’s diabolically cheesy election song even if he is a professor of particle physics. It’s well known that any science book with an equation in it will not sell. People take fright at anything that looks difficult. But with Cox in charge, things can only get better.

Back in olden days when it was assumed that science was interesting in itself, and when there were only 4 channels and no internet, TV presenters could afford to be eccentric. There was no image to promote, no need to look cool and sexy, and oddball characters like James Burke, Magnus the Windmill Pyke or lisping David Bellamy were anything but. The only ones left of this old school are Patrick Moore, the Churchill of astronomy, orbiting a TV black hole for fifty years, and St David Attenborough, the only man ever to be canonised by popular consent while still alive.

Today science doesn’t just have to combat the aggressive ignorance of increasingly influential religious zealots, it also has to combat the fickleness and attention-deficit disorder of a fast-food media audience which is perpetually dazzled for choice. In TV, if the target demographic doesn’t like the message, you do shoot the messenger. As this column has noted before (April 2011), studies show that people accept or reject facts depending on who is delivering them. So no wonder science is getting a shot of showbiz pizzazz.

But there’s no doubt that people are interested, when one considers the recent hoo-ha about faster-than-light neutrinos and the more recent hubbub over the Higgs quasi-result. There is a demand for understanding, if it can be made accessible enough, proof that contrary to the fears of Dawkins Doomsayers the Enlightenment is not about to perish beneath Dark Satanic Forces. Perhaps, in a world of discredited politicians, bent journalists and coppers, kiddy-fiddling priests, venal financiers and vacant know-nothing ‘reality stars’, scientists are seen as the last real deal, the only experts left with any authenticity, genuinely interesting things to say, and no squalid private agendas.

Add these credentials to youthful good looks, and it’s easy to see why Brian Cox and others are getting the star treatment. Now they are playing ‘stadium gigs’ as if they were rock stars, lecturing audiences amid music and comedy about biology, chemistry and quantum mechanics.

At a recent Uncaged Monkeys gig it was debatable if the audience grasped fifty percent of it. It wasn’t so bad when Ben Goldacre did a session denouncing drug companies for not releasing test results, since this was a purely political argument, or even when Simon Singh did a presentation on probability theory, since there wasn’t a shred of mathematics in it. But here was the problem: where the show was comedy there was no content, and where there was content it was no fun. Brian Cox soon reminded audiences why he’s a professor, with an eye-glazing exposition of proton gradients in submarine black smokers that had half the audience secretly ordering Modafinil and other alleged IQ enhancers on their iPhones. Even Tim Minchin, brought in to leaven the stodge with music and comedy, managed to look slightly fearful.

Tim Minchin, a kind of latter-day Tom Lehrer with eyeliner, explains in a recent New Scientist interview why he likes to incorporate militant pro-science and atheism into his material (16 November). The interview strikes an odd discordant note when he is quoted as saying: ‘It is entirely appropriate to appeal to authority, in life. For pragmatic reasons, you can’t know everything. If you say 90 per cent of scientists believe this, that’s an appeal to authority. [...] Your job is to figure out what a good authority is.’

Of course he’s right, up to a point, but it would be easy to take the wrong lesson from this. It’s no good replacing one set of priests with another. Science can and should be participative, and you don’t need to be an expert to think scientifically. One organisation which makes this clear in a practical way are the Sceptics in the Pub, a national network of 25 groups to date which meet in pubs to discuss topics of general interest, including the debunking of pseudoscientific claims. It’s a fast growing new pub game that anyone can play, and another healthy sign that capitalism hasn’t managed to brainwash critical thought clean out of us.

If only the same could be said of politics, which is another theatre where there is a large passive audience and a small troupe of actors. Given the way that politics is routinely conducted, it’s no surprise that people have no respect for it. But this removes the will to understand what needs to be understood about how the world works, and this is why radical opposition to capitalism is dogged with misconceptions and circularities. Socialists try to operate in the same way that scientists do, by looking dispassionately at evidence without prejudging the conclusions, by testing theories with prediction, and by challenging assumptions, including their own. It’s not always easy to do, but it’s not that hard either, and it’s a refreshing way to think, compared to the vacuous sloganeering of the Left. In socialist politics, as in science, one can always be learning, and one should always be participating. When people start approaching politics the same way they do science, it won’t take photogenic young celebs to tell them what needs doing with capitalism.

Erratum
Re January Pathfinders, Brian Cox writes: “Good article. Only one fact check. I didn’t co-author Things Can Only Get Better. It was written by Peter Cunnah and Jamie Petri.” Apologies for the grievous misattribution.

The fall of the ILP (2007)

Book Review from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Failure of a Dream. The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World War II. By Gidon Cohen, Tauris. 2007.

In 1932 the ILP, which had been founded in 1893 and had been instrumental in setting up the Labour Party, voted at its annual conference to disaffiliate from Labour and to set out to establish itself as a leftwing, indeed “revolutionary socialist”, alternative to it. Cohen (a former Socialist Party member as he acknowledges in his introduction) recounts in this book what happened afterwards.

The first thing to happen was that the Stalinists tried to take over the party. With some success. They got the ILP to favour Workers Councils (soviets) as the agent of change, to regard Russia as a “Workers State” on the way to “socialism”, and to commit itself to eventual unity with the Communist Party. In 1935, however, Moscow ordered its agents in the Western Labour movement to change policy and to advocate reliance on the League of Nations (previously, the ‘League of Bandits’) and to agitate for a “Popular Front” of all anti-fascists including Liberals and dissident Tories instead of a “United Front” of workers’ organisations.

The ILP stuck to the old policy and the Stalinists left to join the Communist Party. From then on the ILP was situated to the left not just of the Labour Party but of the Communist Party too. This aroused Trotsky’s interest and he ordered his followers to “enter” the ILP to try to take it over and get it to support his call for a Fourth International. They didn’t get very far.

The ILP survived these assaults but its membership fell, according to Cohen’s calculations, from over 16,000 in 1932 to  under 2,500 in 1939.

Trotsky described the ILP as “centrist” (whatever that meant). For us, it was just another reformist party as it retained the programme of reforms to capitalism it had had since the start and sought support, at and between elections, on this basis. We also pointed out that it was confused about the nature of socialism, seeing it (as Labour did) as essentially nationalisation and mistakenly seeing state capitalist Russia as some sort of pro-worker regime.

On one issue, however, we were prepared to give credit where it was due: on the question of war. When Italy attacked Abyssinia, the ILP’s Inner Executive (dominated by its 3 MPs, led by Jimmy Maxton) issued a statement saying that “in our estimation the difference between the two rival dictators and the interests behind them are not worth the loss of a single British life”. The Socialist Standard  (May 1936) described this as a “sound line”. However – as Cohen describes in detail – this turned out not to be the view of most active ILPers. They wanted to take sides and support Emperor Haile Selassie as a victim of imperialist aggression.

Similarly, after the Second World War broke out, the Socialist Standard (May 1940) wrote: “The ILP propaganda to-day is largely concerned with the war. It takes a line which, in appearance, seems to be fairly sound and in conformity with the Socialist position. It is an imperialist war, it is argued, fought over questions of trade routes, colonies and for political domination”.

By 1939, as Cohen shows, most of the members of the ILP were resigned to reaffiliation to the Labour Party, which he says would probably have occurred had the war not broken out. After the war, the matter came up again, but Maxton opposed it. Instead, members left and joined Labour as individuals, including prominent pre-war members such as Fenner Brockway, Bob Edwards, Walter Padley and Jennie Lee, who all became Labour MPs. In fact “later a Labour MP” is a phrase that occurs quite a few times in Cohen’s book.

The ILP staggered on until 1975 when it changed its name to “Independent Labour Publications” and became a think-tank within the Labour Party.

Adam Buick

Further Reading:

October 2009 Socialist Standard: The rise and fall of the ILP

Mis-spent youth (1986)

From the April 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

It seems that the government's new two-year Youth Training Scheme has got off to a sticky start. The television advertisement suggests that, given two years "training", young unemployed workers can become virtually anything they wish, from circus clowns and musicians to business tycoons and professional footballers—all grateful for receiving a place on the new scheme. Full-page newspaper adverts show how a youth writing "SPURS" on a wall with a can of spray paint is transformed into an employed signwriter working on the lettering of a sign at Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

But if the waste of unemployment and the YTS makes us angry, we should not jump to the conclusion that "real" employment is the answer. It is in fact the problem. For as long as workers think its natural to work for a boss in return for wages or salaries then we will periodically be faced with mass unemployment, as market forces indicate to our bosses that it is no longer profitable to hire us.

This brings us to the Labour Party, which no longer claims that it can bring about full employment, but that it could lower the figures. Here the Labour Party reaches the depths of political dishonesty. If there was such a master plan to reduce unemployment would not all governments implement the necessary policies? Come to think of it—why haven't Labour cured capitalism of unemployment in their past governments? So what is Labour's secret plan for slashing unemployment?

Well, it is a pretty cunning one. It seems that their latest ploy is to capture the hearts of Britain's youth by wheeling out pop stars (spokesmen for the young generation) like Billy Bragg and Paul Weller to sing passionately about the effects of capitalism—and then tell us to vote for capitalism's great friend the Labour Party. But the oddest solutions come from Labour's intellectual heavyweights like Michael Meacher. They claim that "real" jobs could be created by improving Britain's roads and sewage system.

To suggest that such "public works" schemes can solve unemployment is to misunderstand capitalism—a madness fostered by massive advertising campaigns and a constant barrage of political propaganda which claims that employment is natural. However, many workers see that YTS schemes don't teach real skills and are extremely exploitative. Workers should look at their own daily employment and ask the question: Is the boss doing you a favour by employing you, or are you doing him or her the favour of creating their profits and privileged lifestyles?

Derek Devine