A vivid picture of the East End (1963)

Book Review from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Tears in Aldgate, by Ralph L. Finn (Robert Hale 18s.)

When we are young, particularly in our childhood, we may live in the most degrading slum conditions but often fail to appreciate the fact fully. Indeed, with kindly parents, we may even manage to get by with a tolerably happy childhood, unappalled by the stench around us. Maybe that's as well. There is no evidence to show that an unhappy childhood makes better people of us, or that we are any more able to face the rigours of adulthood having had severe parents. The reverse is more likely.

To say all this is one thing, but it does not excuse nostalgia as we grow older. having once got away from slumdom, no one in his right mind wants to return to it, although it is, of course, understandable that he may miss his former friends and neighbours and long for their company again. Now Mr. Finn is a very able writer. He has painted a vivid picture of the early years of his life in London's East End. Yet it is difficult to avoid the feeling that he yearns to go back and live there even after all these years.

Who knows, perhaps the nostalgia, the quiet little sighs for the old days, are a luxury which he can allow himself since it seems pretty certain that he will never go back to them. Broughton Buildings, the slum tenement in London's East End where he spent his youth, was bombed to the ground in the second World War. But he and his family had left there, anyway, some years before. They had shifted just as soon as their financial position allowed them to.

Nostalgia apart, this book is interesting for its description of life in London's dockside slumdom not so very long ago. Mr. Finn was born there in 1912. His parents were Polish Jews and had come to England in search of a better life. "Go to England," they were told, "the streets are paved with gold." But all that they could find was the grime, dirt and decay of the East End. It is interesting to see how history has repeated itself many times since then and, although the immigrants in recent years have had darker skins, behind their arrival has been the same desire to escape from poverty. Again, many of them have drifted into broken down hovels where they have met resentment, prejudice and even downright hatred.

But racialism is not a failing from which only white men and gentiles suffer. Mr. Finn rightly condemns anti-semitism, but in his haste to do this, betrays a similar weakness. To read his comparative descriptions, you would think that most Jews—in his home area anyway—were thrifty and hardworking, yet very kind, while their Gentile brothers spent most of their spare time boozing, neglecting their children and being stingy. Yet on his own admission there was something common to Jew and Gentile alike, and that was the poverty and degradation from which they all suffered, and which had little to do with personal faults or  virtues. Incidentally, we find it incredibly naive of him to suggest in one part of his book that anti-semitism did not really appear on the scene until the rise of the Nazis.

Mr. Finn has been mainly concerned with reminiscences, of course, although he has not been able to resist riding one or two pet hobby horses here and there. For example, "Let's face it," he says early on, "Intelligent people in those days did not frequent pubs. Nice people didn't. They were home from home of the loutish, the stupid, the ignorant, the intolerant—the salt of British democracy. Long live the working class sots!"

But the book is worth reading and there is a lesson to be learnt from it, which Mr. Finn himself would do well to heed, intensely proud as he is of being a Jew. And that is the hard fact of working class identity which cuts right across all other divisions and makes them trifling by comparison. It is in the interests of every worker to recognise this so that the day will be that much nearer when all the Broughton Places of this world will be no more.

E. T. C.

Obituary: Mick Cullen (1951)

Obituary from the March 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mick Cullen, a member of the Socialist Party of Ireland, died in his sleep on the 23rd Jan. He was formerly a member of the S.P.G.B. which he joined a few years before the first World War. Those who knew him will miss a comrade who was solid, untiring and full of zest and humour. He had one absorbing pursuit, the propagation of the socialist movement, and no difficulties dimmed his ardour or broke his heart for he was convinced of the ultimate success of the movement he so much to help along. For years he carried on in Ireland alone, putting over the socialist case at every conceivable opportunity—a thorn in the side of all the established movements of one kind or another.

The first time the writer remembers actually meeting him was in circumstances that were typical of Mick. It was in the winter of 1916 at a meeting in Belfast organised by the I.L.P. In those days we used to attend all the opposition meetings we could in order to put questions and take part in discussions. At the meeting in question the speaker had sat down after finishing his address when a stentorian voice came from the back of the hall criticising his statements and arguments. The chairman pointed out that discussion was not allowed and endeavoured to silence the voice. He was out of luck. The voice roared "What, you can't hear me? All right I'll come to the front," and up the aisle marched Mick grinning. He then proceeded to address the audience for twenty minutes, the chairman having meanwhile dropped back into his chair with a gesture of despair. Mick had only arrived in Ireland that day, a fugitive from the operations of the Military Service Act, and this was his idea of "lying low"!

Perhaps a more revealing picture of Mick is that given by someone outside the Socialist movement who had obviously been impressed by Mick's sincerity and enthusiasm. It appeared in the Dublin Evening Mail on the 25th Jan., under the heading, "The Socialist Party of Ireland."

SOCIALIST PARTY OF IRELAND

DEATH OF MICK CULLEN—The weekly meeting of the Dublin Branch last Tuesday adjourned as a mark of respect upon hearing of the death of Comrade Mick Cullen. He had died in his sleep that evening. 

Mick Cullen's life was devoted to the struggle for Socialism. An early member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain—he was speaking from a Socialist platform during the 1914-18 "War to End War"—he propagated Socialism wherever and whenever the opportunity arose, throughout Great Britain and in Belfast, and Dublin. 

Lloyd George knew him—and the force of his oratory against conscription, war and capitalism. The late George Bernard Shaw was another of the many "eminent figures" of his time who had the misfortune to have Mick in their audience. That was in the Abbey Theatre in the 1920s', when Shaw threatened to wipe the floor with "the red-headed Socialist, Cullen," only to refuse the inevitable challenge to put his threat into practice. 

Wherever workingmen and women collected for a political meeting, lecture or debate, Mick Cullen's voice was often raised on behalf of the Socialist cause. In fact, he was so familiar a figure at such gatherings as to become almost an institution—and one that seemingly would never pass away. 

Quite a number of his acquaintances in the early days who made a show of preaching revolution are, today, in high office, but Mick Cullen never put a price-tag on his principles. That he was widely known as "The Socialist Painter" is proof sufficient of the value he placed on principles. No compromise." 

And now he's gone, having died for that which he'd lived and worked for—Socialism. But, truly, only physically gone; for the memory of his life of struggle will be constant inspiration to his Socialist comrades who stay behind to continue the same struggle. And while one Socialist yet remains, Mick Cullen will never be wholly dead, for he was one with the cause of Socialism.

"Fame is not popularity, the shout of the multitude . . .  it is the spirit of a man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying and imperishable." (William Hazlitt).

We will not attempt to improve upon this excellent tribute. We will only add that Mick appeared at our last conference as full of energy, enthusiasm and conviction as he always was, and it was a real shock to learn that he had so unexpectedly passed out. His parting words to the writer last year were that he would be over this year and hoped to bring us good news of progress in Ireland. But, alas, it was not to be. Socialism has lost another of those sturdy advocates who leave a gap that is hard to fill, and some of us mourn an old and very "Good Companion."

Gilmac.  

An Ancient Russian Custom (1936)

From the December 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Mr. Pritt, K.C., was asked to explain why the prisoners in the recent Russian "Terrorist" trial confessed so readily and abjectly, he thought he had answered the question by saying that the Russians do this sort of thing—it is a characteristic of the Russians. Now we learn that a new batch of 21 prisoners have been arrested in Russia, charged and found guilty of military and economic espionage, distributing Fascist literature, and plotting terrorist acts in company with Trotsky. Reuter's Moscow correspondent states that he was told by M. Litvinov, the Russian Foreign Minister, that the majority of the prisoners "had already confessed to the charges made against them" (Daily Telegraph, November 18th).

The prisoners are not, in this case, Russians, but Germans.

We now await a statement from Mr. Pritt that it is a characteristic of the Germans to confess.

A statement published by the Evening Standard has bearing on this point.

Certainly a Russian trial bears no relation to democratic ideas of justice. But the Bolshevists, wo are cynical in these matters, may point out that German methods of justice differ little from their own. When a Communist, spy, or traitor is tried in Germany the proceedings are secret. No doucments are produced, and, as often as not, the public is informed that the victim has confessed to his alleged misdeeds.—(Evening Standard, November 23rd, 1936.)

Gilmac.

The drudgery of work (1963)

Film Review from the December 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The life of the worker in present day society is one of the weary round of working and sleeping, with brief intervals for relaxation, overtime permitting. What a drudgery work is for the mass of us: boring repetition, dreary surroundings, whether in office or factory, with the reward, a wage packet barely sufficient to keep one going until the next pay-day, a long week away, especially so if one has a family to support, and most people do, sooner or later.

Billy Fisher, the main character of the film "Billy Liar," finds life quite intolerable, from his job as a clerk in a firm of undertakers to his home life with his nagging parents and his television doting grandmother. Well, Billy in his own way rebels, not by sliding into crime, but by letting his imagination run riot, he can conjure up a dream world named Ambrosia where is all the dictators rolled into one or the conquering hero with the cheers of the populace ringing in his ears. Billy also tells ridiculous stories in his efforts to illuminate a drab existence, hence the name of the film.

Billy plans to leave his northern home town with a roving girl friend for London, where he supposes life will magically change for the better. But he hurries from the train just before it leaves the station, as if he realises that in London his problems would be with him just as inexorably as if he never left home; in fact, would be with him wherever he roamed.

D. R. West.

Why I joined the S.P.G.B. (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Saying that one met members of the SPGB does not lead far — Winston Churchill was once chatted up by a member, but he never joined. The question is what made the Socialists' words acceptable: what chord of consciousness awaited being touched by them?

I was raised in East London between the wars, where everyone was poor. I knew jews, gentiles, black men, yellow men and the man in the sweetshop who loved Dickens, and they were all poor. There was a place in the town called "up the Labour" where everybody went, and when people met they didn't say How do you do; they said "Working?"

We lived on a corner near the main road, and sometimes men knocked at the door and asked for a drink of water. They had walked to London to look for work. I heard my parents say that one man had walked from Middlesbrough, and I looked on the map and saw where it was. Jesus! Yet even in this land of misfortune people thought they were better than others: some were said to be "common", and there were children one was not supposed to play with.

When I was I ten I was socially estranged myself. I got a scholarship to the grammar school, from my scruffy down-the-road school — I think it was the first one they had had since the 1870 Education Act. I had to fight nearly every boy in the neighbourhood. The scholarship was an opportunity, the grown-ups said. So it was: to find out that the paying pupils and the staff —M.A. Cantab., etc. — despised scholarship boys with Cockney vowels.

The effect on scholarship boys was interesting. Most became imitators, seeking to please and be accepted so that they could feel yes, they'd risen. But several joined the Young Communist League and the Fascists: having themselves been kicked, they wanted to kick someone else. I was in a thing called the Schoolboys' United Front, where we passed ferocious resolutions about the Means Test and the dole.

The school gave us languages dead and alive, and literature, because it was conducted as if we were all going to universities. Whereas for four-fifths the labour market waited: they were going to be office boys. Even for that, you had to pass "Matric". Some had several goes; their future—a life's penal servitude in a shipping office—was held to depend on it.

Unfortunately for the school as well as me, I liked the lit. and language and didn't want to be an office boy. The only alternative was manual labour. I humped heavy loads, scrubbed floors, became a packer, a builders' labourer, a gravedigger. I learned a trade: drawing the innards out of chickens. I was a small-time professional boxer and won more fights than champions have now, most of them for twenty-five shillings a time.

And everywhere I saw people were exploited and to be born in the working class was to be damned. I met men from whom I learned more about books than a university could have taught me — as Henry Miller says, "men who were fit to rule the world", only they weren't in that way: they were working for wretched wages, being hired and fired and treated like dirt. And the ones who were truly degraded: who scraped to the boss and thought how generous he was to employ them for two or three pounds a week, and what heights of magnanimity were in giving three minutes on the clock before stopping a quarter.

I heard about the system. The Communist speakers preached to crowds on Saturday nights. Their sermon was the one attributed to William Jennings Bryan, "that every man who has a clean shirt is a thief and should be hanged". They said, regularly, that the British Empire was at the crossroads. It had a thrilling, ominous ring, but what did it mean? They didn't seem to know themselves. The Labour Party had clean shirts and were always promising: promises were what the working class lived on. Or one could read Bernard Shaw, all aphorisms like toys and mottoes coming out of crackers, and about as useful.

What engaged my attention most in the SPGB was that it made no offer to do benevolent things and did no urging to love one's neighbour. It said the working class had got to see to its own salvation. The members were not even propitiatory. They found the working class and me both intolerably ignorant, and said so. When I showed my knowledge, they told me my brains were elsewhere than in my head; I voiced my opinions about society, and they told me to go and read my Marx.

I learned, in fact, that indignation and rebellion are only starting-points. Conscious that a great deal is wrong, you have to find — exactly — what it is; or confusion reigns. What is more, the truth can be unpalatable. Political parties and leaders achieve popularity by telling people what they want to hear, and the more passionate you are the more strongly you will insist on hearing it. "Something must be done" is the conviction: but what?

I approached the SPGB because I wanted the right answers. I joined it when they had knocked the impulse to the wrong ones out if me. The story does not have to be everyone's, but it is characteristic for a good many of my generation. And, though times have changed in some respects, the capitalist system and the truth about it have not altered at all.

Robert Barltrop

State of affairs (1988)

Book Review from the June 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Coercive State by Paddy Hillyard and Janie Percy-Smith, Fontana, £5.95

We all live, so the story goes, in a democracy, where governments are elected through free elections, as the result of open political processes in which everyone can participate. The state is supposedly run by democratically-elected politicians who are fully answerable to the electorate and who make relevant information and Government documents available for anyone to read. All citizens are equal before the law and stand to benefit from the state's welfare policies. Such, at any rate, is the liberal democratic theory, but the authors of this book present a very different picture: of the state as a coercive machine, run by a small, secretive minority and constantly interfering with the lives of ordinary people.

Most people's participation in politics begins and ends with voting, and electoral campaigns are dominated by the media and the bigger parties, the latter not even being run by their own members. Local authorities have lost many powers to the central state, and information which reaches the general public is filtered by many devices, from outright state censorship to the prejudices of the press barons. The law is used against rather than for ordinary workers, and has instrumental in extending the Government's scrutiny of individuals and invasion of people's privacy. The welfare system is more concerned with sanctions and control than with meeting needs. Meanwhile, police powers are expanded, and more and more people are brought before the courts.

It is a devastating catalogue, and makes nonsense of Thatcher's claim to be "rolling back the frontiers of the state". To take just one example, one-third of all households in Britain are in receipt of housing benefit, which means that, simply in order to have a roof over their heads, their members must provide the state with extensive details of their daily lives. A recent form for this purpose contains over a hundred prying questions.

The book presents an effective exposure of the democratic pretensions of the state. If it can be criticised, it is on the basis of what is left unsaid. For one thing, it is open to the interpretation that things weren't quite so bad in the past; that the state was perhaps once less coercive and closer to the liberal ideal. The authors make it clear that they are not just dealing with the post-1979 Conservative government, and have some cogent comments on past Labour governments, such as their use of Special Branch against trade unionists, their meddling in the lives of the poorest claimants and their attempts at censorship. Nevertheless, it is easy to gain the impression that the truly coercive state is a relatively recent development.

Related to this is the point that the reasons why the state functions coercively are left very much aside. This is important, because concentrating on specific instances might suggest that, if these were altered or removed, the state would be properly democratic. There are some passing reference to the state acting in the interests of the political and economic elite, but no spelling out of the fact that the state exists and is used to defend the interests of the capitalist class. That is why the state can never be democratic, because it is not just a coercive state but a capitalist state.

Paul Bennett 

Material World: Nicaragua - Truth Will Out (2014)

The Material World column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many liberals, including the newly elected mayor of New York, Bill De Blasio, were inspired by the Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega in the 1980s. Indeed it was difficult for anyone not have some sympathy for the Sandinistas. After all, they were being confronted by the might of the United States who were not only sponsoring acts of terrorism against them but actually engaging in acts of war by mining Nicaragua’s ports, acts for which they were duly found guilty by the World Court (although they totally ignored the verdict). Nor could many help but admire their achievements in literacy and health-care.

Nevertheless, the Socialist Party could see through the false claims being presented that a Sandinista Nicaragua was in some way socialist. The Socialist Standard wrote at the time ‘Needless to say, the Socialist Party is hostile in every way to the Contra terrorists and their backers. But the enemy of an enemy is not necessarily a friend... Socialists do not support the state-capitalist government of Nicaragua and to the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign which implores us to do so we respond that our only support is for workers of all lands in their struggle against the capitalists of all lands, be they imperial exploiters or native ones, left or right wing’ (July 1987).

Ortega may have been a Sandinista rebel who helped defeat the Somoza dictatorship but now he has managed to transform himself from 'revolutionary' leader to simply just another revolting capitalist ruler.

With the subsequent re-elections of Ortega’s FSLN our cautionary counsel has been proved wise. In November 2013, Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister visited the UK to promote his country’s stable economy, potential for growth, infrastructure development and favourable fiscal legislation to international investments. He underlined the political stability, attractive set of labour laws, tax incentives and the comparative advantage that his country offers to British and European investors.

Under the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a trade and economic cooperation pact that includes Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela, Ortega, by presidential decree, established Councils of Citizen Power under the control of the Sandinista party to administer and distribute much of the social spending but which also provides an estimated $3 - 500 million in funds to be personally administered by Ortega with no public accountability.

Since being reconciled with the Catholic Church, Ortega has become a strident opponent of abortion. In a country where the population is 85 percent Catholic it is always helpful in elections to have the blessing of the Church even if it means supporting a ban on therapeutic abortions that has set back women's rights. Even a pregnancy that cannot possibly result in a viable baby – an anencephalic or ectopic one – has to be carried to term. A pregnant woman with cancer has to have the baby first, then treatment for the cancer, no matter what the risk to her chances of survival. A woman who gets pregnant through an act of rape or incest has to have the baby. In 2012 the government forced a 12-year old girl who had been raped and impregnated by her stepfather to remain under ‘state protection’ in a Managua hospital until she gave birth. Sonia Castro, Nicaragua’s Minister of Health, even anointed herself ‘protector-in-chief,’ making sure the child did not escape from the hospital.

The Independent wrote ‘Today in Nicaragua, two years after the Sandinistas' return to power, there is no idealism, no poetry, no romance. The regime over which President Ortega presides is an anthem to brute cynicism. Or a parable of human weakness, the old story of what happens with idealists, always and everywhere, once they have tasted power. It is Animal Farm all over again’ (21 Nov 2008).

The objective of socialists is to assist in the emancipation of the workers from our enslavement to the capitalist class. Ortega’s Sandinistas have not betrayed their core principles or ‘values’. Their socialist credentials were always weak and in fact made no claim to being socialist. The Sandinista movement was officially designated ‘a popular, democratic, and anti-imperialist revolution.’ How often have disillusioned left liberals cried ‘betrayal!’? It’s a simple matter of understanding economic systems. No one need be fooled by propaganda spin.

ALJO

Bernard Levin and the SPGB (1976)

From the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bernard Levin is a well known columnist, a public figure, and if he isn't well known it is not due to lack of effort on his part. A journalist who is under a regular commitment to produce a daily newspaper column, as distinct from reporting news, is a man under constant pressure — a man eternally looking for something to say. Consequently, it is quite impossible for Levin, or anyone else for that matter, to keep up the pace and deal with matters other than superficially. Those who have followed the literary efforts of Levin over the years will have no difficulty in accepting this fact.

Levin wrote a criticism of the SPGB in an article entitled Creda Quia Impossible (The Observer, 18th April 1976) — and here we must add dog Latin to his many other talents. The article patronized us and what he described as the "glorious nonsense" emanating from the SPGB. This attack on the Party gave the impression of an amused tolerance for a "sect" based on "eccentricity" (his words) and was made in a review of a book called The Monument — the story of the SPGB. Unfortunately for Levin, some of the facts and anecdotes contained in The Monument, despite its many merits, are a personal version and the Party does not accept any responsibility for its contents.

Levin says, quite correctly, that the SPGB "has remained absolutely unchanged in its beliefs from 1904 to the present day". However, the SPGB bases its propaganda on the world of today not the world of 1904, as any reader of the Socialist Standard and listener to the spoken word will appreciate. The Object and Principles of the Party were formulated by our founders in 1904, and these Principles laid down the frame of reference for a revolutionary Socialist party. They are not a catechism, nor are they out of date any more than the Newtonian principles or any other scientific principles. We can well understand the amazement of Mr. Levin and others that such a strange phenomenon as a political party with a clean-cut object and principles should actually exist.

He says our position is "Marx is right; the SPGB interpretation of Marx is right". We do not accept that Marx was always right, and we have in the past criticized Marx. Nevertheless, we agree with the main Marxist theories of Historical Materialism and his analysis of capitalism.

Finally the SPGB has never been opposed to, or supported, reforms. Levin is confusing the political action which is necessary to get reforms with the content of the reforms. Nobody could oppose the introduction of safety working measures, of which Levin accuses us, free heating for old age pensioners, or other reforms, and we have never done so. If workers wish to sell their votes for a few crumbs of social reform that is their privilege, and equally, it is our privilege and duty to show that there is an alternative. We want them to take political action that will remove the need for reforms.

We mention these few facts in the rather forlorn hope that Levin will correct his mistaken view of the Party. We would also bring to his notice that no member was expelled or disciplined for carrying a gas-mask, nor is it true that "every time there was a vote on an expulsion those who had voted against it were themselves forthwith expelled". Levin can satisfy himself on this score, as the weekly Minutes of the Executive Committee are intact from 1904 and photocopies are available.

What a world we live in, and what peculiar standards of value we have which set great store on writings like Levin's. He follows a long tradition of instant intellectuals who are bankrupt of ideas and, having little real knowledge in their own right, can provide amusement in the knowledge that this suffices for many of their readers.

Jim D'Arcy

Book Review: The Origins of British Bolshevism by Raymond Challinor (1978)

Book Review from the February 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Origins of British Bolshevism by Raymond Challinor (Croom Helm Ltd.)

This useful addition to the library of working-class political history gives a reasonable account of the movements which established the Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain, and the Communist Party of Gt. Britain. The chapters describing the effect of the Russian Revolution on the SLP are particularly enlightening.

Starting out, in 1903, under the influence of the American orator Daniel De Leon, the SLP was anti-parliamentarian and advocated Industrial Unionism by means of which the workers would "take and hold". With the establishment of the Leninist dictatorship, the SLP swallowed (with some hesitancy) the Russian pill. Its paper, The Socialist, declared: "The theories of Lenin . . . are similar to those advocated by the SLP", and: "For years the SLP has been sneered at, but now Russia, in the transition towards the Socialist Republic, shows the SLP is right". (The Socialist, March 1918)

As his book deals only with what he calls British Bolshevism, perhaps Prof. Challinor may be excused his complete omission of any mention of the SPGB's stance on the Russian upheaval which was the opposite of the SLP's: from the beginning we said there will be no Socialism in Russia.

The subsequent revelations of the intrigues and manoeuvres of Bell, MacManus and Paul to wheel the entire SLP into the new Communist Party; the exposure of the lavish distribution of Russian funds by Theodore Rothstein, in 1920 a Comintern agent but in 1907 a Menshevik (who wrote in Justice, the SDF paper: "Is there any sane man who doubts that the present Russian Revolution cannot lead to Socialism?") Willie Gallacher, returning from Moscow to break up SLP meetings and economics classes of those who would not join the CP (Yes, they were doing it in 1921!) terminating in the utter and complete failure of the CP (using Leninist tactics) to capture the Labour Party—all these make pretty gruesome reading. By 1923 the original SLP contingent were ousted and pensioned off and replaced by Harry Pollitt and Palme Dutt.

The sorry truth of the ignominious failure of the CP now finally exposed, its ridiculously inflated membership figures (for Russian consumption) admitted by Klugman (the party's official historian) never to have exceeded 2/3,000 - but making much noise with 2/3,000 paid organizers, speakers, writers and agitators and numerous "front" organizations. Most pathetic of all is Prof. Challinor's conclusion. Seeking to teach others, he has learned absolutely nothing himself from the SLP's destruction in the Russian disaster. Bemoaning the passing of a party which started out in rebellion against the reformism of the Social Democratic Federation as a group of worker-stalwarts trying to master and teach Marxism as they saw it, but getting caught up and destroyed by Bolshevik intrigues, our Prof. actually repeats word for word the same dreary rubbish the Trotskyists of various shades have regurgitated for years: "Smashing the State", "Soviets", "Build the Vanguard" etc etc.

The lessons are, he says: "Work with the Trade Unions for Workers' Control"; "Build the movement for independent working class education" and "The need for a new type of working class party to act as a vanguard" because the SLP evolved the Bolshevik approach independently of the Russians (p. 281) - despite the fact that his whole book is just an obituary of the SLP which actually took this line. But it's quite a good read.

Horatio

Cons'IS'tent Incons'IS'tency (1976)

From the December 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Saturday afternoon meeting of the Socialist Party at Glasgow's Exchange Square was "honoured" by the attendance of some members of the International Socialists who, not having a meeting of their own to bore people with, decided to latch on to ours instead. Immediately, our speakers were taken to task for not doing anything about "the current urgent proble facing the working class".

"Which urgent problem?"

"Unemployment. You never protest against these problems!"

"Wrong", the speaker replied. "That's precisely what I am doing this afternoon: protesting not merely against unemployment, but all the problems the working class as a whole suffer directly under capitalism".

"But that's not positive enough. What you should be doing is getting out on the streets and marching. That gets definite results."

"Yes, sore feet. Don't you understand the basic ABC of capitalism? Employers employ workers to produce commodities. If they can't be sold on the world's markers to realize a profit for the owner, then he will have no alternative but to close down his factory."

"We would occupy that factory", the critic asserted.

"They tried that in an Italian car factory", said the SPGB speaker. "Then they made a brilliant discovery: you can't eat tyres or drink petrol. So they simply came back out".

"But they would be assisted by their fellow trade-unionists".

"All that would result in", said the speaker, "would be a factory full of unpaid night-watchmen". He added, on the question of the so-called "right to work": "Unemployment can't be solved by making slavish demands for an alleged 'right' which doesn't exist. Neither can any tangible difference be made by screeching at trade-union leaders or throwing sticks at Callaghan's car. How illogical can you be in the IS? First you urge the workers to vote the Labour Party into power - then, when they do get in, you attack them for doing what you voted them into power for: running British capitalism!"

"Tactics, comrade, tactics", the IS member explained. And, with a straight face, he said: "What you've got to do is show the workers the utter futility of voting for the Labour Party, by telling them to vote Labour. That way they experience how awful the anti-working class Labour Party is".

Trying to prevent himself reeling dizzily off the platform, the SPGB speaker said: "What will happen if you put up candidates at the next election? Will you urge workers to vote Labour in constituencies where you are contesting?" This brought the discussion round to the fact that, despite their avowed anti-parliamentarianism, IS were contesting the election at Walsall. This mental somersault was defended with the claim that workers, disgusted with the National Front, would turn instead to them!

The speaker told the audience that the SPGB had tried to debate with the National Front but the meeting was broken up by "freedom-lovers" who were against the free expression of opinions - including members of IS. Apparently as the only reply they could think of, one of the IS group said: "Do you mean that you actually debated with people like the National Front?"

"We debated with IS too", said the speaker. "The way to defeat organizations like the National Front is not to suppress them but to have them express their views and then expose them for the gibberish they are. Once armed with Socialist knowledge, no worker will allow himself to be led up every blind alley demanding the thousand-and-one 'urgent' reforms which only ensure that capitalism stumbles on a little longer".

Exeunt IS members shaking their muddled heads, perhaps trying to clear them.

Tone.

Bismarck's Communist Heirs (1972)

From the July 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the eighteen-seventies Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, went in for a big programme of nationalization, both because it suited the needs of the German ruling class and because he hoped thereby to win support among German workers who confused this state capitalism with Socialism. As Bismarck said to his Conservative supporters in the Reichstag, they "shouldn't be afraid of the word Socialism". Reformists all over the world walked into the trap and in Britain propaganda misrepresenting nationalization as Socialism was carried on by the Fabians, the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Party. Only the Socialist Party of Great Britain, from its formation in 1904, urged the workers not to waste their efforts on something so useless to them and to the Socialist movement. The advocates of nationalization made all sorts of extravagant claims for it - higher wages, greater efficiency, lower prices, and that as the workers would feel that they were working "for the community" strikes would disappear.

Time has shown how right the S.P.G.B. was. No government, Liberal, Tory or Labour, has ever supported the policy of paying the workers in nationalized industries more than the general level of wages. When, under the Wilson Labour government, enquiries were made into the industries with large numbers of low-paid workers, central and local government workers and workers in the nationalized industries showed up no better than private industry and in some cases they came out very unfavourably. Strikes continued and in some years (1966 for example) the days lost through strikes in the nationalized industries were nearly as many as in the rest of industry put together.

Bismarck's policy was written about by Frederick Engels in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific:

But of late, since Bismarck went in for state ownership of nationalised industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating now and again into something of a flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic.

(Socialism, Utopian and Scientific; 

Moscow, 1970, page 70)

Engels went on to point out that state ownership "does not do away with the capitalist nature of the productive forces . . . The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with."

One of the people who fell for Bismarck's "spurious Socialism" was Lenin. In his The State and Revolution (1917) he had this to say:

A witty German Social Democrat of the seventies of the last century called the Postal Service an example of the Socialist economic system. This is very true.

(Central Books edition 1972 based on the 1969 edition published in Moscow. Page 47)

It was in this section of The State and Revolution that Lenin urged the Russian workers that what they needed was to apply the German Post Office model to Russian industry, but with all official, technicians etc. to be paid "a workman's wages". Like the British nationalized industries under Tory and Labour government all idea of avoiding the ordinary wide inequalities of pay has long since been abandoned in Russia.

Following Lenin's advocacy of "spurious Socialism", the British Communist Party has continued to mislead the workers by telling them to waste their efforts on securing an extension of state capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Obituary: Rudolf Frank (1971)

Obituary from the March 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our old comrade, Rudolf Frank of Vienna, passed away peacefully in his sleep on the 21 January. He was 88 years old and had been a fervent advocate of Socialism for over sixty years.

Rudolf Frank came to England before 1914. He attended economic classes at our Head Office and joined the Party. When the 1914 war broke out he was interned in Alexandra Palace as an "enemy alien". Whilst interned he ran classes on Socialism. On account of these activities he was deported to Germany when the war ended. He made several attempts to return to England without success. When the 1924 Labour government turned his application down he gave up and became reconciled to remaining in Austria, where he had moved from Germany.

Over the years he contributed regular articles to the Socialist Standard and the Western Socialist. He also tried to stir up interest in Socialism on the Continent, constantly writing letters of criticism to the Austrian national papers. At one time he made a tour of the continent in an effort to stimulate interest in Socialism. He made a reference to this in the following extract from an article he contributed to the fiftieth anniversary number of the Socialist Standard.

Upon returning to the Continent after World War I, efforts, however feeble, were not wanting to make the founding of a revolutionary Socialist Party in England known over here. Comrades of the writer started a group in Dortmund, Germany, which however seems to have eventually disintegrated after the death of the most active members. Before anything could be got under way here in Austria, even the Western pattern of democratic liberties was finally lost by the advent first of the Dolfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship, then by Hitler and now by another occupation, so that for the last 20 years it has been virtually impossible to openly advocate the revolutionary socialist policy. I need hardly remind you of the fate awaiting anyone who exposes publicly in the Russian Zone the fraud and masquerade labelled communism.

In spite of the risks and the difficulties Comrade Frank found a way of getting over his ideas. He taught English to a class and used, as his examples of English, extracts from current copies of the Socialist Standard. Fortunately no member of his class ever gave him away.

Comrade Frank made a number of translations, including the translating of the following four pamphlets into German: "Socialism or Chaos" (Australia), "Russia 1917-1967" (S.P.G.B. London), "The Socialist Manifesto" (Canada), "History—Economics—Politics". He also wrote a sixteen page manifesto to the Austrian workers on the occasion of a General Election.

Until the formation of the Bund Demokratischer Sozialisten in Austria Comrade Frank had carried on his activities in isolation, though on rare occasions he had visits from English and American comrades in recent years. It is amazing that he could carry on alone with such enthusiasm during the years before the Austrian party was formed and without the assistance of anyone who shared his views. He also wrote a pamphlet explaining the socialist position which he spread widely. When he took a bus or train he would carry some with him and pass one over to anyone with whom he had got into conversation.

About ten years ago he attended our Easter Conference and addressed the delegates, giving them a description of the progress and the difficulties of pressing the socialist position on the continent.

Finally we must pay a tribute to the steadfastness of purpose with which our late comrade carried on his advocacy of the Socialist solution to the problems of capitalism. We are glad that he saw, before he died, the formation of a party in Austria, largely the result of his efforts, which will carry on the work he commenced. We would add that it was a great satisfaction to him when his son joined our Party — of which he has been an active member for over 30 years.

I would like to add a personal note. I first met Rudolf Frank in 1911 or 1912 when we both attended an economics class conducted by F. C. Watts in our old Head Office in Grays Inn Road. I kept in touch with him and had a great admiration for his solo efforts under difficulties over the years. I feel very sad that, like so many old friends, he has gone from us to the "tongueless silence of the dreamless dust".

Gilmac.

Further Reading:

Socialist Standard November 1964 - Reminiscences of an old member

Socialist Standard December 1964 - Reminiscences of an old member (part 2)

Trotskyism (1984)

Book Review from the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Militant, Michael Crick (Faber & Faber, 1984)

Much of this book deals with the history of the Militant Tendency from its stumbling beginnings in the various Trotskyist organisations (whose remains have littered the fringes of the Labour movement for fifty years) to its present, influential role in Labour's left wing.

Entrism is discussed as a specifically Trotskyist tactic, but one interpreted in as many different ways as there are Trotskyist organisations. Militant have developed a peculiar brand called Deep Entrism, a modified version of the "waiting for Lefty" entrism whereby they join a party at a time of social and political upheaval in order to be at the forefront of the revolution when the right moment comes.

Michael Crick notes (page 25) that "it is particularly ironic that three of the main leaders of the recent campaign against Militant should have all incurred the wrath of party officials at one time or another: Denis Healey—the Communist infiltrator of the 1930s; Jim Mortimer—member of a proscribed organisation; and, above all, Michael Foot". He also finds it interesting that "rebels should so easily become leaders" (page 25), but it comes as no surprise to socialists or anyone else who sees the futility of workers placing their trust in leaders of any kind. The argument against leadership is eloquently (if unintentionally) stated throughout the book.

The chapters relating to the organisational manoeuvrings of the leadership, Militant and other groupings in the Labour Party will be regarded by some as a central and important feature of the book. In fact, it borders on the irrelevant. The book however is worth reading as an outline of the history and nature of Trotskyist organisations. The cult of leadership is demonstrated by looking at the various Trotskyist organisations, which seem to have been dominated by only three or four individuals over the past half century.

Allied to this question of leadership, the book examines the organisational form taken by all such parties, the form of democratic centralism. Nominally the leadership is elected by the members, but an outgoing leadership will propose to a conference the new leadership and central committee by means of a "slate" (or list) of candidates. Members do not vote for individuals but for such a slate and it is rare indeed for an alternative slate to be proposed. This explains the "remarkable continuity of the Militant leadership over the years" (page 105). It should also be noted that this process of a self-perpetuating leadership explains the enormous power and prestige such a leadership has relative to its own organisation.

The organisation of such groups as Militant and all other followers of Bolshevism is certainly centralised, but has little to do with any democratic process.

Crick's book is largely a patchwork of interviews with old acquaintances and colleagues of the Militant leadership, the author's own observations and prejudices and already well-known facts about Militant but there is virtually no new material on the organisation. Much of the information on Ted Grant appears to be intended to reduce argument to personalised ridicule, unfairly depicting Grant as a senile eccentric. It is indicative of the state of the Labour Party that while sections can hold enquiries  into entrist groups or whatever, and spend ". . . in the year leading up to June 1983 four of the Executive's monthly meetings . . .  devoted almost entirely to the issue" (page 200), they cannot find time to seriously examine the nature of capitalism or to reach any conclusion regarding the urgency of socialist revolution.

Militant may sloganise and print radical catchphrases on its front page headlines but is in fact just another reformist organisation which is well suited to the Labour Party. Whether Militant and the Labour Party retain their companionship or not is a matter of complete indifference to workers. The tragedy is that in the eyes of many workers, revolutionary socialism is confused with Trotskyism, Leninism and  Bolshevism. It is an urgent task to remedy this situation and expose the quack remedies not only of Militant, but all those on the political left who distort the meaning of socialism.

Steve England

Further Reading:

Socialist Standard September 2006 - 'Death of a tendency'

Socialist Standard April 1982 - 'Which Way to Socialism: Militant Tendency or SPGB?'

Becoming a socialist (1984)

From the August 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

A baby has been defined as a loud noise at one end and little sense of responsibility at the other. However that may be, it is certain that, give or take the odd precocity, the newly-born are not customarily noted for political and economic understanding. Were it otherwise, the year 1929—that of the Wall Street crash—might have made a sight more of an impression on me that, in fact, it did. As it turned out, the only crash that assailed my infant ears was that of the decaying ceiling of the third-floor back room in the borough of Lewisham, which was to be my home for the first few years of my life. (I believe this inelegant apartment later received the undiscriminating attentions of Adolf Hitler, who, it has to be admitted, knew a thing or two about slum-clearance.)

Suffice it to say, then, that my earliest years were, ceiling notwithstanding, as relatively cushioned as caring, if impoverished, parents could make them. (My father, who had suffered serious injuries at Ypres in 1914, was, in recognition of his services to his country, unemployed.) However, as hitherto indicated, my innocence in all these matters was absolute. And this, surely, is the point. We are, each of us, born into a world not of our own choosing. The conditions into which we are thus involuntarily thrust depend not, then, on ourselves (how can they?) or on some mystical preordination, but rather on the material circumstances of our parents and their immediate social condition. At birth a prince is as clean a slate as a pauper. Sooner or later, however, it is the pauper who is the more likely to start asking the awkward questions. So it was with me.

Well, to be strictly accurate, it was my father who put the questions and I was expected to struggle for the answers. For example, he would emerge from behind a cloud of cheap tobacco smoke to ask: "Why is it, do you suppose, that whereas the shoe-shops are bursting with children's shoes, there are thousands of children running about in the streets of London barefoot or ill-shod?" (The same type of question could be asked in connection with the Common Market food surpluses in our own times.) Anyway, I soon became familiar with the idea of capitalism as a generator of crises — the boom/slump cycle. Then there was gold: we had a lot of fun with this one. Not that we possessed any ourselves apart from my mother's wedding ring. But at least I early understood the difference between intrinsic and commodity value. For while gold is rustless, conducts heat and electricity, fills (some) teeth, and can be used to decorate books, fingers and religious houses, these qualities and uses can hardly account for its current (15 June 1984) mark-up of three hundred and seventy-five dollars an ounce. Or for the fact that, having been quarried and mined from the earth at the expense of colossal human hardship it is promptly buried again in places like Fort Knox and the Bank of England. Such idiocies serve to remind us of the fundamentally irrational nature of the capitalist system. No wonder that the logic of socialism is such anathema to its—capitalism's—practitioners.

So where did this paternal tutelage take me? Well, er, the Labour Party, would you believe it? Anyway, the least said the better, I think! A few years and much frustration later saw me out of the "broad church" charade and, er, into the Communist Party. Despite what I found to be a lack of trust within the Party, and notwithstanding, among many other anomalies, what I then interpreted as an incomprehensible backsliding which went under the euphemistic title of "Eurocommunism", I stuck it out with the CPGB. Until, that is, I made the acquaintance of an old anarchist with whom I played a few games of chess. I quickly discovered that my contempt for, and rejection of, the capitalist system was more than matched by his own. One evening he handed me some old leaflets and pamphlets, together with some back numbers of the Socialist Standard. My heart sank! As if I hadn't choked on enough political "literature" in my time!

Eventually I got round to reading some of it. At first I treated it as I might have done a typical Labour Party leaflet. I gradually came to realise, however, and almost unconsciously, that this was different. Nobody was trying to con me with hyperbole or waffle or vague promises impossible of fulfillment. I was getting socialism straight. It worked on me like a purgative. The sheer futility of labourism; the vicious obscenities of Soviet-style capitalism; all this was washed out of my system once and for all. Hitherto I had read quite widely: Marx, of course, and Engels; Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists; Zola's Germinal; the poetry of Shelley (only latterly his political prose writings) and Wilfred Owen. I had dipped into William Morris, Jack London and George Orwell.

All I needed, it is now clear to me, was a corrective — a catalyst. A much read, tea-stained fistful of pamphlets had provided it. Waters muddied by the empty platitudes of pseudo-socialists and phoney "communists" rapidly cleared. There remains a great deal to learn but at least it is now possible to build on a firm foundation. However, I have to confess that, had it not been for my own obstinacy, I could have provided myself with this foundation long ago — before I joined Attlee's Labour Party, in fact.

That same father I have spoken of, long since dead, I'm afraid, occasionally referred to the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its message. He had evidently heard some of the Party's speakers as they threw out their challenging and abrasive truths from their (at the time, more numerous) open-air platforms in London. "These people" he would say "are the real socialists in this country." Well, I could hardly be expected to take for gospel everything the old boy told me, could I?

Richard Cooper

LA Law or class war? (1992)

From the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Riots and anger on the streets of LA. What ignited the flame? The frustration of poverty. In the USA today one in five families live below the official poverty line; the majority of these are non-white. The American Constitution claims that all men are born equal but in 1992 black workers stand more chance of being in prison than in college. In Washington DC 42 per cent of blacks between the ages 18 and 35 are either in prison or on parole. In Harlem, New York City, the life expectancy of a black male is lower than in Third World Bangladesh.

The riots have added fuel to various spurious theories about violence in society. White socio-biologists, wedded to outdated notions of human nature as determinants of anti-social behaviour, have argued that rioters are over-endowed with violent genes. For example, Mark and Ervin Violence and the Brain published with the support of the US Law Enforcement Assisance Agency argue that:

The kind of violent behaviour related to brain malfunction may have its origins in the environment, but once the brain structure has been permanently affected the violent behaviour can no longer be modified by manipulating psychological or social influences.

 Perhaps the authors of this crass rationalisation can explain why such violent brain cells seem to evolve amongst poor unemployed hopeless wage slaves and not amongst the rich people, both black and white, in Beverly Hills, Greenwich Village or Knightsbridge.

The long-held racist ideology of the USA is a reflexion of the fact that chattel slavery ended in the 1860s but that wage slavery persists in the 1990s. The brutality of the plantation owner has given way to the profit-grabbing claim to inherent superiority by the capitalist owners and controllers of the means of wealth production and distribution. Capitalism does not have inequality and divisiveness as an accidental and eradicable feature. Inequality and division are endemic to all class societies.

Some black political activists have seen the division in American society in terms of race or skin colour rather than class and in doing so they are avoiding the root cause. As early as 1865 a black convention in Charleston formulated an "Address to the White Inhabitants of the State of South Carolina" which called for an elusive equality amongst all men:

We simply ask that we shall be recognised as men; that there be no obstruction placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white men shall govern black men; that we have the right of trial by jury of our peers; that schools be established for the education of coloured children as well as white; and that the advantages of both colours shall, in this respect, be equal; that no impediment be put in the way of our acquiring homesteads for ourselves and our people; that, in short, we shall be dealt with as others are—in equity and justice.

This statement assumes that there is one human race rather than that society is divided into antagonistic interests on the basis of property possession. In 1965 the Watts riots in Los Angeles shattered the self-deception of American ideologists who thought that they lived in a land of equality where the wretchedly impoverished would never embarrass them by resisting publicly. Vincent Harding describes the Watts riots:

For five days fighting went on; blacks attacked police, firemen, white stores—but no white civilians. The flames from dozens of fires lighted the nighttime sky; bullets, tear gas shells, screaming sirens, shouting of men and women poured out a cascade of sounds closely approximating those of battlefields and it was. When police and 13,000 national guardsmen finally quelled the uprising 34 persons were dead, more than 1000 wounded and nearly $40 million of property had been destroyed.  (The Other American Revolution).

The then President, Lyndon B. Johnson, responded to the display of working class indignation by making pious reformist noises about The Great Society which would be created out of so-called equal rights legislation. The exhibition of police and court racism in LA is proof that the Great Society was a fiction utterly unrealisable within a system which creates economic waste and an environment unfit for human habitation.

The Bush government will not learn from the LA riots nor can it learn except how to contain its subjects more successfully. The rioters will have gained little from the riots but for some looted cheap goods and a sense of being noticed. And the results of the riots are more working class wounds; the enmity of wage slaves against wage slaves, many left dead. Workers will get nowhere fighting each other and calling for capitalist justice. What we must do is unite anger with understanding and turn these upon the real enemy: those who rob us of the fruits of our labour.

Steve Coleman